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Who Is Tesla’s Customer Now?
How Musk’s behavior has radically altered Tesla’s prospective customer base
Elon Musk is a modern-day P.T. Barnum, a showman who can draw in the crowds and persuade them to part with their pennies in return for promises of wonders. And just like Barnum, he himself does very little but relies on the tireless hard work of others — in Barnum’s case the performers in his circus and in Musk’s case the thousands of highly talented engineers for whose insights and skills Musk then takes credit.
But even buskers and self-promoting billionaires aren’t able to suspend reality indefinitely. Sure, you can definitely fool some of the people all of the time, but eventually a little fragment of reality leaks in and the illusion begins to tarnish. So the question is: what happens to a company like Tesla when its oh-so-visible CEO turns out to be a far-right extremist? SpaceX is immune because it has a de facto monopoly on launches thanks to the engineering talent that has created reusable launch vehicles. But Tesla doesn’t have a de facto monopoly on electric vehicles; indeed, it’s never actually made a profit on selling these but has instead relied on selling carbon credits to teeter on the verge of being in the black. Tesla has relied not on the quality of its vehicles nor on their price-performance, but on the notion that buying a…
