How Real is the Tesla Boycott?

Feb 27, 2025 @ 9:27 pm

Tesla Controversy A Quebec man is selling both his Teslas, and canceling his order for a Cybertruck. Is he the leading edge of a wave of Tesla boycotts?

The picture is murky. The stock chart isn’t.

Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) had a nice jump after the election as CEO Elon Musk was seen cozying up to Donald Trump. Surely, investors thought, that had to be good for the stock. As you can see, shares zoomed from the low $200s up to $500 before recently dropping down to the upper $200s again. Not an unusual roller-coaster for $TSLA (which has bounced between $121 and $400), but the question is which direction the stock is coasting towards.

Tesla Stock

The Momentum

Last August my daughter and son-in-law purchased a new electric vehicle. My wife said they’d “bought an EV” and, with some trepidation, I asked them if it was a Tesla.

“Oh no…no, no” they said simultaneously, with a horrified expression that suggested I’d accused them of paying for it by selling red panda kidneys on the black market.

And that was before the election.

The trajectory of Musk’s personal brand has been a bell curve. Early on, he was a techno savior, getting EVs right where other car companies had failed for years. And then there was SpaceX, too, and cool things like the Boring Company and hyper-loops. Sure, he had critics, but compared to a lot of billionaires, he seemed to a visionary, and a lot less stuffy. I mean, he smoked pot on the Joe Rogan show, and floated taking Tesla private for $420 a share – get it? Even if the SEC swatted him down for that, it was still kind of funny and really, who likes the SEC anyways?

But not long after that, ugly stories began to emerge about the toxic work culture at Tesla and SpaceX. In 2018, while the world held is breath about the Thai cave rescue, Musk proposed creating a miniature submarine. When Thai officials said it was not practical and a British diver snarked about it on TV, Musk falsely accused the diver of paedophila and hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on the man.

This came off badly as a billionaire abusing his power.

And Then Came Twitter

In October 2022, Musk bought Twitter. The way Musk conducted himself was nothing short of dastardly. It included:

mocking handicapped employees
cheating employees out of their severance
eliminating nearly all trust and safety personnel
eliminating accessibility teams as well (because if you’re mocking the handicapped, you probably don’t care if they can read your site)
personally spreading conspiracy theories he likely knew were completely false, such as claiming Paul Pelosi was attacked my a jealous lover and questioning COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness
causing irresponsible chaos with his half-baked verification plan. One example of this was a fake Eli Lilly account tweeting that “insulin is free” which caused Eli Lilly’s market cap to drop by several billion dollars

To be fair, when you pony up billions to buy a company, you’re allowed to make changes, and some things (such as renaming the platform to X) are simply business decisions. But it was the mean-spirited way that he went about things which turned off a large audience. You can lay people off without mocking them and fighting them on their contractually guaranteed severance.

And Then Came…Um…

Cozying up to either major political party is going to turn off at least a third and probably more of the US buying audience. But Donald Trump is perhaps the most polarizing president since Abraham Lincoln.

Musk donated more to a presidential campaign than any other human in history ($277m), and regardless of your party, it’s hard not to see that as a billionaire buying a President.

Tesls Swasticar On January 20, he gave…some kind of salute. I don’t really think he intended it to be a Nazi salute. I mean, he strikes me as the kind of nerd who is probably awkward on the dance floor and throwing his arms out in some kind of weird expression of exuberance wouldn’t surprise me.

But for God’s sake, you have to have the self-awareness to know how that’s going to be taken. Even though he denied it was a Nazi salute, many people around the planet took it that way. If you make a throat-slitting gesture, you have to expect people are going to take it as a threat, regardless of your intent.

Since then, he’s been the figurehead of the Department of Government Efficiency. Politically, the idea of cutting back on wasteful spending is always popular and every president has championed this. But naming it after a meme, waving a chainsaw in the air (quite literally), and going about it capriciously is a different matter. People want sane people in charge of their government, not unelected dilettantes.

And the mean streak has come to the fore again. It’s one thing to recommend to the President that Federal employees send an email summarizing their accomplishments – indeed, this sort of weekly reporting is very common in the private sector – but to say “if you don’t, it’ll be taken as a resignation” just smells of someone who’s confusing his pet Twitter with government agencies.

This is not to argue about politics or whether cutting government staffing is good or bad, but rather to observe that Musk has tied himself up in political controversy, and gone about it in a very awkward, tone deaf way. One might draw a comparison with Steve Forbes, who semi-quixotically ran for the Republican nomination in the 90s, spending huge sums of his own money. He came up short, and eventually bowed out. The Forbes brand (such as its business magazine) did not suffer any harm. Surely some of its readers did not agree with Forbes’ political positions, but he went about things in a sane way, not as a smirking gargoyle.

Thus the bell-curve: from unknown to techno savior to everything people hate about people with too much power.

About Those Teslas…

Now here’s an interesting chart:

Boycott Twitter

That’s a look at how the term “boycott tesla” is trending on Google. Barely existed before January 20, and now it’s spiking sharply.

Tesla’s sales dropped 1% last year despite a 25% surge in global EV sales, which was a shock given that its volume had been galloping year-over-year since inception. Competitors like BYD in China and Volkswagen in Europe, as well as a gaggle of startups, have chewed up Tesla’s market share. Competitors are expanding their product lines while Tesla relies on two aging models (the 3 and Y).

In key European markets, Tesla sales are off by as much as 50%.

Tesla has promised more affordable EVs and new models in a few months, though they’ve been mum on details and analysts are skeptical. The supposed $25,000 Tesla was delayed infinitely last year.

Boycott or Product Timing?

So is Tesla’s sales slump due a snag in its product plans, sharpened competition, or the public’s revulsion over Musk’s antics?

If it’s due to the need to refresh its products, that is a fixable problem. But still a painful one. Every month, EV buyers decide to purchase a vehicle and as any car manufacturer knows, if you buy from a particular maker and are happy, you’ll look at them first next time. Tesla is potentially losing out on those first purchases. Still, there are new purchasers all the time, so this is probably the smallest problem.

If it’s due to other auto makers jumping in, this is normal market dynamics. However, Tesla has a structural advantage here. At present, it’s somewhat painful to be a legacy auto maker. A lot of your buyers don’t want to pay an EV premium so it’s hard to commit factory capital to a full switchover, plus every month there’s new technology you have to factor in. Integrating it all – and navigating patents and IP pitfalls – makes for a lot of complicated decisions where mistakes can cost billions. Tesla, as a pure EV maker, doesn’t have this problem. Then again, neither does BYD.

But if the major factor is Musk himself, this is a very difficult problem to fix. Musk has enormous personal wealth tied up in Tesla and while he could conceivable divest his holdings and move on, that doesn’t seem likely in the near term. While he does suffer somewhat from “latest shiny thing syndrome,” dumping his Tesla stock would be disastrous for the company and painful for him, especially since so much of it is leveraged with personal loans. Of course, if the stock tanks, those loans become even more painful as lenders would demand fresh collateral.

So Tesla and Musk and probably together for the long haul, which means the Tesla brand is tied up with the Musk brand. The question is how much the latter will drag down the former, particularly since there are increasingly other options for consumers.

What do you think? Where do you think Tesla will be in a few months – rebounding or cratering? Please let us know in the comments below!

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

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