Elon Musk Responds to Concerns That His Political Antics Are Tanking Tesla Sales
“We’re hitting all-time highs.”
Not Owned
During a recent conversation, Donald Trump’s most well-known fanboy scoffed at the idea that Tesla’s sales have taken a hit due to his politicking.
“Tesla’s sales are actually doing great,” Elon Musk said during an X Spaces audio chat last weekend, per Electrek. “We’re hitting all-time highs.”
That assessment doesn’t exactly jibe with reality — though in Muskworld, little does.
While the beginning of October did bring in some reported sales growth for the 53-year-old billionaire’s electric vehicle company, it likely isn’t enough to undo its two-quarter plummet from earlier in 2024. With an 8.5 percent sales decrease in Q1 and a five percent drop in Q2, Tesla’s nosediving sales have been blamed on everything from more competition in the EV field to the poor performance of the long-awaited Cybertrucks, which began being delivered at the end of last year — but perhaps nothing so much as its CEO’s hyper-public descent into racism and conspiracy theories.
Apolitical
Continuing his diatribe on the site formerly known as Twitter, the multi-hyphenate CEO erroneously suggested that people who buy EVs don’t care about politics.
“I think people really care about the quality of the product as opposed to whether they agree or disagree with the CEO’s views,” Musk said. “The CEO of any given company is going to have political views.”
That, again, is not backed up by numbers.
As Futurism and other outlets have reported throughout 2024, Musk going all-in for Trump and various toxic culture war topics has massively turned off Tesla buyers both in the United States and across the pond. That trend makes sense given that the act of purchasing an electric car has long been politicized by oil companies who pay politicians — primarily Republicans, though there are choice Democrats in their rosters as well — to sabotage the EV industry.
With his increasing conservatism at odds with the liberal environmentalism that’s practically synonymous with EV ownership, Musk has spent much of this presidential election season antagonizing his core buyers — but to his mind, that’s a non-issue.
“At the end of the day what matters is if Tesla makes a great product,” he told his X Space audience, “and people like buying great products.”
That assertion also isn’t at all backed up by fact — but at this point, we aren’t expecting Musk to tell the truth.
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