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However, the number of times I heard comments like »I don’t want to worry about my car not starting if Musk starts throwing a tantrum« has been quite constant the last couple of months if not years – news about Starlink not working, support layoffs at Twitter, such things. And the target audience of Tesla is people who hear and care about such things.
It will be interesting to see how it unfolds, particularly amongst current Tesla owners, as if that base shrinks the company could be in real trouble.
Exactly. There actually are reasons one might do a gesture that is nearly identical to a Nazi salute without realizing it. For a while I had mixed up the Nazi salute and some alien salutes (or salutes from alternate dimension humans) from Star Trek.
If for some reason I had found myself addressing a crowd of Trek fans I might have done what I thought was a Klingon or Romulan salute and instead done a Nazi salute.
What matters is what happens afterwards. If my attempted Klingon salute was actually a Nazi salute I would immediately apologize and explain what happened as soon as someone told me I'd done a Nazi salute.
Edit: To elaborate: I can see that Elon is sometimes being put in a worse light than would be appropriate. Same is true for Trump. I cheekily think they kinda deserve it, but having run a company that was in the media a lot, you do get unfair coverage from the best outlets. I bet Elon does too. I don't know if that was supposed to be a salute or not, and I anyhow couldn't think much worse of him than I did before the Twitter drama. But I also think parent is right that Elon's brand is entirely poisoned in some circles now, where previously he could barely do wrong.
> His nazi salute was probably not a nazi salute
That’s it.
These guys lie about everyone else and go out of their way to put others into worst light that would be appropriate so much ... that this particular complain rings hollow.
Especially when used in the context where their fans are trying to deny something that is available on camera.
These guys loved it: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-mus...
And so does this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/1i68puj/have_we_l...
According to [1], 2024 sales by model (2 Teslas on podium, 0 BYD in top 10):
FULL YEAR 2024 - UK EV sales
Tesla Model Y 32,862
Audi Q4 e-tron 17,621
Tesla Model 3 17,425
MG4 15,651
BMW i4 12,953
Mercedes EQA 11,617
Skoda Enyaq 11,516
Hyundai KONA 10,858
Volvo EX30 9,931
Volkswagen ID.4 8,927
This maches my experience of English roads. I must have seen one BYD (driven by a Chinese...) while Teslas are everywhere now.
[1] https://www.electrifying.com/blog/article/official-figures-s...
However, the Nazi salute was plainly absurd, and elicited a much more emotional response. I know that on this site there are many who defend him in this instance, either because they think "Germans should get over their guilt", or because they have fallen for picture comparisons with other politicians instead of looking at the videos [1].
The latter is just people falling for propaganda, nothing too interesting there. The former is of course a tempting viewpoint for those who have not had the same education about the holocaust that the average German receives, and looks in from the outside without understanding that it's not "guilt", or even a unique German burden that we put on ourselves. Instead, many of us (myself included) believe that it's the duty of all people, not just Germans, to make sure fascism doesn't rise again. We don't have a bigger duty, we just have more knowledge about it on average, so many of us tend to care more.
Sorry about the long diatribe here, I just wanted to get that out of the way because it always seems to come up anyway (and in fact did in another thread I read just minutes ago).
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180719123811/https://www.bbc.c...
He did raise a valid point that has been raised before, that is actually widely known, and that is specifically German, and it has little to do with "make sure fascism doesn't rise again". It's just that because he said it it is spun like crazy.
You can call it guilt, you can call it castration (and there is a bit of both), you can call it moving from one extreme to another (and I think your "we don't have a bigger duty" is somewhat illustrative), you can call it what you want, but it is true that the spectre of WWII and of the Nazi period has a huge influence to this day in Germany and not necessarily for the better (from a German POV). It shows, for example in how meek Germany is with using its military, or in their immigration policy, most 'infamously' Merkel's open door policy in 2015 (which has spectacularly backfired since), etc.
It's worth highlighting that guilt is not the same as rememberance.