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.
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.
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.
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.
And rightfully so
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).
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
I love Electric cars and Sattelite internet and Spaceships.
WTF has this asshole made all the things I love awful and unacceptable.
Because they’re fucking Nazis and need to face their existence with a fist
These guys actually made me realize satellite grids are not a good idea, they’re in places they’re not supposed to be and use lights that weren’t authorized, meaning about 1/3 of ground-based telescope exposures are being ruined right now. Negative externalities abound.
Musk can shoot whatever he wants into orbit. He even shot up one of his shitty cars.
How about horizon pollution, I can see those shitty things with my own eyes.
How about the huge increase in risk of a Kessler effect?
How about that for most people this won’t even be necessary as most people don’t need low latency satellite internet? I’m sorry if you’re on a boat in the middle of the ocean and have to deal with a high ping while playing fortnite or something but your low ping is not worth the downsides
Kessler syndrome is not a big deal here. These particular satellites are so low they would self-deorbit after like 5 years. That’s an argument that more should be at such a low altitude. Let them collide, and drop out of the sky
You also forgot all those rural people that still don’t have another way to get internet. Yes they should have an option
How about the huge increase in risk of a Kessler effect?
bah… get outta here with science…he shot up a car just as a stunt.
Or destroying the ozone layer.
Up to 4-5 Starlink satellites now burn up in Earth’s atmosphere daily, releasing aluminum oxide particles that catalyze ozone destruction. Each 250kg satellite releases about 30 kg of aluminum oxide when it burns up, forming nanoparticles that persist in the stratosphere for 20–30 years, continuously damaging the ozone layer. With plans for up to 42,000 Starlink satellites (plus thousands more from other companies) all on 5-year replacement cycles, annual reentries could exceed 8,000 by the 2030s, adding 360 metric tons of aluminum oxide per year, 640% above natural levels.
The Montreal Protocol, which successfully phased out CFCs and enabled ozone recovery, does not cover aluminum oxide pollution from satellites. The FCC currently categorizes satellites as “extraterritorial activities” exempt from National Environmental Policy Act review, meaning no environmental assessment is required before launch approval. By the time the full impacts appear in the 2040s–2050s, the damage could be irreversible.
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That’s wild. Can you link us a source for that?
Their orbit is too low for Kessler syndrome. If every starlink blew up today, it would only take a few years for all the debris to fall to earth. It’s the higher geosynchronous orbit you gotta worry about.
You mean where he put a car.
That was apparently in heliocentric orbit.
round-based telescope exposures are being ruined right now. Negative externalities abound.
I can’t help but think we could have done it with a reasonable number of sats. we put so many up it was like it was just a flex to make spacex profitable
I feel the exact same way about Thiel and “Things Named After Lord of the Rings.”
It’s so endlessly infuriating watching billionaires actively turn things we care about against us.
You’ve cost us billions in sales! Your views are killing the company!!
Are you going to fire me?
No! We’re going to pay you MORE!!
Musk has kompromats on board of directors and shareholders.
They’re all his family and friends
Indeed. They literally just support the nazism.
and triple the value of your stock! Take THAT!
profit drop?? TSLA now at $460. The worse they do by any economic measure, the better the stock does.
I was thinking the trillion dollar package was a way to fire musk while letting him save some face
fuck nazis and fuck musk specifically. weird ass pedo mf
It should have cost him all the Tesla sales. The fact that it didn’t is creepy and scary
It could be a happy thought, that most people aren’t part of the terminally online meme culture. That they have real concerns instead of bullshit imagined ones.
As a consequence, he’s the richest person in the world and Tesla is a 1.5 Trillion dollar company. It has TEN times the P/E of companies like apple, microsoft, and google. More than 5x Nvidia, even.
Why do we live in a world that rewards the worst shit? I mean even Trump is a real billionaire now.
The rules of this game need a major rewrite.
P/E?
the measure of if a company actually makes money versus what people think it is worth.
Tesla is 15X overvalued by any financial measure, which is why serious investors avoid it. Meme stock.
Price to earnings ratio. Low p/e means good value, high is either inflated, or a signal that people think their earnings will increase in the future.
Being a nazi is not politics, It’s being a fucking nazi.
I could admire someone sticking to their principles in face of losing money, but when the principles are “be a dick to marginalised people for the lulz” you’ve just got a garbage human being
I feel this very much, yet at the same time feel like people need to understand that it is politics.
People try so hard to compartmentalize politics as this thing not to bring up where it “doesn’t belong” but yet politics that you ignore will eventually push themselves into those places eventually.
Nazi ideology is a political ideology. A rotten, awful one, but one nonetheless.
Its why you can’t afford to sit out politics, ever.
It is politics. Just some political beliefs are fucking evil.
Customer base most likely to hate nazis: people who buy EVs.
Customer base most likely to love nazis: people who buy trucks that get 2 mpg.
Guess the pedo genius found that math problem a little too difficult.
Elon’s Brain: If I buy twitter, surely I can influence public opinion
Public Opinion: Whoa this guy is a real piece of shit
He bought Twitter to help Trump win and Trump won.
I remember all those news articles “Was this a Nazi salute? Can we be sure?” lmao
Fucking complicit ass media
Then the typical idiots posting “salutes” by democrats.
oMg…DeMs aRe nAzIs
Damn aspies and their sieg heil pass!
There Mr. Musk predicts market caps of his competitors.
