Clean Technica: Musk Throws A Pall Over EVs & Memphis004127

Last Updated on: 30th July 2025, 12:38 pm
A new study published on July 28, 2025, in the journal Nature shows that the political antics of Elon Musk have done significant damage to the Tesla brand. People who identify as liberals are thoroughly turned off by his embrace of the MAGAsphere and are much less likely to buy a Tesla then they were before he did his Nazi salute and was seen jumping up and down like a hyperactive 8-year-old during the most recent inauguration.
You might think his antics would have attracted conservatives to the brand, but the study shows that had not happened. But ever worse, Musk has had a toxic effect on electric cars in general in the US. Way to go, Elon. Just when your dream of transitioning the world of transportation to electric vehicles was beginning to come together, you decided to have a drug-induced meltdown that threatens to send the whole calliope crashing to the ground.
“The suspicion is that Elon Musk became so synonymous with EVs in the US that perceptions of him affected the entire class of vehicles,” Alexandra Flores, a psychologist at Williams College and lead author of the study, told The Guardian. “This made them way less appealing to liberals — he really dragged down perceptions of EVs in general. It’s definitely unusual to have a chief executive have an impact on a whole class of products like this.”
Things were going so well for Elon Musk. The study points out that his “public persona was initially one of scientist and entrepreneur, as evidenced by his portrayal in popular culture in the 2010s. He appeared in The Simpsons as a spacefaring inventor and businessman, where his motivation was explicitly stated to be saving the Earth rather than making money. In the film Iron Man 2, he appeared as a fictionalized version of himself, pitching an electric jet to the hero of the film, Iron Man.”
“In Star Trek: Discovery he was referenced as an historically great inventor, in the company of the Wright brothers. He also broadly presented himself as either apolitical, once stating, ‘I get involved in politics as little as possible,’ or liberal, as when he resigned from a business advisory position during the first Trump Administration when President Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement on climate change.”
Unexpected Results
Flores said the results of the research she and her team conducted were unexpected. “We thought that liberals would be pretty stable because EVs are so historically associated with the green movement and that Musk’s rightward turn would bring conservatives on board. But the opposite happened. Over time conservatives remained relatively steady in their lack of interest in EVs and Tesla, while liberals’ attitudes really dropped. They are now equally unlikely to buy an EV as they are a Tesla.”
She added, “The attitude among conservatives to Tesla may be slightly less negative than before but that didn’t translate into the part of psychology of how they intended to behave. That strong link to liberalism is too much for them to be budged on. It’s more foundational to them than if they like or don’t like Elon Musk.”
Thanks, Elon, you jackass. Many regular readers of CleanTechnica are struggling to understand the transformation of someone they once considered a climate hero into a pariah. One theory is that Tesla is and always was just a scheme to cash in on regulatory credits. Over the years, the fact that Tesla has been profitable at all has had less to do with selling cars and more to with collecting payments from other manufacturers whose vehicles failed to meet federal or state emissions standards.
Of course, now, thanks to the policies of the failed administration Musk worked so hard to bring to power, those credits will become a thing of the past, at least on the federal level, reducing Tesla’s ability to show paper profits each quarter. The corollary to that theory is that Tesla was always nothing more than a Wall Street “pump and dump” scheme designed to enrich Elon Musk and the supine board of directors he surrounded himself with.
No matter what the explanation, Tesla appears to be in desperate trouble. There is chatter online about how the factory in Germany may have to be shuttered, and judging by the company’s declining sales in China, the Shanghai factory may be in trouble as well. Elon may be a brilliant engineer (not everyone agrees with that idea) but he is lousy at marketing cars. His modus operandi for years has been to over-promise and under-deliver and people are now thoroughly sick of his schtick.
Musk Comes To Memphis
Musk positioned himself as a champion of the environment initially, but even that guise has proven false. He has thrown in with the climate denial crowd and made business decisions that threaten to damage the very climate he once swore to protect. In Memphis, his new shiny thing is Colossus, a giant data center constructed inside a former Electrolux factory. Its purpose is to provide the computing power needed for Grok, the AI chatbot for xAI.
The problem from the beginning has been to that there was not enough electricity available to supply the voracious needs of Colossus, and so, rather than wait or select a different site, Musk decided to install methane-powered portable generators to make the juice needed. We know a thing or two about methane-powered generating stations, which at least have some controls over their emissions, but those portable generators have virtually none in comparison.
There has been a lot of backing and forthing about whether the necessary permits were obtained before those methane generators were turned on, with the city of Memphis strongly backing xAI — no doubt because of the money it is expected to add to the city’s coffers. But that old Electrolux factory is in a rundown part of town and was not paying the highest taxes. Now with xAI in there, a financial bonanza is coming the city’s way and it doesn’t want anything to cause the money train to jump the tracks.
According to the Tennessee Lookout, the NAACP and other community groups have filed an appeal of a Shelby County Health Department decision to grant xAI an air permit for 15 gas turbines at its South Memphis data center. The appeal claimed that decision violates the Clean Air Act and would allow businesses to “install and operate any number of new polluting turbines at any time without any written approval from the Health Department, without any public notice or public participation, and without pollution controls.”
Earlier this month, the Health Department approved the use of 15 methane generators. Following that decision, xAI pledged that “onsite power generation will be equipped with state-of-the-art emissions control technology, making this facility the lowest emitting of its kind in the country.” The emphasis here is on the words “of its kind,” meaning any other data centers powered by portable methane generators.
State Representative Justin Pearson, a Memphis Democrat, said in a statement Wednesday that the health department’s permit approval “to a company that ran dozens of large gas turbines for more than a year without authorization sends a troubling message that violating environmental laws in Shelby County is acceptable.”
LaTricea Adams, the head of a community group known as Young, Gifted & Green, told the press, “As a Black woman born and raised in Memphis, I know firsthand how industry harms Black communities while those in power cower away from justice. The Shelby County Health Department needs to do their job to protect the health of ALL Memphians, especially those in frontline communities like [ours], that are burdened with a history of environmental racism, legacy pollution, and redlining.”
Some may see a similarity between the pious promise to make Colossus the lowest emitting facility of its kind as just another example of Musk writing checks he can’t cash, such as the now infamous video on the Tesla website that promised the car was driving itself. The driver was just there to meet legal requirements.
The takeaway is that nothing Musk says can be taken at face value. He is simply no longer a credible voice. Elon is in it for Elon, and anyone who thinks otherwise has been duped. The damage he has done to the EV revolution and the promise of a sustainable world is immense. For those who choose to do business with Musk, we have only one thing to say: caveat emptor.

Sign up for CleanTechnica’s Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott’s in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!

Advertisement

 

[embedded content] [embedded content]

Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.

Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.

CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica’s Comment Policy

Share this story!

Go to Source