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.
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.