People are using it as a buying criteria. (I cancelled a Model 3 order and went with a Kia EV6 instead) That said, confirmation bias is a real thing. There are those who are convinced Bed Bath and Beyond went under because they stopped selling My Pillow.

What kind of evidence do you want? I’m a car buyer and I’ve gone from seeing Tesla as a decent brand to one I will not consider at all, because I don’t want to associate myself with Musk’s behaviour. It’s not a conspiracy - some people just don’t like him, and there are good alternatives.

There are lots of angry people who are trying to summon a ‘reality’ that they want to see, where their political opponent has suffered for sharing their political views. It’s why this story got upvoted on Hacker News at all, despite it being obviously misleading and easy to disprove. HN users are critical readers on many topics, so to me it appears that they stop using those critical thinking skills when they have an emotional investment in a topic. In other words, this is just like any other political topic in America.

Agree that people may want this to be a bigger factor than it is, or no factor at all, depending on their personal feelings on Musk and his politics.

I would say its hard to argue it is likely some factor in the middle. I'd love to see it studied.

I'll anecdotally add that I've always found Teslas design language pretty ugly, but did pine after the status of owning one briefly. Now I would never buy one for the association with Musk. So there you have it, scientifically there are at least 3 of us, and at most 8 billion of us. Further study is needed.