Amid plunging share prices due to poorer-than-expected earnings and the unpopular political activities of CEO Elon Musk, Tesla’s slapdash methods once again caught up with the automaker.
Hours after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick used an interview slot with Fox News’s Jesse Watters to urge Americans to buy stock in Tesla, the company was forced to issue a recall on every single Cybertruck it has sold to date.
More than 46,000 Cybertrucks produced between Nov. 13, 2023, and Feb. 27, 2025, were recalled this week due to a large steel exterior panel’s tendency to detach from the car. A report shared by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the automaker became aware of the problem in January and has no knowledge of any accidents related to the defect.
According to auto industry news site Jalopnik, it’s the eighth recall since release day for the Cybertruck, a car that’s reportedly numerous times more deadly than the infamously explosive Ford Pinto.
The issue stems from an unconventional bit of penny-pinching from the world's richest man. Per Gizmodo, the panels on the vehicle are merely glued together. The NHTSA recall notice confirms the panel is joined to the car with “structural adhesive” and could fall off on the road. Videos obtained by other automotive outlets have shown the piece in question falling off of the vehicle while it was being driven.
The billionaire’s corner-cutting may seem like a minor affair, but it's merely the latest example of Musk's rushed work posing major risks. As Musk holds the reins of DOGE, applying his slash-and-save playbook across wide swaths of the federal government, his issues with quality control could quickly become every American's problem.
A less-than-stellar record
Tesla has earned a reputation among automotive critics and knowledgable consumers for build quality issues. Gaps between panels, chipping paint, and other manufacturing problems have been found on nearly every model that the electric vehicle giant has released. Even before the full recall of all Cybertrucks, the automaker’s shoddy construction practices and rush-to-market self-driving software netted Tesla four of the top five spots on a list of the country’s most-recalled cars.
Musk's slipshod philosophy extends to nearly every product he owns, with the CEO valuing cost-cutting over the end product to an almost compulsive degree. After purchasing Twitter for $44 billion, Musk sought to bring the cost of operating the platform down exponentially. Layoffs at Twitter, now X, reduced the headcount by roughly 80%, Musk said in 2023.
Staffing shortfalls made widespread outages increasingly frequent and slower to resolve. In early 2023, about six months after the Musk purges began, the New York Times reported that the platform had as many widespread outages in a month as it posted in half a year before the billionaire’s acquisition.
Cybersecurity experts and federal regulators also worried that the staffing reduction made Twitter users less safe than ever.
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In a 2023 court filing, the FTC claimed that former Twitter chief privacy officer Damien Kieran “testified that the firings and layoffs meant no one was responsible for about 37% of X Corp.’s privacy program controls.” Regulators added that the company was “impaired from completing improvements in its data management, access, and deletion practices” following layoffs.
Mr. Musk goes to Washington
And the headcount-slashing, hostile takeover approach is already producing similar results within the federal government.
Musk’s mass layoffs at the Department of Energy made evident the thoughtlessness behind DOGE’s breakneck approach to cost-cutting. In a representative (and nearly catastrophic) example, Last month, DOGE gave a pink slip to Acting Chief of Defense Nuclear Safety James Todd, the American official with the most control over nuclear safety. Todd was axed along with a host of other officials tasked with overseeing America's nuclear security. The layoffs were so catastrophic that the nuclear safety org was forced to plead with employees to come back days later.
Musk’s henchmen also raised eyebrows when they inadvertently revealed the names of some CIA hires, including those potentially placed in dangerous regions, through an unclassified email to the Trump administration last month.
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., accused DOGE of making “incredible blunders” under the auspices of Musk’s promise to cut costs.
“These actions don’t just reflect incredible incompetence – they are dangerous. They undermine national security and increase risks for American citizens,” Sen. Reed said on the Senate floor earlier this month. “In any other setting, blunders like these would be grounds for firing. But Musk and DOGE operate with arrogance, impunity, and zero transparency.”
Musk’s burn down first, clean up later strategy has even plagued the very ledger tasked with reporting DOGE’s purported savings.
Per the Times, staffers with little experience working with federal contracts initially massively overstated the agency’s true savings, demanding waves of corrections. And with DOGE being forced by federal judges to double-back on some of its most ill-thought-out firings multiple times per week, the agency could be costing taxpayers.
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