But Musk later changed his mind, reportedly donating $45 million a month of his money to the pro-Trump political action committee American PAC.
`Nuff said. CEOs are often Republican, but to be this outspokenly political is normally a bad thing for CEOs like Musk. Media company heads (and Twitter/X is a media company) are supposed to at least pretend to be neutral.
And catering to the far-right seems like a bad idea if your company makes EVs. But what do I know?
I don’t think they are anymore. There are more options in the market now than there were four years ago, Teslas tend to be expensive for what you get, and the quality of Tesla has been demonstrated to be terrible, time after time. I think that the biggest thing that’s working in Tesla’s favor right now is availability; if other fully electric cars were as available as Teslas are, he’d probably see the bottom fall out of his market completely.
As it is, Dems in general are more likely to be interested in electric vehicles, and he’s actively pissing them off. That’s a very bad business decision, if you want to keep having a company.
other fully electric cars are already available and dominating across the entire planet except for the united states and canada and the price tag for a competitive model is around $20k; so i suspect tesla is going to stay king so long as both republicans and democrats continue to support 100% tarrifs on EV’s.
given how we bail out the big american car companies with no-strings-attached handouts every decade and a half or so and we’re about to do it again; it’s a sure bet to assume tesla is safe for a long time.
Discounting the tariffs–which are not an easy issue–American electric vehicles are still in their relative infancy. Tesla has been making electric cars, yes, but they’re bad. Tesla simply doesn’t have the institutional knowledge about car manufacturing and design, so they do things that the auto industry as a whole knows is dumb. Like, electric components than can get shorted out from going to a car wash (!), or electronic door latches that become inoperable if the battery fails because the car has caught on fire (!!!). Right now, non-Chinese/non-Tesla EVs simply don’t have a lot of market presence, but the few that are on the market are selling out (e.g., when the Ford F-150 Lightning was introduced, pre-orders were more than a full year’s production). Software issues seem to be plaguing American EVs, which is… Not surprising, TBH. But IMO, I’d rather have software issues than hardware problems.
– in the united states and canada because of those tariffs; they’re dominating everywhere that doesn’t have high tariffs.