As billionaire CEO Elon Musk gets further entrenched in the U.S. government and international politics, could his political displays be impacting his electric vehicle business? Possibly, according to an expert.
“There’s a few factors,” said Kara Carlson of Bloomberg in a recent interview with Audacy about Musk’s company, Tesla. “That [Musk’s politics] is definitely something investors and analysts have raised as a possible concern. But there also is an aging lineup,” she added.
Musk is the CEO of electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and aeronautics company SpaceX as well as the founder of the Boring Company and the owner of the social media platform X. In the U.S., Republican President Donald Trump appointed Musk to co-lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Even before he took on the role, Musk was making waves with his posts on X. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn) sarcastically referred to him “President Musk” during remarks in the House shortly before Trump took office last month. Since the new administration has moved in to the White House, Musk has continued to make headlines.
Over the weekend, there were reports that Musk aides blocked career officials from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), a government-run human resources department, from computer systems. He also took to X to attack the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency with 10,000 employees who help provide foreign aid and development assistance in 100 countries, including disaster recovery, efforts to fight poverty and efforts to promote democracy.
“USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die,” Musk wrote in a repost on X, which claimed senior officials with USAID were put on leave after “physically trying to stop DOGE from accessing agency systems,” per an Audacy report.
Trump said Monday that Musk “can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval.” However, Musk said that same day that the president had agreed with him about shutting down USAID and folding it into the State Department.
“Secretary of State Marco Rubio is now overseeing what’s left of the agency,” Audacy reported.
Meanwhile, there has been a sharp drop in EV sales in California, based on Tesla’s latest earnings report. Carlson said the drop was 12% year-over-year, bringing Tesla’s market share in California to 52%, what she called a “steep decline.”
Another area where Tesla saw sales plummet was France.
“I registered about 1,100 cars in January – in the whole month… that was a pretty steep drop off, 63% drop, in fact,” said Carlson. “And that’s one of the biggest [EV] markets in the EU.”
This dive in sales may also be linked to Musk’s politics, she said. He recently endorsed a far-right party in Germany, Carlson noted, and he has also talked about endorsing candidates in the U.K. On X, he has frequently posted about a sex scandal in the U.K. and butted heads with a doctoral candidate who said that Musk was spreading disinformation on the platform.
‘It’s not super clear… specifically what is triggering the drop off in sales,” Carlson said. “I mean, it’s a very much like here, where there’s an aging lineup. There’s a lot of factors to consider, but there is concern that could be leading to that drop off as well.”
Last year, Tesla saw their first dip in sales in over a decade, Carlson told Audacy. However, she said they are expecting a return to growth next year and that the company has plans for a robo-taxi service as well as a new vehicle model that is more affordable than some of their other models.
Despite the recent drop in sales, Carlson noted that Tesla is the biggest seller of EVs in California, with no other company coming close. Moving forward, some of the Trump administrations new policies may also impact Tesla – tariffs on Mexico and China.
“They are expecting impacts from tariffs,” Carlson said. “They didn’t really say what countries or what supply chain specifically they’re concerned about, but they said there certain parts of supply chain are still very reliant on parts of the world and that they’re expecting impacts just like everyone else.”