Science

Few auto executives are as closely identified with the companies they manage as Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, is. And probably none are more prolific in broadcasting their political views on social media.

But as Mr. Musk’s public persona has become increasingly right wing, Tesla appears to be paying a price in sales, especially to liberal and left-leaning customers who are much more likely to buy battery-powered cars than conservatives are, according to analysts and many car owners who responded to a questionnaire on The New York Times’s website about whether his behavior affected their views of Tesla.

His image as an erratic, impulsive manager appears to have rubbed off on the cars, raising doubts in some people’s minds about their quality and helping to explain why Tesla sales have been falling. On Tuesday, the company reported that its global sales in the second quarter fell 4.8 percent from the same period a year earlier, after an 8.5 percent drop in the first three months of the year.

“Musk is a true lightning rod,” said Ben Rose, the president of Battle Road Research, which has a generally positive view on Tesla’s stock. “There are people who swear by him and people who swear at him. No question, some of his comments are a real turnoff for some people. For a subset, enough to buy another brand.”

Tesla and a representative for the company’s board did not respond to requests for comment.

Some of the more than 7,500 people who responded to The Times’s questionnaire said they were offended by what they perceived as antisemitism from Mr. Musk, which he denies. Some were upset by the way Mr. Musk has managed Twitter, now called X, since he bought the company in 2022. He fired thousands of employees and removed guardrails on content shared on the social media platform. His increasingly friendly relations with former President Donald J. Trump and other conservative personalities were also cited as concerns. A vast majority of the readers who responded to the questionnaire were critical of Mr. Musk.

“You’re basically driving around a giant red MAGA hat,” said Aaron Shepherd, a product designer at Microsoft in Seattle who said he was planning to buy an electric Volkswagen ID.4 instead of a Tesla.

It is not possible to know what price Tesla has paid for Mr. Musk’s political statements and activities. What is clear is that Tesla, once the dominant seller of electric vehicles worldwide, has lost market share in many countries for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is the company’s reliance on the Model Y sport utility vehicle and the Model 3 sedan, which haven’t been substantially updated in years, for almost all of its sales. Other companies are luring buyers by introducing new or updated cars more frequently.

In China, domestic carmakers like BYD have gained ground on Tesla by offering more affordable cars with technology features that appeal to Chinese consumers, like rotating screens. In Europe, BMW, Volkswagen and other local brands are doing well by offering more luxurious or cheaper cars than Tesla. And in the United States, Hyundai-Kia, Ford Motor and General Motors have increased sales by offering a growing selection of models.

Times readers who responded to the online questionnaire said they had been turned off by Mr. Musk’s statements and by their experience with Tesla’s cars and service operations — the company sells and services cars directly, rather than through dealers.

“There’s a time when I’d have given Musk an organ if he needed one,” said Tim Yocum, an engineering director at a software company. But Mr. Yocum, who lives in Chicago, said that he had experienced problems with his Tesla Model S and that he had been unsatisfied with the company’s repair and maintenance services. Mr. Musk’s veer to the right has also upset him.

“Tesla is the only manufacturer in contemporary times that has unapologetically let its C.E.O. take a tiki torch to its good name,” Mr. Yocum said. “This car will be the last Tesla I own.”

Such comments help illuminate surveys that say Tesla’s reputation has suffered recently. The company slipped to 63rd place in the 2024 Axios Harris Poll 100, which asked respondents about their views on corporate brands. In 2021, the company was in eighth place.

Mr. Musk has maintained that his public statements and persona don’t affect Tesla’s sales. “We make the best cars,” he said at The Times’s DealBook Summit in November. “Whether you hate me, like me or are indifferent, do you want the best car or not the best car?”

Mr. Musk still has plenty of passionate admirers. And some said the executive’s public statements would not influence their decision to buy a Tesla. Many people gave him credit for pushing the auto industry to produce electric vehicles, a powerful tool to combat climate change.

“He has led a company that has successfully disrupted a corrupt, lazy car industry,” said Julian Mehnle, a software engineer who lives in San Francisco. While no fan of Mr. Musk, Mr. Mehnle said, “I’m adult enough to separate these concerns from my choice of consumer products.”

Robert Dean, an architect who lives in Redding, Conn., echoed those sentiments: “Musk is a gigantic, disruptive talent with a transformative and positive effect on the world we live in. He also is an oddball personality, but I’m not marrying him; I’m buying cars from a company he brilliantly leads.”

Most of Tesla’s shareholders remain largely supportive of Mr. Musk. Last month, investors endorsed a $45 billion compensation plan for him by a wide margin.

Yet car buyers whom The Times heard from and analysts said Mr. Musk’s political activity had clearly hurt the company’s reputation with left-leaning consumers. And there is little evidence that Mr. Musk’s turn to the right has attracted more conservatives to buy Teslas. In fact, 77 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters said this year that they were not interested in battery-powered cars, up from 70 percent who said the same last year, according to the Pew Research Center.

“He might be winning some people who like his positions,” said Greg Silverman, the global director of brand economics at Interbrand, a consulting firm that advises clients on marketing strategies. But, he added, the odds that Mr. Musk is attracting more customers rather than pushing them away “are very low.”

Interbrand research indicates that a chief executive or other company representative who offends customers can reduce sales as much as 10 percent, Mr. Silverman said.

Some car owners’ concerns went beyond Mr. Musk’s political statements. They cited accusations of racial discrimination at Tesla factories, or the perception that he has allowed racist content to flourish on X. Tesla has denied that it tolerates discrimination at its factories.

“My mother was seriously debating buying a Tesla,” said Achidi Ndifang, who works in information technology in Baltimore. “As a Black person, I felt like it would be an insult for my mother to drive a Tesla.”

Derek Morf, a high school math teacher in Verona, N.J., reported feeling alarmed when Tesla removed the Disney Plus app from some dashboard screens late last year, apparently because Mr. Musk was angry at Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of Disney.

Mr. Morf didn’t care that much about the Disney app. But, he said, he found it unsettling “that the vehicle I purchased could have features changed in an instant simply because one man had that much control.”

Such concerns could be a liability for Tesla as it pours resources into autonomous driving technology. Mr. Musk has promised to unveil a self-driving taxi on Aug. 8. The technology cannot succeed without trust from consumers.

Many Times readers pointed out that other car companies also had baggage. Volkswagen had an emissions scandal a few years ago. Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor, held and spread antisemitic views. A decade ago, G.M. sold cars with faulty ignition switches that were blamed for more than 100 deaths.

Established car companies still sell gasoline cars that emit greenhouse gases and other pollutants. Tesla sells only electric cars.

But probably no other current auto executive has as loud a megaphone as Mr. Musk has, or is more willing to use it.

“If people think that the C.E.O.s of other companies are saints, they are a bit naïve in my opinion,” said Jan Leys, a Tesla owner in Zurich. “They just don’t have as big a mouth and/or platform as Elon Musk.”

Hurricane Beryl, which devastated islands in Grenada on Tuesday and is now heading toward Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, has broken records as the earliest hurricane ever to reach Category 4 and Category 5 intensity in the Atlantic Basin. Wind speeds of at least 160 miles per hour were recorded on Monday.

“There are so many superlatives to describe Hurricane Beryl given the time of year, the location and the strength,” said Jonathan Zawislak, a meteorologist and flight director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Dr. Zawislak is a hurricane hunter, the title held by about 30 to 40 scientists, data crunchers and pilots based in Lakeland, Fla., who fly into hurricanes on three airplanes nicknamed Gonzo, Kermit and Miss Piggy. Both Kermit and Miss Piggy are equipped with Doppler radar on their bellies and tails that scientists use to create 3-D images of the storm.

Over the last three days, Dr. Zawislak and his team have taken off in Kermit from St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, and navigated through the swirling eyewall of Hurricane Beryl. In a Category 4 or 5 storm like Beryl, the eyewall — the ring of thunderstorms, heavy rain and dangerous winds surrounding the center of the storm — is loud and bumpy.

“It’s like being on a roller coaster in a carwash, except you don’t know when the ups and downs will occur, or what the next turn is,” Dr. Zawislak said on Tuesday as he prepared for his third Beryl reconnaissance flight.

But the eye of the storm is calm. During daytime flights, Dr. Zawislak can look out his bubble window from behind the cockpit and see a quiet bowl of cloud with clear, blue sky above.

His job is to navigate through the chaos, finding the path for Kermit to fly between 8,000 to 10,000 feet while maintaining an airspeed of exactly 210 knots and flying the aircraft directly into the wind so they’re not pushed around.

Jonathan Shannon, a spokesman for NOAA’s Aircraft Operations Center, said the goal of these flights, especially with hurricanes that change quickly, was to provide better data to better prepare for emergencies.

Since Dr. Zawislak’s first flight on Sunday, Hurricane Beryl experienced rapid intensification, which means its wind speeds have increased by 35 miles per hour or more over a 24-hour period. Part of the change came from an eyewall replacement cycle, or what Dr. Zawislak called the “ice skater effect”: the storm contracts like a figure skater pulling arms in tight while spinning. Pulling energy from warm ocean water, the storm replaces the old eye with a new one and reorganizes its outer wall.

As Earth’s atmosphere heats up, more storms are undergoing this kind of rapid intensification. A recent study showed that rapid intensification is now twice as likely for Atlantic hurricanes, at least partially because of human-caused climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels.

Beryl is a disastrous start to what Hosmay Lopez, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, said was the “most bullish” forecast the agency has ever made for an Atlantic hurricane season. NOAA predicts an above-normal hurricane season with four to seven major storms clocking winds above 111 miles per hour.

The forecast is based on the change in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a natural climate pattern linked to warmer conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which is moving from a neutral state toward La Niña. The calm conditions produced by La Niña, combined with abnormally warm ocean temperatures, increase the likelihood of Atlantic hurricane formation.

As they travel, hurricanes stir the surface of the ocean. They churn up colder water from deep below the surface, which can dilute the storm’s energy, like stirring a cup of coffee to cool it down. But along with exceptionally warm sea surface temperatures that have shattered records for more than a year, temperatures are also higher than normal at greater depths.

“In this case the cup of coffee is very tall, so it’s very difficult to mix up cold water from below, even though you have strong winds,” Dr. Lopez said. Warmer temperatures at a greater depth give the storm even more energy to pull from the ocean, he said.

Hurricane season, which lasts from June 1 to Nov. 30, has historically been quiet in June and July before picking up in August. Hurricane Beryl beat the previous record-holder for earliest Category 5 storm, Hurricane Emily in 2005, by about two weeks.

June 28, 2024: This article was updated to add details about the lunar sample that were announced after its original publication date.

China brought a capsule full of lunar soil from the far side of the moon down to Earth on Tuesday, achieving the latest success in an ambitious schedule to explore the moon and other parts of the solar system.

The sample, retrieved by the China National Space Administration’s Chang’e-6 lander after a 53-day mission, highlights China’s growing capabilities in space and notches another win in a series of lunar missions that started in 2007 and have so far been executed almost without flaw.

“Chang’e-6 is the first mission in human history to return samples from the far side of the moon,” Long Xiao, a planetary geologist at China University of Geosciences, wrote in an email. “This is a major event for scientists worldwide,” he added, and “a cause for celebration for all humanity.”

Such sentiments and the prospects of international lunar sample exchanges highlighted the hope that China’s robotic missions to the moon and Mars will serve to advance scientific understanding of the solar system. Those possibilities are contrasted by views in Washington and elsewhere that Tuesday’s achievement is the latest milestone in a 21st-century space race with geopolitical overtones.

In February, a privately operated American spacecraft landed on the moon. NASA is also pursuing the Artemis campaign to return Americans to the lunar surface, although its next mission, a flight by astronauts around the moon, has been delayed because of technical issues.

China, too, is looking to expand its presence on the moon, landing more robots there, and eventually human astronauts, in the years to come.

Building toward that goal, it has taken a slow and steady approach, executing a robotic lunar exploration program it devised decades in advance. Named after the Chinese moon goddess Chang’e (pronounced “chong-uh”), the program’s first two missions orbited the moon to photograph and map its surface. Then came Chang’e-3, which landed on the lunar near side in 2013 and deployed a rover, Yutu-1. It was followed in 2019 by Chang’e-4, which became the first vehicle to visit the moon’s far side and put the Yutu-2 rover on the surface.

One year later, it landed Chang’e-5, which sent nearly four pounds of near-side lunar regolith to the Earth. The achievement made China only the third country — after the United States and the Soviet Union — to achieve the complex orbital choreography of collecting a sample from the moon.

According to Yuqi Qian, a lunar geologist at the University of Hong Kong, the maneuvers of Chang’e-5 and Chang’e-6 are both test runs for China’s future crewed missions to the moon, which, like the Apollo missions of the 1960s and ’70s, need to land and then launch humans from the lunar surface.

While it works toward putting astronauts on the moon, China’s long-term strategy is paying scientific benefits for understanding the solar system.

The Chang’e-5 sample was younger than the lunar material collected by the Americans or Soviets in the 1960s and ’70s. It is made up mainly of basalts, or cooled lava from ancient volcanic eruptions.

Two Chinese-led research teams concluded that the basalts were about two billion years old, suggesting that volcanic activity on the moon extended at least a billion years beyond the time frame deduced from the U.S. Apollo and Soviet Luna samples.

Other studies of the material ruled out theories about how the moon’s insides had warmed enough to generate volcanic activity. One research group found that the amounts of radioactive elements in the lunar interior, which could decay and produce heat, were not high enough to cause the eruptions. Another result ruled out water in the mantle as a potential source of the interior melting that led to volcanism.

Chang’e-6 launched on May 3 with even grander scientific ambitions: bringing back material from the far side of the moon. The near side of the moon is dominated by wide, dark plains where ancient lava once flowed. But the far side has fewer of those plains. It also has more craters and a thicker crust.

And because that half never faces Earth, it is impossible to directly communicate with landers on the lunar far side, making it difficult to reach successfully. The Chinese space agency relied on two satellites it previously launched into orbit around the moon, Queqiao and Queqiao-2, to remain in touch with Chang’e-6 during its visit.

The spacecraft used the same technique as Chang’e-5 to reach the moon and then return its sample to Earth.

After a few weeks in lunar orbit, Chang’e-6 descended to a site at the edge of the South Pole-Aitken basin, the oldest, deepest impact crater on the moon. Equipped with a mechanical scoop and a drill, the lander spent two days gathering lunar rock and dust from its surroundings and the moon’s subsurface.

It then stashed the material away. The mission deployed a miniature rover that snapped a picture of the lander with a small Chinese flag raised. Then, on June 3, a rocket flung the sample canister back into lunar orbit. The materials then reunited on June 6 with a spacecraft that had remained in orbit and prepared to begin the journey back to Earth.

The sample container re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at 1:41 p.m. local time, moving at speeds around 25,000 miles per hour, according to Xinhua, a Chinese state news agency. Its parachute opened about six miles above the ground.

The capsule, scorched from its passage through the atmosphere, landed in the Siziwang Banner area of Inner Mongolia at 2:07 p.m. local time. A Chinese flag planted near the pod flapped in the wind as ground crews worked to recover the material.

The sample weighed more than four pounds, based on preliminary measurements. A spokesperson for the mission said to Xinhua on Friday that the soil appeared more viscous and clumpy, compared with material retrieved in the past from the moon’s near side.

Qiong Wang, the China National Space Administration’s deputy chief designer of Chang’e-6, told Xinhua earlier in the week that part of the sample will be permanently stored. The rest will be distributed to researchers in China and abroad, he said.

When scientists take possession of the far-side soils, they will compare the composition of the newly recovered basalts with those from the lunar near side. That may help them deduce how the moon’s volcanic activity caused its two halves to evolve differently.

“New samples will inevitably lead to new discoveries,” Wei Yang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Xinhua. “Chinese scientists are eagerly anticipating the opportunity to contribute to lunar science.”

The mission team will also be looking for material from surrounding regions, blasted away from their original sites by impacts with comets and asteroids. If strong enough, these collisions may have excavated material from the lower crust of the moon and its upper mantle, Dr. Qian said. That could lead to insights about the structure and composition of the lunar interior.

Melted rock from those impacts could also yield clues about the age of the South Pole-Aitken basin and the era in which it formed, during which scientists believe a barrage of asteroids and comets bombarded the inner solar system.

This period “totally changed the geological history of the moon,” Dr. Qian said, and was also “a critical time for the evolution of the Earth.”

Clive Neal, a planetary geologist at the University of Notre Dame, called the goals lofty, but he is looking forward to the discoveries that will follow the sample’s return. Referring to China’s streak of lunar success thus far, “it’s excellent,” he said. “More power to them.”

Strained political relations, however, will make it challenging for American scientists to collaborate with Chinese researchers on studying the far-side samples.

The Wolf Amendment, enacted in 2011, prohibits NASA from using federal funds for bilateral cooperation with the Chinese government. Federal officials recently granted the space agency an exemption, which allowed NASA-funded researchers to apply for access to the near-side sample retrieved by Chang’e-5. But another bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in June would bar universities with research ties to Chinese institutions from receiving funding from the U.S. Department of Defense.

For the future, China has its eyes set on the lunar south pole, where Chang’e-7 and 8 will explore the environment and search for water and other resources. It hopes to send crewed missions to the moon by 2030. Eventually, China plans to build an international base at the south pole.

NASA’s Artemis campaign is also shooting for the lunar south pole. Bill Nelson, the space agency’s administrator, has previously referred to the parallel programs as a race between the United States and China.

Many scientists reject that framing. Resources for studying the moon plunged after American astronauts beat the Soviets to the lunar surface in 1969, Dr. Neal said. “I don’t like international space races, because they’re not sustainable,” he said. “A race is to be won. Once you win it, then what?”

He added, “I think it’s important to look at space as something that can bring us together, rather than tear us apart.”

Several countries contributed payloads that flew with the Chang’e-6 mission, including France and Pakistan. Chinese researchers took this as a good sign for the future.

“Lunar exploration is a shared endeavor for all humanity,” Dr. Xiao said, adding that he hopes for increased international collaboration, “particularly between major spacefaring nations like China and the United States.”

Joy Dong contributed reporting from Hong Kong.