It’s time to finally acknowledge as fact what many of us have long suspected — Tesla groupies are perhaps the kookiest cult this side of the Jim Jones fan club.

Now, blind loyalty in the face of facts does have its benefits. After all, it just got a U.S. president elected. Indeed, burying your head in the sand is the most common of human reactions to adversity; just ask any man confronted — stand up and take a bow, former president Bill Clinton — with seemingly irrefutable evidence of infidelity. But the last few days have seen the Teslarati raise the stakes in aberrance. Indeed, considering Elon Musk’s latest prognostications, the reaction of the faithful is akin to Reverend Jim, suddenly beset by something approaching a conscience, tossing away his pitcher of Kool-Aid only to have his devotees cook up another batch themselves.

This latest divorce from reality started about a month ago when Lord Elon, not content with his latest exaggerations of electric car dominance and space-time travel, upped the ante with predictions that Tesla would have “a million cars with full self-driving” capabilities on the road by next year and that, in two years, “we’ll make a car with no steering wheel or pedals.”

Now, never mind that deadly crashes directly attributable with the company’s Autopilot system are at least partly responsible for the recent chilling in autonomous automobile development, devotees cheered the news as yet more tablets from the mount. ARK analyst James Wang said Musk’s decision to bring autonomous chip design in-house would put Tesla four years ahead of its competition. The disciples were a tad quieter, however, when — have Tesla engineers learned absolutely nothing in the three years since the Joshua Brown debacle? — 50-year-old Jeremy Banner’s Model 3 drove into yet another tractor trailer not ten second seconds after he engaged Autopilot.

Not able to keep a good proselytizer down, though, the fanboys quickly rallied on recent headlines that the good ship Tesla is slowly running toward financial reefs. Wall Street analysts being to Teslarati what the mainstream media is to Trumptards, even once bullish analysts such as Daniel Ives — noting production woes and Musk’s distraction with “sci-fi projects” could soon to cause a cash crunch — were shouted down as traitors to the cause. The fact that Tesla shares are now hovering around the US$200 mark — making mockery of Musk’s infamous prediction of $420 — just caused some of the truly faithful, such as Teslarati.com commenter Taylor Marks, to promise to buy “TSLA with every paycheck until TSLA is back over $250.” Others — again, the analogies to Trump’s legions are endless — blame globalists. “This is Koch industries and their allies,” claimed another Teslarati. They want to “kill Tesla dead.”

The problem with all this blind faith/conspiracy theory nonsense is that no less than Musk himself is now sounding the alarm bells. In an intercepted internal memo, Tesla’s CEO seems to imply that the bankruptcy he so mocked on April Fool’s day last year might be a possibility in less than 10 months, the company’s current cash burn — some US$200 million a month — “only gives us approximately 10 months … to achieve breakeven.”

Of course, he could go back to the stock market for more money. But with the company’s shares dropping like a stone, he might finally find a heretofore compliant Wall Street unwilling to finance his latest excesses. Ditto plumbing the bond market, the Los Angeles Times recently reporting Tesla’s “5.3 per cent bonds due in 2025 now yield about 8.9 per cent,” a sure sign that credit is going to be a little harder to come by this time around. Things are so desperate, according to that internal memo, that “going forward, all expenses of any kind anywhere in the world, including parts, salary, travel expenses, rent, literally every payment that leaves our bank account must be reviewed, confirmed as critical and the top of every page of outgoing payments signed by our CFO. I will personally review and sign every 10th page.”

So, to all the Teslarati out there who can broach no criticism of your messiah, I have a message for you: Not only are you possibly the stupidest people on the planet, you’re actually an impediment to that which you so loudly proclaim to be most devoted — namely the popularization of zero-emissions electric vehicles. Every time you discount news of Model 3 build quality; every time you pooh-pooh reports of Tesla’s fiscal fragility; every single time you defend yet another of Musk’s excesses — proclaiming Autopilot ready for full autonomy when it’s resulted in another fatal collision just the tip of the iceberg — one more mainstream consumer becomes convinced that all EV owners are bats@!t crazy and refuses to believe anything you say.

So, here’s my message to those Tesla fans constantly denigrating Musk’s critics. I — and my supposed pro-internal combustion bias — am not the roadblock to mass electric vehicle adoption. Wall Street analysts who ask a company’s CEO about “cash flow” are not the reason TSLA is facing yet more economic headwinds. Even the National Traffic Safety Board (NTSB) and MIT research scientist Bryan Reimer, Ph.D — who recently claimed that “we know that [Autopilot has] an issue with the detection of static objects” — are not the problem.

You are.