After plunging nearly 70% last year, Tesla’s shares are catching up in early 2023. The same cannot be said for the picture brand of the world’s top electric vehicle maker, whose preference is waning after CEO Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter, according to a new survey.
Now, just 13.4% of American adults have a favorable opinion of Tesla, up from 16% last month and 28.4% in January 2022, according to survey data published Thursday by Morning Consult Brand Intelligence. This supposes a drop of 15% year-on-year. This decline is due to Tesla’s loss of popularity among people who identify as Democrats. Just 3% of those adults view Musk’s EV company favorably, up from 10.3% in December 2022. Which is noteworthy, given Musk’s erratic comments on Twitter and the frustration of some investors. from Tesla that it is too focused on the social media platform.
In the last year, Musk has expressed partisan political views, a practice typically avoided by CEOs of large companiesexplicitly encouraging people to vote Republican over Democrat during the recent midterm elections and voicing support for Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a potential presidential candidate. During his time on Twitterin addition to lay off thousands of employees Y lose major advertisershas relaxed the guidelines aimed at avoiding false information about vaccines and Covid-19 and has once again given the welcome controversial public figures, including former President Donald Trump; and to people and accounts, like former national security adviser Michael Flynn, linked to the January 6 assault on the US Capitol and lies about the 2020 election results.
That prompted some Tesla owners to announce on Twitter that they were getting rid of their vehicles and potential customers to cancel planned purchases..
“Due to the recent disclosure of Elon Musk’s political views -all of which I loathe- I’m starting to worry about the kind of political statement the car is making. Will people see me as a symbol of right-wing environmentalism, a living oxymoron?” John Blumenthal, a former magazine editor and owner of Tesla, wrote in a recent op-ed for Los Angeles Times. “Musk has turned Twitter into an unsupervised playground for neo-Nazis and other random hatemongers and kooky QAnoners.has embraced all things Trumpian and tepidly responded to Kanye West’s outrageous flirtation with Hitler.”
The Morning Consult survey did not explicitly identify Musk’s behavior as the reason for the drop in Tesla’s overall preference. However, his recent report measuring the views of American adults on CEOs found that the net preference for billionaire Musk fell to 9 points in November 2022 from 16 points a year earlier and from 22 points in February 2021.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Shares of the electric vehicle company are up more than 14% so far this year. On the Nasdaq it barely changed this Thursday, closing the session with a rise of less than 1%, to $123.56.
*Published in Forbes US
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