Tanking Tesla

The bump that Tesla got because its grand poobah was appointed president has vanished entirely, and there’s no reason to think that the slide of an already highly overvalued stock is going to end:

Tesla’s turbulent February, marked by a significant stock decline and sales drop in Europe, highlights the growing tension between Elon Musk’s political role and his company’s performance. As protests and market pressure mount, the EV maker is facing increasing headwinds.

As Elon Musk’s influence in the U.S. government grows, Tesla’s fortunes are continuing to nosedive.

The EV maker just had its worst month since December 2022, overlapping with CEO Musk’s first full month as part of President Donald Trump’s administration.

Tesla stock fell by approximately 28% last month, the company’s worst month of decline since a 37% drop in December 2022.

Several factors are driving this decline, including a drop in sales, fears around Trump’s tariffs, and rising backlash against the business’s boss, the richest man on the planet, Musk.

The company’s poor performance has also affected Musk’s personal wealth. At the beginning of February, Musk’s net worth was around $433 billion. Today, that number is $330 billion, per Bloomberg’s billionaire index—a drop of $103 billion.

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There is an integral connection between Musk and the Tesla brand.

The billionaire is the public face of the brand, and actions he’s taken outside the company have directly affected Tesla’s performance in the past.

As Wedbush’s analyst Dan Ives put it last year: “Tesla is Musk and Musk is Tesla.”

Boycotts are generally ineffective, but as I’ve said Tesla is an unusually good target:

• Musk is associated with the brand to a truly unusual degree. (“The appeal is also tied up in what a Tesla says about its owner,” wrote Wirecutter in 2021.)
• Teslas are an expensive, niche product. (In addition to Musk’s brand destruction, this also make the recession Musk is currently engineering bad news for his most valuable company.)
• The market for Teslas is overwhelmingly comprised of people Musk is going out of his way to alienate. Musk’s fans have been trained for years to hate electric cars and he doesn’t even seem to care about marketing to them because he has other administrative states to destroy.
• Despite its still high American market share there are now many perfectly viable if not superior alternatives; you’re not asking people who like them to give up electric cars.
• Tesla owners are already complaining about how driving their Nazimobiles are making them public pariahs.

Tesla Takedown is a movement that can work.