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> Tesla used to be a status symbol. Driving one meant you were forward thinking, that you were on the bleeding edge, and probably conscientious about the environment.

I hate to break it to you, but generally only other Tesla owners feel that way. Otherwise, I doubt the public does. In fact, I personally feel the opposite, that's it's a symbol of a "techbro".

Correct. All of my few encounters with a Tesla in the wild were a near accident. That + the attitude I see from Tesla fans online cement a negative view.

My partner was sideswiped by a Tesla engineer testing Autopilot. Tesla's insurance did pay for the damages, FWIW.

Could we avoid participating in this? The price hikes were pretty brutal, but tesla and their charging infrastructure are still at or near the top of the list when it comes to electric cars that you can actually purchase, at least from the perspective of someone looking to replace their ancient mazda in the next year or so.

Also people don't deserve to be judged by their car unless it is a modern german luxury car in which case they obviously are the kind of person who makes bad life choices.

> Also people don't deserve to be judged by their car

In a way, that was my point, because I was responding to this: "Driving one meant you were forward thinking, that you were on the bleeding edge, and probably conscientious about the environment."

Elon deserves a lot of credit for Tesla. But now I'm starting to hear the term "Muskmobile" bandied about when people refer to his car. It's not like Tesla is the only game in town anymore either.

In a weird tangent, I've been thinking about the TV Show "Ted Lasso", and why it's so popular lately. Ted Lasso is the exact opposite of Elon Musk, even to a fault. People don't care if Elon succeeds anymore, but they do want Ted Lasso to.

Electric Jesus deserves credit for not firing the right people and shit a muskmobile that works eventually !

"Magamobile" is the name I've been hearing. Unfortunate timing for Tesla really given that their early mover advantage has been basically eroded at this point.

> I don't know if the word "contamination" is appropriate here, but it's pretty clear that Elon doesn't see any kind of sharp boundaries between his various enterprises.

Even without "contamination", TSLA stock price collapsed by over $100+ because Elon Musk predictably sold $Billions of stock to pay for the TWTR buyout. Its not like $33 Billion came out of nowhere. Elon had to sell TSLA to get that money.

If TWTR keeps losing money, Elon will be forced to sell more and more TSLA stock to keep it afloat.

And this is all the legal / ethical way of doing things. No "contamination" in just selling stock to support another. Even then, we can see the huge drop in TSLA stock prices (compared to the rest of the market, which rebounded in the past few weeks on good inflation data).

Random thought -- is it a conflict of interest to sell so many shares, knowing that it will have a major impact on share price? If you know your personal actions (needing to sell a lot of TSLA shares to buy Twitter) will have an impact on your professional responsibilities (keeping the TSLA share price high), when does that become a conflict? Is there a way to mitigate that conflict?

That's the board's problem. Normally, you're not supposed to have the largest shareholder, CEO, and Board Chair be the same person.

SEC forced Elon off the board chair at least. But yeah, its a well known fact that Tesla's setup is full of conflicts of interest. It doesn't seem like the shareholders (or the board) feels like fixing it though.

Why does SpaceX need to advertise on twitter? Who there is going to be buying their services?

Come to think of it, why does SpaceX need to advertise at all? Those who need to launch rockets already know who can do it.

Starlink, not rocket launches

Teslas are nice cars. Owning one is a status symbol, but I don’t think Elon Musk is the deciding factor when it comes time to buy one or go elsewhere. Until other car makers get their acts together and produce luxury EVs with charger infrastructure, consumers will overlook Elon Musk’s antics.

I agree with you though that Musk’s brands are becoming too associated with his personality, which is mercurial and irksome. Caveat emptor.

What accomplishments of others? They took a simple database driven tweet index, that just showed tweets as they were posted, and turned it into a politically polarized echo chamber. They created dozens of internal social “teams” to ensure their algorithm blocked what they didn’t like and showed only what they liked, and destroyed any actual discourse that was on the site at all. Elon likes the CONCEPT of Twitter, sees how simple it is once you strip away the shackles of the algorithm, and has money to burn. He’s still unfathomly rich after the acquisition. Let him do what he wants. Let him shut it down for good. Who cares? It’s his to do so with.

I was talking about PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and StarLink.