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Comment by polygamous_bat | Hacker News Reader

One of the hypothesis Matt Levine posits in Money Stuff today [1] is that Tesla is branded as liberal tech, and Elon is engaging in Q-foolery to bring in more right leaning people: "the only car free from the woke mind virus". I don't know how much I believe this theory, but definitely interesting.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-12-15/the-se...

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But why? I am under the impression the Q crowd doesn't tend to be the wealthiest bunch. Tesla was also already selling every car they could make, with like a 6 month backorder. Expanding, or switching, your target market makes no sense if they cannot afford your product, and you have no inventory to sell them anyways.

Other companies seem to have success with being as ambivalent and silent as possible (with careful PR) while Elon seems to believe his hold on existing customers is strong enough so he can somewhat alienate them without loosing them.

We will see if that works out.

>I don't know how much I believe this theory...

Or how well it would actually pay out, as he's alienating his original user base at the same time.

Sounds to me more like Musk is trying to fill in the void left by Trump by creating 24/7 headlines to get people onto the platform.

I'd be willing to bet that the Qanon crowd is also the last set of people who still reliably click on ads and fall for vitality pill scams, so Musk pandering to them makes financial sense.

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