Elon Musk's reputation is falling – and it's taking Tesla with it
theverge.com
theverge.com
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world that he was an artist.
Everyone has weird and extreme views somewhere on some topic. Most just won't express them.
He's a dumbass Twitter troll, but also he has done maybe more than any other human being for climate change by using Tesla to pull the entire automobile industry forwards at least a few years on the EV transition. He's also the reason that the US is far and away the dominant power when it comes to space, and he got us there by spending basically all of his personal fortune (where a lot of other people would've bought yachts or sports teams or whatever with it).
I wish he didn't have some of his more insane views, and I wish he wouldn't be a dickhead on the internet. Grand scheme, though, it does feel like we're better off with him than without.
I know the counterargument is that he's not smart, he just hires smart people, but if you know smart people, they generally don't get recruited by idiots (even rich ones). He managed to surround himself with rocket scientists and engineers who revolutionized space travel. His company successfully navigated not only the engineering side but also the part that involves dealing with the bureaucracy of the US government. He came up with the idea to launch Starlink (and idea that others failed at before him) in order to create revenue to support rocket launches.
I just apply Occam's razor here - given all of these things that he and his companies have accomplished, is it likelier that he's smart or stupid? And if he's stupid but still managed to accomplish these things, why didn't other rich people who are smarter than him accomplish them? How come Bezos is so much worse at creating a space company than Musk? We live in a capitalist society, so if all it takes is a few hundred million dollars and no brains to start SpaceX, which is worth many, many multiples of that, why has no one else done it?
I also happen to have met him and have several friends who work with him directly. The people who know him well certainly don't think of him as a genius
Damn, watching a little too much Fox News, eh?
That said, I consider Musk to be so awful in so many ways that I do my best to avoid doing anything that will put money in his pocket. So even if Tesla produced a product I would enjoy, I wouldn't buy one.
You see the same treatment for anyone who is vocal and isn't leftist. They have even started to come after Joe Biden, likely the most progressive president in history.
People rush to share their anecdata on sites like this where they say, "I hate Musk so much I'd never buy a Tesla." The vast, vast majority of the world doesn't exist in online bubbles.
I say this as a liberal who has never voted right in my life so please don't label me as alt-right or nazi or whatever the current flavor is of "I don't agree with leftist Twitter posts.
The world is more complex than american politically rotted brains believe it to be
With that said, I do largely agree with your main point.
If a company has a weak quarter then blaming the CEO and largest shareholder is a perfectly valid thing to do. Who else has more blame? How else do you expect people to judge company performance then stock prices? This isn't some witch hunt, this is normal business procedures. A company has a bad quarter we question it's leadership.
But if everybody in the sector is having a weak quarter, generally you blame it on macroeconomic or outside conditions.
The leader of the EV market is BYD. So by your logic we should blame their CEO. Yet nobody knows his name, so we obviously aren't.
It seems to mostly be a China problem. Tesla has massive China exposure, but a lot less than BYD. BYD was hit harder than Tesla.
Sure are a lot of "leftists" out there.
This is only a left/right issue insofar as the respondents to the survey cited his right-wing online views specifically as a reason.
I would think if your pitch is at least partly to the environmentally-conscious, being toxic to left-leaning people is probably bad business.
Additionally, as far as the stock goes, it has an extremely high P/E ratio meaning very high future expectations are priced in. IN that world, failing to meet expectations is much worse than for a more reasonably-priced stock. That's just how the maths works out (given how P/E ratio relies on discounted future earnings).
To avoid getting a wrong impression, Tesla has a worldwide marketshare of 2% and is outside of top ten largest producers.
Companies spend billions on marketing and advertisement, to evoke association of pleasant feelings with their products. But somehow Elon spitting into the face of Tesla's target demographic (affluent, tech affine, ecology-conscious people who typically lean left) has absolutely zero effect on sales. Color me skeptical.
Correlation != Causation
To me this idea seems more divisive than any of the actual political differences.
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