As Tesla faces a global sales slump, and with shares down for the seventh consecutive week, could Elon Musk’s antics really be to blame?
Photograph: Kyle Grillot/Getty Images
Tesla sales fell in the US again last month, further fueling the suggestion that the growing backlash against billionaire CEO Elon Musk could be impacting Tesla at retail.
According to Kelley Blue Book, Tesla shifted 43,650 EVs in February, a decrease of nearly 6 percent from the 46,262 sold in the same month last year. Globally, sales are much worse, with drops of over 75 percent in Europe and over 65 percent in Australia for the first two months of the year. The UK is one of the only markets bucking the trend, with Tesla’s February sales jumping by 20 percent compared with the same month last year.
In the US, the month-over-month sales decline in February was primarily driven by significant drops in Cybertruck and Model 3 sales, which fell by 32.5 percent and 17.5 percent, respectively. But Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights for Cox Automotive, says these drops aren’t that bad when considered within the wider market.
“Compared to the overall EV market, Tesla’s decline in February is relatively moderate compared to some other manufacturers,” she says, “indicating that while there was a decline, it was not as severe as those seen by some competitors.”
Some analysts blame Tesla’s lackluster sales on inventory snafus, customers waiting for the refreshed Model Y, and fierce competition from auto rivals. Others point to the company’s habit of making deliveries in batches, resulting in big variations in registrations between months.
Tesla’s Model Y is awaiting a refresh.
Photograph: Luigi Iorio/Getty Images
Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas even suggests the downturn in sales is all part of a key turning point for Tesla, as it moves beyond a car company into a robotics-focused behemoth.
“Tesla’s softer auto deliveries are emblematic of a company in the transition from an automotive ‘pure play’ to a highly diversified play on AI and robotics,” the Tesla bull told clients in a note.
“While the journey may be volatile and nonlinear,” he adds, “we believe 2025 will be a year where investors will continue to appreciate and value these existing and nascent industries of embodied AI, where we believe Tesla has established a material competitive advantage.”
However, there has been the feeling that at least some of the fall could be due to anger over Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s political activism and the decisions made by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency under his leadership. Since mid-February, Tesla showrooms have attracted protesters in 100 or so cities across the US, eager to let passersby know their feelings about the chainsaw-wielding Musk.
These largely good-natured, sidewalk-staged protests—some with Mariachi bands, puppeteers, and large cardboard Cybertrucks to decorate—have been organized by a website called TeslaTakedown, and they attracted plenty of media coverage in the process.
Alex Winter, a Los Angeles-based documentary maker—and the titular Bill from 1988 time-travel comedy Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure—is the creator of the website. He tells WIRED that the TeslaTakedown movement wants to topple Musk: “We aim to devalue the brand. It’s a very simple and effective means for people to get onto the street and protest.” Media coverage amplifies the movement’s message, says Winter. “We want to spread verifiable, factual information on Musk, DOGE, and why Tesla should be devalued.”
“Musk himself is toxifying the Tesla brand,” Winter says. “We’re just helping him.”
TeslaTakedown started last month, kicked off by a February 10 posting on Bluesky by Joan Donovan, a disinformation researcher and assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University. “Come out and participate in an international picket #TeslaTakeover locally,” she wrote, later agreeing with renaming the movement.
“I asked myself, what was I willing to physically do to raise awareness [about Musk]? Well, I’m willing to go out on Saturdays and protest in front of a Tesla dealership,” Donovan tells WIRED. “I made a flyer and started circulating it online. Alex saw my post, and we started texting about what to do; it all came together super fast.”
At the first demonstration in Boston on February 15, there were 50 people. By the third week, this had risen to 300. “I’ve met teachers, people who work in public health, people who are retired, students at universities—all Americans who want to see DOGE disappear,” says Donovan. “It’s not only a strategic boycott of Tesla, it’s a polyvocal protest where lots of grievances are aired.”
Elon Musk and Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, has studied over 300 modern uprisings worldwide and found that change usually becomes inevitable when just 3.5 percent of a population join a movement.
“There are typically far more people who sympathize with movements than people who actively participate in them,” Chenoweth tells WIRED.
So might TeslaTakedown work quickly? “Instead of thinking about how long it takes,” she says, “I typically look to see whether a movement is building pressure and momentum with each subsequent action.
“In the social science of these movements, many people talk about eliciting defections—making people within different pillars of support shift their loyalty away from the status quo. In the case of corporations, those pillars can include shareholders, workers, suppliers, distributors, advertisers, consumers, and those around them.”
Losing Loyalties
Those pillars may already be showing signs of instability. Across Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, and even X, posts have started to stack up of people saying they are ditching their Teslas. Singer Sheryl Crow was one of the more high-profile among them, who posted an Instagram video on Valentine’s Day wishing good riddance to her Tesla as it was driven away on a flatbed truck.
“There comes a time when you have to decide who you are willing to align with. So long Tesla,” she wrote, adding that she was donating the sale proceeds to National Public Radio, because it was “under threat from President Musk.”
Sleep researcher Asa Farnham lives in Rochester, New York, and used to work in a Tesla showroom. He has owned five Tesla EVs, previously owned company stock, and has attended shareholder meetings. He also made the decision to part ways with his Tesla recently.
“I’m not rich, so I really hemmed and hawed about getting rid of a perfectly fine vehicle but, not being a Vulcan, every time I drove the car I felt emotionally sick,” he tells WIRED. “Finally, in December, I couldn’t take it anymore, and traded my Model 3 for a Rivian and reduced a significant amount of cognitive dissonance.”
“The decision to ditch was difficult,” he remembers, “like breaking up with someone. As an environmentalist, I was aligned with [Tesla’s] mission statement to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” But Farnham started souring on Tesla in 2022 after Musk purchased Twitter. “2024 was the nail in the coffin,” he says. “Musk amplified election conspiracy theories, extreme far-right views, and tweeted more vile things. I was done.”
Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Another Tesla ditcher who spoke to WIRED has been a staffer at the US Department of Transportation in Washington, DC, for 25 years. He asked to remain anonymous due to concerns he could lose his job for speaking out. He had been a Tesla owner since 2018, but replaced his 2023 Model 4 for a Kia EV6 late last year.
“I used to think Musk was a goofy but intelligent man [who] had good intentions,” he says. “My feelings changed around the time he bought Twitter. I loathe that, as a government employee, I have to submit five bullet points each week detailing what I’ve been doing at work. I cannot imagine the shame I’d feel if I still owned a Tesla.”
That sentiment is not an outlier—many more ex-Tesla owners reached out to WIRED to share their reasons for ditching their cars, but none were prepared to be named, due to concerns for their safety.
“I am the child of German immigrants,” another tells WIRED, “and the [Nazi-style] salute was very much when I had enough. I owned a Tesla Model 3 RWD 2018 from the first year of delivery until last month; I got a Volkswagen ID4 instead. I am happier not to be driving a car associated with Musk. Every American knows that your car says something about you: Driving a Tesla used to say ‘I am driving to a better future’—now it says ‘I believe in destroying government.’”
Company Politics
And yet Tesla’s US market dominance remains staggering. It has a 48.7 percent EV market share in the US, with the next biggest automaker being Ford at 7.5 percent.
Ivan Drury, director of insights at car-buying site Edmunds, believes that when it comes a big purchase like a car, the majority of people are more focused on price and perceived value than the politics of a company CEO.
“There’s a huge swath of the population that doesn’t care about politics,” says Drury. “Many people will put aside their feelings about politics when purchasing a car. Tesla is utilizing several incentivization methods, including low APRs, leasing, outright discounts, and free supercharging. These might be enough for someone who sees the protesting in front of the stores and thinks nothing of it, especially as you can circumvent the dealership experience and buy online with delivery to your door.”
Whether anti-Musk sloganeering, ownership ditching, and showroom picketing can meaningfully reduce new car sales at the EV behemoth is moot. Tesla’s share price might be trending down right now, but the gains made after Trump’s election mean there’s still a long way to go before the stock even falls to last year’s lows.
However, with the company’s valuation recently dropping below $1 trillion, Musk has lost more than $100 billion from his paper fortune, and if Tesla tanks, he’ll lose a whole bunch more.
This isn’t fanciful. Barclays research analyst and Tesla bull Dan Levy argues that Tesla shares are “disconnected from fundamentals” with “stock trading at [many] times earnings.” And for Levy, “what matters is narrative,” with the “markets not really challenging any of the things Tesla is saying.”
Markets can be slow, somehow yet to realize that Tesla’s price-to-earnings ratio don’t really add up. It would take 140 years to recoup an investment at Tesla’s current earnings rate. Ford’s ratio of 6.5 and Mercedes-Benz at 5.7 are the realistic ones.
But Tesla’s share price is at profound risk from targeted activism. “We’re doing [TeslaTakedown] to devalue the stock,” says Winter. “We could see the rapid decline of Tesla’s stock value and the diminishment of sales. Musk’s attachment to Trump did a lot of that. And I think his [Nazi-style] salute did a lot of that.”
Tesla’s share price is currently 263, down from the 480s following Trump’s inauguration. “If it gets down to 120, you’ll start to see a lot of angry shareholders,” believes Donovan, “people who bought the dream.” She, and many others, hope TeslaTakedown will become a nightmare for Musk.
