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.
Elon Musk’s
politicsNazism cost his firm Tesla more than one million EV salesFixed it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
So their stock valuation is going to go down to normal levels, right? …right?
More.
MORE!
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.
He doesn’t care
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
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
And he has a fever dream about robot butlers and suddenly his stock is at an all time high and he’s negotiating a trillion dollar payday. Make it make sense.
“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.
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!!
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
Musk has kompromats on board of directors and shareholders.
They’re all his family and friends
Indeed. They literally just support the nazism.
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.
I wouldn’t use a Tesla as a gender neutral bathroom let alone buy one.
Being a nazi is not politics, It’s being a fucking nazi.
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.
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
It is politics. Just some political beliefs are fucking evil.
Then why are they wanting to pay him 1 trillion dollars? Rich people are weird.
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)
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 thought they were setting him up for a graceful exit when they could not agree on a ridiculous pay package
Tesla has to hit 10Trillion to get that pay out. It will not.
