Despite empirical evidence to the contrary, the Cybertruck’s fans defend it as the greatest car ever made—some going as far as sending death threats on X to those who disagree. It is this refusal to learn from experience, whether one’s own or that of others, that I find to be the hallmark of the Cybertruck devotee. Ever ready to believe the hype, fans exhibit an almost religious devotion to their purchase, forgiving everything from harmless foibles (inconvenient door handles) to major flaws (a tendency for parts to fly off).

But perhaps we are all duped by something. A willingness to be conned as long as the illusion flatters our sense of self and our image of the future is a defining characteristic of our time. American culture has always favored snake-oil salesmen, but perhaps never more than in the era of Trump, America’s most successful con man. Under an administration that was backed, at least temporarily, by the world’s richest man—Elon Musk—the performance of innovation has become more important than the substance. The Cybertruck is today’s paradigmatic consumer object because it perfects the art of expensive disappointment, pushing buyers into ego-protecting delusion. To survive America in 2025 requires at least a little self-deception, if not about our cars then about the environment, politics, or the general direction society is heading. In a country run by scam artists, all that’s left is the illusion of autonomy and control. Why wouldn’t people gravitate toward a car that similarly promises, however falsely, to make them powerful and free?

Dojo’s lead, Peter Bannon, is leaving the company, and the remaining team members will be reassigned to other data center and compute projects within Tesla, per Bloomberg’s reporting, which cited anonymous sources.

The disbanding of Tesla’s Dojo efforts follows the departure of around 20 workers, who left the automaker to start their own AI company called DensityAI. The new startup is reportedly coming out of stealth soon and is building chips, hardware, and software that will power data centers for AI that are used in robotics, by AI agents, and in automotive applications. DensityAI was founded by former Dojo head Ganesh Venkataramanan and ex-Tesla employees Bill Chang and Ben Floering.

In 2023, Morgan Stanley predicted Dojo could add $500 billion to the company’s market value by unlocking new revenue streams in the form of robotaxis and software services. Just last year, Musk noted that Tesla’s AI team would “double down” on Dojo in the lead-up to Tesla’s robotaxi reveal, which happened in October.

Thiel told the New York Times that “Mars was supposed to be a political project; it was building an alternative. And in 2024 Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, the socialist US government, the woke AI would follow you to Mars.”

Musk’s change of heart was reportedly inspired by a conversation with London-based Google DeepMind AI boss Demis Hassabis, in which the two discussed whether AI or interplanetary travel would be the most important technological advancement in the world. According to the New York Times interview, “Elon went quiet” after Hassabis told him: “Well, you know my AI will be able to follow you to Mars.”

In Thiel’s view, this was the impetus for Musk backing Trump so heavily in last year’s presidential election. The Palantir founder agreed with Douthat that this was the reason why the X owner had invested so much time in “battles over budget deficits or wokeness”.

Thiel also depicted Musk’s interstellar utopia as akin to American science fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s vision of the “moon as a libertarian paradise”. A Martian colony may have started out as purely scientific aspiration, but Thiel says that as this was “concretised”, it became clearer “that Mars is supposed to be more than a science project. It’s supposed to be a political project”.