Elon Musk made his name as an innovator who pushed the boundaries in terms of online payments (PayPal), space exploration (SpaceX), and electric vehicles (Tesla), and was feted for his business acumen and vision. However, having established himself and become the richest person in the world, the wheels started to fall off, quite literally.
In a recent piece in The Guardian, Ramon Vargas interviewed renowned US marketing professor Scott Galloway describes Elon Musk’s ill-fated decision to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump Administration’s commission tasked with slashing Federal spending and jobs, as “one of the greatest brand destructions” ever. Why so?
A well-known bit of wisdom, attributed to Warren Buffett, is that “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
Perhaps Elon Musk didn’t think about that, because as Professor Galloway says, “Tesla was a great brand”, note the past tense. Just last month, in April 2025, Tesla was reported to have suffered a mammoth 71% drop in profits. More worryingly, in terms of its reputation, according to recent brand reputation polling, Tesla is reported to have fallen from 8th in 2021 to 95th in 2025.
Professor Galloway observes that Musk did an excellent job alienating his core demographic – the very type of people who believed in his vision and bought a Tesla as a result.
Abraham Lincoln is famously known for saying, “Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.” Perhaps this piece of advice was ignored as well. While reputation is so important, it is an external perception – what genuinely matters is true character and substance. Many customers who bought a Tesla or intended to do so did so because of the positive brand image that the company and its high-flying CEO had as leading the way in innovation and clean, energy-efficient vehicles.
Essentially, all successful brands embody and portray in some way the positive attributes of the product or service or the person they are promoting. For example, when you buy an iPhone, you are not buying a phone as such; it is an embodiment of Steve Jobs’ dream of a single ubiquitous device that fits in your pocket, communicates with all your other devices and has everything you need at your fingertips, and is beautifully simple to use. Equally, when you buy a can of Coca-Cola, you are not buying a fizzy drink, but a feeling of optimism and joy, and sharing the experience with others around you.
Tesla is, or possibly was, the same. A lot more than a car. It was much bigger, a positive, optimistic idea, built around forward-thinking, performance, and most importantly, sustainability. And those who wanted to do the right thing for the environment, early adopters and enthusiasts, lapped it up. Sadly, for Tesla, that is not necessarily the case any longer.
Elon Musk turned his back on the very people who supported him and endorsed his vision. He rewrote the narrative and the whole idea that generated the enormous brand equity in Tesla, and in doing so, single-handedly tainted the brand. MAGA voters in the US and far-right supporters in other key markets like Europe won’t be much help. Instead, the vast majority will stay with their gas guzzlers.
If Warren Buffett is correct, and it takes 20 years to build a reputation, it is interesting that Tesla Motors was set up in about 2003, 22 years ago. It might have taken Elon Musk more than five minutes – more like five months – to ruin the Tesla brand. But all the same, I think that the damage is done. Once a brand is spoiled, it is so hard to rehabilitate it.
If that proves to be the case, this may prove to be one of the greatest unforced errors – and own goals – in modern-day branding.
