Tesla shareholders have approved a pay package that could make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, even as a new study quantifies the cost to the electric vehicle maker of their chief executive’s political activism.
A new working paper, The Musk Partisan Effect on Tesla Sales, calculates that between October 2022 (when Musk acquired Twitter) and April 2025, Tesla sales in the US would have been 67 to 83 per cent higher without Musk’s “partisan effect” – equivalent to up to 1.26 million additional vehicles.
Basically, counties with more Democratic voters – Tesla’s most loyal customer base – shifted away from purchasing Teslas. Meanwhile, any rise in sales among Republican voters was minimal.
His political interventions also boosted rival electric and hybrid vehicle sales by 17 to 22 per cent, the authors add, while potentially putting California’s zero-emissions vehicle targets at risk.
RM Block
Note too that the trend is accelerating. The study finds that by the first quarter of 2025, monthly sales figures for Tesla would have been about 150 per cent higher were it not for Musk. Of course, the actual hit to global sales would have been far greater again.
The study looks only at US data, but the European picture is much bleaker for Tesla. Sales have halved in Italy, the Netherlands and Norway compared with last October. In Germany, where Musk has praised the far-right AfD and urged Germans to move beyond “past guilt” ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day, sales more than halved to just 750 cars in October.
It seems like the ultimate irony: Musk’s political antics may have cost the company more than a million vehicles, but he still gets a pay packet larger than any other in corporate history.
Then again, do falling car sales matter to shareholders? Tesla’s share price is near all-time highs. Because of their faith in Musk, investors continue to treat the company as something other than a car maker – a unique stock that moves independently of, well, actual cars sold.
