So it's actually a 60% market share drop when you consider the growth of market share of EVs.

Beyond politics, this is simply an exercise in CEO malpractice.

Brands and the marketing around them are extremely important to large long-term companies like TSLA presumably is.

In car companies, as its been explained to me, branding is even more important because a consistent positive attachment of existing car owners to the brand is critically important for the biggest source of a car company's customers: the existing ones.

A car is daily used item, a piece of a consumer's ego, a large scale purchase that almost everyone has emotional not just rational investment.

Tesla the car company probably had two fundamental archetypes as purchasers: a techno-geek gee-whiz buyer, and a left-leaning pro-environmental buyer. It's hard to figure out what proportion is which, but let's just say it is at least 50% pro-environment.

Your customers are basically your brand. And the Tesla brand has completely destroyed the pro-environmental crowd. And not just vaguely turned them off. It has angrily reversed them.

Tesla has no marketing department, or very little. It does little advertising. It relied on passionate owners, and of the two archetypes, the techno-gee-whiz is the less passionate, because they are always looking for the next best thing.

The pro-environment crowd was the most emotionally invested, because Tesla represented one of the few hopes for improving the environment over the ICE / petroleum iron grip on transportation. But that emotional investment didn't turn to indifference.

It turned to betrayal and anger.

In Europe, you have compounded this with anti-American sentiment and creepy pro-Russian propangada parroting as well as fascist politics meddling.

On top of all this, Tesla is fundamentally an urban brand. Charging infrastructure sucks in rural areas and driving distances are higher, so urban/suburban drivers buy them, which aligns with the progressive/Democratic buyer profile.

So with the vast anger towards Musk, a driver of a Tesla gets a daily emotional rebuff, from both Musk's daily headlines, to covert looks of dismissal, to overt confrontation, mocking, and danger of vandalism.

So, is there some massive pool of conservative voters ready to enthusiastically buy Teslas? The Cybertruck has been fundamentally rejected by the pickup crowd, and angry young men of that segment are the youth movement of the far-right Republican party. The rest are change-resistant older people, or the miniscule numbers of the wealthy.

The weak response of many Tesla owners is to blame the people as wrongfully blaming Tesla for Musk's actions, which is just a ridiculous notion. CEO does Sieg Heils on national TV. CEO gets money and fame from Tesla. CEO is STILL CEO of Tesla after Sieg Heils.

Those Sieg Heils should be immediate termination grounds for Musk, and a forced selloff in any functioning democracy. There is ample evidence of Twitter dogwhistles and his public statements in support of AfD that there is no "roman salute" or "he's just autistic" that can be argued with a straight face. Public Sieg Heils are not trolling, they are a fundamental offense on democracy. Fascism's very purpose is to contravene democratic principles to gain authoritarian control, and not a benevolent dictatorship. The path of fascism explicitly uses appeals to the darkest side of humanity, and so the authoritarianism will be of the very evil sort, and that comes from a philosophically moral relativist.

On top of that, Musk has hitched himself to a trade warring administration, which will doom Tesla in China, either from indirect edicts from the CCP to not buy Teslas, to outright seizing of their factories and assets if/when the Taiwan saber rattling and cold war expands.

And I could detail a dozen other CEO failures: Cybertruck bust. Semi misexecution. Solar is a joke. Should have acquires a struggling ICE company (like Nissan) for stock swap funny money to gain platforms/engineeers/production capacity. Only basically make two models of mass market cars. Only has one brand and doesn't have other branding levels. Failure of battery day execution/no novel drivetrain or battery technology. Failed to become the premier EV infrastructure provider (and has joined to a administration that will drop the funding). Should have introduced PHEVs in a separate company to apply battery production to more cars. Should have lines in ebikes, power tools, yard tools, anything that is battery-electric. Should have industrial applications and drivetrains. Should actually show up to work.