Tesla discloses it spent $200k advertising on X
cnn.com
cnn.com
Does the fact that his own company barely advertises on twitter be used against him now?
Elon also Tweets about Tesla often, as one would expect. With his reach on the platform, that is likely better than actually advertising.
Musk boasted that Tesla spent $0 on advertising in a tweet from 2022, but Vivvix estimated that they actually spent around $200k in ads in 2022 and $6.4 million in 2023. I'd guess that they're not done increasing those budgets since they're still quite low when compared to others in the space.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-dives-into-advertising-af...
> every time he tweets, millions of potential people see it.
that feature is always there without the $40B spend :-)
ruining your reputation by the CEO: priceless
Regardless, why is Tesla advertising policy news, on YC of all places?
Twitter is Musk’s private plaything.
Tesla using Twitter services could be a conflict of interest because Musk is CEO of both and could be using his position at Tesla to funnel public shareholder money into Twitter, aka his pocket.
Theoretically it is a way to siphon funds from one company to the other if he forced one of his companies to take a raw deal from the other. If both sides got a fair deal, it’s probably not much to worry about though.
He largely owns X which is a private entity. He owns ~20% of Tesla, and the rest is owned by other shareholders. As a company officer he has a fiduciary duty to act in the interests of all Tesla shareholders, and any sales or deals to other entities he has in an interest in pose a conflict. That conflict can often be mitigated by oversight or deferral of decision making to parties that don't hold the conflict such as other board members or corporate officers.
[0] the amounts are so tiny, I wouldn't really care. I'd be more angry that he thinks he can reasonably function as a full-time CEO for Tesla while gallivanting about with his other ventures.
Let’s say company does $1bn a year, and my decision adds $1m/y revenue (0.1%) and my share holding is 0.1% and worth $10m. This has made me $10k. Not insignificant but a person making that decision $10k bribe to make a suboptimal decision is bad value. Especially when it is not clear it happened due to volatility.
The real reason they may do it is favour for favours.
I think a lot of people who haven’t been involved with business laws (not sure what the correct English term would be) would genuinely be surprised with just how much you can do. I work in an investment bank, we manage around 1100 companies which are in reality investment projects. A couple of these are tied directly to ourself, so that we have a top shell company which owns the actual companies. One is an employee shell company which allows our employees to spend 14,5% of their yearly income on company shares, before taxes. Up to a certain amount of these can be sold at a 25% tax rate, it’s around $9000 a year that can be earned at a tax rate which is around 20% lower than the normal income tax rate ours employees pay. It also deducts from the amount of money they can earn before every thing they earn above that rate is taxed at almost 60%. On top of this, if they are married they can also use the $9000 of their spouse (if their spouse isn’t doing similar) and another $9000 for their household, because well, because the people who write/lobby these things are good at what they do. Anyway… it’s perfectly legal, even here in Scandinavia, and it’s maybe something 99% of our population has no idea exists.
And that’s just for employee benefits. You wouldn’t believe the stuff we do with our investment projects. I’m not going to tell you any of the current things, but at one point our government wanted to promote small businesses and made <=10 owner companies almost tax-exempt. Meaning that a good deal of our still running projects pay almost no tax on the revenue they generate. Including when a project is eventually sold, even though the law has since been rectified so that it’s impossible to do this for new companies and there is a grace period for when it ends for existing companies.
I square it with my personal morals because every project is either a solar park that was build or a solar park that was bought and renovated to be capable of running another 25-50 years instead of being scrapped. But on a whole… it’s just so ridiculous compared to what “regular” people do. Like… a Danish Nurse in the public sector (and honestly in virtually every private hospital/company) has none of these benefits. Often because even business owners outside of finance (or companies large enough to have big legal departments) has no clues these things exist. But in terms of income, our legal department sometimes generate almost as much revenue as our sales department now that we have as many projects as we do around the globe.
I have seen numerous Tesla ads on Youtube
or
"Overconfident CEO has to eat his words again."
Is this really a Musk thing or is he just the most visible and comical example of it?
Seen many opine that SpaceX is slow and expensive, which only makes sense when anchored against Musk's fantasy timelines as all the old space companies are much slower and more expensive than what SpaceX actually delivers.
Likewise with electric cars, the talking point is how Musk didn't really found Tesla, not that pre-Musk-CEO Tesla delivered 147 cars in 5.5 years for over a million dollars invested per vehicle.
“Instead [of advertising], we use that money to make the product great.” That they feel the need to start advertising might mean the product isn’t as good as it was once perceived to be.
The article goes into this more. Asking “so?” Makes it appear as if you just read the headline and thought you knew enough to make a worthwhile comment here. Which I know isn’t true.
So?
A company maturing and doing what every other company is doing is not however interesting. The only reason it is a story is because it is an Elon company.
Personally what I find strange is how people perceive Twitter comments as somehow a contract with the public. People say lots of things, the smart ones are able to change their minds.
That's an odd stance to take.