• Surveys conducted by Caliber and T-Online both show a sharp drop in favorability for Tesla among Germans. Sales in the first two months of this year plunged a combined 71% amid controversy over Musk’s embrace of the AfD as well as a scheduled production shutdown.

In an affluent residential neighborhood of Berlin, four Tesla vehicles burnt to a crisp in the early morning hours of Friday after unknown vandals set them ablaze. 

This latest act of arson to engulf CEO Elon Musk’s cars is now being investigated by a special commission for its likely political motive, according to the city’s police department.

Symbolically it’s another blow to the complicated love affair between Musk and a country that is home to his only manufacturing plant in Europe, located less than an hour away from the crime scenes.

While the four burnt cars are perhaps the most vivid manifestation of Germans turning their back, surveys suggest consumers in Europe’s largest economy are deserting the brand over Musk’s embrace of President Donald Trump and the populist far right. 

“The correlation with Musk’s behavior cannot be overlooked,” Shahar Silbershatz, head of the Danish market research firm Caliber, told the country’s leading business daily Handelsblatt. 

His team has been polling Germans on their opinion of Tesla for months. In August, shortly after Musk endorsed Trump, 31% considered purchasing a Tesla as their next car. 

That dropped to just 16% in January amid Trump’s inauguration and the scandal around Musk’s stiff-armed gesture that prompted comparisons to a Nazi salute. February does however showed a slight rebound to 20%, according to the paper on Monday.

After a catastrophic January and February, March should see an improvement

That is still far more positive than an informal survey by T-Online last week that asked Germans whether they would buy a Tesla. More than 94% responded ‘no’ while just 3% claimed they still would.

Although it was not conducted with the usual rigor a professional polling firm like Caliber and therefore not statistically representative, it was notable for the fact that a record number participated, with roughly 100,000 voting through the website.

Directionally that suggests the brand is losing ground in Germany, which is tied with the U.K. as Europe’s largest EV market with roughly 380,000 vehicles sold last year.

The latest sales data supports this. In January registrations of new Teslas plunged 60%, a descent that accelerated to 76% in February. 

Part of this is due to the changeover from the original Model Y, far and away the brand’s best-seller, to a slightly newer version that debuted this month. In the process, Tesla’s factory outside Berlin shut down for a period to prepare the assembly line. 

Some customers will have also postponed a purchase in order to wait for the refresh, so March results will most likely see a sharp improvement over the steep plunge witnessed in the first two months.

Images of Musk’s controversial salute may fall foul of German laws

The direction of recent polls suggests Tesla will struggle to claw back lost market share given the growing number of competitor models. A swathe of Germans are infuriated by his failed attempt to install the far-right in power in last month’s election.

It’s a remarkable fall from grace for entrepreneur Musk, who took a big gamble in choosing high wage Germany for the site of his third vehicle factory.

When the country’s domestic carmakers preferred setting up new manufacturing plants in countries like Hungary to capitalize on Eastern Europe’s lower labor costs, Musk invested billions to build his site on a patch of land on the outskirts of Berlin. 

Germany’s often high level of bureaucracy—including the full print out of tens of thousands of pages of permitting applications for record keeping—didn’t deter him. Neither did the opposition from some groups protesting the plant’s impact on the local water supply. 

Yet the Tesla factory, which has contributed significantly to the region’s otherwise weak economy, has become a symbol of Musk, and not just the company. Last month it served as the backdrop to a protest with an image of the CEO’s stiff-armed salute projected onto the building alongside the words, “Heil, Tesla”.

The salute is strictly forbidden in Germany. Even the image itself as a political statement against Musk could potentially fall foul of local laws.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning! Poppi could get acquired, surveillance tech monitors women in Iran, and Gwyneth Paltrow takes Goop into its next era. Have a mindful Monday.

– Next chapter. Gwyneth Paltrow founded Goop nearly 20 years ago—which means Goop is almost a “heritage brand” in an increasingly crowded marketplace of lifestyle competitors, Paltrow tells me in a new interview.

The actor-turned-founder called me last week for a wide-ranging conversation about the future of Goop, leading through layoffs, and how she’s grown as a founder over the past decade-plus. Talking to Paltrow, it’s immediately clear that she’s a real-deal founder. She speaks the language fluently, from how she decided which categories to exit and which to focus on (some Goop had experimented with, like sexual wellness, saw low lifetime value); to deciding to do layoffs (a “difficult” but “necessary” choice to put payroll costs back into growth); to her advice to new founders (it’s about ESPs and QuickBooks).

Paltrow credits a close-knit group chat of female founders and CEOs with helping her grow as a leader. “It’s sort of like Fight Club,” she jokes. “We’re not really supposed to talk about it.”

And Goop is also growing. Despite the headlines around its 2024 restructuring, I report that revenue grew 10% between 2023 and 2024, with growth across the three categories Goop is now focused on: beauty, its G. Label fashion line, and its Los Angeles-based takeout chain Goop Kitchen.

As Goop enters this next chapter, Paltrow says profitability is coming and that she’s not interested in selling for at least three more years.

“It’s amazing to me we’ve been around this long,” she says. “We want to energetically own who we are and what we’ve accomplished—continue to innovate and accept our place in the landscape and lean into it.”

Read the full interview here.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In his platform for reelection in 2024, President Donald Trump promised to “build the Greatest Economy in History.” But in his first 60 days as president, the stock markets have dropped like a rock: The S&P 500 is down 7%, the Dow Jones has dropped 6%, and the Nasdaq has plummeted 10%. It’s an about-face from Trump’s first term, when the major stock indices all jumped about 5% in the first two months.

And it’s worse than Biden’s first 60 days as president, when the former Democratic president oversaw an almost 2% gain in the S&P 500.

View this interactive chart on Fortune.com

The market downturn comes as Trump wages an aggressive tariff war against the U.S.’s largest trading partners. “We’re going to raise hundreds of billions in tariffs; we’re going to become so rich we’re not going to know where to spend that money,” the 47th president said last week while boarding Air Force One.

In February, Trump signed an executive order that imposed tariffs on products from China, Mexico, and Canada. China retaliated with its own surcharge on American imports, Canada did the same, and Mexico’s president said the country plans to strike back, too. 

Trump also issued sector-wide tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which prompted the European Union to retaliate with its own taxes on American beef, motorcycles, bourbons, among other products. “We deeply regret this measure. Tariffs are taxes. They are bad for business, and even worse for consumers,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

In response, Trump threatened a 200% surcharge on European wine and champagne.

Trump’s trade war has spooked Wall Street and prompted some analysts to warn of a potential recession. “If we would continue down this road of what would be more disruptive, business-unfriendly policies, I think the risks on that recession front would go up,” JPMorgan chief economist Bruce Kasman said on Wednesday.

The stock market downturn under Trump also follows signs that U.S. economic growth is slowing. Gains in gross domestic product dropped from about 3% in the third quarter to just above 2% in the fourth, according to the U.S.’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. And consumer sentiment, or a measure of how Americans feel about the U.S. economy, dipped 10% in March, according to the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers.

Despite the market downturn, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he’s not worried. “I’m not concerned about a little bit of volatility over three weeks,” he told CNBC on Thursday.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com