獅山巡禮
投資雜談
Tesla CEO Elon Musks polarizing and partisan actions may have cost the EV maker over 1 million U.S. car sales, Yale researchers find in a new paper.
Why it matters: It puts huge numbers around what auto analysts and pollsters have directionally believed about the business effect of Musks political arc.
Driving the news: The study sees a key break in sales data in Democratic counties beginning in October of 2022, when Musk bought Twitter (now X).
It zooms in on October 2022-April 2025. That stretch featured his many right-leaning statements; alliance with Donald Trump; and time leading DOGE.
It looks to isolate Musks politics from other sales drags, like an aging lineup and rising competition.
Stunning stats: By the first quarter of 2025, we find that without the Musk partisan effect, Tesla monthly sales would have been about 150 percent higher, the working paper finds.
When the effect is aggregated over the entire period from October 2022 through April 2025, we find that Tesla lost between 1 and 1.26 million vehicles in sales.
Reality check: Thats an eye-popping effect if true, and industry analysts that Axios touched base with were skeptical.
Consider that Teslas full-year U.S. sales peaked in 2023 at around 671,000 units, per Kelley Blue Book data.
Yes, but: Co-author Kenneth Gillingham, an environmental and energy economics professor, said Tesla could have managed the higher output.
Tesla had plans with sales even above our counterfactual sales impacts and was continuing to build production and delivery infrastructure when sales flatlined and they had to ramp back on the growth, he said via email.
What were watching: Teslas future sales. It reported record global deliveries, a proxy for sales, in Q3 as U.S. buyers rushed to use vanishing federal tax credits.
