@TBPInvictus here. (Also on Post and Mastodon).
Happy holidays to all, and the best for 2023. It’s been a hot minute since my last post, hope I remember how this thing works.
I’ve been a huge fan of Twitter for well over a decade. It’s a fire hose of invaluable information from countless reliable (if your follows are solid) purveyors of all manner of news, on every topic imaginable, from every corner of the globe. It has been disheartening, to say the least, to watch the vivisection Elon Musk is performing on it since closing his purchase in October.
Watching Musk’s ongoing antics, it has become very clear to me that his actions are not only destroying Twitter, but the collateral damage is taking Tesla down with it – a veritable twofer of ineptitude and rake-stepping.
Let’s have a look at some numbers:
The state of NY maintains a great catalog of data that can be found here. Drill down a bit and we get to Vehicle, Snowmobile, and Boat Registrations. Filtering, we learn that there are ~48,795 Teslas registered in the state. We’ll do some further work on that in a bit, but let’s put it aside for now.
The state of NY (obviously) also keeps records of election results. One such page can be found here.
Do you see where this is going?
My thesis is that in Musk’s newfound desire to own the Libs, he’s alienating the very people who have overwhelmingly been buyers of his EVs. How to validate this thesis? Well, let’s look at data for the state of New York from three distinct datasets: Census Bureau gives us population by county, the state gives us a breakdown of 2020 election results (see above), and another state database gives us (as but one of a truly impressive catalog) vehicle registrations (again, see above).
The table above contains the top 10 and bottom 10 Trump-voting NY counties in the 2020 election, showing the percentage of Trump voters, the population, the number of TSLA registrations, and critically, TSLA registrations per 10k population. The result:.
Adjusted for population, Teslas are ~5x more common in heavily Democratic counties than they are in heavily Republican counties.
The data above probably play a role in the performance of TSLA’s stock, which was $328 on the day Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter (see below).
Musk is doing himself no favors. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how he could be doing more damage to both properties than he currently is, but I don’t want to underestimate him.
My friend Nick Hanauer has apparently seen enough; I’m sure he’s not alone.
More charts after the jump…
See also:
An EV Buying Guide for People Fed Up With Tesla’s Elon Musk (Bloomberg, December 19, 2022)
I’m a Tesla Investor. Elon Musk Is a Danger to the Company. (TDB, December 20, 2022)
Previously:
Get Yourself Some “No Men” (December 19, 2022)
What’s Ailing Tesla’s Stock? (October 17, 2022)
BR here, jumping in from vacay to add a few more charts.
I have been amazed for quite some time by the price action in Tesla, and genuinely perplexed about Musk.
Charles Gaba picked up where Invictus left off, applying a similar analysis to a few different states. He confirmed the basic premise if Musk owning the Libs is a self-own, a bizarre way of alienating most of Tesla’s core owners and future prospective buyers.
“Counties where Trump got < 30% of the vote in 2020 registered *60x* as many Teslas PER CAPITA than counties where he received >70%.” (not 60 percent, but 60 times!)
Here is the chart of California:
Gaba performed the same analysis on 6 states (with the caveat that each state manages its data somewhat differently).
Its less dramatic than California alone, but the overall conclusion is the same: In states as varied as California, Florida, Montana, New York, Tennessee & Virginia, representing 98M people or ~30% of the U.S. population, Tesla registrations are 6.7x higher in counties where Trump received less than 30% of the vote than counties where he received > 70% of the vote.
Enjoy what’s left of 2022, its one for the record books…
~~~
