Tesla's Gamble on MAGA Customers Won't Work [View all]

[LetMyPeopleVote]

Musk is running off all or most of the liberals and Democrats who might buy a Tesla. Musk will not be able to replace these liberals or democrats with MAGA assholes
https://bsky.app/profile/kraigb.bsky.social/post/3lko5obnr7c2s

Link to tweet

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-18/elon-musk-s-tesla-bet-on-maga-customers-will-fail

With that in mind, consider Tesla Inc., which is in the middle of what might be politely described as a vibe shift. The company has long enjoyed a massive advantage among the predominantly left-of-center car buyers who make up the American market for electric vehicles. First, because it was pretty much the only game in town for zippy, attractive EVs, and then, as more competition emerged, because owning a Tesla had already become a status symbol for a certain kind of affluent progressive. Until recently, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk had enthusiastically encouraged that association, branding himself and his company as bold, brash innovators fighting climate change.

And, well, Musk—whose massive public profile as the face of Tesla has always been one of the company’s main value propositions for investors and car buyers alike—isn’t doing that anymore. He’s swung the whole operation to the hard right, positioning Tesla as an antagonist to pretty much its entire customer base.

That base has gotten the message: Cybertruck owners have found their vehicles defaced with everything from spray paint to dog feces, and embarrassed drivers of less controversial Tesla models have taken to adding bumper stickers or magnets to their cars to make clear they purchased them before they knew about Musk’s politics. Tesla showrooms and Superchargers have attracted “Tesla Takedown” protests across the US, and a handful of suspected arson incidents of the company’s cars and facilities have also been reported. Sales numbers and registration rates for new Teslas have fallen around the world in 2025: Sales are down 45% across Europe; in Australia, the Electric Vehicle Council estimates a sales drop of 70% over the previous year; in China, shipments of domestically manufactured Teslas have plunged 49%.......

There’s little indication that Musk will simply be able to switch his product from one ideological market to another of equal size, having now remade Tesla into a symbol of sneering anti-progressivism. Some Tesla watchers posit that all of this will be little more than a bump in the road toward some masterful gambit that will make the company’s traditional customer base irrelevant—perhaps the advent of self-driving robotaxis, which Musk has promised for years are just over the horizon.......

Fundamentally, though, Musk seems to have made a similar error with Tesla that he made a couple of years ago with one of his other businesses, Twitter. In that instance, he stripped the blue verification checkmarks that the social platform’s old regime had given out freely to public figures and journalists, viewing them largely as markers of elite status within the platform’s petty little social hierarchy. (We were, to be fair, very annoying about the blue checks.) Under Musk, anyone who wanted their blue check back would have to pay a monthly fee to the company, and anyone who wanted one for the first time could also buy in. The company’s leadership seemed surprised when relatively few people volunteered to pay, but they shouldn’t have been. The verification marks had been changed from a symbol of professional status into a symbol of fealty to Musk, which meant they weren’t valuable to the same people anymore.

Brands decide to pursue new types of customers all the time, but usually they do so consciously—they find a target market and court it, often after assembling some kind of proof that they might be able to foment a particular type of demand among a new set of buyers. That’s why soda brands launch healthy beverages, for example, or why Louis Vuitton recently announced plans to introduce a line of color cosmetics. These companies know that some of the goodwill they’ve built up among the public can be transferred to new products, if done carefully—the meaning remains stable, but it’s contained in new vessels. What Musk is trying to do with Tesla, knowingly or not, is something different. The cars are the same, but he’s changed their meaning to satisfy a much smaller audience: himself.

Redneck, ignorant Maga types will not be buying Teslas