MAGA Customers Aren’t Going To Save Tesla

For years, Tesla (and its CEO Elon Musk for the most part) marketed itself as a fairly left-of-center automaker that cares about things like the environment, LGBTQ+ rights and other fairly progressive causes. Because of that, it brought in those very left-of-center buyers who wanted to portray themselves as tech-forward while also caring about the environment. That all changed when Musk swung hard to the extreme right of politics, not only in the U.S., but around the world. Since Tesla is pretty much seen as an extension of Musk himself, the perception around the brand has changed drastically and alienated most of its existing customers. 

Even folks who like their Teslas have to deal with the public shaming they now get every time they leave their homes — especially if they own a Cybertruck. Showrooms and Superchargers have also attracted “Tesla Takedown” protests across the U.S. as Musk becomes further dug in with his best friend Donald Trump. From Bloomberg:

[H]e appears to have completely misapprehended the symbolic value of Tesla’s brand. Or, at the very least, he seems to have misunderstood his own capacity to change the nature of that value without also diminishing it.

At first, people seemed to think he might pull it off, even as the Trump transition team promised to end policies that benefited the company’s business. Tesla’s share price jumped to an all-time high of almost $480 in December, in part because investors seemed to assume that Musk’s proximity to President Donald Trump was bound to benefit his businesses. Do you even need to worry about your customers’ feelings when your company can just drink directly from the federal government’s money hose?

It’s beginning to look like the answer to that question might be yes, at least for Musk. Tesla’s shares have since lost almost half their value, wiping out more than $150 billion of his personal net worth. Americans are socialized to view consumption as the front lines of politics, in part because it’s easier to govern a populace that sees themselves as shoppers instead of political actors. But that’s only true when the governing elites aren’t also retailers who can be directly damaged by massive swings in personal purchasing behavior.

There’s little indication that Musk will simply be able to switch his product from one ideological market to another of equal size, having now remade Tesla into a symbol of sneering anti-progressivism.

Tesla and Musk loyalists will say that this is just some sort of minor bump in the road toward some goal that exists on a higher plane of understanding than any of us are capable of. Perhaps that lies with Musk’s promise of self-driving robotaxis, which Musk has been promising since I was a freshman in college.

Until that can happen, though, Tesla still has to sell cars, and its base is shrinking at a rather dramatic rate. Unfortunately for Musk, “owning the libs” is as easy as buying the latest gas-guzzler — no charging headaches or well-past prime vehicle line up required. 

If there’s one thing Musk does have in his back pocket, it’s influence over the most powerful person in the world. Just last week, after shares of Tesla plummeted on Wall Street, Musk enlisted Trump to do a sort of Tesla infomercial on the White House lawn. The President said he would buy one of Musk’s cars and that the aforementioned Tesla vandalism is actually domestic terrorism.

Maybe a spokesman like Trump will be enough to get MAGAs interested in electric cars — specifically Elon’s electric cars — but I’ve got some very serious doubts about that.