Musk’s political ambition has turned Tesla into an ideological lightning rod. And the whole company is paying

Tesla’s action touched its historical maximum at the end of 2024, just in time for Christmas. Since then You just made receiving coala paradox for the leader of the electric transition. From $ 480 to 240. Half.

50% fall (and 15% in a single session last Monday) is no longer a market correction or temporary fluctuation. Is the materialization of the political risk that Musk has accumulated deliberately during the last two years.

Musk, with its lights and their shadows, It is an atypical phenomenon and a case study like or not. But he has also starred in his own even more atypical phenomenon in recent business history: the transmutation of an aspirational brand in the object of cultural repulsion for a part of its original client base, as stated The Verge.

Tesla built an empire on very specific pillars:

1. Technological innovation
2. Environmental sustainability.
3. A vision of the future techno -optimist.

It was a perfect car – figured and literally – for progressive consumers with purchasing power that wanted to signal not only financial power, but avant -garde values.

Musk’s political turn has caused a cognitive dissonance too heavy For a good part of this segment.

This ideological fracture can be put figures. In California, one of the great progressive bastions and originally the most important market for Tesla, Model 3 sales They collapsed in 2024. In Europe, collapse has been even greateralthough it would be unfair to signal only to Musk’s personal future, since here a perfect storm has come together.

They are more typical figures of A brand exodus – Here we can point to Chinese cars, but in the United States not – than a simple sector recession. Especially because even in Europe we have seen A growth of 34% in electric car sales at this time.

The most visible demonstration of this brand crisis is the spontaneous emergence of an ecosystem of embarrassed owners. From apology stickers (“I bought it before Elon went crazy”) to the replacement of the Tesla logo with other generic badges. They are drivers who seek to dissociate their creator’s car.

The protests have climbed to pure and hard vandalism, with concessionaires Tiring in Oregon, Molotov cocktails in Colorado and some Cybertruck on fire in Seattle.

Tesla has become An ideological lightning rod.

Meanwhile, competition has taken advantage of that vulnerability. Hyundai, Kia, GM U Honda (let’s mention Chinese brands on this side of the Atlantic) have been launching electrical alternatives perhaps not as painting as a tesla, but already attractive and more or less reasonable prices.

In this equation There is a blind spot: Musk itself. His political ambitions and his parallel agenda with Trump have eclipsed their business vision. Tesla needs more than ever its affordable model – about $ 25,000, The repeated and deformed promise since 2018– To compete against byd, omoda, Jaecoo and company. But Musk is aspiring to something much older, maybe even too conceptual, such as Humanoid robots. Or with the promises of robotaxis that do not finish arriving … while Waymo already operates real fleets of autonomous taxis.

Tesla’s technical credibility has also worsened. The promise that all cars manufactured after 2016 contained the necessary hardware for totally autonomous driving turned out to be true. Musk He admitted that they will have to replace on board computersa process that he confessed “painful”, and now faces collective demands for deceptive advertising.

Tesla was, is and will surely be the king of the electric car in many ways, but something has changed lately.

Trump can convert the White House into a Tesla dealership and proclaim in your social network Your absolute support to Muskbut You cannot reverse financial physics. The destruction of value has been monumental: 800,000 million dollars of stock market capitalization and 100,000 million of Musk’s personal heritage have evaporated in less than one semester.

Even some historical shareholders, loyal to Musk, They have sold mass actionssuch as Robyn Denholm (the president of the Council) or James Murdoch (son of Rupert).

There is a fire in Tesla, but that is not too worrying, every company happens at some time. The problem is that it is self -induced. Tesla will survive, surely, it has a solid cash position and hard -working economies. We are no longer in 2019. The real question is whether you can recover your old statusthat of Visionaria company, while its founder is still determined to sacrifice it on the altar of its political aspirations.

The divorce between Tesla and a part of its original customer base seems difficult to reverse in the short term. The maximum irony of this story may be that the greatest enemy of the original mission of Tesla – to school the world transition towards sustainable energy – turns out to be Musk itself.

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