The 2025 model of the Axios Harris ballot of name fame is out, and it exhibits a pointy decline within the fame of Tesla and different Elon Musk-related manufacturers, placing them among the many lowest-ranked manufacturers in America, largely as a result of toxicity of Musk himself.
The Axios Harris Ballot 100 ranks model fame of America’s 100 most seen corporations, and asks a pattern of hundreds of People how they really feel about every model.
The survey is a collaboration between Axios and Harris that has been happening since 2019, although is predicated on 20 years of comparable Harris Ballot analysis earlier than then, beginning in 1999. It has developed its personal fame as a dependable approach to take temperature of the American public’s opinion on numerous excessive profile manufacturers.
It’s performed by a number of samples of hundreds of People, asking them what probably the most high-profile manufacturers are, how acquainted they’re with these manufacturers, and their opinions of these manufacturers.
Tesla has been ranked within the survey many occasions through the years, with various outcomes. Within the first ballot in 2019, it ranked forty second, with a model rating of 75.4 out of 100.
However Tesla rose from there, rating 18th in 2020 and reaching a high-water mark because the eighth most trusted model in America in 2021, with a fame rating of 80.2 out of 100.
Since then, the corporate’s shine has began to tarnish, and it has been dropping within the rankings. 2022 noticed a slight dip to #12 and a rating of 79.5, however in 2023 Tesla took an enormous hit, dropping a whopping 50 locations within the rankings. Axios titled the ballot the “yr of the tarnished titans” partially attributable to Tesla’s enormous drop.
However the drop didn’t cease there, as Tesla dropped one other place in 2024, right down to #63, however with a model rating that might nonetheless a minimum of be a barely-passing grade (for a lenient trainer), at 72.5 out of 100.
However this yr’s ballot exhibits that issues simply proceed to worsen, and in reality, the fame injury is accelerating.
In 2025, Tesla dropped one other 32 locations into ninety fifth place, and right down to a model rating of 61.3, an enormous numerical drop in each place and model rating.
The one corporations ranked worse are:
SpaceX, the third firm run by Musk on the record, additionally earned a low fame rating, rating 86th with a rating of 66.4.
Notably, there are a number of corporations with dangerous reputations ranked above Tesla, lots of which have had high-profile scandals both not too long ago or that also loom massive within the public consciousness.
For instance, these within the title of this text: BP, which presided over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill; UnitedHealth, which is presently imploding and whose former CEO was not too long ago murdered in broad daylight and plenty of individuals sort of didn’t appear to thoughts it; and Temu, which has confronted knowledge privateness lawsuits and is the butt of many jokes for promoting low high quality merchandise, on high of normal anti-China sentiment.
For a number of different names, one other Chinese language app, TikTok, can be ranked above Tesla. As is Fox Company, one of many largest purveyors of misinformation and causes of the political division we see in America at this time. And at last, Boeing, which spent final yr wracked by scandals, but is 7 locations above Tesla on this yr’s record.
In the meantime, each different automaker on the record ranked greater than Tesla by a minimum of 35 locations (Ford, #60).
Electrek’s Take
So, the information is kind of dangerous for Tesla. However why is Tesla ranked so low?
Effectively, as you will have divined from our repeated point out of a sure title, the first motive is Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
As we’ve been warning individuals about for fairly a while now, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is doing his finest to utterly destroy Tesla’s model.
Musk has presided over an unimaginable quantity of name injury to Tesla, with the corporate rating the bottom of any US EV model in a latest survey. This damaging notion appears to use to just about any query requested concerning the model, together with its standout Supercharger community, which means that the explanation isn’t something to do with Tesla’s merchandise.
As an EV publication, we’ve got the identical mission as Tesla – to advance sustainable transport. To ensure that that to occur, we clearly need the (previously) largest EV firm on the earth to do its job the most effective it could possibly.
The issue is, Musk doesn’t have that mission, and has been doing his finest during the last yr(s) to damage Tesla’s model notion with more and more idiotic selections, each when it comes to his public advocacy and his work inside Tesla.
Musk’s high-profile political advocacy, which has included assist for German neo-Nazis and agreeing with a protection of Hitler’s actions within the Holocaust, amongst many different white supremacist statements, has pushed protests in opposition to the corporate, embarrassed house owners and pushed many shoppers away. The primary spherical of the ballot began on Jan 22, which implies it captured the interval after Musk did two back-to-back Nazi salutes in public.
Past politics, Musk’s management (or lack thereof) has additionally resulted in Tesla placing all of its effort into merchandise that both don’t work or don’t promote, as a substitute of specializing in Tesla’s strengths like its value benefits and Supercharger community.
So, as soon as once more, this report exhibits the impact of the fixed drumbeat of dangerous Tesla enterprise strikes and horrendous public habits by the corporate’s CEO.
Certainly, it looks as if the legend of the “Tesla killer” lastly got here true – and it’s Elon Musk.
The corporate’s workers, for probably the most half, are nonetheless working to succesfully to make good electrical autos. However Musk is spending the cash he produced from promoting EVs to attempt to damage EVs – one thing that the corporate itself needed to name him out on in its quarterly report (and which the formerly-more-lucid Musk would have opposed only a few years in the past earlier than he forgot how local weather change works).
Sadly, Tesla’s board appears content material to destroy the corporate, and its shareholders do too, as they voted once more final yr to offer Musk $55 billion in trade for his dangerous management, an award that’s higher than the full quantity of earnings Tesla has revamped its total lifetime.
That pay package deal was stopped by a courtroom for violating company regulation, however Musk has spent his political affect getting Texas to rewrite its enterprise legal guidelines to drawback shareholders and profit Musk personally – whilst Texas continues to dam Tesla from promoting vehicles within the state Musk unwisely moved its headquarters to.
We’re unsure what’s going to make Tesla’s board (which have been dumping TSLA inventory like mad) or shareholders get up to Musk’s destruction of the corporate, however this report is only one extra knowledge level exhibiting how extreme the state of affairs has gotten.
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