When we all realized we needed a commuter car in the family to save a crap ton of money. Rather spend $4 in electricity than $25 in diesel for a 100 mile commute.

The "rolling coal crowd" fell in love with Musk when he bought Twitter in retaliation for them blocking Babylon Bee.

The more recent Trump alignment is just icing on the cake (or fly ash for your concrete, if you want to strain the metaphor)

There are a lot of Republicans who aren't the rolling coal crowd, though. The partisanship is really weird that way. More Americans support environmentally friendly policies than vote Democrat, for example -- unless you tell them it's a democratic party policy, in which case they reject it.

Honestly if he announced tomorrow "Hey that was a hell of a bender, and I regret it - I'm leaving politics and focusing on running my companies" and he actually STUCK to that, then I'd be happy. Mostly because I believe people are most dangerous when they think they have nothing to lose (I've heard privately he's talking a lot about being #2 assassination target after Trump) and get pushed into more extreme positions by the culture being so black and white these days. If he was truly out of politics I wouldn't give two cares if he's an asshole or not. But yeah, somehow I doubt he'll get over the sunk cost fallacy and just dip out of politics. He really needs to choose though - if he's going full into politics he should be really get out of Tesla. He's got pretty much full control over the Tesla board though, if I understand correctly.

As a board member, you would be unhappy? The board members represent the investors. As an investor, what would your assessment be for Tesla as part of your portfolio?

Massachusetts might be partly due to economics. It has a combination of low gas prices and high electric prices that makes it the least favorable state for EVs.

Using statewide average gas and electricity prices as of a couple weeks ago or so (whenever I last grabbed the data) a pure ICE RAV4 has a lower energy cost per mile than a Tesla Model Y (the trim with the highest MPGs) there on the highway. The Tesla still wins in the city.

Change that Toyota to a RAV4 Hybrid (non-plug in) and then the RAV4 wins both highway and city.

Go for a Prius and then there are 8 states where the Prius beats the Tesla on both city and highway (Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont). There are two where the Prius wins highway but not city: California and New Jersey.

The states most favorable to EVs are Washington, Idaho, North Dakota, Utah, Nebraska, Oregon, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, Missouri, South Dakota, Iowa, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.

In those states gas prices would have to fall about 60% (Washington) to 35% (Oklahoma) for the Prius to win.

It's interesting that most of the states where energy prices most favor EVs are red states.

Note: the above was using residential electricity prices. For people that can't charge at home the Prius will win a lot more. Around here the best commercial charging is about twice what residential charging costs. If that holds elsewhere then I think only about 8 states would have the Tesla come out ahead of the Prius.

Tesla built an extensive EV infrastructure and amazing cars when everyone outside of Tesla said EVs are fad. The cars were unmatched and they brought the EVs mainstream. Falling in love in the says past was easy (I owned two Tesla’s). Falling out of love was quick and swift though :))))