Elon Musk’s car company is required each year to report to investors all the bad things that could happen to it, and the latest version lists every imaginable threat from costly lawsuits to out-of-control battery fires to war and another epidemic.
The Associated PressTesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk speaks at the SATELLITE Conference and Exhibition, March 9, 2020, in Washington.
“It’s marketing 101: Don’t involve yourself in politics,” said New York brand consultant Robert Passikoff. “People will stop buying your products.”Tesla sales plunged 45% in Europe in January, according to research firm Jato Dynamics, even as overall electric vehicle sales rose. That comes after a report of falling sales in California, its biggest U.S. market, and the first annual drop globally for the company last year.
The sales numbers were particularly bad in Germany and France in January, down roughly 60% each, more than the average decline for the more than two-dozen European countries surveyed. Sales in France fell another 26% in February. Many Tesla buyers used to be wealthy, environmentally-conscious professionals, often liberal, who were attracted to Musk’s talk about how his EVs could help save the planet from fossil-fuel destruction.“I used to be adored by the left,” Musk said in an interview with Tucker Carlson on February 18 as his stock was halfway through a nearly 30% plunge for the month. “Less so these days.”
An effigy of Musk was hung in Milan and image of him doing a straight-arm salute projected on a Tesla factory outside Berlin. In London, a bus stop poster of him above the word “swasticars” lit up social media. A Polish government minister called for a Tesla boycott. “People want to buy stuff that makes them feel good, you don’t want politics involved,” said Gerber, a money manager whose portfolios hold nearly $60 million in Tesla stock. “It’s even worse when you have such divisive issues, whether it’s firing climate scientists or taking aid away from starving African children.”
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