New study claims Elon Musk's politics cost Tesla millions of sales

28 October 2025

Tesla's sales have hit a rough patch after the company dominated the electric car market for years. Its growth has stalled, and many people point to new EVs from other companies as the reason, but a new report suggests a different, more personal problem: the company's famous CEO, Elon Musk.

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) puts hard numbers on this problem. The report is titled "The Musk Partisan Effect on Tesla Sales," and it makes a bold claim: Musk's "polarizing and partisan actions" have directly cost Tesla over one million vehicle sales just in the United States. This is a huge number, not just some rounding error. The researchers believe that without this "Musk effect," Tesla's sales would have been 67% to 83% higher between October 2022 and April 2025.

The researchers from Yale and NBER did not just ask people their opinions. Instead, they studied official data. They looked at every new vehicle registration, month by month, in every US state and county. This data included all electric cars and hybrids sold from March 2020 to April 2025. This allowed them to see exactly what people were buying and where they lived.

In the next step, they used a method that spots changes in trends. They tracked sales in counties that tend to vote Democratic and compared them to counties that tend to vote Republican. Before late 2022, the trend was clear. Counties with more Democrats showed a growing love for Tesla. This was not a surprise, as liberal-leaning buyers have often been the first to adopt EVs.

But that trend broke. The "treatment" event, as the researchers call it, was Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter in October 2022. After that date, the data shows a dramatic reversal. As Musk's political activities increased, Democratic-leaning counties began "shifting away from Tesla purchases." The study is direct. It says Musk's actions "antagonized his most loyal customer base." By the first quarter of 2025, the study estimates Tesla's monthly sales would have been 150% higher if this had not happened.

This leads to the next big question: where did those million buyers go? Did they decide electric cars were not for them? No. They simply bought EVs from other brands. The study found what it calls a "nearly one-for-one substitution." For almost every customer Tesla lost, a competitor gained one. When Tesla's sales were tanking, companies like Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, and Kia got a huge, unexpected boost. The study says Musk's actions increased the sales of other electric and hybrid vehicles by 17% to 22%.

You might think that if Musk lost Democratic customers, he might have gained Republican ones. The study looked at that, too, and the answer was a surprising, but firm "no." Survey data showed that Musk's public shift "significantly reduces liberal and Democratic support for Tesla without increasing conservative and Republican support." It seems the move did not win new friends; it just cost the company old ones. This is partly because Tesla's sales network is not as strong in the rural, conservative areas where it would need to build this new support.

This detailed look at US sales also comes as Tesla faces similar problems overseas. In Europe, Tesla deals with even tougher competition, with many more EVs available for buyers to choose from. The NBER study focused only on the US, but it shows how deeply a CEO's public image can affect the bottom line. For Tesla, it was an effect that cost them over a million customers.

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