Elon Musk’s polarizing political actions since acquiring Twitter, later rebranded X, in 2022 dramatically hurt the automaker’s U.S. sales, underscoring how deeply its fortunes are intertwined with the billionaire’s persona.
The findings quantify for the first time how the political actions of the world’s wealthiest person – including his role in U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration – may have cost Tesla billions in lost vehicle sales while benefiting rival electric carmakers.
Tesla’s U.S. sales would have been between 67% and 83% higher, or about 1 million to 1.26 million additional vehicles, from October 2022 to April 2025, had it not been for what researchers call the “Musk partisan effect,” according to a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by Yale University economists.
That whole heil Hitler thing was wild, who could forget it
The fact that he was still given a position in the White House after he explicitly outed himself as a Nazi is really telling.
That was probably what tipped the scale over. So he’s african, but i think he’s one of the good ones it seems.
Technically, at least according to the court records and the admins defense, Elon Musk never had a real position.
But yes, he spent way too fucking much time at the white house.
No, there are no “court records” that say that. If you want to believe this administration about it, that liquid falling in your face is only rain, don’t worry about it.
Idk why you’re getting so mad about semantics, I’m just saying that piece of shit Elon Musk never had a position and never will.
It’s weird to pretend that I’m mad when I’m simply correcting you. I’m just saying that Elon Musk was the head of Doge and I don’t see any reason to pretend he wasn’t, especially because the administration would like to pretend that.
You insinuated that I was drinking piss, thats not normal behavior and you should see a professional about your mentality.
I apologize. I was trying to make a joke, but it came across more rudely than it sounded in my head. I was alluding to the common saying.
One million so far
Elon Musk’s
politicsNazism cost his firm Tesla more than one million EV salesFixed it.
And not even just that. Also his bullshit acting like he was the president, speaking for the president, and his dodge bullshit.
Fuck that guy, he’s a real piece of work on all areas.
He only stopped the publicity because it was hurting sales, it’s still going on.
100%
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Sentiment toward Tesla improved somewhat as Musk pivoted the company towards robotaxis, self-driving technology and robots in human form.
What are three things that don’t exist and don’t have a market?
Robotaxis exist and have a market. Tesla just isn’t the one doing it.
Waymo taxis are pretty common around me.
There are pilot programs from several vendors. Waymo May have the biggest but it’s unscalable. Tesla is growing and if they succeed will scale massively. There are several smaller ones
But what they have in common is
- all have shortcomings
- None are generally available
- each are individually approved for limited scope - there’s no legal framework to make them generally available
- none are even on a path to a profitable business model
Well, they exist, and there’s a theoretical market, but it’s just that Tesla isn’t particularly the leader in any except maybe personally owned self driving, but that’s mainly because Tesla’s willing to test in the streets while others are more traditionally conservative about the safety thing.
Pre-unmasked Musk, Tesla might have done well as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Smart people wanted to work with a seemingly smart company, so it was a positive feedback loop.
In the post-Twitter acquisition world, the shine has kind of come off around the concept of working for Musk, and more keenly so with the coverage of what sort of person he truly is.
Tesla has a huge advantage in scalability. If they can succeed, they will quickly scale out to the biggest.
A lot of people believe Waymo is closer to achieving self-driving, since their pilots are more established, but they are not scalable. They’re not ready to mass produce vehicles nor can they do so at a cost that could be profitable
A large portion of the people that bought or wanted to purchase EVs are going to be people intelligent enough to believe in climate change and at least wanted to make personal choices that would make less of an impact on the environment. People intelligent enough to understand climate change are probably also going to understand that Hitler, Nazis, and the holocaust were bad. The party that Elon supported denies and downplays climate change, along with a myriad of other scientific and socioeconomic reports. Logically, the average MAGAt was never going to be a Tesla customer, so firing off that Heil Hitler was never going to win the company new customers. That one Heil Hitler alienated him from much of his customer base at a time when Tesla no longer had a monopoly of the EV market. Plenty of people that were considering a Tesla probably pivoted to other manufacturers because of the Nazism. I’m sincerely enjoying watching him find out about the financial consequences of fucking around. I feel bad for the people that bought Teslas before he went full Nazi, because now they are stuck with a swasticar for the foreseeable future.
And yet the stock broke a new record this week.
Waiting for the other shoe to drop. I shorted it since i believed dropped sale would actually bring them back to earth. But clearly it has turned into some meme-stock.
The stock price and vehicle sales are not directly linked. Tesla is a meme stock. It’s a house of cards thy keep lying about
Good luck with your gamble
When he gets Farage elected it will get better for him (worse for us) and he can move on to the AfD
Perhaps it helps that their cars are still better than the competition.
Mechanically, they’re shockingly bad. I’ve spoken to mechanics that tell of some serious cost cutting when it comes to suspension and their attachments.
New cars (3 years) can essentially fall apart at the wheels.
The three people I know with Teslurs had to have the car replaced under the 48 month lease. That’s why these cars are practically free used after warranty. They now shit parts and entire frames out using a Gigapress.
Tesla was a tech company making cars. It’s like buying a car from MicroSoft.
Yeah, the weight + acceleration + mechanics quality combo isn’t great especially if you accelerate like a race driver. Which most new owners will for awhile certainly.
I got some of those parts replaced in warranty just recently. Interesting to see if the same problems will come back.
It’s possible that my opinion on this changes when warranty expires and we’ll see how the car really does long term. But so far it’s so much better than any competitor car we’ve tried that it’s not even close.
Hyundai EVs are so much better than Tesla
We test drove a couple Ioniqs and nope. They are pretty good, perhaps good enough to get if you don’t already own a Tesla – but not good enough to warrant the hassle and cost of changing. Not better than Tesla in any meaningful way, and worse in a couple of ways: the general UX of the car and boot size for instance.
Tesla after losing one million ev sales after the actions of the CEO: here’s 56 billion and you know what? We’re going to give another trillion in pay package to the CEO
He will never meet those milestones, beacuse he has never met a milestone in his life.
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you mean asshole.
So their stock valuation is going to go down to normal levels, right? …right?
He had no choice. The feds were on his ass and his scams was going to unravel. Fucking twat.
He literally said this aloud. no one cared.
…political views
The guy’s a dipshit self serving wannabe fascist. Calling it politics is disingenuous.
Yes, yes, i know technically correct, but i refuse to softly legitimise something that should have died out generations ago
The cybertruck is also a piece of shit from an engineering standpoint, tbh.
A big plastic body with steel plates glued on? Collects water in the carwash? What could go wrong?
A big plastic body with steel plates glued on?
Not just any glue, thermal adhesive. Hot glue. Everyone knows hot glue arts and crafts last forever.
Tesla Giga presses are for the largest aluminum castings in the world. That part is pretty clever.
Finally! Some good news!
More.
MORE!
Of course it’s ‘politics’ and not how EVs in America are artificially expensive due to tariffs with China.
The average person is a fucking moron and gets fleeced for it daily.
Presumably this was measured against other EV sales so that the Musk effect could be isolated.
Then why are they wanting to pay him 1 trillion dollars? Rich people are weird.
Then why are they wanting to pay him 1 trillion dollars? Rich people are weird.
Because Musk is asking for it, and the Tesla board who are all his hand picked friends, are the ones that vote on it.
The board doesn’t vote on his compensation package, the shareholders do. The pay committee proposes his compensation package to the shareholders and then they all vote on it.
The board doesn’t vote on his compensation package, the shareholders do.
Are you being willfully ignorant or are you not aware that during a proxy vote, shareholders that don’t cast an individual vote let the board vote for them? The VAST MAJORITY of shareholders don’t vote. This hands an enormous amount of votes to the board that vote how they want. A proxy vote that goes against the boards recommendation, is very rare in the corporate world.
He put two LED light bars on the old Model Y and came up with a cheap Model Y that covers the existing glass roof in headliner fabric.
How is that not innovation?
Don’t forget he took the lidar sensors out to make self driving way better. Oh wait
He took out manual door handles to make 4D chess figures.
Radar and ultrasonic. I don’t think they ever had lidar.
It had lidar rangefinders I believe. Nothing like the lidar scanners on actual delft driving cars, but still better than just cameras.
Tesla has never used lidar. As the other person said, they did use radar and ultrasonic detectors until covid supply chain issues when they decided to go camera only.
I guess not, but affordable small and very simple LiDAR range finders (ToF) have been around for a while. Not the fancy spinning scanners on Waymo and military robots. More like parking sensors and measuring tools.
I remember when the Israeli company that was developing Tesla’s first automation systems dropped them because it didn’t like the reliance on cameras only that Musk was insisting on.
Edit: removed useless link and provided Wikipedia page with better history of the hardware used. Mobileye dropped Tesla in 2016. Funny enough they were developing Lidar after dropping Tesla, but are more recently going to a camera only approach too. I’m still skeptical any firm will succeed with only mostly visible spectrum photons and have a safe product. But as secondary backup safety devices I’m ok with them. They shouldn’t be allowed to call any of it autodriving or autopilot though.
They removed plastic hooks from the frunk to save two cents. Same with rain detectors on windshield for auto wipers.
I was going to say “what about the cybertruck” but I guess everyone wants to throw him in an oubliette for that.
I wouldn’t presume to speak for anyone else’s motives. Mine are much more pedestrian; I want him in the oubliette because he’s a monster who needs forgetting about.
Of course! We therefore have 2 reasons to throw him in (and probably more).
And rightfully so
Because he did one thing right. He didn’t build a traditional investor base, he built a cult.
Like Joseph Smith and L Ron Hubbard.
Tesla has to hit 10Trillion to get that pay out. It will not.
He controls the board. So it’s him wanting to pay him that (with the stipulation he magically increases the company market cap to like 8 trillion or something - like 4x what it currently is)
I thought they were setting him up for a graceful exit when they could not agree on a ridiculous pay package
