We just finished talking with the labor journalist Hamilton Nolan and 1,600 Ink readers about the #teslatakedown movement and a real, practical plan to take $100 billion out of Elon Musk’s bank account.
As Nolan told us, Tesla’s stock is hugely overvalued — it’s based not on the value of the cars or factories, but on public expectations about the company’s future explosive growth. And that’s a big opportunity to change things because those expectations are simply beliefs in Musk’s genius, based on a story that, ultimately, the public owns — and the public can take it away, by protesting, talking to people, and participating in all sorts of things you can find out about by visiting Tesla Takedown. Change the story enough, and when people go shopping for a car, they’ll buy something else, which means investors will sell off their stock — and turn the Wall Street math that made Musk towards unmaking him.
We spoke with Nolan — the publisher of How Things Work, and author of the new book The Hammer, Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor — not just about Tesla, but about the many challenges facing the labor movement in the 21st century, from gig economy entrepreneurs making an end run around union regulations to A.I. threatening to take away the jobs of millions, and about the hope and possibility labor solidarity still represents. And we talked about the kind of change people working together can achieve in this moment. Taking away Elon Musk’s power is just the start.
“The bad people who are in charge right now are not that smart,” Nolan pointed out, “So there’s no reason we can’t kick their ass.”
Want to get started? If you missed the conversation, check out the full video above. You won’t want to miss it.
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We’ve got more great live conversations coming up this week: Thursday, February 27, at 3:30 p.m. Eastern we’re speaking with Gabriel Sherman, the writer of the new Trump biopic The Apprentice. Then on Friday, February 28, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk with Stephen Wertheim, the historian and theorist of America’s place in the world. To join us, download the Substack app and turn on notifications. You’ll get an alert when we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android device.
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