Americans are well aware of what happens when a powerful business titan begins to adopt a defensive position that includes blaming the media.
Things become pretty divisive, and people have to choose sides. Not good.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, unfortunately, seems to be falling into a similar situation, and elektrek.co is calling him out for his behavior.
Musk, stressing transparency as his companies (including SpaceX) rocketed toward massive profitability, has shown a reluctance to accept or engage with criticism.
He now calls such legitimate questions as “weird” attacks from the media.
Following the playbook of former President Donald Trump – playing hard to his base and doubling down on media hate – Musk has narrowed his interactions to include basically only those “Tesla superfans” so as to discourage any legitimate criticism of Tesla.
Musk recently responded to a superfan who said recent stories about Tesla are “attacks” from “scared” people:
“Does seem a little weird,” Musk wrote via Twitter on Thursday morning.
The stories in question appear to include the fatal accident involving a Tesla Model S with reportedly no one in the driver’s seat, Tesla’s recent solar roof price hike and more.
From elektrek.co:
“Stories in the media about this move are not ‘attacks from scared people’ but legitimate criticism of Tesla’s business practices.
“As for the fatal crash, I’m willing to admit that several media outlets wrongly publicized the accident as an ‘autonomous Tesla vehicle crash,’ but I think there are also legitimate questions to be answered about the accident.
“If you still want to address (questions) yourself instead of through a PR department like most companies, that’s fine, but please stop just listening to your superfans on Twitter only talking about the good things and minor bug fixes and instead address the more serious concerns … .”
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