How many CEOs & owners have you vetted when making purchases? CEOs are a pretty shady crew as a class of people; it attracts people who like power and they are the dangerous ones. Or people who are single-minded in their focus and they tend to come with a raft of unusual views and personalities. And even after vetting, you're probably just biasing your purchases in favour of CEOs who do image management rather than people you'd actually like to support.

If you're buying cars based inversely on how much money the company owner has, you're implicitly ruling out a lot of good options. It is using the language a bit loosely but in some relevant sense we'd expect people who make the most cost-effective products to make the most profit.

Lmao how amny other companies do you buy products from that have shady business strategies or CEOs with unacceptable views? At least Elon doesn't hide it.

> If you aren't in the cult of personality, a lot of people need to justify it at this point

The cult of hate seems a lot more like a cult than the alleged cult of personality. This post and comments like yours only make it more apparent.

Would you still buy the Powerwall today?

I think it's because people don't want to come off as endorsing elon musk/distance themselves from his weirder fans. I'll say though, 3 years ago is well after he called that one rescue diver a pedo so I don't know if the opening statement totally holds. Not that I really care that much.

It's because the brand is borderline toxic now.

I've seen it firsthand living in a very liberal area. 3 years ago people loved the brand. People would strike up conversation about it. It was all upbeat, happy and hopeful.

Now, people rarely talk about it. And when they do it's apologetically. It often ends with some down statement about politics. Someone saying there were no other choices. Just a crappy time.

I love my Tesla. It's a great car. But it's my last. I want nothing to do with this type of politics or conversation.

I for one am sorry for its frontman. It's a good car that I don't want again... That's just stupid of him.

There is probably a reason why we hear very little about the political opinions of most Megacorp CEOs on a daily basis.

I'm sure I would agree with some of them and disagree with others but they are smart enough to not make that a center piece of their public persona.

Elon Musk decided on his own to

a) be a central marketing and PR channel of Tesla. He has everyone convinced that the company cannot thrive otherwise.

b) involve himself in hot button political discussions all around the globe (usually in a "hot-take-no-need-for-further-reasearch" manner).

c) buy a social media company while publicly lamenting the state of social media. At said social media he (again very publicly) instituted changes to align it with his political philosophy.

Whether one likes or dislikes his opinions, it is very clear that he wants to be seen as some kind of political influencer and that he bases some of his business decisions on this persona.

This is quite unusual and probably the sole reason people even think about the "frontmann" of the company when discussing the product

> TV said he was buying a Tony Stark car. Then TV revealed that Tony Stark was two Mussolinis in a trenchcoat. Car bad now

Do you celebrate the moon landing? The US maintaining a constant lead in aerospace over the rest of the world? Those were built by the Mussolini supporters of the world. NASA and Saturn V would not have existed if not for the nice German folks who were recruited to work for Uncle Sam. Science and engineering are more apolitical than you think.