Tesla is becoming a partisan brand, says survey

https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/tesla-becoming-partisan-brand-survey/

by redbell • 4 years ago

59 106 4 years ago

noncoml3• 4 years ago

I am thankful that society is rejecting sociopathic cult leaders like Trump and Musk. I was starting to lose hope.

It still is a pity that everything has to be about politics. Tesla paved the way for the electric cars and was a net positive for society.

I hope the stockholders see that Musk is more of a liability now, and kick him out.

claytongulick8• 4 years ago

It's really strange how people allow their political ideology to color their thinking.

Musk a "sociopathic cult leader?"

He gets this label apparently because he believes in the marketplace of ideas.

That's now equivalent to sociopathic tendencies?

And because a lot of people agree with that freedom of expression (sort of the reason the U.S. was founded, and the thing that a lot of people have fought and died for) he's a cult leader?

Roughly half or more of folks in this country tend to agree with him on a lot of things. That's a cult? They are all just dumb or something? From Locke to Sewell, they are brainwashed cultists too?

Or is it maybe possible that reasonable people can disagree?

noncoml3• 4 years ago

It's really strange how people allow their political ideology to color their thinking

I think that it is you that is trying to make this political. I referred to two specific people, one of which is supposed to be "not left, nor right". So why are you trying to paint it political?

If anything I explicitly said in the post you replied that I find it sad that people are all about politics these days.

Since you support freedom of ideas I ask you to respect my opinion about Musk, which has nothing to do with his claim of "marketplace of ideas" but a lot to do with all the other opinions he posts online.

I would go into detail what are the things that he says that make him appear like a "sociopathic cult leader" to me, if you want. But by your message it sounded like you are sure that I don't like Musk because I don't support free speech. So, not sure it's worth continuing the discussion.

I'll just leave this here for reference: https://www.psychmechanics.com/characteristics-of-cult-leade...

throwawayacc3• 4 years ago

This is a symptom of the macro-level bifurcation of the economy and the things/ways we consume. Completely parallel economies that signal what side you're on won't be fiction for long.

Ekaros• 4 years ago

I hope this will lead to brands that just shut up and sell stuff. And do not attempt to signal anything in anyway.

HPMOR• 4 years ago

I believe consumption patterns in general will reflect political leaning. For example a college kid probably travels to and from home requiring airline tickets, Uber, etc. Whereas a rural kid might have need of satellite wifi and diesel vehicles for long haul trips. These are inherently different consumption patterns that require brands to pick sides for their respective consumers. If anything the trend of companies choosing political sides will become exacerbated by consumers.

hakfoo• 4 years ago

That applies to an extent, but there's plenty of products that sell across the political spectrum. I might not buy a work truck, and my neighbour might not be interested in fiber internet, but we both buy hamburgers.

I could see this break two ways:

1. Investors start handing companies their asses for throwing away potential customers.

2. There's just enough extra margin available in segmenting their customers that politically flaired brands end up being successful. Obviously that gets toxic fast if it works, but will it actually pan out? I can see brands trying to be "big fish in a small pond" by being the "anti-woke" (or "woke") choice, but will people really pay a premium for it? I could see choosing Lyft over Uber, or ordering a mainboard from B&H instead of Amazon, when the price is more or less the same, but I'm not sure I can justify paying 20% more.

badRNG• 4 years ago

It is often a bad bet in the long run to associate your brand with specific conservative causes.

Conservatism, and right-reactionary thought, often exists as a critique or skepticism of the ideology and programs that progressives and leftists wish to enact. Sometimes the criticism is warranted, and this skepticism is an important part of civil discourse. Inevitably however, sometimes progressive causes will win and overcome their detractors. If you tied your brand to a critique of gay marriage, the Civil Rights Movement, or women's suffrage, your brand would face far more damage than being critical of rightist causes.

mullingitover• 4 years ago

The big failure of the conservatives in the present day is their grouping into a single political party and the purging of anything progressive from that party. The problem with this is that progress usually wins, and conservatives again and again end up on the wrong side of history. History in this area is like the Harlem Globetrotters against the Washington Generals.

At one point both parties had conservative and progressive wings.

So now, by lumping everyone against progress into one party, they're firmly consolidated as the regressive lost-causers, and everyone who aligns with them ends up getting that label.

xedrac• 4 years ago

I feel the same way about technical projects that force political/social agendas to be part of the project. Why can't we just keep things focused on technical stuff, and leave the virtue signaling out of it? The world has become a toxic place, no matter what your views are.

beams_of_light• 4 years ago

Elon is the brand. They don’t advertise. If he’s really as smart as most people think he is, then all of this pandering to right wing politics is just a way to sway people who wouldn’t otherwise buy an electric car into buying one because they side with him politically. At least, it’s possible that’s the long game. It’s also highly possible he’s a narcissist and doesn’t care or have enough self control to stop harming Tesla with his antics. Ultimately, I don’t think right wingers are going to buy Teslas en masse because he “freed the bird”.

fknorangesite• 4 years ago

And do not attempt to signal anything in anyway.

Implicitly supporting the status quo is also a signal.

thaneross• 4 years ago

Neutrality does not "implicitly support the status quo" unless you believe the status quo is stable or exists in a local maxima. That clearly isn't true however because the status quo is dramatically different today than it was historically, and I wouldn't attribute activism for the bulk of those changes.

ericb• 4 years ago

I have so much trouble squaring the "genius" narrative with the "alienating the core constituency that buys electric vehicles by making my personal brand into a MAGA hat" reality.

Isn't moving humanity to mars the ultimate in cautious, long-term thinking while burning your personal and company brand value the ultimate in reckless short term thinking?

The apparent rationality and irrationality blows my mind.

Veedrac2• 4 years ago

You're probably having trouble because neither Musk's narrative nor edge have come from being a cunning salesperson. This is “Tesla stock price is too high imo” Musk, robotaxi next year Musk, other person is a pedophile Musk, yell at legal authorities Musk.

Musk's edge has come from tackling hard, technical problems, and doing so successfully, for long enough, on enticing enough problems, that people started to buy the dream.

Contrast, leftist flamebait is just Musk being impolitic on Twitter, and an increasingly-hostile anti-left Musk is just what you get when the left runs campaigns specifically attacking him. It's not a smart business move because it's not a business move, merely a reflection of the increasing polarization of America.

MrMan2• 4 years ago

You are dead wrong about a lot of things here. Musk may not seem like a salesman to you, but he is actually one of the best salesmen and marketers we have seen, and created the major brands which have enriched him basically entirely using media coverage of him and his companies, and massive social media reach using his personal twitter account.

In my opinion the one thing he is truly good at is sales and marketing. Selling the dream, and a very good design team, is what made Tesla what it is.

I have no comment on whether technical solutions requiring the coordination of hundreds and thousands of people can be credited to one non-technical person, nor the political stuff.

JohnFen2• 4 years ago

Musk's edge has come from tackling hard, technical problems, and doing so successfully

What hard technical problems has he ever successfully tackled? Serious question.

His two successes, Tesla and SpaceX, are companies he purchased. He hired people to tackle hard problems, yes, but what has he done personally?

brnt2• 4 years ago

When you consider that his PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel is deeply embedded in the American extreme right, openly advocates abolishing democracy and worse, it starts to make some sense. Musk in solidly in that orbit and always has been.

claytongulick8• 4 years ago

Do you have a citation for Thiel openly advocating for abolishing democracy?

V__• 4 years ago

I had this same thought for a while, but I think the answer is simpler in reality. In my opinion, he has an ego problem, and his companies are his best way to feel important (or whatever emotion he craves). I don't know whether that was always the case, but to me it seems apparent that is what he has been doing for the past few years.

I think it started happening when he realized there was no next big-idea which his companies could actually solve. After Tesla made electric cars trendy and influenced the market (actual accomplishments), his next idea was self-driving. Maybe he didn't know enough at the time or thought he could make it happen quickly, he promised big and failed but can't admit it. So he tried to pull the next shiny thing out of the hat, Cybertruck, semi, solar-roof, roadster, smart-summon, boring-tunnels, Hyperloop etc. They also kept failing or are coming soon TM. For some time SpaceX delivered, but right now they also don't have anything new shiny to show.

He's trying to desperately stay relevant, but all his ideas are staring to crumble or are a lot harder to solve than he cares to admit. He started to become edgy, and it spiraled from there. Him being forced to buy Twitter because he couldn't get out of the joke he made, is probably his worst nightmare. His 'coming soon'-excuse isn't working on Twitter, and it's a very public humiliation should he fail. I actually think he is very similar in this regard to Trump. A big sense of self-importance and a need for affirmation which can't handle rejection is what I personally thought his presence at Chappell stand-up showed. I also think that is the reason he is appeasing the right so much. They give him a lot of attention and don't criticize him.

hotpotamus• 4 years ago

You forgot frying monkeys' brains in an attempt to create a brain-machine interface (turns out that elevating brain temperature more than 2 degrees starts to cause issues).

But I have to take issue with some of your selections too. It seems like the semi is in fact shipping, and I don't know if it's actually useful, but perhaps it has some niche in the transport industry. I'm not sure what's up with the Cybertruck, but it doesn't seem infeasible like self-driving might be. And the SpaceX Starship has been making pretty solid incremental progress over the last few years and really does have some potential to further upend the economics of getting tons of material into orbit.

But he's clearly been consumed by ego whatever the cause.

mindslight2• 4 years ago

Solar roof is a pretty fantastic idea. What is the point of laying asphalt shingles just to puncture them to fasten another frame that sits above the roof?

The problem is that the idea is not "scalable". There are high capital costs, high per-project cost basis (low profit margin), and needs incremental refinement to get it right. It's not the kind of thing that works well when shotgunned nation wide and subbed out to contractors to manage the specifics of actual projects.

sdwr• 4 years ago

Like this take, feels very even-handed. As an Elon fanboy going back years, I see this wave of hate as temporary, a natural backlash from overexposure. It has a "bullying the substitute teacher" vibe on twitter. He's moving from being an underdog in tech (everyone loves an underdog, and tech people are very forgiving of oddball personality) to an overlord in politics. Rough transition.

Would love to see him pull a Herbert-Hoover-in-WWI and use his engineering mindset to genuinely help people. People are focusing on the short-term (7000 people laid off at twitter! lame anti-woke jokes! what a jerk!), and missing the bigger picture.

Algorithm-driven content is eating the world's attention. It's misaligned by ad dollars (twitter, fb) and race-to-the-bottom viral stickiness (tiktok). Some lucky people have resilient real-life social networks, but a lot of people are stuck at the bottom of a soulless lonely well. Online feeds are a poor substitute for community. Everyone you see is better than their real-world counterparts (can't look away!) and unattainably distant.

Untying twitter from the next-quarter ad spend mindset is a great chance to reengineer it towards connection and away from broad dissemination.

Spooky23• 4 years ago

The electric car market is getting crowded and Tesla offerings are aging.

Doubling down on a consumer segment that tends to listen closely to influential figures and do things not their self interest may be effective.

sxyuan• 4 years ago

It's not so hard to reconcile. Moving humanity to Mars is clever marketing; real long-term thinking would focus on keeping Spaceship Earth livable and biodiverse. Stirring up Twitter controversy is similarly about marketing: learning (whether rightly or wrongly) from Trump 2016 that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

legitster2• 4 years ago

Whether intentionally or not, I think he instinctively has been trying to disassociate "his brand" from the rest of the green or progressive movements overall. The electric car industry suffered for decades under the NPR and kombucha crowd. But if there is one common thread to his success, it has been to completely ignore the existing identifiable market and make your own (Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla).

Musk wanted bros and rednecks and meat-eating red-blooded Americans all alike to think a Tesla is cool. Actual environmentalists would follow suit regardless as a captive market - waste no effort on them.

And I think he sees Twitter the same way. Twitter's core demographic is a captive group of left-leaning educated users. If he can successfully flip a switch to appeal to everyone else in America, and hold on to enough captive current users in the process, he will have successfully grown the pie.

I don't actually know if this is Musk's blatant strategy or if he is "crazy like a fox". But Musk has engaged in conservative-leaning flame wars for several years at this point. However, he just recently admitted to casting his first vote for a Republican this election cycle.

That means during all of those years he was saying flamboyant things and meeting with Trump etc, he was largely saying one thing and doing another.

So I'm leaning towards the idea that he is a bit more coy than he lets on and sees political drama as a sort of business asset.

aeternum• 4 years ago

It would be quite amazing if this was all a ploy to actually gain a larger market for Tesla. During the pandemic, the techies had all the disposable income and were the key Tesla market. Now the pendulum has swung the other way and the energy sector and more traditional businesses have seen a resurgence. Makes sense to increase appeal to that more conservative-leaning demographic.

over_bridge2• 4 years ago

There's definitely some merit to this view. It's much like how in a political primary all candidates pander to the extreme so that they win and then immediately ignore them and pivot to the other side to scoop up votes from the other party. If you are true left or right you are a captive audience of your respective center left or center right party. It's cynical and dishonest but it works.

There's no reason to think that Musk isn't as single minded about his own goals as those parties are about winning. This is the best case for his behavior.

Unless hydrogen takes off and captures the environmentalists, they have nowhere to go but EVs. Watch him pivot back fast if that does happen, and push further into the 'rolling coal' crowd until then.

I still wish him success but I no longer like him. I doubt he cares.

8note• 4 years ago

The environmentally friendly option isn't electric or hydrogen powered cars, it's efficient transportation and efficient communities. Things like electric bikes and trains fit that bill much better

NicoJuicy• 4 years ago

Not sure, I'm more curious about the average wealth of republicans vs. Democrats to make a better assumption.

To me, i don't think that would work.

I just think it's tax motivated => profits. Sometimes the simple answers are the correct ones.

Fyi, take into consideration he just severely overpaid for Twitter...

MrMan2• 4 years ago

this is one of the only good takes I have seen on Musk and the issue of how he is steering his brand. I think he is really foolish and truly dangerous but he is no dumber than any other successful business guy when it comes to making big decisions. I am not that interested in how many D chess he is playing or if he is like Richard Branson and jut does things by feel. Branson is the brash marketer of past decades who I feel Musk most resembles - the brand is a direct extension of the person and the name goes on various different business. Dyson is another in a slightly similar vein and our former president is an exemplar of the style as well.

legitster2• 4 years ago

Honestly, Musk kind of reminds me of turn of the century industrialists (Ford, Edison, etc).

No formalized business training, no PR teams, no market analysis. They just had super brash (and often foolhardy) visions of what consumers would buy, took huge risks in bringing them to market, and brought in investors by charisma alone.

And I think you have to be born with the exact level of EQ to be smart enough to know what's possible and what customers would want, but be dumb enough to still throw yourself into the problem and ignore every reason previous attempts had been unsuccessful.

Nomentatus• 4 years ago

"One Swallow Does Make a Summer, says Survey"

more_corn• 4 years ago

This is fantastic news! I never would have thought there’d be a day when conservatives could own the libs by buying an electric car.

goatlover• 4 years ago

Does it roll electric coal?

dieselgate• 4 years ago

Rolling “coal” with biodiesel or renewable diesel is still a thing..

throwayyy479087• 4 years ago

This is honestly a great thing for the planet

godshatter• 4 years ago

Not if all the libs drop it like a hot potato. It's a 50/50 split, more-or-less.

We really, really, need to do something about this political polarization. I put it up there above climate change as an existential problem for the US.

yummypaint• 4 years ago

I agree. Getting vanity truck engines off the roads is a fundamentally different problem than getting large truck engines off the roads in general. These decisions aren't made rationally for many people so attacking them with logic is bound to fail. If we can transition culture war conservatives from doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason to doing the right thing for the wrong reason, that would be progress.

clouddrover12• 4 years ago

How much longer will Tesla tolerate Musk as CEO? How much work is Tesla getting out of him these days when he's wasting his time on Twitter and stage appearances? How is he helping Tesla when he's alienating existing and potential customers with his petty antics and rants?

Musk seems determined to become more cost than benefit.

akomtu• 4 years ago

Tesla has always been a partisan brand, and the party loved it until Musk started mocking their quasi-religion.

glonq• 4 years ago

I don't think that's true, especially outside the US. I bought my Tesla because it's a really good bang-for-the-buck electric car. My political ideogies are not particularly aligned with Elon Musk's, but that doesn't really affect my purchasing decision.

What do you mean about 'religion'?

lazyeye4• 4 years ago

Note how it's only "partisan" when they are perceived to lean in one particular direction only. Despite multiple very close elections the other side is the "mainstream consensus" of course.

tene80i3• 4 years ago

What examples of partisan leaning in the other direction would you say are being overlooked? Some other companies / CEOs?

lazyeye4• 4 years ago

Have you been paying much attention to what Twitter has been doing for the last few years? Particularly leading up to the last election?

la64710• 4 years ago

This is quite brilliant . I am sure most of the democrats who could afford to buy a Tesla has already done so and stuck with it - so Musk is now targeting the remaining half of the population ie the republicans. With deep partition ship in the American social consciousness , this may be the only path forward where to sell a product quickly the company has to align itself with one party or the other. It does not matter much if they change affiliations down the line - public memory is very short. From a moral standpoint it is really bad but then who cares?

sergiomattei• 4 years ago

to sell a product quickly the company has to align itself with one party or the other

Or just make a compelling product. Most of the things we use and buy on the daily aren’t partisan, they’re just good.

peterashford2• 4 years ago

Oh, so it really is 4 dimensional chess, huh?

helf• 4 years ago

Still amazes me how many fanboys he has.

The dude has successfully run some companies. Yes.

He’s also a gigantic narcissist. Womanizer. Workaholic. Liar. Edgelord from hell. Blah blah

But he does xyz things that I like and/or I wish I was rich!!

sighs

Tesla is becoming a partisan brand, says survey

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