How to Destroy a Brand, Musk Style

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/opinion/elon-musk-tesla-democrats.html
https://archive.ph/e7TST

How to Destroy a Brand, Musk Style
Dec. 30, 2022, 3:09 p.m. ET
By Paul Krugman

...

As I wrote in my last newsletter, the main reason to believe that Tesla’s huge market value doesn’t make sense has little to do with Musk’s antics at Twitter. The problem instead is that Tesla’s dominance of the electric vehicle market is already fading as we speak, so the company is unlikely to generate the kind of extraordinary long-term profits that would justify its stock price.

That said, Musk has indeed been acting very oddly — and in ways that seem almost perfectly calculated to drive away his best customers.

After all, what does it mean to buy a Tesla? It’s a luxury car, but there are other luxury cars. What’s special about a Tesla is that it’s an electric, zero-emission luxury car — one that purports to be a glitzy ride to a sustainable future.

Also, until just the other day, Musk himself was widely seen as a cool guy. And cool in a futuristic sense: His company sends rockets into outer space; he was living with a popular musician who released an album inspired by the science-fiction novel “Dune” (a book that, by the way, was recently made into a terrific movie).

So what message was someone sending by driving a Tesla? Basically — I don’t think I’m being unfair — it was: “I’m rich but I’m woke.” Mock that stance all you like, but it really did increase Tesla sales. And it means that many Tesla buyers are probably also Democrats.




Teslas are a Democratic thing. Credit Charles Gaba