IMO this Twitter deal has been nothing but bad news for Tesla shareholders. The CEO is completely distracted and forced to sell his shares, and the company has been dragged into stupid culture wars. Tesla brand perception has crashed among Democratic-voting Americans who previously were its biggest supporters.
It’s hard to believe he spent $44B and crashed his car company’s valuation and personal reputation just to bring back Babylon Bee’s trans harassment onto an also-ran social media platform. It’s even harder to believe that some people fantasize about moving to a Mars colony where a person with this kind of judgment is king.
I work with scientists. Everyone who got a tesla feels a bit off about owning it now. Many jokes are had about being a musketeer, and the rise of twitler etc.
It's all jokes, but then at the end of the day, everyone else drives home in some other car and they don't know what the CEO said about "tweet of the day" etc. Yet Musk is all in everyones face all the time. It doesn't seem to be a winning strategy at the moment.
Tesla cars have been described as an electric car software platform, so I'm not surprised they are nervous. The car is not just what it is today, but depends on remote services, regular updates and foremost it seems like the car can fundamentally change its features based on remote software updates. It's concerning, suddenly you do not trust that software vendor as much as you did before.
Maybe $80k capital assets turning into scrap-value bricks would finally be significant enough for the general population to wise up to the scam that is the Internet of Trash.
TSLA was always going to go down since it was (and probably still is) way overpriced. In fact I think a large part of why he started this twitter saga was to have an excuse to offload a bunch of stock at the top. He probably then hoped to get more people into the deal with him, so he could keep some billions left over.
Elon Musk is fairly well protected. Tesla corporate bylaws require a supermajority of votes for any major changes, so despite only controlling a minority of voting rights he has an effective veto over any shareholder resolutions.
The anti-trans movement masquerades as feminism but is essentially a retread of the anti-gay arguments of 1960-2000. Gays need medical help. Gays shouldn’t be allowed in spaces with children. Gay men don’t belong in spaces where real men interact (like the army) because they’d be colonizing them with their unbridled sexuality. Etc.
This is hardly the kind of thing where a prudent CEO spends $44B to make a stance.
That’s actually good news for Tesla in the long run.
It’s a company that sells cars mostly to yuppies and woke buerguesie who drive the cars as a statement.
Now it’s time to let this bird fly and see if it survives, for that it needs to appeal to the mass market and not just the ones who “move to Canada” every 4 years.
Tesla stock like every stock is (over)valued based on the future, and at this point de-Musking Tesla a little bit could be the thing that actually brings the money to those Tesla stock “investors” in the mid/long run.
Apple around 2000 was stuck in a niche that would probably be described as “woke” today: graphic designers and hipsters.
The way that Steve Jobs broke out of the niche wasn’t that he suddenly started courting Dell PC buyers and went around saying: “Designers are dummies and ‘Think Different’ was a joke anyway.”
That’s basically how Musk is treating his existing Tesla customers now. (Including myself. The car is still good but I have serious doubts I’d buy another.)
> It’s a company that sells cars mostly to yuppies and woke buerguesie who drive the cars as a statement.
You’re bringing a lot of emotional baggage to this mischaracterization. Tesla’s buyers are affluent because they didn’t sell anything cheap but that doesn’t make them woke - the dedicated environmentalists bike or take the bus to work - and the smartest move Tesla ever did was making the first one a sports car. That got all of the “car guys” interested because it changed the thought of an EV from something bland but virtuous to a fun, premium experience. Even knowing that “woke” is how right-wingers describe anyone who isn’t, it’s really not accurate – I know more libertarians who bought them until the quality control problems started catching up with them.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-08/musk-bank...
IMO this Twitter deal has been nothing but bad news for Tesla shareholders. The CEO is completely distracted and forced to sell his shares, and the company has been dragged into stupid culture wars. Tesla brand perception has crashed among Democratic-voting Americans who previously were its biggest supporters.
It’s hard to believe he spent $44B and crashed his car company’s valuation and personal reputation just to bring back Babylon Bee’s trans harassment onto an also-ran social media platform. It’s even harder to believe that some people fantasize about moving to a Mars colony where a person with this kind of judgment is king.