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.

  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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?

    • betanumerus@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      Tesla Giga presses are for the largest aluminum castings in the world. That part is pretty clever.

    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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      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.

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    1 month ago

    He might have fucked over his company but didn’t he make a shit ton of money personally over the last year or so?

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    1 month ago

    It should have cost him all the Tesla sales. The fact that it didn’t is creepy and scary

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      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.

    • vga@sopuli.xyz
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      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.

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    1 month ago

    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!!

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    He had no choice. The feds were on his ass and his scams was going to unravel. Fucking twat.

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    1 month ago

    “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.

    • Formfiller@lemmy.world
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      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.

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      Just say it as it is.

      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.

  • Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    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.

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    1 month ago

    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

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    1 month ago

    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?

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      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.

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        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

    • Bassman1805@lemmy.world
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      Robotaxis exist and have a market. Tesla just isn’t the one doing it.

      Waymo taxis are pretty common around me.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        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