Here we must talk about Elon Musk, whose positions as de facto head of the US government’s new Department of Government Efficiency and agitator for right-wing politics and mocker of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on social media bin fire X haven’t been doing his car company any huge favours in recent weeks.
Tesla’s shares are down and, depending on where you look, its sales are too. As the Financial Times titled it last month: “Tesla stock is falling because Elon Musk’s stock is falling.”
We will have to wait to see how much this matters, because while it feels significant, it might be just online fuss that passes. Loads of people buy things from companies or places they don’t like, knowingly or otherwise, all the time, and saying you’re not going to is about the easiest thing you can do.
I’m not buying anything Russian at the moment, but given that I wasn’t likely or able to anyway, it turns out that’s a doddle and makes no difference – something that Tesla might note about the kinds of people currently planning to protest against Musk outside its US retailers.
And while I know that I would prefer to be seen in a Jaguar than a Tesla, the company with the Oval Office’s chief scruffbag will sell 1.5 million or more cars this year, while the one with the pink advert will sell none.
So it’s rather hard to argue that what’s known as virtue signalling – the root cause of the ‘go woke, go broke’ cliché – feels a less cringy or controversial thing to do than it did only a couple of years ago.
