Tesla owners getting post-it notes on their car is an example of the unsettling reaction to “lunatic” Musk.
Tesla’s profits fell 71% over the first three months of this year, a company earnings release on Tuesday showed. The company’s performance fell short of analysts’ expectations.
Total revenue decreased by 9% from one year earlier, to $19.3 billion, while revenue derived from car sales plunged 20% over the first three months of 2025 compared to a year ago, the earnings showed.
Sales of electric vehicles climbed to 294,000 in the first quarter of the year, a 10.6% increase compared with the year-earlier period. January through March is a relatively slow time for car sales, nevertheless EVs moved off the lot much more frequently than cars and trucks in general. (Total US auto sales were nearly flat in the first quarter).
EV adoption is cruising along in the US, despite a backlash against the industry’s largest player and the Trump administration’s push to wind back clean energy incentives and emissions regulations. Interest is spreading from early-adopters to mainstream consumers, from EV evangelists to the EV-curious. Williams, for example, isn’t concerned about his personal emissions or climate change. He’s just tired of paying for gasoline and oil changes and considers the preponderance of new EVs a better, more reliable form of technology.
The gains came in spite of (and in some cases because of) struggles at Tesla, the country’s market-leader for battery-powered vehicles. Tesla sold 1.3 million cars in the quarter, a 9% decline from the year-earlier period. Sales of rival brands, meanwhile, collectively notched a gain of 32%. In two years, Tesla’s share of the US EV market has skidded from almost two-thirds to less than half.
A grassroots boycott of the brand in response to CEO Elon Musk’s heavy-handed efforts to streamline federal employment drove some of the sales swoon. JPMorgan has characterized the backlash as “unprecedented brand damage.”
Tesla net income slid 71% in the first quarter and the company widely missed analyst estimates on revenue. Tesla Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said vandalism and hostility were to blame, in part, for double-digit percent declines in vehicle deliveries.
However, there is also a crowd of EV converts that aren’t so much put off by Musk as they are attracted to a parade of newer products. Of the 63 or so fully electric cars and trucks on the US market, one quarter weren’t available a year ago. The product blitz includes the first EV offerings from Acura, Dodge and Jeep, second models from Mini and Porsche and two more battery-powered machines each from Cadillac and Volvo.
“There’s just a lot of competition now,” explained Stephanie Valdez Streaty , director of industry insights at Cox Automotive. “And it’s not just one make or model that’s filling in that (Tesla) gap … The familiarity of these brands is really driving people.”
Many of the new EVs are relatively affordable. Cox estimates the price spread between EVs broadly and internal combustion cars and trucks has shrunk to just $5,000. General Motors, meanwhile, plans to resurrect its Chevrolet Bolt later this year with a price point around $30,000.
“We’re about giving customers a choice,” CEO Mary Barra told Bloomberg. “Over the long term, we think EV demand will grow.”
Hayden Jones, a Microsoft retiree in Seattle, loved his two Tesla Model Ys, but traded them both in a few weeks ago. He’s come to consider Elon Musk “a bit of a lunatic.”
“I was getting post-it notes when I parked,” he explained, “and it’s a slippery slope from putting a sticker on someone’s car and setting it on fire.”
