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Electric Slide

While Tesla billionaire Elon Musk and his gaggle of tech lackeys gnaw at the wires of the US federal government, his bread and butter venture is slumping hard.

As Musk has become even more inescapably political, Tesla's sales have dropped sharply across the European Union and the UK. In Germany — the only European country with a Tesla plant — sales of the new EVs plummeted by nearly 60 percent, while France saw a 63 percent decrease compared to January 2024. In Norway, new Tesla registrations fell by 38 percent. Sweden, meanwhile, registered just 405 new Teslas for the month — a 44 percent plunge. (Sales in the United States are also falling, though less drastically.)

That's not to mention the spectacular collapse of Cybertuck sales — currently only available in the US and Canada — which fell by 22 percent from Q3 2024 to Q4 as the controversial EV's resale value hit the toilet.

The collapsing sales figures are likely to compound the company's already horrendous performance issues. From 2023 to 2024, Tesla's net income dropped by a disappointing 23 percent, and from 2022 to 2024 it fell an eyewatering 40 percent.

Tesla's stocks, which spiked after Musk's outsize financial support for Donald Trump paid off in the November election, are now reeling, dropping more than 16 percent over the past month and nearly 13 percent in the last week alone (some investors remain optimistic in Musk's ability to force a rebound by steamrolling regulations, but one vote-of-no-confidence is coming from inside the Musk clan: Musk's brother, Kimbal sold off tens of millions of dollars in shares last week.)

While some blame a cooldown in European EV subsidies for Tesla's sales woes, the biggest issue is almost certainly that Musk's personal brand, which is inexplicably tied to the electric carmaker, has taken a public beating for his increasingly childish antics in the government and beyond.

The unsubtle tech mogul spent the opening weeks of 2025 rallying with the far-right AfD party in Germany, performing a fascist salute in front of a MAGA crowd, posting a barrage of Holocaust jokes, and retweeting neo-Nazi accounts to his hundreds of millions of followers.

That's to say nothing of the hurricane of federal budget cuts and government employee inquisitions spearheaded by his DOGE group, which has managed to confuse everybody and send Tesla's favorability rating down to a ludicrous 3 percent — the lowest rating since financial services company Stifle began the poll in 2018.

In other words, it's not hard to understand why Tesla's facing immense headwins; those DOGE cuts represent a huge contradiction to Musk's business interests, which have received hundreds of millions in government handouts. Tesla, specifically, is estimated to draw up to 43 percent of its revenue from selling regulatory credits, a lucrative scheme which Trump's administration wants to axe.

So while it's too early for Musk's enemies to pop the champagne — his ventures are still worth just under $400 billion — the haters can enjoy some schadenfreude knowing even the world's richest person isn't immune to good old-fashioned karma.

More on Tesla: The Cybertruck Appears to Be More Deadly Than the Infamous Ford Pinto, According to a New Analysis


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