“I canceled my Cybertruck reservation after Elon’s behavior with Twitter. Don’t see myself buying another Tesla.”
Space Cadet
It’s not just users and advertisers of Twitter — now chaotically renamed X — who have soured on the company’s figurehead.
In a brutal new Bloomberg poll, Tesla owners’ opinion of CEO Elon Musk appear to have also turned increasingly negative, with respondents calling him a “space cadet” and a “child” — with much of the negative opinion driven by his antics on Twitter.
One person wrote, “I canceled my Cybertruck reservation after Elon’s behavior with Twitter. Don’t see myself buying another Tesla.”
Another said, “If you like terrible human beings, you’ll love Elon Musk.”
Ouch.
Model Citizen
In 2019, Bloomberg had conducted a poll of 7,000 Model 3 early adopters. For this poll, it reached out to the same pool of respondents and got 5,000 to respond, in order to gauge any change in sentiment.
In the first poll, people had a largely positive view of Musk, but that view dropped significantly in this new poll — the “steepest” change among all the questions in the survey, according to Bloomberg.
But if you think about it, early buyers of an all-electric vehicle that is widely billed as an “internal combustion killer” would most likely be dismayed by Musk’s catering to right wing and conspiratorial elements on the social media platform — a counterintuitive move because you are basically spitting in the eye of your customer base.
Indeed, the poll revealed that a great many Tesla owners feel Musk’s public opinions do not “align with Tesla’s mission” and do not reflect their own personal values.
Silver Linings Playbook
While the results lay bare the negative impact of Musk’s alarming antics on social media, the poll also finds that Tesla owners overwhelmingly love their vehicles. The users highly ranked the Tesla Model 3’s performance, ease of use, design and reliability, and most plan to stick with the brand.
But there’s a sense of unease and feelings of betrayal.
“I love the vehicles but do not want to support someone who has such vitriol and low opinion of the very people who have made Tesla a success,” one person wrote.
Notably, some said Musk should step down from Tesla.
“Elon needs to step down from running Tesla,” one poll taker wrote. “Tesla needs a different kind of leader and is largely successful despite Elon, not because of him.”
More on Elon Musk: Former Twitter Manager Describes Elon Musk’s Sudden Swings To Rage
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