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.
What are three things that don’t exist and don’t have a market?
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
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