Really grateful for that—I’d hate to think this publicly traded company that had a sky-high valuation that was, in part, based off this promise was being led by somebody who is off in the weeds worried about social media or something.
Though I'd be concerned about the effect he is having on their brand image. Even two years ago I was on the verge of buying a Tesla but ended up cancelling my order in large part because I just couldn't stand the obnoxiousness of Elon and he has gotten orders of magnitude worse since then. His new "demographic"/cult also seem to be climate change / green energy skeptics, not convinced they will be gobbling up Teslas at quite the same rate as my demographic would.
The ID4 is decent but that company was started by actual Hitler and Nazis, so if you are interested in not buying from companies that have a history of evil leadership that one isn't a good option.
And gas cars are not good for CO2 emissions, so sometimes you have to accept that you sometime buy products made by companies that have executives you don't like. And realistically I find it very unlikely that every product you buy on a regular basis today is run by people who have much better morals and politics than Elon.
This is a wild comment. The current leadership is slightly more important than the leadership 80 years ago. It is especially strange considering you could have made moral arguments against that company based off much more recent misdeeds.
And... Hugo Boss suits make me look like a wardrobe on legs... and are too expensive... but for sure the SS thing.
It's not perfect but I like that is has more of a "traditional" interior compared to Tesla, which felt kind of like a giant tablet with a car-shaped case around it. That design was already making me hesitant and Elon with his endless stream of nonsense was the straw that broke the camels back so to speak.
My Renault Zoe would like a word with you. Cheaper than a tesla (in not rich, and I bought one), available, and can charge everywhere.
I was his former prime target demographic. I feel very strongly about protecting the environment, I hate gasoline engines after working on them most of my life, I loved how economical it was to drive an electric car, I love technology, and I could afford a Tesla. I don’t know what his new demographic is but I don’t think they even can buy a Tesla or will. I wish him lots of luck. Based on my experiences in a small town, his new demographic buys dually trucks listening to alt right propaganda and lives check to check working in the oilfield. Or is on a very fixed income and is retired and stays at home afraid, watching Fox News, with their last car in the driveway, a 1997 Oldsmobile or Buick.
Southern suburbs tend to be fairly conservative. Maybe not quite as Trump loving as rural areas. But conservative nonetheless and likely not turned off by Elon's recent emergence as a right wing political figure.
Also, if you read enough /r/elonmusk you'll see that a lot of people have bought into Elon's schtick that he's actually just a centrist (apparently centrists love DeSantis)
Also emissions reductions doesn’t come from selling more private vehicles.
Had a group of BLM protestors positing live on twitter how they where coming up to where I live to burn down neighborhoods.
I’m surrounded by gun fanatics. If police hadn’t blocked mass transit and highways it would have been a blood bath.
Sorry to be so blunt, but I find this level of online political attachment to be completely deranged. Either it's a good car or not.
If the viability of the company relies on the hype machine then it’s pretty relevant what kj d of person is “renting” me the car
I strongly doubt millions of cars will be left bricked to be towed to the junkyard.
That eSilverado tho
I think that, from watching the likes or Rich Rebuilds, who ostensibly operates without any approval from tesla, the cars will run without the internet but I guess they'd become "feature complete" and when modules die it will be on the car hacking community to pick up the mantle.
Traditional cars aren't in a much better position as somewhat superfluous modules (think a radio head unit) can take down one of the many CANbus networks in your car and leave it a brick.
Many (most?) auto techs are not well versed identifying these types of low level problems and will fall back to firing the parts cannon at the car rather than identifying the issue definitively. Just like in Battleship you can get a hit by random guessing but this is a waste of money and resources.
The random superfluous modules also become unavailable and if they're critical to making the car start then your car might be out of commission for the foreseeable future. GM and Ford just don't have as much of a social media halo around them.
You do see a few headlines around particularly egregious money digs, like one company making remote start a subscription feature. That module and the car it's in is not built to last in my view.
and if you are part of the Democrat/NYT group buying a "MyPillow" is a bad thing.
To your point, this is crazy because both sides probably buy the exact same Tyson Farms chicken and have spent zero time learning about Tyson's business and labor practices and Tyson executives political beliefs. They are just thinking about which businesses Fox News / NYT has told them to care about.
Ever since Madison Avenue taught the postwar consumerist middle class to consider purchases as buying into aspirational lifestyles, tying it into personal identity, the same process has shifted from simply patronizing businesses all of the way to political choices. Thus, charismatic and attention-seeking CEOs no longer sell their businesses simply no the basis of the quality of their goods or services, but buying into entire constructs of Zizek voice ideology. Thus, perhaps paradoxically, consumer individuals, craving belonging, are buying their way into tribes of like-minded individuals with similar convictions.
In short, don't blame the country themselves; these businesses and their management are pushing politicizing as a tactic to sell, sell, sell. As we in tech know, everything is ads.
But if I know I'm going to enrich someone that I find completely obnoxious, it gives me pause. (Of course, dealing with an organization helmed by someone obnoxious tends to have its own costs: they tend not to be super laser-focused on the customer experience).
Ordinary political disagreement isn't enough to do this for me. But seemingly systemic wanton disregard for others gets me to the point that it's a lot harder for me to justify buying that product.
There's a pizza place in my town co-owned by a notorious jerk. They have pretty good pizza. I still don't go there anymore (even though he is generally not there and the risk of running into him is low).
I might have been a little less "blunt", but the word "deranged" for someone's ethical choice made me vomit in my mouth a little.
For the same reason, I call him now - eww-Lawn!
Today? I do <3 my car, but I'd likely not touch new one with a 10 foot pole; especially as a new customer and there actually being other EV Options available. It's distressing because Tesla does (mostly) what I want in a daily driver well.
I think that's probably correct. One question I find interesting: What is Musk actually good at?
He's clearly good at hype-driven PR and painting himself as a Tony Stark character. That has been great for Tesla; he's been able to raise gobs of money cheaply. Money that apparently kept Telsa from going bankrupt. [1] But that genius for hype also makes it harder to figure out other skills.
Looking at his track record, he got fired from Zip2 and PayPal. The jury's still out on Telsa; it recently got into the black, but it has always had its troubles, and its first-mover advantage is eroding. As is its stock price, down by half recently, something surely not helped by Musk's delusional promises (e.g., 1 million Tesla robotaxis by the end of 2020). The Boring Company and Neuralink both look troubled. [2] [3] And of course Twitter is an extremely public clusterfuck.
That only leaves SpaceX as possible evidence that he's good at anything other than hype and raising money. But recently a former SpaceX intern posted about his experience there [4], saying "Elon was basically a child king. He was an important figurehead who provided the company with the money, power, and PR, but he didn’t have the knowledge or (frankly) maturity to handle day-to-day decision making and everyone knew that. He was surrounded by people whose job was, essentially, to manipulate him into making good decisions."
So I think what we're seeing with Twitter is the real Elon. And yeah, if I were at Telsa trying to pivot from hype-driven startup to solid company able to compete with everybody from GM to Toyota to BMW, I would much rather Musk stayed at Twitter.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/musk-tesla-was-about-a-month...
[2] https://jalopnik.com/elon-musks-boring-company-leaves-local-...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/06/elon-mu...
[4] https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...
Technically, no, he got fired as CEO from X.com twice, once before it had PayPal as a product, once after it bought Confinity which had PayPal as a product. X.com became PayPal right after the second time he was fired, so he never actually got fired from (or worked for) PayPal.
Tesla did a good job hyping electric cars and selling them to an early-adopter market when they had no real competition. But now that the market is proven and the discussion has shifted, every major car company and a bunch of other players, possibly including Apple, are going after the much bigger mainstream market. If you look now at Consumer Reports and their recommended BEV cars, Tesla only has 1 of the 5 models listed, and its score is a middling 78, behind the 91 for the Kia EV6 and the 84 for the Genesis GV60. Once the rest of the competition has a few years to iterate, the picture could be significantly worse for them.
It's possible that Tesla could be the Google of electric cars, where first-mover advantage leads to decades of dominance. But it's also possible that they could be a Groupon or a Pebble: companies that were initially leaders and darlings, but that couldn't keep up over the long term.
He seemed to go steadily off the rails since the Thailand rescue debacle but that might have just been the first gaffe that I noticed as being an obvious misstep.
My father finds Musk entirely reputable. I am currently subject to at least a 30 minute call a day from him, a retired model S owner, who has nothing left in his life other than the Tesla. The calls are 30 minutes of him reeling off Tesla PR bollocks. He chased everyone he knew away, speaks of nothing else and cannot see reason or error in this or any of Musk's things. He thinks the Twitter thing is a freedom grab, he literally thinks SpaceX are building rockets to take the good humans off and build a new world order on Mars. To get the model S in the first place he cashed in his annuity pension and sold his house and is now on a downward spiral of financial oblivion.
This is exactly cult behaviour.
I'm at a loss of what to do other than refer him to mental health services here in the UK.
I couldn't even possibly consider owning something associated with someone so utterly socially damaging on every front.
Edit: I'm actually fucking crying while I'm writing this. Posted anon as my other account has my GH and stuff on it.
For me, the frame breaks in me have been deep thought from both an engineering perspective and cultural scaffolding perspective, paired with real travels to places where technology was limited (either be practical circumstance like going to a rural village or intentionally like a silent meditation retreat).
A graphic I still come back to is the good life project ( https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/ ) with inquiry around how many planets of stuff even the alternatives require from a planetary boundaries perspective. There's more technical works like https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m .
It's Musk
Our billionaires subscribe to greed is good capitalism and hoard their wealth though. Musk bucks this trend and therefore gets a ton of my sympathy despite his erratic nature. We need more Elon Musks not less.
See also: The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri which focuses a lot on the criticism issue
A billionaire tells his critics they should build stuff instead of criticize him, as if their opportunities to do so are equivalent, and as of criticism and building stuff are mutually exclusive? That doesn't hold a drop of water.
We didn't have enough respirators because of critics? My recollection is that we failed to invoke the Defense Production Act and impress companies into building them. This was based on the values of the Trump administration (who saw this as a violation of free market principles) and not an overabundance of criticism; as an executive order, it would have been immune to veto.
The piece goes on to argue the federal government is a vetocracy, and I can agree that Congress is in a state of gridlock like 90% of the time. But that isn't because of critics, that's because of party politics and deficiencies in the structure of Congress. This is a cynical power play to sabotage one's opponents, not criticism run amok.
I can agree that there's "vetocracy" in the sense of gridlock, but when you say "critics rule the roost," I remain unconvinced. Perhaps the answer is to be found in the book you recommend, I have not taken a look at that yet.
The internet is part of the issue, but only part. Long-term political strategizing is another part, and a third factor is 9-11 which seems to have permanently traumatized the USA. As a simple example, information displays on subway platforms in my area are still putting up announcements about how public bathrooms in the subway station are closed for security reasons. It's been 21 years since 9-11 and major cities in the US are too freaked out to figure out basic things like public bathrooms and instead live in a permanent state of mental emergency.
Delivery or not doesn't imply improvement. Progress for the sake of progress is not necessarily an improvement either.
What ideological purposes do you think Musk has? What is the ideology he is pushing building rockets and electric cars?
On the other hand conditions are ever changing and our knowledge of the world changes our understanding of those conditions. To me these things nearly always imply that we should act in some direction to improve our lot. I don't see many people willing to put in the work. I see a lot of people willing to sit on the sideline and talk about how the people on the field are dumb or what they're doing obviously won't work, and that they are evil scheming villains who will surely change the world for the worst for their own benefit.
People are just substituting God with false idols and cults.
That deep need to believe in something bigger than self is not going away, it will always be there, it can be filled with religion or something else.
I believe the least destructive way to fill it is with sports affiliation so I won't be so cynic about the SuperBowl hype come this February
Sometimes I legitimately believe that the SCP foundation or something like it is real because it feels like elites who are totally asses have reality distortion fields around them.
I don't know what to suggest for your situation - maybe talk to a family lawyer? I have the impression that the NHS is probably not up to providing the kind of mental health support needed to deal with a broad spectrum social problem.
Amazing how much a group of people have gone from loving him to hating him because he is allowing free speech.
What you mean is that Elon Musk has made a series of self-contradictory claims with no evidence about what was going on at Twitter before he was there, and you believed his empty claims unquestioningly.
I don't generally accept claims without proof, because no rational person should. When we're talking about a serial liar like Musk,
> Amazing how much a group of people have gone from loving him to hating him because he is allowing free speech.
Nope, there's no proof he's doing that, either, and plenty of serious researchers on the left who have been thrown off the platform with no reason given.
---
You should learn to demand proof for people's claims before repeating them unquestioningly. It will help the quality of your belief systems.
I mean I agree he’s super obnoxious, but if making car purchase decisions based on the virtue of company leadership, I would have called it a tie and bought the better car instead.
And it's not just the price. My kids who previously couldn't stand long drives now want to go places, at first because of the glass roof but now because they love when I sqeeze them into the seatback with the throttle. It's car number 15 for me, and the best of any of them by far. Who cares about the CEO? I don't even know who the CEO of Nissan was when I had that, or Ford when I had that, or Renault when I had that.
> The CEOs of those other car companies were not raging egotists
> backed up by a crowd of howler monkeys chasing a parasocial dopamine hit.
Tesla benefits from SpaceX materials engineering, for example. Tesla now effectively has access to a massive comms/PR engine, with far more reach than traditional advertising, without paying gatekeepers.
Ford spends $2B a year on advertising. Elon can reply directly to Tesla owners.
If you're an investor in Tesla and Musk pulls 50 engineers from the Autopilot team to come work at Twitter [1]. How exactly are you benefitting from that? Autopilot development just pauses for the team to go work on blue check implementations?
1 - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-has-pulled-more-th...
It is not being developed It has been irresponsibly marketed as this is the entire premise of the class action.
It sounds like he is laser focused on impressive promises to lure investments into his money making empire.
Tesla need Musks public charizma, his money, his connections and him bullying everyone who stands in a way. Sure, especially his ability to convince public about dreams is super key aspect. But, his management style and the way he runs things seems to be something company needs to protect itself from.
They still are doing so about this Twitter thing. It’s all a nothing burger.