Elon Musk has always been a controversial figure, but until a few years ago a lot of people still considered him more flawed genius than global threat. Since he purchased Twitter and renamed it X, however, his public image has become more negative. Most recently, Musk’s positivity towards Donald Trump and his involvement in conversations around the UK riots have pushed some over the edge. How will this affect the sales of his core brand, Tesla?
Although cars are technology products, and not supposed to be political, electric ones have always found themselves part of the “culture wars” debate. The initial early adopters were a mixture of new technology lovers and those worried about global warming. Teslas are a bit different, because they were intended to be aspirational. Part of the reason why they have been much more successful than previous EVs was that they weren’t just emissions free, but better than their combustion competitors in performance and technology as well.
Still, while Tesla vehicles therefore appeal to a lot of “tech bros” and “stonks” investors who bought shares as well as the cars, their primary customer base has still historically been environmentally concerned buyers. That’s more likely to be on the left politically than the right. This is why Musk’s apparent shift rightwards in the last few years raises questions about the positioning of the Tesla brand.
Right-Leaning Elon
When Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, he did so under banner of reinvigorating the free speech on the platform that he claimed had been impeded by the “liberal” management. However, the re-platforming of questionable far right users such as Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, and the so-called “Tommy Robinson”, left advertisers concerned that their promotions would be placed next to unsavory content such as hate speech. This has allegedly happened with ads from the Olympics, GSK and the British Medical Association appearing next to far right posts.
Many companies have stopped advertising on X because of this, and Musk is suing a group of them as a result. It’s understandable why he’s upset. The effect of this revenue exodus has been an apparent plummeting of X’s value from the $44 billion Musk paid for it in 2022 to a reported $19 billion now, leaving the banks who helped him with the purchase to contemplate billion-dollar holes in their accounts.
The last two years of Musk’s ownership of X have been filled with almost daily controversies, beloved of the right and deplored by the left. There was even a bizarre story going round recently that Musk had sent a Tesla Cybertruck to a Chechen warlord for him to use on the Russian side in the war against Ukraine. This seems unlikely (and he denied it) but illustrates how fractious the opinions of Musk have become.
However, the final straws for many have been Musk’s chummy relationship with Donald Trump and his reactions to the events surrounding the recent riots in the UK. Whether or not he is giving $45 million a month to a Trump super political-action committee, his recent personal interview with the former president has met with widespread astonishment and criticism from “liberals”. For people in the UK, Musk’s assertion that civil war in Great Britain was “inevitable” also filled a significant portion of the country’s population with outrage.
X-odus, Movement Of Threads People
There have been numerous articles about X being over, claiming there is a mass “X-odus” underway. However, for now, its main competitors remain far behind. In July, Meta’s Threads had about 38 million daily actives users compared to Twitter’s 251 million and the newcomer Bluesky has much lower traffic still. However, when I recently asked Threads users whether they were keeping their X accounts 75% said they’d deleted them. So there seems to be very strong negativity from those who have made the switch.
There have also been quite a few posts on social media (X, Threads and Facebook) from Tesla owners saying how much they dislike Musk, with some even saying they were selling their cars in disgust. To get a glimpse of what was really going on, I posted polls on X and Threads. I also posted the same poll on the UK’s most popular EV Facebook group, but after a few hundred votes the discussion got ugly and the admin removed it before the results could be collated. That rather illustrates how contentious this issue is.
The poll asked “Are you a Tesla owner who is selling up because of Musk, or just not planning to make your next car a Tesla? Does it not matter, and you’d still buy one? Or did you never like the brand in the first place?”
The results were quite surprising. On Threads, 9% claimed to have sold their Teslas because of Elon Musk, while 46% said they wouldn’t buy another one, and 39% said they never liked Tesla anyway. Just 7% said they would buy another Tesla.
You’d think that X, the social network that Musk owns and that is increasingly dominated by his fans, would have different results. However, even here 5.3% of respondents said they had sold their Tesla, and 31.6% wouldn’t buy another, although 28.9% would buy another car from Musk’s company and 34.2% didn’t like Tesla’s anyway.
Like any social media poll, this is not a scientific result. The sample sizes were small, could easily be skewed by the political bias of those who tend to follow me on X and Threads, and there’s no way of knowing whether those who claim to have sold their Teslas actually did. It seems like an extreme course of action when a car is such a major financial decision. In fact, a Bloomberg Intelligence survey stated 87% of Tesla buyers in the USA would purchase from the same brand for their next car.
Tesla Cars Haven’t Changed, But The Market Has
The car’s green credentials also haven’t changed. Panel gaps aside, Teslas are still very efficient EVs, frequently manufactured with green energy, and their technology remains years ahead of most competitors. Tesla Giga Berlin was also recently praised for its employee diversity, although about 500,000 trees were cut down to build it.
There is also a theory that the Cybertruck is meant to break EVs into the mainstream American audience, and pickup purchasers tend to be further right politically than urban sedan and SUV owners. Therefore, Musk might be courting favor with this new market for the brand. Maybe there’s some method there?
It’s worth noting, too, that one of Tesla’s main markets – China – could not care less about Elon Musk’s politics. You can’t even use X in China without a VPN. It’s unlikely that most people even know about what has been going on. The threat to Tesla in China is nothing to do with Musk’s public image, and much more about the increasingly potent local competition from the likes of BYD.
Despite the surprising results of my polls, Tesla’s cars themselves are still the main issue with the general market rather than the niche of opinion you find on social media. Here, Tesla does have a problem. The recent Highland update of the Tesla Model 3 is a notable improvement on the previous version, and the Performance variant even more so than its predecessor. But there is a lot of choice in the market now, so even the updated Model 3 doesn’t look so new compared to the fresh arrivals from other brands, despite still being ahead on technology. The fact that BMW recently surpassed Tesla as the most popular BEV brand in Europe could hint at that.
Perhaps the biggest issue, though, is that the much-vaunted $25,000 Tesla still seems at least a year away. Most attention has been given to the Cybertruck, which is unlikely to be popular in Europe as we don’t love pickups this side of the Atlantic as much as Americans. It’s also way too big for European roads. Although SUVs remain the most popular vehicle format, and the Tesla Model Y still the bestselling BEV, the market is crying for more affordable electric cars. The Dacia Spring is a step in the right direction, but that’s made in China. Despite the new tariffs, Chinese imports could be delivering the sought after affordable BEVs before Tesla, and that’s probably more of a challenge than Elon Musk’s political leanings.
