The "Elon's reputation has no effect on Tesla's sales" needs to also show some evidence they might be right. Saying that sales are at record levels does not prove anything. Correlation != causation. BTW - 22Q4 also had significant price cuts, too to move metal.
Correlation is a necessary but not sufficient condition to claim a causal relationship between two variables. This means the absence of correlation is a good sign of the absence of any relationship at all, either direct or indirect. Most variables don’t have any relationship with each other so by default the null hypothesis (no relationship) is more likely in the absence of clear evidence otherwise.
Just because sales are good, does not mean that they would not be better if Elon didn't constantly act like an idiot.
While it is hard to make a counter factual statement about where demand would be if Elon stopped this stuff or never started it at all, the next best test is to look for differences between subsets of the whole. If it were true that Elon+Twitter were substantially hurting demand, then we would at least tend to see a difference between areas of the world where people are likely to care about his participation in American/Californian/San Franciscan politics and areas not likely to care. As it turns out, we do not see meaningful differences since October in the publicly available data thus far. Furthermore the CEO of Tesla himself said in direct response to this very question asked by a TSLA shareholder, “If you look at sort of automotive demand almost anywhere in the world, it’s problematic almost anywhere in the world, and not everywhere cares about my political comments. So I think this is of really minor, minor impact…I really just don’t think this is a significant factor.” The conversation between him and investors then continued to cover the fact that rising interest rates and resulting higher auto loan costs have been increasing the effective cost of buying the cars and that this was the main challenge of late.
So one of the following is true:
1) What he said was accurate
2) He was lying to investors, in breach of his fiduciary duty as CEO and risking civil or potentially criminal prosecution for fraud
3) He somehow genuinely had a misunderstanding about this topic despite having access to all the relevant information and presumably analysts working for him monitoring all these factors—before the decision just a couple weeks later to majorly adjust prices worldwide
I’m inclined to believe #1 is most likely by far.
If Twitter shenanigans were substantially hurting demand, we also would tend to observe a shifting pattern of who is buying Tesla vehicles within the areas where people might have stronger feelings about his political activity. Specifically we would expect to see a shift in US market in the demand balance away from liberals and towards conservatives buying Teslas, and especially in California which is where Twitter is located, which has often been the specific recipient of Elon’s political attacks, which has the nation’s largest selection of alternative EV options, and which contains two of the most liberal regions of the entire nation. The available data indicates that this too is not happening.
The surveys of Elon's favorability and many, many anecdotes of people opting for other EVs would indicate he for sure has had a negative impact.
Surveys are one of the lowest-quality sources of information about human behavior. They’re not even all that useful for predicting election results.
Anecdotes on an Internet forum are an even worse tier of data. Pretty much every popular consumer product in the world has people complaining online. Negative comments and complaints are usually more common in general than positive or neutral ones.
