Popular tech YouTuber Zack Nelson, better known as JerryRigEverything, just called out Elon Musk for a bold promise that hasn’t aged well. In a post on X, he shared a screenshot showing that his 2018 Tesla Model X is now worth just $22,400. That’s about 20% of what he paid for it, despite Musk’s claim that Teslas with Full Self-Driving would appreciate over time.
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Back in 2019, Musk said buying a Tesla was an investment, not an expense. “If you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset – not a depreciating asset,” he claimed. The idea was that Tesla would keep raising the price of its FSD package, making used Teslas more valuable.
But reality has gone in the opposite direction. Tesla has cut the price of FSD multiple times since 2023, and used Teslas are now losing value three times faster than the average car, according to recent market data.
In replies to the YouTuber’s post, many Tesla owners shared similar frustrations. Some said they “drank the Kool-Aid too” and bought more than one Tesla and saw each of them lose around half their original value. Others criticized Tesla for prioritizing its future robotaxi network instead of completing promised FSD features “they sold us years and years ago.”
Musk has been overly optimistic about autonomy for years. At a 2015 Nvidia conference, he said self-driving was a “solved problem” and predicted that fully autonomous cars would arrive in just a few years.
That timeline has repeatedly slipped. On a recent earnings call, Musk finally admitted that Tesla’s current hardware isn’t enough to make full autonomy a reality. He said the realization was “absolutely painful and difficult.”
