how common do you think this perspective is? outside of places like this one, of course. as far as I can tell, the average person's perspective of the guy likely hasn't changed much in the past few years at all.
At least where I live, a lot of people I know are turned off by him. Including expressing opinions like the OP where they intended on buying a Tesla but now are looking elsewhere. Granted I live in a bubble, and one's friends & acquaintances are another sort of bubble. But it's different than HN.
I'd expect somewhere in between the strong negativity on the Internet and total obliviousness.
Average person probably doesn't consciously register all that is happening and can't tell you about the past weeks' drama, but I think there's a certain point where too much negativity attached to a brand starts to drag it down, and Tesla might have reached that point.
I'm not saying it certainly has, but a few years back the outlook on Tesla was so overwhelmingly positive, you'd have to actively seek out criticism on your own. At least nowadays sentiment on them seem to have returned back to Earth.
I think you're underestimating how much people love drama. Average people don't give a shit about what CEOs do, except when they fire half of a very public company and there's stupid stories to be shared for weeks and weeks.
Same way people still remember Carlos Gohn, when they probably couldn't name WV's CEO.
A decade ago most people I knew thought of Elon neutral or even positively, he was just a figure that was doing good stuff with cars for the environment. At this point everyone I know thinks he's pathetic and a disgusting person.
I don't know when the Cybertruck was announced initially, I believe Elon had already started to enter the public eye a bit more aggressively... but sentiment has definitely changed over the last ~8-9 years.
The risk is that he will go much farther than he already has. If he comes out as a full-fledged neo-Nazi, which I wouldn't bet against given how erratically he has behaved lately, the value of Teslas on the used market will plummet.
If you think Elon is a neo-Nazi, where are you getting your news from? Obviously, not from a primary source or you’d realize what you are saying is ridiculous.
There was no reason to think he would bid $54.20/share for Twitter, either.
There was no reason to think he would call a guy a pedophile for criticizing his submarine idea.
There was no reason to think he would name his kid with nonstandard characters.
There was no reason to think he would offer to trade horses for blowjobs.
There was no reason to think he would _______. I'm not saying he's a Nazi, or that he is especially likely to call himself one. It's impossible to say whether he is more likely to wake up one morning identifying as a Zen Buddhist, or a Laveyan Satanist, or a Nazi, or a Methodist.
You don't know what he'll say or do to hose the value of your car, and neither do I, and neither does he.
have you ever noticed how odd it is that the anti-Musk rhetoric is functionally identical to the anti-Trump rhetoric of 2016–2020, and also how no new Reichs were started 2016–2020, such that one can conclude that perhaps takes like this are possibly a hair hyperbolic in nature, and should maybe be reevaluted a bit before terms such as "neo-Nazi" completely lose any remaining weight they might have?
I don't think anybody missed it, but many people experienced far worse in their own cities during the "Summer of Love" in 2020. Nobody I know cares about J6 except as a political football.
Man, you guys would be so screwed if you didn't have the "Summer of Love" to fall back on when someone criticizes your personality cult.
You should contemplate that sometime, just as an exercise. What would it be like to live in a world where whataboutism doesn't amount to a cheat code to summon the easily-led? One where your beliefs, opinions, arguments, and actions actually have to stand on their own, without reference to unrelated crimes committed by other people in a different time and place.
this has nothing to do with it though. it's not that most normal people like him—it's just, most normal people don't spend any portion of their daily lives ruminating on how much they hate someone they've never met, who is much wealthier and more successful than themselves, to the point of repeatedly expressing said hate on the Internet... well, at least, since about 2020 or so.
Almost everyone I encounter dislikes Elon Musk. I'm not even talking about tech people, although I do live in Silicon Valley and that might bias things. My hair dresser, my wife's make-up artist friend and stay-at-home moms. My kids' teachers.
For better or worse, even random Joe Q. Public knows who the richest man in the world is, and has some opinion on him. Everything he does is scrutinized by the media and put into some political or moral framework. Just like Bill Gates in the '90's, he's inescapable.
But unlike Bill Gates and other prior holders of the richest-man title, Musk eschews any personal PR department and instead broadcasts to the world unfiltered takes. And by and large, people don't like what they see.
