The emperor's new mandate

 From Pat Bagley

Accidents will happen

 By Australian cartoonist Mark David  from Independent Australia

Elon Musk, stud

 By Bill Amend

Elon's X-ray specs

By Ben Jennings 

I was just stretching

 

Musk's politics lost Tesla 1 million car sales

 

From Electrek

We’ve been talking about the impact of Elon Musk’s venture into politics on the Tesla brand for years, but now a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is putting some staggering numbers to it.

According to a new working paper, Musk’s “polarizing and partisan actions” have directly cost Tesla over a million vehicle sales in the US alone.

The study, titled “The Musk Partisan Effect on Tesla Sales,” argues that without this effect, Tesla’s sales would have been 67% to 83% higher between October 2022 and April 2025. That’s an absolutely massive number, and it suggests Tesla’s recent sales slump isn’t just about “increased competition” or “pent-up demand” being satisfied.

It’s about the brand.

The researchers from Yale and NBER didn’t just run a poll. They dug into county-level, monthly new vehicle registration data for all EVs and hybrids from March 2020 to April 2025.

They used a “difference-in-differences” analysis. In simple terms, they tracked how sales trends changed in heavily Democratic-leaning counties versus heavily Republican-leaning counties. The “treatment” event that broke the trend? Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022.

Here’s what the data shows:

Before Oct. 2022: Counties with more Democrats showed an increasing preference for Teslas compared to Republican counties. This makes sense, as we know EV adoption has historically been higher among liberal-leaning buyers.

After Oct. 2022: The trend dramatically reverses. As Musk’s political activities—including “relaxed content moderating of far-right and extremist voices” and massive campaign contributions—ramped up, Democratic-leaning counties began “shifting away from Tesla purchases”.

The study is blunt, noting Musk’s actions “antagonized his most loyal customer base”.

The paper runs two different models to quantify the damage, and the results are “remarkably similar”.

Aggregated from October 2022 through April 2025, the “Musk partisan effect” cost Tesla between 1.0 and 1.26 million vehicle sales.

Again, that’s in the US alone. Tesla’s sales in Europe have also been crashing over the last 2 years. Some of that has been attributed to Musk’s political activism, but Tesla is also facing tougher competition in Europe, where more EV models are available due to fewer protectionist rules.

Trump wants the Nobel peace prize

 By Ben Jennings

All you need to know about Twitter

From Mark Cuban 

Beheading

By Pat Bagley 

Consumer sentiment slides. Recession, anyone?

The consumer sentiment index from the University of Michigan has led every recession since 1953, except of course the Covid Crash.   The decline in the last couple of months is not precipitous, but it's driven by sharply deteriorating inflation expectations.  Which are, obviously, driven by Trump's tariffs.

However, there's another effect of the Trump tariffs.  This is the big jump in uncertainty.  And the effect of this is being seen in some data series---for example, the sharp decline in the services ISM.  When uncertainty strikes, it's easy to reduce your expenditure on services---reduce your eating out; stop going on holiday; don't go to shows; postpone going to the hairdresser.    Another example: the NFIB (National Federation of Independent Business) optimism index.  This index jumped after Trump was elected.  Small business thought he would be good for business.  It turned out to be the opposite, and small business optimism is now falling.

We've only had a few new data points since the inauguration.  So far, they've all pointed towards a slowdown.  Every month that the chaos continues means that things are going to get worse, and the recovery is going to be harder to engender.