This. Despite Musk wanting to pull out of the deal once he found out what a basket case Twitter was, in the long run it's been good for him - just as I predicted. All those liberals who insisted that Trump should be banned from Twitter are reaping the reward for their attempts to cancel him. I said at the time that it was a bad idea, and I was
right.
The sad part is that 'the left' actively drove Musk into the arms of 'the right'. Sad because protecting the enviroment is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of their ideology, and Musk is doing more to achieve that than practically anyone else alive. And what did he get for it? Now liberals dump on Musk at every opportunity and refuse to buy Teslas. Certainly they had some reasons not to like everything he did, but they could have engaged in a more friendly manner for mutual benefit. The sadder thing is that many of them still don't understand how much the result was their fault, and won't do anything to repair the relationship.
Those 'good old texan boys' are the market Tesla needs to crack if it is to achieve its goal of 'accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy'. Musk becoming part of the right-wing community is helping there. 'The left' won't stop buying EVs because they hate Musk, they will just buy other brands - which is a
good thing for the industry. The biggest problem right now is that legacy auto gleefully accepted incentives to make EVs and then did a piss poor job of creating them, if they seriously tried at all. Now they are pulling back and crying about cheap Chinese imports (both in the US and Europe), while Tesla dominates the domestic EV market with cars which have more US content than any of the other 'American' brands.
The sick part is that Tesla has been trying to help legacy automakers through the transition - by giving away patents, allowing access to their supercharger network, creating open standards for charging plugs and electrical connectors etc., even selling carbon credits cheaper than the fines they would otherwise have to pay. And their response? They continue promoting last century's dirty technology, with EVs being just another product that they
might make a few of if it doesn't cost too much (ignoring the fact that small quantities
make them cost too much).
You say Tesla has 'consistently falling sales figures' outside the US, as if this is some kind of gotcha. But it simply isn't true. In the January-October period this year Tesla sold 500,685 vehicles in China, up 8.29% from a year earlier - in a market which is saturated with Chinese EV brands. Meanwhile other foreign automakers are losing their shirts in China, with steeply falling sales and profits dropping as much as 80%. In 2020 Tesla sold 97,548 cars in Europe, rising to 170,507 in 2021 and 232,066 in 2022. In 2023 the Tesla Model Y was the best-selling car in Europe with 251,617 units sold. The Model 3 was the second-best selling car with 100,888 units sold.
As these numbers show, you are laughably wrong. I don't know where you got this idea that Tesla's sales outside the US are 'consistently falling'. Frequenting the wrong news sites? Gaslighted by short sellers? Misunderstanding the statistics? Or just blinded by bias?
The truth is,
global new car sales peaked in 2018 at 85.83 million. In 2019 they dropped to 80.0 million. Of course Covid put a big dent in sales in 2020, which has still not fully recovered. In 2023 76.67 million were sold worldwide. What's more interesting is that gas powered car sales have
continued to decline, down from a peak of 83.77 million in 2018 to 62.87 million in 2023. Meanwhile electric car sales increased from 2.06 million in 2018 to 13.8 million in 2023. Whether Tesla is part of that increase or not, it's still achieving its goal. The World
is transitioning to EVs - despite what the news media might be telling you.
With more brands coming into the market - particularly in China - Tesla is
expected to lose market share. After all they are just one company. In the long term it's better if Tesla doesn't dominate the market. Musk himself said that he would be happy if Tesla went bankrupt provided it reached its goal of kickstarting the EV industry. He's probably a bit less keen on that now, but I'm sure he still expects that one day Tesla will be just another brand among many, and be happy with it. Eventually Tesla's other products such as battery storage and AI (self-driving cars, robotics...) may provide most of their income.
The International Skeptics Forum was supposed to be a place to attract 'brights' who would use their superior intelligence, knowlege and criticial thinking skills to debunk misinformation and encourage rationality. However it doen't seem to be working. Instead it's infested with 'skeptics' who never bother to do any proper research before spouting off, forcing a few of us to spend much of our time playing whackamole with debunked talking points. If this is all the 'best and brightest' of the world are capable of, it's no wonder Trump is President of the US. Before we lol at the stupidly of others we might want to take a long hard look in the mirror...
