The shine is off Tesla these days. Once the golden boy of the fight against climate change and the poster man-child of sustainable capitalism, Elon Musk has gone well and truly off the rails in recent months, and he has dragged Tesla with him.
Tesla sales and deliveries have faltered recently, and it has started to offer deep discounts as inventory continues to pile up (we are mainly talking about America here). The company's stock price has also headed down the drain in recent months.
Tesla, of course, was the electric car that started it all. It revolutionized the auto industry, and forced other car manufacturers to develop their own electric models. You can't take that away from Tesla and Musk. But as the market for EVs in general starts to sputter somewhat, Tesla is starting to feel the heat from China's BYD and Korea's KIA and Hyundai. It doesn't help that the rollout of the long-awaited Tesla Cybertruck has been, well, spotty and underwhelming, but there is much more going on here.
Part of the problem is Tesla's insistence on completely redesigning the family saloon, with its minimalist interiors and its lack of familiar buttons and switches. The early adopters and techies, who actually like doing everything from a glorified tablet screen, now all have their Teslas, and the hoi polloi are much less gung ho about driving an iPad. (I'm one such - I deliberately gravitated towards a more traditional style interior, and ended up with a Hyundai Kona Electric, not a Tesla, some two years ago.)
The other problem, though, is Musk himself. Once an impish maverick and iconoclast, he has since turned hard right and become something of a running joke. He appears completely disengaged from Tesla's commercial woes, and fresh out of new ideas (once his stock-in-trade). He seems bogged down in his failing social media outlet X (a sorry, disembowelled Twitter), content to make disparaging lame jokes about anything he considers "woke", all while condoning hate speech in the interests of extreme free speech. (Musk was also a consideration when I was looking for an EV two years ago - I really did not want to line the pockets of such an unpleasant, hypocritical, sociopathic billionaire.)
Be that as it may, it remains a fact that Tesla's latest quarterly car deliveries fell for the first time in nearly four years, and the company's share price has taken a substantial hit recently. It's also a fact that some people are definitely blaming Musk personally (and his toxic behaviour in recent months) for Tesla's problems. Predictably, Musk reacts to such criticisms in a suitably toxic and childish manner.
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