Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: YouTube/Mark Rober
This week, engineer and practical joker Mark Rober, best known for a series in which he pranks package thieves with glitter bombs, released a characteristically elaborate two-part video. In the first section, he sneaks a lidar camera into Disney’s Space Mountain to get a 3-D scan of the ride’s design. In the second — the segment that has drawn much more attention — he runs a series of tests pitting a lidar-equipped test vehicle against his Tesla, which uses traditional cameras for its driver-assist and self-driving features.
Rober’s Tesla does not come out ahead. It fails to automatically brake in multiple scenarios where the lidar-equipped car succeeds, thwarted by thick smoke, heavy spraying water, and a fake road superimposed on a foam wall. Getting a self-driving car to fall for a Wile E. Coyote trap is a pretty good bit, and Rober’s video was hugely popular with his 65 million YouTube followers and beyond. It was also immediately controversial, with critics arguing that the tests were unfairly stacked against Tesla and suggesting that Rober, a former NASA engineer and Apple product designer whose past videos have contained misleading material, had rigged the result to make the company look bad. Setting aside the experiment’s exact results, the video is clearly intended as a criticism of Tesla’s choice to move away from technologies like lidar — a “fool’s errand,” according to Elon Musk — in favor of cheaper but less reliable camera-based systems. Tesla’s legion of online defenders has responded accordingly. “Mark Rober *just* DEFRAUDED Tesla [Lawsuit Likely],” reads the headline of one popular response video. “Mark Rober Just Ended His Career,” reads another.
But whatever one makes of Rober’s experiment, his video marks the next stage of a subtle but significant shift on YouTube, a place where, in different but arguably no less significant ways than Twitter, the reputations of Tesla and Musk were built. For years, overlapping clusters of massively popular tech and science YouTubers — most of them studiously apolitical, or at least coy about their beliefs — have enjoyed a productive informal partnership with Musk’s car company, sharing with their massive audiences their interest in and affection for the brand. This made sense: For relatively young audiences interested in engineering and science, Musk was a well-known and fairly accessible figure; for YouTubers who built audiences reviewing and talking about consumer tech, gadgetlike and novelty-rich Teslas were a great fit, as natural a subject for their channels as new iPhones or VR headsets.
YouTuber Marques Brownlee, known as MKBHD (over 20 million combined subscribers), interviewed Musk and toured Tesla’s Fremont factory in 2018, later calling the Tesla Model S Plaid “the best overall car in the last decade” and using one as his daily driver. MKBHD competitor Zack Nelson, a.k.a. JerryRigEverything (over 9 million subscribers), gradually acquired four Teslas and made videos with and about them. For tech reviewers, science explainers, and project YouTubers, Teslas were a rich subject and source of engagement. Among an influential blob of YouTubers, they were also the default car. Linus Sebastian, who runs Linus Tech Tips (over 16 million subscribers), incorporated Teslas into his videos and walked subscribers through his (slightly reluctant) purchase. Unbox Therapy (over 24 million subscribers) bought a Model S Plaid. Engineer Simone Giertz chopped her Tesla into a “Truckla,” poking gentle fun at the company for its own delayed truck plans. For his part, Rober, who used his own Tesla for his new video, has spoken admiringly of Musk on numerous occasions:
Tech YouTube’s relationship with Musk started to fray with his acquisition of Twitter in 2022, by which point Musk had become divisive in ways that many cautious general-audience YouTubers likely saw as risky. By 2024, Musk’s heel turn had manifested in product form. YouTubers swarmed the release of the Cybertruck, reviewing and buying them for tests and stunts. Tesla had once again produced a vehicle that was good for engagement, and YouTubers got a lot out of it. Nelson shot his with a gun, while Brownlee reviewed his and concluded it was “iconic” but dangerously attention-grabbing. Elsewhere on YouTube, in a sign of things to come, criticizing and destroying Cybertrucks became a genre unto itself. Trollish, MAGA–dabbling YouTuber Cody Detwiler, a.k.a. WhistlinDiesel (over 9 million subscribers), subjected the Cybertruck to one of his over-the-top “durability tests” that ended with a disabled truck and unusually harsh and earnest words for Tesla. The video supplied countless mega-viral clips to TikTok and Instagram Reels. (A second part came out two months ago; a segment in which Detwiler ripped a glued metal panel from the truck with his bare hands presaged a sales halt for a related issue this week.)
Musk is now one of the most polarizing people in the country, making it difficult to talk about Tesla’s products — even in the context of a gadget channel — without addressing his ownership. Brownlee, who sold his Plaid in early 2024, ditched his Cybertruck for a Rivian; despite efforts not to make too much of a spectacle of his choice, Musk took notice:
Nelson, meanwhile, recently released a video in which he stress tests (and destroys) his Cybertruck — a video that, like Rober’s, was criticized by fans, Tesla, and Musk for being unfair. Maybe so, but it was revealing regardless: In 2024, getting your hands on a new Cybertruck was a shortcut to massive engagement; in 2025, within the YouTube economy, the shortcut to engagement is destroying your Cybertruck. (Nelson has since pledged to get rid of all his Teslas.)
Rober’s recent video isn’t explicitly anti-Tesla and doesn’t call out Musk, but it has been widely perceived and treated as though it is and does. At the very least, it taps into an ambient interest in and anger about its owner — there’s a real chance that some Teslas, or Tesla dealerships, are still smoldering as you read this — which is the sort of thing any successful YouTuber is acutely aware of and capable of exploiting.
That a handful of loosely affiliated popular YouTubers have adjusted their strategies around Tesla may not be hugely significant on its own. But if we’re suddenly interested in who young men are listening to online, YouTube’s cheery and mostly politics-averse ecosystem of tech and science personalities should be in the conversation. Their intuitions about their influential sector of the attention economy say something. Tesla used to be good for business. Now, it’s a little more complicated than that.
