Musk's political foray cost Tesla huge sales, Yale study finds
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Tesla CEO Elon Musk's "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 Musk's political arc.
Driving the news: The study sees a key break in sales data in Democratic counties beginning in October 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 Musk's 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: That's an eye-popping effect if true, and industry analysts that Axios touched base with were skeptical.
- Consider that Tesla's 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 we're watching: Tesla's future sales. It reported record global deliveries, a proxy for sales, in Q3 as U.S. buyers rushed to use vanishing federal tax credits.
Sign up here for Axios' Future of Energy newsletter.
