If we’ve learned anything from watching Elon Musk and his recent business ventures, it’s this: Elon Musk is bad for business.
Why? He is the CEO of Tesla, but he doesn't understand or he doesn't care that he represents the Tesla brand. Negative press about him reflects poorly on the company. It’s possible he has terrible judgment.
Elon Musk is Bad For Business
A CEO doing Nazi salutes on television, speaking at a rally for a far-right political party in Germany, or making antisemitic, racist, and misogynistic comments on social media would hurt the reputation of any company.
He made poor decisions running his own business as well. Look at X — the social media platform he bought in 2022 when it was called Twitter.
Twitter was a thriving “marketplace of ideas.” The owner, Jack Dorsey, wasn’t sitting around “tweeting” 100+ times a day, and he wasn’t “punishing” users for posting negative comments about him.
Elon Musk purchased the tech company for $44 billion when it was actually only worth around $30 billion at the time. After rebranding it as “X,” it’s now worth about 50% less than what he paid, valued at estimates that range from $9.4 to $13 billion.
X is not a platform people want to be on. Under the guise of being a “free speech advocate,” Musk allowed hateful, racist rhetoric to become the norm. After buying the platform in 2022, he immediately fired 75% of the staff—including about half of the data scientists.
He then eliminated the rules that prohibited hate speech and misinformation. (How else was he going to get MAGA to join?)
Jack Dorsey went on to create a new platform called Bluesky that functions differently from other social media platforms. It doesn’t use an algorithm to determine what posts users see in their feed. Instead, users only see content from the people they follow on the platform.
(During the 2024 election, Elon Musk was found to be amplifying conservative political content on everyone’s feed. It was discovered during a study conducted by Queensland University of Technology (QUT), in which people doing the study created user accounts on X and they intentionally did not select politics as one of the user’s interests on some of the accounts.
The study found that, around the time that he endorsed Donald Trump for President, Elon Musk’s personal account and the accounts of other Conservatives were being amplified, showing up in the feed of every user, including those without an interest in politics.
After the election, Bluesky grew to a million users. Former Twitter users left X to escape the hateful rhetoric and misinformation that now proliferated the platform.
In fact, in September, the European Union issued a warning to Musk after it found that X had the highest ratio of disinformation posts of all large social media platforms.
Musk did more than just fire workers and allow hate speech that caused the platform to lose value. He took away the “blue check” verification system, which wasn’t about “clout” or elitism as those on the Right like to imply.
No, being verified was a service created for businesses and celebrities to protect them from impersonators and so users and advertisers could differentiate real accounts from the fake. Now anyone that pays for a “blue check” can get one.
The imposters can now just buy verification and pretend to be the “official” account of a business or celebrity.
X is only one of the businesses that has proven Elon Musk is bad for business. He’s also the CEO of Tesla.
Tesla has not fared well since Donald Trump won the 2024 election. Musk created DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) and has been busy infiltrating and shutting down various departments and agencies in the United States government.
Tesla sales all over the world have declined as a result of Musk’s endorsement of then-candidate Trump. In Germany, sales were down 59% from last year.
In France, sales were down 64%. In the UK, EV sales overall were up 35%, but Tesla sales were down 12% compared to January of last year. Musk has been trying to break onto the Chinese market with Tesla, but even there sales were down 14%.
It wasn't just Tesla vehicle sales that declined, Tesla stock dropped by nearly 3% since the election. Why doesn't Tesla just find another CEO who’s not doing Nazi salutes or engaging in a “coup” against the U.S. government?
In case anyone questions whether these changes happened because of the CEO, people were asked why they decided to sell their Tesla vehicles.
Tesla owners who sold their Model 3 in order to purchase a different EV brand were asked why. Disapproval of Elon Musk was the most common response.
If you look at the approval-disapproval ratios for Ford, VW, and Tesla, you’ll find Tesla has the highest disapproval rate and the lowest approval rate.
Sales of electric vehicles overall in the U.S. grew for various automakers. Hyundai/Kia saw a 56% increase from 2023 to 2024. Ford sales grew 86%. Tesla sales were down 13.3% compared to last year.
Musk’s personal approval rating has plummeted since the election as well, even as Donald Trump is looking better than he was at this same period during his first term.
It seems that Americans aren't fans of the richest man in the world and his band of “just out of high school” boys barracading themselves into various agencies and refusing to allow members of Congress entry.
These are elected members of Congress. Elon Musk wasn’t elected by anyone! And while President Trump is saying he knows what they’re up to, it looks like he may not have a clue but is trying to save face in front of reporters.
It could also be that Trump sees Musk becoming more unpopular and wants to stay far away from it, even if he is doing exactly what Trump wants him to do.
Resist Hate is about honest, authentic, factual reporting, so we can’t ignore where Elon Musk has found success. He founded Space X in 2006 with $100 million. Today, the company is worth $150 billion. SpaceX isn't just the rockets he launches into space. The company is also responsible for the Starlink satellites used by the Ukrainian Army and the U.S. government/Pentagon also has contracts with the company.
Neuralink is another company Musk founded back in 2016 with $100 million plus an additional $128 million in outside funding. Neuralink is responsible for the “chips implanted in brains” people talk about. Technically the chips were designed to help people with quadriplegia control their electronic devices using their thoughts. The rumors about Neuralink made it seem much scarier compared to the company’s website. As of June 2023, the company was worth $5 billion.
He also founded The Boring Company in 2016 and xAI in 2023. Musk has made some good decisions when it comes to the companies he started and we can’t say for sure if the success of those endeavors is because of him or in spite of him.
Perhaps the poor decisions he’s been making only began when he made the decision to join the Republican party and endorse Donald Trump. Musk wasn’t “in the face of” America so much as a Democrat, but when he made the decision to purchase Twitter and turn it into the cesspool of humanity that is X, it made him look negligent when it comes to business decisions.
Overpaying for Twitter was the first issue, followed by his sharp turn to the Right. The incessant antisemitic comments and the conspiracy theories he talks about in his posts make him seem unhinged.
As the CEO of an EV company as big as Tesla, it didn't make sense for Musk to pander to the Right-wing, since they are notoriously anti-electric vehicle.
Any CEO who makes racist/sexist comments and discusses conspiracy theories is going to have a negative impact on the business they head. If Elon Musk is the genius businessman as some people claim, wouldn't he know that his behavior is bad for Tesla and possibly his other companies?
Only time will tell if Musk’s popularity and approval will continue to decline.
Hopefully things don’t get any worse than they are now with what’s happening in our government. That is one aspect of the story that none of us want to think about. Instead, we’ll end where we began. Elon Musk is bad for business.
