Justin Pot

Imagine a Budweiser Super Bowl ad where the Clydesdales can talk and they spend the entire two minute ad discussing how much they despise country music, pickup trucks, and Christianity. The tagline: “Budweiser: we hate everything you hold dear”. 

What do you think that ad would do to Budweiser’s market share? 

This is basically the situation Tesla is in. It’s worse than that, though, because a Super Bowl commercial only costs $8 million and Tesla’s CEO has spent hundreds of millions of dollars—and most of his time—alienating the company’s core consumer group. Five years ago owning a brand new Tesla was aspirational for progressive people—a way to project that you cared about the environment but still liked having nice things. Now, in 2025, people in progressive cities casually refer to the company’s CEO as a fascist, mostly because he’s neglecting his day job to focus on his passion project (fascism). 

The target demographic for electric cars, right now, is urban and suburban progressives. Electric cars (at least for now) aren’t as obviously practical in the countryside as they are in the city. Conservatives (trained by decades of propaganda to distrust anything that might prevent our increasingly inevitable climate catastrophe) are less likely to consider buying electric cars. 

Now, I’m not a marketer, but alienating the core demographic for your product seems like, and I’m using a technical term here, a bad idea. And the data suggest I might be on to something. EV sales are up overall but Tesla sales are down, especially in Europe and California. Sales in Germany, in particular, are down 70 percent year-over-year (they’re touchy about fascism for some reason). Progressive Tesla owners who can afford to are selling their cars at a loss so as to not be associated with the brand. Others are replacing the Tesla badges on their cars, or adding anti-Elon bumper stickers. I suspect their next car purchase may be from another company.

Now, everything in the world is upside down right now, and the worst people on the planet seem to consistently escape consequences for their actions. Maybe this will all work out for Tesla. Maybe conservatives will buy electric vehicles to own the libs and make up the difference (this wouldn’t be the worst outcome, to be honest—we really do need to stop burning fossil fuels if we plan on living on this planet long term). 

I can’t help but wonder, though: has any company in history so completely alienated their core demographic? I couldn’t think of any so I asked around online, and someone on Mastodon told me the story of Gerald Ratner. It’s a wild ride. 

In the 1980s Ratner ran a chain of jewelry stores in the UK that was popular with working class customers. Then, in 1991, he gave an infamous speech during which he basically stated that his products are bad and that people are dumb for buying them. He called his own products “total crap”. He said that his earrings are cheaper than a grocery store shrimp sandwich and that “the sandwich will probably last longer than the earrings”. Sales, shall we say, declined—the company lost £500 million in value as insulted customers shopped elsewhere. 

Now, some context was lost during all this. The full speech—which you can watch online—makes an argument that Ratner’s succeeded because they gave people what they want. The message of the overall speech was that there is value in forgoing pretension. Tabloids, understandably, focused more on the shrimp sandwich line. 

And that’s what makes the Tesla example so interesting. The CEO of that company isn’t being taken out of context for a single speech—he spends a good chunk of every day posting online about how stupid people who disagree with him are. He truly, deeply, despises progressives and everything they stand for.  

Which, again: I’m no marketing expert. But pissing off the majority of your established customer base seems like a bad way to sell cars. 

featured image of Cybertruck from u/Kruzat via Wikimedia Commons.