“It’s automotive suicide,” writes Fred Lambert at EV news site Electrek. It could have been different, he lamented. Musk could have spun out either Tesla or the AI businesses, both options allowing him to regain the world EV crown, and both preferable to “letting great EV programmes die”.

BYD overtook Tesla as the world’s number one electric carmaker last year. BYD models are significantly cheaper than Teslas, and would be even cheaper without protectionist tariffs. These are nominally 100% in the US, but add in duties, and it’s closer to 245%.

For years, Musk assured us that a $25,000 budget model was being developed, and we watched hours of presentations explaining that Tesla was pioneering clever new manufacturing techniques that would allow it to compete directly with China. Few expect that to happen now.

So where is Elon going now? He talked up driverless Tesla Robotaxis, which began modest trials last year.

“We expect to have fully autonomous vehicles in probably, I don’t know, somewhere between a quarter and half of the United States by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval,” he told investors.

But Tesla’s broken promises stretch back to 2014 (there’s a Wikipedia page devoted to them). When I was researching an essay on the future of driving, I was surprised how peripheral Tesla was to the conversation. Few of the world’s leading safety experts see Tesla as something to emulate.

On Musk’s order, the company has removed infrared and lidar sensors from cars to cut costs. Research from Morgan Stanley, shared last week by Edward Niedermeyer, an author and autonomous-driving podcaster, suggests that Tesla’s Robotaxi has seven times the accident rate of Google’s Waymo, the market leader, although the sample size is small. Waymo will launch in London this year.

Musk also talked about putting data centres in space. But “compute” is a ruthless commodity business, and sending bit-barns into space and trickling the data back over a satellite link, rather than fibre, makes this an unattractive and uneconomical proposition.

Least impressive of all are the humanoid Optimus robots. Optimus can barely walk unaided, and demos of manual tasks requiring dexterity appear to involve a remote operator. The robots that Musk could build, that the world needs, aren’t bipeds.

By making attractive EVs, Tesla was a pioneer that could create products with elegance and performance, when there was no serious competition. But robotics is an established field, tough and unforgiving, and nothing indicates he can do it better through sheer force of will.

“Tesla single-handedly led the EV revolution and now they are abandoning it to make a copy of C-3PO just for the sake of doing it. A product with no logical purpose,” mourned one former fan on X last week.

So this is not a new story, but really an old one: a market leader neglects the product pipeline, and succumbs to nimbler Asian rivals. For Toyota in the 1980s, read BYD today. But perhaps Tesla Motors was never about product, and instead finance: it was the pole that kept all of Musk’s plates spinning. In tough times he could sell stock and release capital. But Tesla is no longer his only option to do so.

SpaceX, the private rocket business is valuable, and AI is in its bubble phase, making xAI extremely valuable on paper. But xAI is burning through a bonfire of cash of $1b every month. A public flotation of SpaceX would value the company at $1.5 trillion, and yield $50b of cash.

According to reports, this could be the cue for a serious consolidation of capital across his ventures, a galactic feat of financial engineering. SpaceX would swallow xAI, which last year swallowed X, formerly Twitter, which Musk paid $44b for in a disastrous private acquisition.

Analysts and the media have bet against Musk before and lost, as he powered through financial and operational crises with wild gambles and a lot of gumption. This time feels different.

Musk has always been able to count on the support of an army of Tesla owners and retail investors, for whom the product feels personal, in a way that Musk’s other ventures do not. These are the loyal foot soldiers who sold the brand, by word of mouth, for years when pundits mocked. Now they’re being betrayed. Letting Tesla wither or die feels like the soul is being ripped out.