The Tesla Influencers Leaving the ‘Cult’

She thinks some of these individuals will never stop running cover for the company because of their long-term investments. “To me it’s a lot about the money, more about the money than it is Elon—even though they say it’s Elon,” she says.

No one, however, provokes the wrath of the Tesla swarm like Dan O’Dowd.

A tech billionaire who founded Green Hills Software and serves as its CEO, he, too, was once a great proponent of Tesla vehicles and Musk’s leadership. In 2016, he owned two Roadsters and a Model S. “Big fan,” he says. That year, he was thrilled to hear Musk proclaim that a Tesla would autonomously drive itself across the US from Los Angeles to Times Square in Manhattan by the end of 2017.

“He wanted people to believe that, but there was no truth to it at all,” says O’Dowd. At that time, he still argued that Musk was a “genius.” But as the 2017 deadline went by and Musk stopped bothering to offer new time frames for the cross-country drive, O’Dowd wondered if it would ever happen. He now believes that “nothing worked at that point.”

O’Dowd also began to notice that Tesla would make splashy announcements for new products with amazing specs—like a souped-up edition of the Roadster and a line of Tesla semi trucks—that were then indefinitely delayed.

He felt Tesla was losing sight of its most important objective: a more affordable base model EV. The company scrapped plans for a long-awaited vehicle with a price target of $25,000 in 2024, and in January of this year, Musk announced that Tesla would stop producing the Model X and Model S, two flagship products, to focus on building its Optimus humanoid robots.

By 2020, people were sending O’Dowd videos demonstrating Tesla’s beta version of FSD. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, this thing is failing way too much.’ Like, this isn’t close to being done,” he says, despite Musk’s claims that it was almost perfected. O’Dowd and his team began downloading every available Tesla FSD video to analyze its malfunctions.

In 2021 he founded the Dawn Project, an organization that lobbies against the implementation of “defective and insecure software” in infrastructure and safety-critical systems. Its first and still primary campaign is aimed at shutting down FSD. The Dawn Project has warned of the dangers of the software in an ad published in The New York Times and commercials that ran during the Super Bowl broadcasts in 2023 and 2024, which showed self-driving Teslas breezing past stopped school buses and striking child-sized mannequins in pedestrian crossings.

These videos have never convinced the FSD evangelists of anything, O’Dowd says, because no matter how the tests are conceived and filmed, the Dawn Project is accused of faking everything. The Teslarati smear O’Dowd himself as a bad-faith actor. “They say ‘He’s in the pay of the oil companies, he works for Waymo, he hates Tesla,’” O’Dowd says. In response to the Times ad, Tesla faithful Omar Qazi, who goes by the handle @WholeMars on X, published a lengthy blog post that accused O’Dowd of having “blood on his hands” because Green Hill is a defense contractor. O’Dowd expected no less when he launched the Dawn Project. “I knew what had happened to the people who had called out Tesla before,” he says. Harassment and abuse come with the territory.