Last night a quickly organized group called “White Dudes for Harris” staged a zoom call which was attended by almost 200,000, and raised 4 million dollars for presumed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
The group was quickly suspended by Elon Musk’s “X” media platform, and although it was reinstated this morning, the incident only adds to a strong stench that is pushing away buyers and investors from the Tesla brand.
It seems clear that Elon Musk’s dive into social media with purchase of the Twitter platform has been a destructive distraction from his responsibilities at Tesla. The auto unit’s brand has, in turn, has been damaged by Musk’s obvious and weird fascination with conspiratorial, racist, and right wing ideas, as demonstrated by numerous posts on the site, and endorsement of Donald Trump in the current Presidential Race.
For many buyers who have looked to Tesla as a leader in a key technology to fight climate change, the turn towards a Party that denies science and physics, and trashes Electric Vehicles, has been jarring.
Video below from the Wall Street Journal front page today, shows how data from Tesla onboard computers was accessed. At the end of the video is a link to another vid, not yet accessible on youtube, that explains more on the Autopilot risks.
Additional weirdness:
Some users noted the, well, weirdness, of the reason cited for the block.
White Dudes was suspended, apparently, for “evading suspension”.
This is long past off the rails.
Where is the Tesla board? Where are shareholders?
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere … Teslas are throw-away cars, there’s already a wrecking yard in LA that’s just Teslas. My German made e-Mini is 100% recyclable, as are all German cars: every part, every bit of that little car can used someplace else. No so Teslas … single-use plastic
For the record, Tesla is not responsible for Musk’s other plaything, X.
Musk’s behavior via Twitter/X is damaging sales of Tesla. Source: me losing all interest in owning a Tesla based on hypocritical, racist, and anti-environmental actions of Musk:
– CyberTruck focus instead of launching a more affordable commuter car. Of course, it’s a free country, he can focus on whatever he wants. But $100K CyberTrucks will have minimal positive effect on CO2.
– Proprietary plug design for superchargers – fortunately now accepted as default plug but wanting it to be proprietary is the opposite of pushing for rapid expansion of the EV fleet.
– Buying Twitter and converting it from a flawed platform to one that blatantly pushes misinformation and pushes for the most anti-environment candidate.
– Boring Company – waste of time, money and energy.
– Starlink – awesome to bring connectivity to the planet… until he decides to play politics with it. No one elected him. He either provides Starlink to a country or he doesn’t; he doesn’t get to pull the plug in the middle of a battle in favor of his fossil fuel-dependent friends with impunity.
– SpaceX – again, he gets to do what he wants to do, but there is precisely nothing that he is doing that is maximizing the chances of success for a sustainable human colony on Mars. He’s making it more economically viable, but ignoring the fact that we have rocket technology but have never once established a self-contained, self-sustaining ecosystem is a pretty big hole in that supposed goal of his.
Just my opinions, YMMV.
The Tesla plant here in Buffalo, which is a new plant, built on brownfields where a steel mill used to be, used to employ hundreds of workers, but there’s been nothing but layoffs all year long. The unions are blamed, of course.