A figure of $800 billion (€734 billion) is a lot of money. To put it in context, with Ireland considering buying a job-lot of cutting-edge jet fighters, a Saab Gripen – regarded as one of the best and most capable current multirole military aircraft – costs about $85 million.
So $800 billion is how much value Tesla has shed since December. Back then, the carmaking brand run by the increasingly controversial Elon Musk, hit a peak of $480 per share. At time of writing, that value had plummeted to $240 per share, up a little in the past few days, but still half what it was once worth.
Your sympathies in this instance may be limited, whatever you might think of Musk and his lurch towards outright fascism. Tesla remains the world’s most valuable carmaker, still worth 10 times as much as the likes of General Motors, Volkswagen, or Ford despite making a fraction of the number of cars each year manufactured by those industrial giants.
Tesla’s stock market valuation, often described as being vastly overinflated, has long since been based more on its potential as a tech company – developing autonomous driving taxis, humanoid robots, and artificial intelligence systems – than as a maker of electric cars.
Still, the foundations of Tesla have been badly rocked, and much of it appears due to Musk’s increasingly erratic and autocratic tendencies.
Musk’s support of US president Donald Trump, and his eventual elevation under Trump to head up the highly controversial department of government efficiency, have meant car buyers of a more liberal bent abandoning the brand.
In Germany, where Musk attracted ire for his support of the hard-right political party Alternative Für Deutschland (AfD) Tesla sales fell by 71 per cent in February, a drop which was perhaps not coincidental with Musk employing not one but two stiff-armed salutes, which seemed to reference those used by the Nazi party in the 1930s and 1940s, at Trump’s inauguration ceremony.
[ Tesla sales plummet across Europe amid Elon Musk backlashOpens in new window ]
France marked similar drops in Tesla sales, as did the United Kingdom. In Ireland, Tesla sales have also fallen so far this year, but to a far smaller degree. Irish Tesla sales are down 6.1 per cent compared with the first two months of 2024, but there’s devil in that detail.
Sales of the Model Y SUV, at one point the biggest-selling car in the world, have fallen by 53 per cent in Ireland, but that is less likely due to us developing a sudden national loathing for Musk, and more likely because a new, potentially improved, Model Y has just been launched but is yet to land on Irish shores. The Model 3 saloon, updated last year, has seen a 28 per cent increase in Irish sales.
What damage is Elon Musk doing to Tesla’s shares and sales?
In other markets, notably the US market, Tesla is being increasingly seen as a lightning rod for people’s sudden realisation of just how dramatic the shift to the far right American politics has seen this year.
Musk is the world’s wealthiest man, but much of his wealth is tied up with both Tesla’s stock market valuation and with various loans which are tied to that value. That has turned Tesla from a mere carmaker into a potential lever for those seeking to exert political influence at a time when the Trump administration appears to be doing all it can to stamp out dissent and criticism.
Ed Niedermeyer is one of Tesla’s and Musk’s staunchest critics. A former senior editor at the Drive and Automotive News, he’s also the author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, published in 2019. Niedermeyer has some skin in this game – he’s a leading light in the recently emerged #TeslaTakedown movement which is, quite genuinely, seeking to bankrupt the world’s richest man by protesting against the sales of his cars.
The Irish Times asked Niedermeyer if the current sales slump at Tesla is a blip, or something for more serious for the company? “Like everything about the future, it kind of depends on us, right?” Niedermeyer responded.
[ Are Elon Musk’s antics just a blip for Tesla or permanent brand breakdown?Opens in new window ]
“What I’ve been trying to communicate to people is that if taken seriously, Tesla is an immensely powerful lever that the public has to exert some influence over the political situation, at least with regards to Elon Musk. That there’s sort of fundamental vulnerabilities. That while he seems invulnerable, you look at the wealth. And sort of like the Death Star, there’s that thermal exhaust port that is a very fundamental weakness. There’s no guarantee that that we’ll be able to blow up the Death Star, so to speak, but the opportunity certainly exists. I want to make people aware of that so they understand the options around the table.”
Is it actually possible to topple one of the world’s most powerful and influential people in such a manner, though?
Niedermeyer certainly thinks so. “The first thing to recognise, is that Elon Musk was not elected, that we as a body politic have not had a say in the power that he now wields. And so the question is, what can we do about it? And and my argument is that this is the only real opportunity that we have to exert meaningful influence on the situation between now and the next election.
“Even in the next election, he wasn’t elected, so the idea that the political system is going to be the way to remove him is not, I think, any more clear than the opportunity that this opportunity presents. And while that’s uncertain, there’s an X factor to the extent to which people buy in and collective action is able to take place at real scale.
“But what I know is that if that scale of rejection of selling Teslas, divesting from the stock, of boycotting future sales, boycotting service revenue, boycotting charging revenue, if that all happens at scale, combined with the other trends in Tesla’s business and the fundamental instability of the stock valuation, and the sort of triggers that are built into that, that could fuel a downward spiral.”
Clearly the anti-Tesla, anti-Musk movement has touched a chord, or you wouldn’t have seen Trump reading from a literal Tesla sales pitch, live from the Oval Office. However, there remains the question of how much of the downward trend in Tesla sales and value is due to protest, and how much is merely a blip as the company refreshes an ageing model line-up.
Matthias Schmidt is the chief European auto market analyst at Schmidt Automotive Research, based in Germany. “Tesla’s regional registrations trend has been downward, even prior to the Trump/AfD contagion. We see the withdrawal of purchase subsidies for EVs in many key European markets having a big negative impact, which was priced into Tesla’s business model and is now absent,” he said.
“Being a pure-player EV company, Tesla was most exposed to this. The ageing and limited model line-up is also impacting them, and alongside that, the market for first-time adopters who were drawn to new brands such as Tesla is likely seeing some market saturation as incumbents increasingly bring new EV models to market to reach sharpening regulatory emission levels.
“The imminent introduction of the Model Y refresh could also be causing some purchasing decisions to be delayed, impacting January even harder, while the baseline last year was slightly inflated thanks to the Model 3 refresh roll-out. EU anti-subsidy tariffs may be having a small impact but Tesla has the least exposure here due to it facing the lowest rate of all manufacturers exporting BEV models from China to the EU, and it impacts the Model 3 only.”
However, Schmidt also said there is some underlying protest movement effect. “In highly emotional Germany, we are seeing increasing anecdotal evidence – such as bumper stickers – of a consumer shift due to the toxic fallout from the AfD comments as consumers vote with their feet and look for, shall we say, Alternatives Für Tesla.”
In Ireland, such sentiments seem thin on the ground at the moment. The Irish Times has made repeated attempts to contact current Tesla owners to see if they’re now feeling the tingling sensations of buyer’s remorse, but perhaps concerns over flatlining their residual value have kept their heads below the parapets for now. There are anecdotal reports of used Teslas becoming increasingly hard to trade in and move on, but that could be as much about market saturation and the reluctance of used car buyers to move to electric as it is any political toxicity.
Adrian Slattery, of electric car leasing specialists DCEV, said that when it comes to anti-Tesla sentiment, “we definitely see it in the UK with posters on bus stops and murmurings of shaming owners, but not so much in our circles in Ireland. Although their numbers across Europe are way down, we still see a lot of new and used models zipping around the Irish cities and towns. The second-hand Model 3 market is still very strong here”.
Potentially a much bigger worry for Musk and Tesla could be far away from the political sphere, and simply the fact that where Teslas were once pioneering and ground-breaking, now they’re having to compete with a multitude of other very impressive EV models.
The New York Times reports that in China, buyers are abandoning their Teslas not because they’re bothered about fascist salutes or the mass-firing of US government employees, but simply because other brands can offer them more.
One report has it that consumers can buy two Chinese-brand EVs for the price of one Tesla, and that seems borne out by sales figures – in the first two months of 2025 in China, Tesla sold 60,480 cars, while it’s biggest rival, in global as well as Chinese terms, BYD, sold 481,318 (although some of those in fairness were hybrids, not all fully electric models).
BYD’s vice-president Stella Li has recently said that she would be open to a collaboration with Tesla, telling The Financial Times: “Our common enemy is the internal combustion engine car. We need to work together … to make the industry change.”
Quite how Musk might view such a collaboration is at present unknown (has anyone checked his X feed?), but one assumes that collaborating with a gigantic Chinese car maker would not be a good look in the current corridors of Washington power.
It also remains to be seen whether Tesla is genuinely teetering on the brink of disaster, or whether the recent plummet in sales and stock is just a blip from which the carmaker, and its chief executive, can recover. Given time and space, most companies can recover from most problems, but the ticking clock of quarterly results will have investors spooked, and if they begin to demand change, Musk’s troubles may merely be beginning.
