Elon Musk’s polarizing political actions since acquiring Twitter, later rebranded X, in 2022 dramatically hurt the automaker’s U.S. sales, underscoring how deeply its fortunes are intertwined with the billionaire’s persona.
The findings quantify for the first time how the political actions of the world’s wealthiest person – including his role in U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration – may have cost Tesla billions in lost vehicle sales while benefiting rival electric carmakers.
Tesla’s U.S. sales would have been between 67% and 83% higher, or about 1 million to 1.26 million additional vehicles, from October 2022 to April 2025, had it not been for what researchers call the “Musk partisan effect,” according to a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by Yale University economists.
Then why are they wanting to pay him 1 trillion dollars? Rich people are weird.
Because Musk is asking for it, and the Tesla board who are all his hand picked friends, are the ones that vote on it.
The board doesn’t vote on his compensation package, the shareholders do. The pay committee proposes his compensation package to the shareholders and then they all vote on it.
https://fortune.com/2025/10/27/tesla-board-chair-robyn-denholm-shareholders-elon-musk-1-trillion-pay-package/
Are you being willfully ignorant or are you not aware that during a proxy vote, shareholders that don’t cast an individual vote let the board vote for them? The VAST MAJORITY of shareholders don’t vote. This hands an enormous amount of votes to the board that vote how they want. A proxy vote that goes against the boards recommendation, is very rare in the corporate world.
He put two LED light bars on the old Model Y and came up with a cheap Model Y that covers the existing glass roof in headliner fabric.
How is that not innovation?
Don’t forget he took the lidar sensors out to make self driving way better. Oh wait
He took out manual door handles to make 4D chess figures.
Radar and ultrasonic. I don’t think they ever had lidar.
It had lidar rangefinders I believe. Nothing like the lidar scanners on actual delft driving cars, but still better than just cameras.
Tesla has never used lidar. As the other person said, they did use radar and ultrasonic detectors until covid supply chain issues when they decided to go camera only.
I guess not, but affordable small and very simple LiDAR range finders (ToF) have been around for a while. Not the fancy spinning scanners on Waymo and military robots. More like parking sensors and measuring tools.
I remember when the Israeli company that was developing Tesla’s first automation systems dropped them because it didn’t like the reliance on cameras only that Musk was insisting on.
Edit: removed useless link and provided Wikipedia page with better history of the hardware used. Mobileye dropped Tesla in 2016. Funny enough they were developing Lidar after dropping Tesla, but are more recently going to a camera only approach too. I’m still skeptical any firm will succeed with only mostly visible spectrum photons and have a safe product. But as secondary backup safety devices I’m ok with them. They shouldn’t be allowed to call any of it autodriving or autopilot though.
They removed plastic hooks from the frunk to save two cents. Same with rain detectors on windshield for auto wipers.
Wait until you see the new “standard” model Frunks. The couldn’t be bothered to cover the wheel wells.
I was going to say “what about the cybertruck” but I guess everyone wants to throw him in an oubliette for that.
I wouldn’t presume to speak for anyone else’s motives. Mine are much more pedestrian; I want him in the oubliette because he’s a monster who needs forgetting about.
Of course! We therefore have 2 reasons to throw him in (and probably more).
And rightfully so
Because he did one thing right. He didn’t build a traditional investor base, he built a cult.
Like Joseph Smith and L Ron Hubbard.
He controls the board. So it’s him wanting to pay him that (with the stipulation he magically increases the company market cap to like 8 trillion or something - like 4x what it currently is)
Tesla has to hit 10Trillion to get that pay out. It will not.
I thought they were setting him up for a graceful exit when they could not agree on a ridiculous pay package