It’s pretty amazing: Once the darling corporation of the woke left, the selfsame contingent of the American body politic is tacitly or explicitly urging people to boycott Tesla and take action against owners of its EVs, then taking delight in the company’s dropping stock valuation, assuming that Elon Musk’s political views are to blame.
There are two problems with this. The first is that this is ostensibly political blackmail: Play along with us or we’ll torch your stock — literally and figuratively — the left seems to be saying. This is bad enough. But the second problem: Not only is this reprehensible, it’s also not working.
If you need a better example of this, you’d be hard-pressed to find one better than former Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ running mate and someone we’re still talking about for inexplicable (dare I say “weird?”) reasons, gloating over the fact that an American company is having issues:
If you need a little boost during the day, check out Tesla stock 📉 pic.twitter.com/KBEh6pOZLW
— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) March 19, 2025
If you need a little pick-me-up, Tim seems to be saying, just gloat over the fact that Tesla stock is down and those jobs will be going to Korean, German, and Chinese car companies. A good look for a guy who was caught lying about his presence in Tiananmen Square and may have had a fling with a CCP functionary during his trip to China as a young man on that last count to boot.
To use Tampon Tim’s own favorite term for it, this bit of schadenfreude seems a bit, well, “weird.” It also makes some deliberately foolish assumptions about the company’s stock price that don’t really hold water.
First, Tesla is down because the stock market is down because the stock market was artificially inflated and is a poor indicator of the health of the economy as a whole.
Do you think Tesla’s price has dropped due to Democrats’ outrage or normal market fluctuations?
Democrats’ outrage: 0% (0 Votes)
Normal market fluctuations: 0% (0 Votes)
In addition, EV stocks are past their honeymoon period with investors as it’s clear that adoption of chargeable vehicles outside of a few markets will be slower than anticipated and likely to be rough thanks to the need to diversify supply chains for the cars from China.
Furthermore, if you’d invested in the company’s stock back in 2010 during its IPO at $1.28 a share, you’d be up 18,326 percent at the moment, with a share price of $235.86 as of close on Wednesday.
While this is down from its all-time high of $488.54, set during the past year, it’s also up from its 52-week low of $138.80. That means if you bought at the low for the year, you’d still be up over $97 a share.
Meanwhile, take the stock of Rivian Automotive — please, as Henny Youngman might say if he were reincarnated as a ESG-centric investor. Rivian is considered one of Tesla’s biggest competitor in the upmarket EV sphere, and its IPO debuted at $129.95 in November 2021. Since then, it’s down to $11.36 — a whopping 91.26 percent decrease.
You’d think that if this was about a Tesla boycott and Elon Musk’s “toxicity” with buyers, Rivian stock would be a safe haven. It makes the most directly comparable equivalent to the Cybertruck — the most Tesla-y of Teslas, one that practically sums up the company’s ethos in a neat package. But, nope: The “boycott,” to the extent it exists, hasn’t helped them any either.
Then consider the valuation of X, the platform that Elon Musk supposedly killed. Remember how he drove everyone off of it? Remember how all the blue-checks took their balls and ran off to Threads or Bluesky or Mastodon? Remember how he’d choked off the asset he bought by allowing free speech?
Turns out that’s not true, either; the company’s valuation is back up to $44 billion, according to the Financial Times, the same amount that Musk bought it for — a number that many agreed was inflated, it’s worth noting.
The New York Post also noted that X has received $1 billion in equity from a round of investing, which Musk has participated in.
“The valuation points to a major turnaround for Musk and his handpicked CEO Linda Yaccarino, who have set about remaking X as an ‘everything app’ with loosened content moderation standards and plans for an onsite payment platform,” the Post reported.
X is even easier to boycott than Tesla stock — and yet, judging by its valuation, people aren’t doing that.
Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t problems, particularly with the left encouraging its own to basically say: “Expensive car you’ve got there. Shame if anything were … to happen to it.” Then, they’ll gloat like the little Mafia dons they are, thrilled at the possibility of higher insurance premiums because of vandalism concerns.
This, it’s worth noting, is basically a form of voter intimidation. And yet, it doesn’t seem to have caught on. Try as he might, Tampon Tim’s weird schadenfreude isn’t shared by the majority of the American population — and a truculent minority doesn’t seem to have spooked investors as much as Walz or other Democrats might have hoped. Nice try, though. If Democrats think this is failure, they need to have their heads examined
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