Elon Musk’s politics cost his firm Tesla more than one million EV sales, report reveals
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.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/elon-musk-politics-tesla-ev-sales-intlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
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.
https://fortune.com/2025/10/27/tesla-board-chair-robyn-denholm-shareholders-elon-musk-1-trillion-pay-package/
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
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.
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.
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
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.
That's wild. Can you link us a source for that?
Absolutely!
https://phys.org/news/2024-06-satellite-megaconstellations-jeopardize-recovery-ozone.html
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.
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
bah.. get outta here with science...he shot up a car just as a stunt.
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
Musk can shoot whatever he wants into orbit. He even shot up one of his shitty cars.
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.
Because they're fucking Nazis and need to face their existence with a fist
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
It should have cost him all the Tesla sales. The fact that it didn't is creepy and scary
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.
P/E?
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.
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.
The rules of this game need a major rewrite.
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.
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.
Feels like if he could just STFU he'd be golden. I remember when he was widely seen in a positive light. He was practically messianic on Reddit back in the day. Then his innate pettiness came out when he called that diver a peado. It feels like his mask slipped then and everything after just reinforced the fact that he's an unchecked and uncaring megalomaniac.
That's why a lot of people admired him until early 2010s. Hell, I have a photo from 2014 pride parade with a rainbow model S being centre of attention.
Luckily for us, shutting up is a rare skill for such assholes.
Fixed 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%
"Musk partisan effect"
Fucking hell, these people can euphemism their way out of anything. It's the Musk Is A Fucking Nazi effect. Just say it as it is. How is this guy still allowed to be a director of a company that he is actively hurting? Are there no laws regarding fiduciary duty? Shareholders ought to be rearing him to shreds, not voting to pay him more.
The richest man in the world is the main shareholder. You can thank our government for giving him massive tax payer subsidies instead of investing in multiple American run businesses. I’ve noticed our government likes to give all of our tax dollars to South African apartheid Nazis who are now looting our government and stripping our freedoms because they think they haven’t gotten enough.
It's the "piece of shit human being is rejected by sane people effect" and has been a thing since the dawn of civilization.
Ivet said ot a few times in.a thread on.a local Australian forum about buying Tesla's and.the post just gets deleted.
Australian's are atill buying heaps of them and we only get 2 models, the 3 and Y.
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
One million sales? It needs to be all sales. Don't buy swasticars.
For a while, I saw them all over the fucking place, probably 50 on my commute.
These days I see 2-3 and very rarely see the trucks. I wonder where they all are now. I seeing 10 of the trucks per day. Now, maybe one.
You're kinda lucky. I see them everywhere with their goofy vanity plates, and way too many swastitruks with crazy wraps.
I don't think they're all muahaha nazis, but they do have an air of aimless consumer zombies who ignorantly bought something ridiculous to show everybody how cool they are. (Kinda like musk himself.)
And they sure do drive like their "autopilot" could do a better job. Geeze.
As far as most dangerous, aggressive, petty idiots on the road go, my low expectations are tied between "tesla products" and "white pickup trucks with obnoxious stickers and a toolbox." Followed very closely by "My brand new enormous Mercedes SUV says I can do whatever I want."
Most of the the jackwagons in my area must have sold them to jackwagons in your area :)
Same. Almost 1 in 3 cars that I saw, at one point, was a Tesla (in certain areas).
They're still around, but definitely not nearly as many.
scrapyards. impossible to fix, written off by insurance for minor crashes. GREEN.
Honestly surprised it is so low.
And yet Tesla sales are increasing once more 🤷♂️ People are stupid, don't care or both.
only in US.
I saw one a week or two ago with several bumper stickers apologizing for Musk and literally explaining that they got the car before we knew.
For as long as Musk has been in the picture, he has been a walking red flag inferno. "I bought it before he went crazy!" Dude, it has been so clear from the beginning he's crazy, you're just ignorant AF.
People are so stupid. Even when I told them he is crazy they try to defend the guy. Only now they come with these dumb bumper stickers as they cannot find ways to defend him anymore, so they try to cover their ass with a fucking sticker.
Just his politics? Not his holistically shitty personally, face, body, vibe and …aura?
I mean... I don't know shit about any other car manufacturers. If I were in the market for an EV, and the specs on a specific car sound best for my needs, and you tell me "Did you know the CEO of that car company, has a terrible personality, face, vibe and aura... I'd probably still buy the car.
If you tell me the CEO of that company did a sig heil, created a group to slash pediatric cancer research, helped get the orange cheeto elected, supports the US republican party and the far right german party, constantly tweets and agrees with great replacement theory posts....
Then yeah I'm not buying that car.
CEOs are generally terrible. Anyone who wants to be in charge should on no account be allowed to be.
especially one on DRUGS. that switches between ketamine, cocaine, shrooms, and alcohol.
I feel like it shouldn't have to be repeated so often but if you're going to do drugs: DO NOT MIX THEM. That includes alcohol and whatever else you want to do, even fucking weed. Just don't mix shit.
Musk is a piece of shit nazi whose public opinions are actively harming his companies, but let’s not get all puritanical about the use of drugs. Plenty of people use the drugs you’ve listed (and many more) and aren’t hateful fuckwads.
Nah, tons of savvy, socially-awkward, successfuly ugly mugs exist. This guy's just a tool.
Sadly if you spend any time on LinkedIn, most management types still look up to him as a role model.
they believe everything he says, and they tell each other how awesome he is...because... they did some bullshit business degree and have no clue how anything in STEM works.
ketamine king, you can order ketamine on the TAP from elons blood. enough ketamine in his system to knock out an small elephant.
All he had to do was stfu and rake in money. How many other car ceos can you name?
Chris Farley's cousin. I wanna say Jim Farley?
Jim was on CBS Sunday morning recently and they showed clips of Tommy boy
Gordon Murray and also ex CEO Carlos Ghosn. First guy is cool and second one is very interesting. He had to get himself smuggled out of Japan
I get it for those that were stuck in a loan, etc...totally understandable. But yeah, I have no idea why someone would buy his cars knowing what we all know now.
Unless they support Nazis.
I was pricing various solar setups and quite a few options involved the Tesla name. I just cannot imagine putting that on my house, which is likely to be something I hang onto even longer than a car...
I mean, I have one. But I got it a long time ago when it was the only long range electric car on the market. Now Tesla is the absolute last brand I would choose.
Well I mean he was always crazy, but at least he used to be merely distasteful rather than full-on fascist.
Meanwhile, in the land that was previously populated mostly by lifted, coal-rolling diesel trucks with "Prius Repellant" decals, Teslas are now everywhere shortly after February 2025 for some fucking reason.
"from my heart to..." Uhh yea, he's a Nazi
He doesn’t care, there is nothing that can really ruin him financially, and the idea that he would ever be convicted for a crime is ridiculous as well.
These people, the ones who have control over the major levers of power, they have completely insulated themselves from accountability, they are all psychopaths, and many are nearing the ends of their lives, so they are particularly nihilistic and dismissive of the consequences of their actions.
Ohh but he does, he has a terribly thin skin. He'll never hurt for money, but he's deperate to make his mark on the work that isn't branded an utter failure.
Yeah we gotta remember this is a guy who paid someone to play Diablo for him in an attempt to look cool.
Eh, I dunno, none of that is really dissuading my opinion, and in my experience most “normies” still see him as a visionary, albeit an erratic and sometimes arrogant one. He has a “cocoon” of acknowledgment, and his place in the history books is ensured at this point.
The companies were good before he bought them. The only visionary thing he did was buy them. Every time he gets in there and starts flipping switches and pulling knobs, they become worth much less.
unlike rescue submarines, traffic tunnels, hyperloop, Mars landers, electric semi trucks, his penis, tesla ventillators, FSD....
And yet that's all he shall ever be remembered as. The moment he's dead, make sure every statue, plaq and memorial he tries having built is rusted always by some magical compound that rhymes with peach
So their stock valuation is going to go down to normal levels, right? ...right?
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.
you mean asshole.
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.
Good luck with your gamble
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
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.
Needs to be higher. Fuck Elon.
Fascist billionaire is still way too rich. Stupid people still buying nazimobiles
Any model year 2024+ Tesla needs to be open game for vandalism. The damn things should be uninsurable.
That was happening for a bit early this year, then, I shit you not, they committed resources and personnel to a "Tesla Task Force." to protect their best boy's little stonks.
The sad thing is, a majority of victims of this property damage would probably be too smoothbrained to understand why their choice of wagon is controversial.
I remember people on Nextdoor (LOL I know) being like "Why's this happening people are so mean and hateful :("
I showed them the famous musk heil photo to explain the phenomenon, and the copium and whattaboutism denial response was insane. "hE's NoT a NaZi JuSt BcUz U dOnT LiKe HiM nUh-Uh"
(One legit tried the "throwing out his heart" defense LOL)
I was pretty calm and respectful in explaining the situation but the comment got moderated, meanwhile these braindead suburbanites were engaged in a feverish goon session about how people who keyed their cars should literally be killed in response. No intervention whatsoever.
It's amazing how the bad guys are propped up by untold multitudes of morons who have literally no idea what's going on about anything. Their sole identity is the things they own, and they'd gladly report their neighbors to ICE for a head pat.
But they would legit be confused as to why they draw ire or retribution with their choices because they "Don't get involved with politics."
The trading with tesla stocks is prabablyworse because there is where he drains his income from
And he wants $1 trillion to keep burying the company.
And he'll probably get it.
What a world we live in.
Elon never reaches milestones, so the $1T thing won't happen.
He met every last milestone for the previous compensation package everyone called utterly ridiculous and unachievable last time, so I wouldn't count against it, even if no one deserves that much compensation for meeting those goals.
And at least the first couple aren't that hard to reach in the time span provided. The annualized growth to meet them isn't high, and the payout just for that is also ridiculous
That's not how it works. The pay package is linked to milestones that would earn the company much more than the payment.
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
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.
How is he still the CEO?
He stacked the board like Trump does government agencies. Friends and family.
He filled the Board with his buddies. If they kick him out, TSLA stock is asswipe.
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.
More.
MORE!
So far
I wouldn’t use a Tesla as a gender neutral bathroom let alone buy one.
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?
Not just any glue, thermal adhesive. Hot glue. Everyone knows hot glue arts and crafts last forever.
He clearly needs a trillion dollar pay package!
Exactly, just needs a little motivation.
...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
Finally! Some good news!
He took his heart and threw it out to the world for that company. /s
I know people who won’t buy Tesla because of Nazi, but would buy any other ev.
he largely abandoned tesla already, he moved onto his XAI.
oh, because AI will never lose money.
That's a pretty good start, keep that energy going.
falco: "GOOD!"
He might have fucked over his company but didn’t he make a shit ton of money personally over the last year or so?
I think he s fine
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.