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At this point I'd imagine Tesla is better off with Musk being distracted by his shiny new toy. Though I'd be concerned about the effect he is having on their b

At this point I'd imagine Tesla is better off with Musk being distracted by his shiny new toy. Though I'd be concerned about the effect he is having on their brand image. Even two years ago I was on the verge of buying a Tesla but ended up cancelling my order in large part because I just couldn't stand the obnoxiousness of Elon and he has gotten orders of magnitude worse since then. His new "demographic"/cult also seem to be climate change / green energy skeptics, not convinced they will be gobbling up Teslas at quite the same rate as my demographic would.

gitfan86 4y ago
It is totally fine if you don't like Elon, but in the real world there isn't an EV that is cheap and available and has a good charging network. The ID4 is decent but that company was started by actual Hitler and Nazis, so if you are interested in not buying from companies that have a history of evil leadership that one isn't a good option. And gas cars are not good for CO2 emissions, so sometimes you have to accept that you sometime buy products made by companies that have executives you don't like. And realistically I find it very unlikely that every product you buy on a regular basis today is run by people who have much better morals and politics than Elon.
- slg 4y ago
  > The ID4 is decent but that company was started by actual Hitler and Nazis, so if you are interested in not buying from companies that have a history of evil leadership that one isn't a good option. This is a wild comment. The current leadership is slightly more important than the leadership 80 years ago. It is especially strange considering you could have made moral arguments against that company based off much more recent misdeeds.
  - coolbreezetft22 4y ago
    Yep, there was 'diesel-gate' back in the early-mid 2010s and even today the way the company overlooks the behavior of the Chinese government is also very unsavory (a problem Elon has as well)
  - sgt101 4y ago
    Also I don't wear Hugo Boss because they made the uniforms for the SS. And... Hugo Boss suits make me look like a wardrobe on legs... and are too expensive... but for sure the SS thing.
- ryantgtg 4y ago
  Shell/Chevron/Exxon/etc vs Elon. Hmm, let me think…
- coolbreezetft22 4y ago
  Interestingly I did end up buying an ID4 and it's been great for a full year now. It's not perfect but I like that is has more of a "traditional" interior compared to Tesla, which felt kind of like a giant tablet with a car-shaped case around it. That design was already making me hesitant and Elon with his endless stream of nonsense was the straw that broke the camels back so to speak.
  - gitfan86 4y ago
    Ironically the VW CEO that is responsible for the ID4 asked Elon to explain to his executives how to make EVs. https://electrek.co/2021/10/16/vw-ceo-herbert-diess-invites-elon-musk-to-talk-on-how-tesla-innovates-quickly/ https://electrek.co/2021/10/16/vw-ceo-herbert-diess-invites-...
- djaychela 4y ago
  >It is totally fine if you don't like Elon, but in the real world there isn't an EV that is cheap and available and has a good charging network. My Renault Zoe would like a word with you. Cheaper than a tesla (in not rich, and I bought one), available, and can charge everywhere.
- projektfu 4y ago
  It's a good thing you instead use a car that doesn't have any Bosch parts.
Mistletoe 4y ago
I had the same exact response and cancelled mine around the time of the tweets about the Pelosi attack he made. It’s a shame, we loved our last Tesla but I can’t stand the thought of being associated with him. We were supposed to pick it up the week he made those tweets. I was his former prime target demographic. I feel very strongly about protecting the environment, I hate gasoline engines after working on them most of my life, I loved how economical it was to drive an electric car, I love technology, and I could afford a Tesla. I don’t know what his new demographic is but I don’t think they even can buy a Tesla or will. I wish him lots of luck. Based on my experiences in a small town, his new demographic buys dually trucks listening to alt right propaganda and lives check to check working in the oilfield. Or is on a very fixed income and is retired and stays at home afraid, watching Fox News, with their last car in the driveway, a 1997 Oldsmobile or Buick.
- nerdix 4y ago
  From what I've seen there are quite a lot of Tesla drivers in major southern suburbs. Southern suburbs tend to be fairly conservative. Maybe not quite as Trump loving as rural areas. But conservative nonetheless and likely not turned off by Elon's recent emergence as a right wing political figure. Also, if you read enough /r/elonmusk you'll see that a lot of people have bought into Elon's schtick that he's actually just a centrist (apparently centrists love DeSantis)
  - fundad 4y ago
    Yeah, Emissions reductions will come from lighter cars, not steel cars weighed down with enough battery for ludicrous mode. Also emissions reductions doesn’t come from selling more private vehicles.
  - treeman79 4y ago
    There is a heavy mix of liberal and conservatives in the south. Classic big city vs everyone else dynamic. Had a group of BLM protestors positing live on twitter how they where coming up to where I live to burn down neighborhoods. I’m surrounded by gun fanatics. If police hadn’t blocked mass transit and highways it would have been a blood bath.
mandeepj 4y ago
> I just couldn't stand the obnoxiousness of Elon and he has gotten orders of magnitude worse since then For the same reason, I call him now - eww-Lawn!
w0m 4y ago
Seriously True. I bought my 3 in 2019; and my biggest hesitancy at the time was Musk being (insane) and tanking the company preventing me from keeping the car on the road long enough/resale value. Today? I do <3 my car, but I'd likely not touch new one with a 10 foot pole; especially as a new customer and there actually being other EV Options available. It's distressing because Tesla does (mostly) what I want in a daily driver well.
wpietri 4y ago
> At this point I'd imagine Tesla is better off with Musk being distracted by his shiny new toy. I think that's probably correct. One question I find interesting: What is Musk actually good at? He's clearly good at hype-driven PR and painting himself as a Tony Stark character. That has been great for Tesla; he's been able to raise gobs of money cheaply. Money that apparently kept Telsa from going bankrupt. [1] But that genius for hype also makes it harder to figure out other skills. Looking at his track record, he got fired from Zip2 and PayPal. The jury's still out on Telsa; it recently got into the black, but it has always had its troubles, and its first-mover advantage is eroding. As is its stock price, down by half recently, something surely not helped by Musk's delusional promises (e.g., 1 million Tesla robotaxis by the end of 2020). The Boring Company and Neuralink both look troubled. [2] [3] And of course Twitter is an extremely public clusterfuck. That only leaves SpaceX as possible evidence that he's good at anything other than hype and raising money. But recently a former SpaceX intern posted about his experience there [4], saying "Elon was basically a child king. He was an important figurehead who provided the company with the money, power, and PR, but he didn’t have the knowledge or (frankly) maturity to handle day-to-day decision making and everyone knew that. He was surrounded by people whose job was, essentially, to manipulate him into making good decisions." So I think what we're seeing with Twitter is the real Elon. And yeah, if I were at Telsa trying to pivot from hype-driven startup to solid company able to compete with everybody from GM to Toyota to BMW, I would much rather Musk stayed at Twitter. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/musk-tesla-was-about-a-month-from-bankruptcy-during-model-3-ramp.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/musk-tesla-was-about-a-month... [2] https://jalopnik.com/elon-musks-boring-company-leaves-local-governments-arou-1849836671 https://jalopnik.com/elon-musks-boring-company-leaves-local-... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/06/elon-musk-neuralink-animal-creulty/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/06/elon-mu... [4] https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296/elon-wyd https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Looking at his track record, he got fired from Zip2 and PayPal Technically, no, he got fired as CEO from X.com twice, once before it had PayPal as a product, once after it bought Confinity which had PayPal as a product. X.com became PayPal right after the second time he was fired, so he never actually got fired from (or worked for) PayPal.
gumboza 4y ago
He does run a cult. My father finds Musk entirely reputable. I am currently subject to at least a 30 minute call a day from him, a retired model S owner, who has nothing left in his life other than the Tesla. The calls are 30 minutes of him reeling off Tesla PR bollocks. He chased everyone he knew away, speaks of nothing else and cannot see reason or error in this or any of Musk's things. He thinks the Twitter thing is a freedom grab, he literally thinks SpaceX are building rockets to take the good humans off and build a new world order on Mars. To get the model S in the first place he cashed in his annuity pension and sold his house and is now on a downward spiral of financial oblivion. This is exactly cult behaviour. I'm at a loss of what to do other than refer him to mental health services here in the UK. I couldn't even possibly consider owning something associated with someone so utterly socially damaging on every front. Edit: I'm actually fucking crying while I'm writing this. Posted anon as my other account has my GH and stuff on it.
- seltzered_ 4y ago
  Ugh, Sorry to hear youre going through this. Unwinding an entrenchment is hard, wonder if theres a support group or something for those deep in techno-optimism. For me, the frame breaks in me have been deep thought from both an engineering perspective and cultural scaffolding perspective, paired with real travels to places where technology was limited (either be practical circumstance like going to a rural village or intentionally like a silent meditation retreat). A graphic I still come back to is the good life project ( https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/ https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/ ) with inquiry around how many planets of stuff even the alternatives require from a planetary boundaries perspective. There's more technical works like https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m .
- maxbond 4y ago
  Thank you for sharing. I think it's important for people in this forum to hear stories like this.
- poszlem 4y ago
treeman79 4y ago
Of course your option has nothing to do with him exposing all the censorship that was going on at twitter. Amazing how much a group of people have gone from loving him to hating him because he is allowing free speech.
- TomSwirly 4y ago
  > him exposing all the censorship that was going on at twitter. What you mean is that Elon Musk has made a series of self-contradictory claims with no evidence about what was going on at Twitter before he was there, and you believed his empty claims unquestioningly. I don't generally accept claims without proof, because no rational person should. When we're talking about a serial liar like Musk, > Amazing how much a group of people have gone from loving him to hating him because he is allowing free speech. Nope, there's no proof he's doing that, either, and plenty of serious researchers on the left who have been thrown off the platform with no reason given. --- You should learn to demand proof for people's claims before repeating them unquestioningly. It will help the quality of your belief systems.
kenjackson 4y ago
You're lucky. My family (father, sister, etc) have pretty much fully outfitted themselves in Teslas, but hate Musk. They could stand him enough before, but now they are ready to move on to Lucid or anyone else really. I'm glad I never pulled the trigger -- Musk just always came across as extra creepy too me.
natch 4y ago
So instead you bought a car from a company run by people who are afraid to ever travel to the United States because they know they may be subject to personal prosecution for Dieselgate, which they so far evaded. I mean I agree he’s super obnoxious, but if making car purchase decisions based on the virtue of company leadership, I would have called it a tie and bought the better car instead.
dotancohen 4y ago
What is with this Cult of Elon? I really don't care who the CEO is, I love my Model 3. It costs me literally one sixth the cost per kilometer than my previous Nissan was costing, when comparing the cost of electricity and gas. And that's before considering that I haven't had to change the oil or do any other scheduled maintenance in the 35000 or so KM I've put on it. And it's not just the price. My kids who previously couldn't stand long drives now want to go places, at first because of the glass roof but now because they love when I sqeeze them into the seatback with the throttle. It's car number 15 for me, and the best of any of them by far. Who cares about the CEO? I don't even know who the CEO of Nissan was when I had that, or Ford when I had that, or Renault when I had that.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  The CEOs of those other car companies were not raging egotists backed up by a crowd of howler monkeys chasing a parasocial dopamine hit.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    > The CEOs of those other car companies were not raging egotists Actually, from the stories of 1950's and 1960's Detroit, in fact they were. I don't know about today. > backed up by a crowd of howler monkeys chasing a parasocial dopamine hit. _This_ is the problem. Who cares if Elon eats kittens or promises Mars rocks in the glovebox? It's the Twitter Shitters magnifying every musing into predictions and three-page blog posts that is the problem. Just don't listen to them.

gitfan86 4y ago

It is totally fine if you don't like Elon, but in the real world there isn't an EV that is cheap and available and has a good charging network. The ID4 is decent but that company was started by actual Hitler and Nazis, so if you are interested in not buying from companies that have a history of evil leadership that one isn't a good option. And gas cars are not good for CO2 emissions, so sometimes you have to accept that you sometime buy products made by companies that have executives you don't like. And realistically I find it very unlikely that every product you buy on a regular basis today is run by people who have much better morals and politics than Elon.

slg 4y ago
> The ID4 is decent but that company was started by actual Hitler and Nazis, so if you are interested in not buying from companies that have a history of evil leadership that one isn't a good option. This is a wild comment. The current leadership is slightly more important than the leadership 80 years ago. It is especially strange considering you could have made moral arguments against that company based off much more recent misdeeds.
- coolbreezetft22 4y ago
  Yep, there was 'diesel-gate' back in the early-mid 2010s and even today the way the company overlooks the behavior of the Chinese government is also very unsavory (a problem Elon has as well)
- sgt101 4y ago
  Also I don't wear Hugo Boss because they made the uniforms for the SS. And... Hugo Boss suits make me look like a wardrobe on legs... and are too expensive... but for sure the SS thing.
ryantgtg 4y ago
Shell/Chevron/Exxon/etc vs Elon. Hmm, let me think…
coolbreezetft22 4y ago
Interestingly I did end up buying an ID4 and it's been great for a full year now. It's not perfect but I like that is has more of a "traditional" interior compared to Tesla, which felt kind of like a giant tablet with a car-shaped case around it. That design was already making me hesitant and Elon with his endless stream of nonsense was the straw that broke the camels back so to speak.
- gitfan86 4y ago
  Ironically the VW CEO that is responsible for the ID4 asked Elon to explain to his executives how to make EVs. https://electrek.co/2021/10/16/vw-ceo-herbert-diess-invites-elon-musk-to-talk-on-how-tesla-innovates-quickly/ https://electrek.co/2021/10/16/vw-ceo-herbert-diess-invites-...
djaychela 4y ago
>It is totally fine if you don't like Elon, but in the real world there isn't an EV that is cheap and available and has a good charging network. My Renault Zoe would like a word with you. Cheaper than a tesla (in not rich, and I bought one), available, and can charge everywhere.
projektfu 4y ago
It's a good thing you instead use a car that doesn't have any Bosch parts.

Mistletoe 4y ago

I had the same exact response and cancelled mine around the time of the tweets about the Pelosi attack he made. It’s a shame, we loved our last Tesla but I can’t stand the thought of being associated with him. We were supposed to pick it up the week he made those tweets. I was his former prime target demographic. I feel very strongly about protecting the environment, I hate gasoline engines after working on them most of my life, I loved how economical it was to drive an electric car, I love technology, and I could afford a Tesla. I don’t know what his new demographic is but I don’t think they even can buy a Tesla or will. I wish him lots of luck. Based on my experiences in a small town, his new demographic buys dually trucks listening to alt right propaganda and lives check to check working in the oilfield. Or is on a very fixed income and is retired and stays at home afraid, watching Fox News, with their last car in the driveway, a 1997 Oldsmobile or Buick.

nerdix 4y ago
From what I've seen there are quite a lot of Tesla drivers in major southern suburbs. Southern suburbs tend to be fairly conservative. Maybe not quite as Trump loving as rural areas. But conservative nonetheless and likely not turned off by Elon's recent emergence as a right wing political figure. Also, if you read enough /r/elonmusk you'll see that a lot of people have bought into Elon's schtick that he's actually just a centrist (apparently centrists love DeSantis)
- fundad 4y ago
  Yeah, Emissions reductions will come from lighter cars, not steel cars weighed down with enough battery for ludicrous mode. Also emissions reductions doesn’t come from selling more private vehicles.
- treeman79 4y ago
  There is a heavy mix of liberal and conservatives in the south. Classic big city vs everyone else dynamic. Had a group of BLM protestors positing live on twitter how they where coming up to where I live to burn down neighborhoods. I’m surrounded by gun fanatics. If police hadn’t blocked mass transit and highways it would have been a blood bath.

mandeepj 4y ago

> I just couldn't stand the obnoxiousness of Elon and he has gotten orders of magnitude worse since then For the same reason, I call him now - eww-Lawn!

w0m 4y ago

Seriously True. I bought my 3 in 2019; and my biggest hesitancy at the time was Musk being (insane) and tanking the company preventing me from keeping the car on the road long enough/resale value. Today? I do <3 my car, but I'd likely not touch new one with a 10 foot pole; especially as a new customer and there actually being other EV Options available. It's distressing because Tesla does (mostly) what I want in a daily driver well.

wpietri 4y ago

> At this point I'd imagine Tesla is better off with Musk being distracted by his shiny new toy. I think that's probably correct. One question I find interesting: What is Musk actually good at? He's clearly good at hype-driven PR and painting himself as a Tony Stark character. That has been great for Tesla; he's been able to raise gobs of money cheaply. Money that apparently kept Telsa from going bankrupt. [1] But that genius for hype also makes it harder to figure out other skills. Looking at his track record, he got fired from Zip2 and PayPal. The jury's still out on Telsa; it recently got into the black, but it has always had its troubles, and its first-mover advantage is eroding. As is its stock price, down by half recently, something surely not helped by Musk's delusional promises (e.g., 1 million Tesla robotaxis by the end of 2020). The Boring Company and Neuralink both look troubled. [2] [3] And of course Twitter is an extremely public clusterfuck. That only leaves SpaceX as possible evidence that he's good at anything other than hype and raising money. But recently a former SpaceX intern posted about his experience there [4], saying "Elon was basically a child king. He was an important figurehead who provided the company with the money, power, and PR, but he didn’t have the knowledge or (frankly) maturity to handle day-to-day decision making and everyone knew that. He was surrounded by people whose job was, essentially, to manipulate him into making good decisions." So I think what we're seeing with Twitter is the real Elon. And yeah, if I were at Telsa trying to pivot from hype-driven startup to solid company able to compete with everybody from GM to Toyota to BMW, I would much rather Musk stayed at Twitter. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/musk-tesla-was-about-a-month-from-bankruptcy-during-model-3-ramp.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/musk-tesla-was-about-a-month... [2] https://jalopnik.com/elon-musks-boring-company-leaves-local-governments-arou-1849836671 https://jalopnik.com/elon-musks-boring-company-leaves-local-... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/06/elon-musk-neuralink-animal-creulty/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/06/elon-mu... [4] https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296/elon-wyd https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...

dragonwriter 4y ago
> Looking at his track record, he got fired from Zip2 and PayPal Technically, no, he got fired as CEO from X.com twice, once before it had PayPal as a product, once after it bought Confinity which had PayPal as a product. X.com became PayPal right after the second time he was fired, so he never actually got fired from (or worked for) PayPal.

gumboza 4y ago

He does run a cult. My father finds Musk entirely reputable. I am currently subject to at least a 30 minute call a day from him, a retired model S owner, who has nothing left in his life other than the Tesla. The calls are 30 minutes of him reeling off Tesla PR bollocks. He chased everyone he knew away, speaks of nothing else and cannot see reason or error in this or any of Musk's things. He thinks the Twitter thing is a freedom grab, he literally thinks SpaceX are building rockets to take the good humans off and build a new world order on Mars. To get the model S in the first place he cashed in his annuity pension and sold his house and is now on a downward spiral of financial oblivion. This is exactly cult behaviour. I'm at a loss of what to do other than refer him to mental health services here in the UK. I couldn't even possibly consider owning something associated with someone so utterly socially damaging on every front. Edit: I'm actually fucking crying while I'm writing this. Posted anon as my other account has my GH and stuff on it.

seltzered_ 4y ago
Ugh, Sorry to hear youre going through this. Unwinding an entrenchment is hard, wonder if theres a support group or something for those deep in techno-optimism. For me, the frame breaks in me have been deep thought from both an engineering perspective and cultural scaffolding perspective, paired with real travels to places where technology was limited (either be practical circumstance like going to a rural village or intentionally like a silent meditation retreat). A graphic I still come back to is the good life project ( https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/ https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/ ) with inquiry around how many planets of stuff even the alternatives require from a planetary boundaries perspective. There's more technical works like https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m .
maxbond 4y ago
Thank you for sharing. I think it's important for people in this forum to hear stories like this.
poszlem 4y ago

treeman79 4y ago

Of course your option has nothing to do with him exposing all the censorship that was going on at twitter. Amazing how much a group of people have gone from loving him to hating him because he is allowing free speech.

TomSwirly 4y ago
> him exposing all the censorship that was going on at twitter. What you mean is that Elon Musk has made a series of self-contradictory claims with no evidence about what was going on at Twitter before he was there, and you believed his empty claims unquestioningly. I don't generally accept claims without proof, because no rational person should. When we're talking about a serial liar like Musk, > Amazing how much a group of people have gone from loving him to hating him because he is allowing free speech. Nope, there's no proof he's doing that, either, and plenty of serious researchers on the left who have been thrown off the platform with no reason given. --- You should learn to demand proof for people's claims before repeating them unquestioningly. It will help the quality of your belief systems.

kenjackson 4y ago

You're lucky. My family (father, sister, etc) have pretty much fully outfitted themselves in Teslas, but hate Musk. They could stand him enough before, but now they are ready to move on to Lucid or anyone else really. I'm glad I never pulled the trigger -- Musk just always came across as extra creepy too me.

natch 4y ago

So instead you bought a car from a company run by people who are afraid to ever travel to the United States because they know they may be subject to personal prosecution for Dieselgate, which they so far evaded. I mean I agree he’s super obnoxious, but if making car purchase decisions based on the virtue of company leadership, I would have called it a tie and bought the better car instead.

dotancohen 4y ago

What is with this Cult of Elon? I really don't care who the CEO is, I love my Model 3. It costs me literally one sixth the cost per kilometer than my previous Nissan was costing, when comparing the cost of electricity and gas. And that's before considering that I haven't had to change the oil or do any other scheduled maintenance in the 35000 or so KM I've put on it. And it's not just the price. My kids who previously couldn't stand long drives now want to go places, at first because of the glass roof but now because they love when I sqeeze them into the seatback with the throttle. It's car number 15 for me, and the best of any of them by far. Who cares about the CEO? I don't even know who the CEO of Nissan was when I had that, or Ford when I had that, or Renault when I had that.

anigbrowl 4y ago
The CEOs of those other car companies were not raging egotists backed up by a crowd of howler monkeys chasing a parasocial dopamine hit.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  > The CEOs of those other car companies were not raging egotists Actually, from the stories of 1950's and 1960's Detroit, in fact they were. I don't know about today. > backed up by a crowd of howler monkeys chasing a parasocial dopamine hit. _This_ is the problem. Who cares if Elon eats kittens or promises Mars rocks in the glovebox? It's the Twitter Shitters magnifying every musing into predictions and three-page blog posts that is the problem. Just don't listen to them.