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Comment by leetharris | Hacker News Reader

Tesla has the #1 selling vehicle in the world for years. They have a weak quarter, just like BYD and others, and suddenly the entire leftist online world is eager to blame it on Elon. They salivate at the idea that every problem is his fault. Successes, of course, are never his fault.

You see the same treatment for anyone who is vocal and isn't leftist. They have even started to come after Joe Biden, likely the most progressive president in history.

People rush to share their anecdata on sites like this where they say, "I hate Musk so much I'd never buy a Tesla." The vast, vast majority of the world doesn't exist in online bubbles.

I say this as a liberal who has never voted right in my life so please don't label me as alt-right or nazi or whatever the current flavor is of "I don't agree with leftist Twitter posts.

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> the entire leftist online world

The world is more complex than american politically rotted brains believe it to be

> They have a weak quarter, just like BYD and others, and suddenly the entire leftist online world is eager to blame it on Elon.

If a company has a weak quarter then blaming the CEO and largest shareholder is a perfectly valid thing to do. Who else has more blame? How else do you expect people to judge company performance then stock prices? This isn't some witch hunt, this is normal business procedures. A company has a bad quarter we question it's leadership.

If one company has a weak quarter while its competitors have strong ones, you blame the company and CEO.

But if everybody in the sector is having a weak quarter, generally you blame it on macroeconomic or outside conditions.

This isn't an auto industry problem. This is a Tesla problem. Toyota is doing fantastic. Ford and GM are performing well. If you argue that this is an EV problem then we can easily blame the leader of the EV market for the reason why EV is down.

Tesla & BYD comprise almost 50% of the entire EV market. None of the companies you list are on the top 10.

The leader of the EV market is BYD. So by your logic we should blame their CEO. Yet nobody knows his name, so we obviously aren't.

It seems to mostly be a China problem. Tesla has massive China exposure, but a lot less than BYD. BYD was hit harder than Tesla.

Typically the blame is on the CEO’s performance, not his personal views. This is nothing more than a cheap hit piece by a regime that hates Musk giving a voice to the little people.

> A separate study from analytics firm CivicScience tracking Musk’s approval among US consumers found that 42 percent of respondents viewed him unfavorably, compared to 34 percent when his stake in Twitter was announced in April 2022.

Sure are a lot of "leftists" out there.

The source for the story isn't the "entire leftist online world" (Whatever that is) but rather is a survey called the "consideration" survey published by reuters. In the latest version tesla's score (which is basically the percentage of people who would consider a particular brand when deciding on a new vehicle) has gone down a lot and in the survey of results people cited Musk as part of the reason they would not consider a tesla.

This is only a left/right issue insofar as the respondents to the survey cited his right-wing online views specifically as a reason.

I would think if your pitch is at least partly to the environmentally-conscious, being toxic to left-leaning people is probably bad business.

Additionally, as far as the stock goes, it has an extremely high P/E ratio meaning very high future expectations are priced in. IN that world, failing to meet expectations is much worse than for a more reasonably-priced stock. That's just how the maths works out (given how P/E ratio relies on discounted future earnings).

Tesla has absolutely not been the #1 selling vehicle in the world, especially not for years.

With that said, I do largely agree with your main point.

The Model Y was the number one selling vehicle in the world in 2023. You can easily Google this.

Is that a well-defined thing? How is one supposed to know whether the FooBar WomBat 20 is the same vehicle or not as the FooBar WomBat 20i? Do auto industry insiders have a clear concept of this?

The original commenter said that Tesla had the most selling vehicle in the world "for years". This is not true.

> Tesla has the #1 selling vehicle in the world for years

To avoid getting a wrong impression, Tesla has a worldwide marketshare of 2% and is outside of top ten largest producers.

Companies spend billions on marketing and advertisement, to evoke association of pleasant feelings with their products. But somehow Elon spitting into the face of Tesla's target demographic (affluent, tech affine, ecology-conscious people who typically lean left) has absolutely zero effect on sales. Color me skeptical.

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