Elon Musk promotes negative Tesla survey turned positive by bots

Elon Musk has shared a survey that was clearly negative about Tesla last week, but it was made to look positive for Tesla after bots rigged the results.

Tesla’s sales dropped by 41% in Germany last year compared to 2023 despite EV sales surging 27% during the year.

Despite the already bad results in 2024, Tesla’s sales were down 70% in the first two months of 2025.

In 2024, the decline was attributed to tougher EV competition, but this year is even more brutal and different. The sharp decline is attributed to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s rapidly losing credibility with Germans over his meddling in local elections and promoting the far-right AfD party.

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Amid this evident crisis for Tesla in Germany, we reported last week on a survey of 100,000 people by Germany’s popular T-Online publication that showed that only 3% of respondents would consider buying a Tesla vehicle.

Our article on the survey went viral, with millions of views on X:

However, we were surprised yesterday when Musk himself shared the same survey, but with entirely different results.

Musk shared a post that claimed the survey now points to “70% of people in Germany would buy a Tesla again”:

This reversal of the results of the ongoing poll raised some red flags.

Sure enough, T Online has now reported that the survey has been manipulated by bots, with 253,000 votes coming from just two IP addresses in the US:

Where these votes—and the sudden reversal of opinion—came from was initially unclear. At first glance, the number of article views in recent days and the number of survey participants do not seem to match. Initial internal research now shows that 253,000 of the votes cast came from just two IP addresses in the US . This suggests that the survey may have been manipulated.

They shut down the survey after those findings were revealed.

Electrek’s Take

Well, this should help Tesla’s recovery in Germany: manipulating surveys to make it look like people actually would buy Tesla vehicles when they clearly don’t want to and are not buying them.

It was so obviously manipulated.

70% of people want to buy a Tesla, in particular, when most surveys show that EVs, in general, are not even at that level yet.

In addition, Tesla is having issues selling more than a thousand vehicles a month in Germany right now.

The desperation is palpable.