This afternoon, Sawyer Merritt shared a snippet of Tesla Owners SV's recent interview with Elon Musk on Twitter, where Elon stated that:
"There's an argument for maybe we should advertise. The tradition media won't run hit-pieces about automotive because automotive is one of the biggest, if not the biggest advertiser in their paper. Tesla's basically like free game, whereas it's safe to say that if they write a negative piece about General Motors right next to a GM ad, GM marketing exec is going to call them up and ask, "um, why did you do that?" They know who's paying their salary.
So maybe we should advertise. It doesn't feel right, but maybe that's what we should do. In the grand scheme of things, is it actually causing us to sell less cars? Doesn't seem to be. So then why should we care?"
According to Elon, the constant amount of negative hit pieces on the news actually boosted sales in 2017 to 2019.
"Frankly, a bunch of the pieces trashing Tesla, especially in 2017-2019, the press was a nonstop hate stream. . . . And our sales went up!"
Elon has teased advertising before, for example, in this tweet a year ago (provided by @Buckminster):
In 2022, Tesla's continued to grow rapidly, and it's unlikely this exponential growth will stop any time soon, so it's safe to say they won't need to advertise unless it's to promote their vehicles' lesser known features and not necessarily because they need to stop negative press.
Though it would be amazing if we could stop seeing news threads talking about how "unsafe" Teslas and EVs are, every week of the year.
(Source: lex fridman, CC BY-SA 4.0 <Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International — CC BY-SA 4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
(TMC Staff: Image added for use in Blog feed.)
"There's an argument for maybe we should advertise. The tradition media won't run hit-pieces about automotive because automotive is one of the biggest, if not the biggest advertiser in their paper. Tesla's basically like free game, whereas it's safe to say that if they write a negative piece about General Motors right next to a GM ad, GM marketing exec is going to call them up and ask, "um, why did you do that?" They know who's paying their salary.
So maybe we should advertise. It doesn't feel right, but maybe that's what we should do. In the grand scheme of things, is it actually causing us to sell less cars? Doesn't seem to be. So then why should we care?"
According to Elon, the constant amount of negative hit pieces on the news actually boosted sales in 2017 to 2019.
"Frankly, a bunch of the pieces trashing Tesla, especially in 2017-2019, the press was a nonstop hate stream. . . . And our sales went up!"
Elon has teased advertising before, for example, in this tweet a year ago (provided by @Buckminster):
In 2022, Tesla's continued to grow rapidly, and it's unlikely this exponential growth will stop any time soon, so it's safe to say they won't need to advertise unless it's to promote their vehicles' lesser known features and not necessarily because they need to stop negative press.
Though it would be amazing if we could stop seeing news threads talking about how "unsafe" Teslas and EVs are, every week of the year.
(Source: lex fridman, CC BY-SA 4.0 <Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International — CC BY-SA 4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
(TMC Staff: Image added for use in Blog feed.)
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