I wrote a much tamer version of this article last week.
I didn’t email it out.
This week, I figured it deserved a rewrite with some polite, nuanced editorial changes.
Elon Is A Sad Little Bitch With No Friends
ICYMI: In 2017, Cards Against Humanity, yes, the card-game people, purchased a parcel of land near SpaceX’s headquarters with crowdsourced funds.
That land was subsequently annexed by Elon’s town, Starbase, Texas.
The Cards Against Humanity folk plan to build something on the land that will “annoy Elon Musk,” possibly a monument or a giant sign, and they launched a new project to fund its design and construction.
Specifically, they want to build something that will cause Elon to stop and consider that maybe he’s a “sad little bitch with no friends.”
This image is from the Cards Against Humanity Instagram profile.
I applaud their fearlessness and support this effort because I believe Elon is a sad little bitch with no friends.
I also love a clever domain name.
The Cards Against Humanity people made a domain name choice that warmed my heart.
You can fuck with Elon and support their project here at: sadlittlebitchwithnofriends.com
Elon’s Rocket Roadster
The redesigned Roadster prototype. Photo via MotorTrend’s October 2026 first-look gallery. Source
Last week, nearly a decade after the second-generation Tesla Roadster was announced, we finally got a look at a new Roadster prototype.
If Elon had friends, maybe he would have felt obligated to deliver the originally planned Roadster somewhere in that decade.
If Elon had friends, they would tell him to stop wearing cheese hats
But Elon has no friends.
Tesla rescheduled the outdoor launch event originally planned for October 1 due to weather.
That was confusing at the time, but it makes way more sense now.
The new Roadster bears little to no resemblance to the original Roadster or the previewed 2017 Roadster prototype.
However, it did something that was hard to dismiss as a model, a tweet, or Elon having an especially ketamine-filled afternoon.
At SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas, test site on October 15, a white aerospace-inspired prototype Roadster climbed a curved ramp, held itself upside down, left the ramp, rotated in the air, and landed.
Yep, Elon had his engineers build a flying rocket car.
The official launch video has the ramp sequence, acceleration demonstrations and plenty of deliberate theatrics.
Car and Driver reports that the ramp car and the car driven on stage were different prototypes.
That is a small detail with a large impact on how much confidence we should place in these Roadster show-pony antics.
Three Roadster Trims
Most of the loudest headlines have already mashed several vehicles into one imaginary supercar.
Tesla’s own configuration announcement makes the split clearer.
Performance is Tesla’s road-ready, two-seat configuration. Tesla assigns it active aerodynamics, a multi-mode suction system and a claimed 0-60 mph time under 1.6 seconds in the configuration announcement.
Thrust is a limited-release two-seater with rear cold-gas acceleration thrusters. Tesla’s claim is under 0.9 seconds to 60 mph.
Rocket is the bonkers one-seat, invite-only version with perimeter cold-gas thrusters. Tesla claims under 0.59 seconds to 60 mph, over 230 mph, and over 300 miles of range. Its own Roadster page states that Rocket is not approved for public road use and is unavailable in some regions.
Who will get those Rocket Roadster invites if Elon has no friends?
If Elon had friends, they would tell him to stop jumping on stages
How Does It Work?
High-powered fans located in the rear diffuser and underbody of the Roadster pull air out from beneath the car. This creates a low-pressure vacuum zone underneath while normal atmospheric pressure pushes down from above.
The car features 10 cold-gas thrusters powered by 600 litres of compressed air stored in carbon-fibre tanks. These thrusters provide vectoring control to lift, stabilize, or flip the car when it detaches from an upside-down position.
It operates similarly to SpaceX’s self-landing rockets.
And the rear wing actuators are borrowed from Optimus leg actuators.
There are still many unanswered questions about this “car.”
How fast can you refill those tanks?
How many full-power runs when that tank is full?
How is this machine controlled in flight?
Where will you be allowed to fly it?
A controlled prototype demonstration at Tesla’s October 15 event. Image: Tesla, via TechCrunch. Source
Tesla has not published Roadster-specific data on pressure, usable gas, refill, durability, safety, or anything that would allow future customers to answer these questions.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has already stated that he’ll ensure Tesla’s new jumping and flying Roadster is street-legal in his state.
So maybe you’ll be able to fly it in Florida and parts of Texas, but nowhere else.
The 2028 Asterisk
Anyone writing that the Roadster will be “available in 2028” has turned a production-start ambition into a customer promise Elon did not make.
His latest public statement suggests that production will start in 2028.
Options, hardware, and price are still subject to change.
If Elon had friends, they would tell him to stop buying swords
InsideEVs noticed that the reservation agreement for the new Roadster on Tesla’s website states that “Roadster is still under development and so we cannot guarantee when your vehicle will actually be delivered or if it will be delivered.”
Elon isn’t going to make many friends with those sorts of open-ended promises.
Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna praised Tesla’s redesigned Roadster as a daring project, while noting that the car’s production timing remains uncertain after years of delays
The original 2020 Roadster launch date slipped and slipped again.
In October 2025, he hoped to demonstrate the car before the year ended.
The demonstration vehicle that arrived in October 2026 didn’t resemble the vehicle folk had already dropped $50,000 or more greenbacks to reserve.
How likely is it that production Roadsters will start shipping in 2028?
Not very likely.
No New Friends: Tesla Sales
Elon isn’t making many new friends.
This week, Tesla reported a second consecutive quarterly decline in profit as the company poured resources into self-driving cars, humanoid robots and other new technologies.
Optimus is the robot friend Elon wished he had
Net profit fell to $787 million in the third quarter from $1.4 billion a year earlier, the company said.
Sales were $28 billion, little changed from the previous year. Wall Street analysts had expected net profit of $815 million and sales of $28.3 billion, according to the average of estimates compiled by Tesla.
No New Friends: GOP
Elon is trying to buy new friends in the Republican Party.
With a fresh infusion of cash to his super PAC in the first two weeks of October, Elon has now dished out more than $445 million in the current election cycle and has become one of the largest contributors in US political history.
Meanwhile, Americans broadly disapprove of economic conditions under the Donald’s administration and the GOP, with three-quarters rating the economy as fair or poor.
Donny has told his “supporters” to consider that he IS on the ballot in November, even though he isn’t.
A majority of voters blame Donny for the decline: 69 percent disapprove of his handling of the cost of living, 65 percent disapprove of his handling of the war in Iran, and nearly three-quarters disapprove of his handling of gas prices, which are above $4 a gallon.
I guess you can’t buy friends with $445 million either.
No New Friends: Starlink
Last week, Ukraine’s military reported that the communications system, produced by Elon’s SpaceX but managed by the Donald’s administration, was no longer working on terminals moving at speeds greater than 100 mph.
Throttling Starlink and Starshield speeds effectively rendered most of the drones used by Ukraine inoperable and also affected the country’s best air defence system to stop Russian jet-powered attack drones.
Elon blamed Donny.
Donny blamed Elon.
People died.
Yesterday, Elon posted on X saying that his company had throttled the Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine because they violated the terms of service.
"The speeds are now where they need to be," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy replied, adding that restoration began overnight,
No friends were made.
IMHO
Maybe I’m being too harsh.
I’m sure Elon has some friends.
But maybe most of those friends can’t bring themselves to be honest with him and are only friendly because they want his money.
The control that Elon has over Starlink and StarShield is a little terrifying.
The Roadster demonstration was impressive.
But not impressive enough for Elon to make new friends.
Will the prototype resemble the final vehicle?
Time will tell.
Tesla built enough working hardware to make the Roadster feel real again, and it presented us with a clean demarcation line between a plausible two-seat performance car and the far wilder Thrust and Rocket concepts.
Perhaps the most impressive part of Roadster is how it demonstrates what a SpaceX-Tesla merger might produce: vehicles we’ve not even remotely imagined.
And based on recent filings, that merger is looking increasingly likely.
That said, the Rocket Roadster is a textbook example of things we probably don't need cars to do.
In a world where car buyers are primarily concerned with affordability, the Roadster emerges as an example of a billionaire’s tone-deaf pipe dream.
Yeah, the flying car backflip got people’s attention.
Building the car on time will earn some applause.
Building the mythical Model 2 that people can afford will earn some praise.
Elon still won’t make any new friends.