Elon Musk Calls Mark Zuckerberg a ‘Cuck’ as Threads Nears 100M Users
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
I was going to buy a Tesla. Now I am never going to buy a Tesla and I am actively going to persuade people to make different choices.
The two reasons we got a Tesla were:
1. Charging network is the best by a significant margin.
2. When we bought it, there were no good alternatives. We had to replace our old car and wanted to go electric, and didn’t want to drive ICE while waiting years for the competition.
Now there’s a plethora of EV choices so 2 isn’t an issue any more. By the time this car hits the 10-year mark , everyone will be on NACS.
We won’t be replacing it with another Tesla primarily due to Elon. That extends from his behaviour to his constant penny pinching on features we use regularly.
Mostly due to the prejudice most shops have against working on them, to the point they flat out refuse, leaving most to figuring out where to get their car serviced.
Might be different on the coasts, but in the Midwest most chain shops won’t touch them for basic things like tires.
The quality control of Teslas is terrible. I have heard extremely mixed things from friends that have one and at least 2_returned them within a year.
For a long time I also tried to boycott the shittiest oil companies, but after Deepwater Horizon, I realised that's all of them, and I still don't have an electric car.
Although in the case of Tesla, there are also less principled reasons to avoid it: after seeing his handling of Twitter, it's hard to believe he's actually a good CEO. Can I really trust Tesla's quality? Not to mention what effect his erratic behaviour may have on the support I would depend on.
All civilization requires is to politely ignore each other. But if somebody goes out of their way to make themselves obnoxious, they make politely ignoring them impossible.
So you might choose to pretend you didn't overhear the local dry cleaner manager making racist comments on the phone. But when a fast food chain goes out of its way to make it clear that they support anti-gay causes, I will never shop there again.
My choices won't be consistent with yours. They won't even be consistent with each other. But I won't let inconsistency stop me from taking at least a stab at doing the right thing.
Popularity on reddit isn't exactly a great heuristic for spending or not-spending 70k on a new vehicle.
https://fortune.com/2023/05/24/elon-musk-tesla-reputation-ax...
https://www.axios.com/2023/05/23/corporate-brands-reputation...
>According to the 25th annual RQ study, Tesla’s score fell 6.4% to 74.3 out of a possible 100. Only U.K. energy group BP, best known for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, saw a greater percentage decline in reputation, with a 6.6% decline, from the 2022 results.
The media has whipped redditors up into a comparable frenzy over a guy who doesn't like the large role social media companies have been playing in the suppression of free speech as companies responsible for major ecological disasters.
That is beyond parody.
BP had competent PR people running the show while Musk never lets an opportunity to damage his own reputation pass by.
It's obvious that the political and social biases of journalists play a large role in constructing narrative.
What you're saying just isn't compelling because it exonerates the role that media outlets have played in narrative formation.
> It's obvious that the political and social biases of journalists play a large role in constructing narrative.
> What you're saying just isn't compelling because it exonerates the role that media outlets have played in narrative formation.
Lots of words just to say that you're blaming it all on the media rather than Musk's own decisions to disband PR teams at every single one of his companies only to vent into thin air e.g that he wants Ukraine to take a peace deal with land concessions to Russia.
That you're blaming this on the press rather than Elon's own decisioning in spite of a plainly evident trail of blood from Elon's use of footguns speaks volumes.
I think blaming this on "the media" and "redditors" is highly exaggerated. My entire social circle went from neutral leaning positive to negative leaning highly negative in about 5 years. My boomer dad, my friends from college who live in the bay area and own Teslas, my wife who is completely disconnected from tech, everybody.
Every upstart goes through a phase where they transition from a hip, sort-of-underground brand to being Big Business and all the reputational risks that come with being Big Business.
During that transition, it takes a lot of effort for brands to keep a professional image. How much money and effort does a $3Trillion company like Apple put into remaining somewhat cool despite being the very definition of Big Business? Google was once a do-no-evil darling and now struggles to keep their brand positive. Facebook was extremely cool and now practically synonymous with "evil".
And what does Elon Musk do during this transition? He shitposts on Twitter daily, broadcasts political opinions, and starts flame wars. This guy is considered THE tesla guy, and he does absolutely nothing to keep Tesla's brand image during the hip-to-corporate transition.
His antics were great in the mid/late 2010s when people would excitedly share on social media about flamethrowers or boring company swag.
No fucking wonder Tesla's brand image is going down, and good riddance. The CEO who was right for Tesla the scrappy underdog isn't the same CEO that's right for Tesla the trillion dollar megacorp.
It would be the physical embodiment of what their respective social networks has become: fighting arenas.
Like I don't actually mind ads at all, if they're streamed in like the other content and offered as an option. I don't even mind flashy graphics that try to grab my attention. Fair play.
But this idea that because I clicked the bait that I'm gonna stick around to watch an ad or deal with a pop-up that I have to wait for it to load... We can't live like this.
But FFS do we really have to exist in perpetual war with our sources of information for the rest of our lives?