I'm sorry Elon, I love you, I really do, but now you're just trolling.
While adjusting decisions like that is great and something I expect Silicon Valley tech startups to do all the time, communicating it in the way that you do is just blatantly stupid and irresponsible. You hurt your clients, you hurt your employees and you hurt your investors.
Imagine the headlines we would have had if you just made your internal due diligence properly about the stores you want to shut down and didn't announce outright the way you did. Imagine the SP we would have seen if the story was "Tesla finally releases $35k Model 3" and not "Tesla shuts down stores all over the world and fires employees in order to deliver their long-promised $35k Model 3".
I'm sorry, Elon, you're great, you're a genius, but nobody is a genius at everything they do. You need help, you need a COO or a CMO to handle this stuff for you. Last 2 weeks have been pure chaos and Tesla looks like a headless chicken running around trying to figure out what to do.
When you achieved profitability in Q3 2018 you wrote in your email that "Tesla has now become a real company". Please, start acting like one. You're no longer a startup. Your moves are admirable if you're a small agile startup trying to find their product market fit and figure out who its early adopters are. You are way beyond that point now. You're a grown up company.
It doesn't mean you should stop adjusting prices, stop being dynamic and agile. Not at all. But please, for the sake of everyone that loves you and for the sake of your mission, be responsible about what and how you communicate. Be responsible about the decisions you make and announce. If it only took two weeks to reverse your decision, why did you make it in the first place? Did you really have to lower the prices of all the cars so much?
I'm here with you for the long run and now that I have my Model 3 I'm not selling any shares until you scale up Semi at least, so I'm not too fussed about weekly fluctuations. But
You call it brilliant, I call it dumb luck. None of this was pre-planned. And if it was, then it's even worse than it looks.
Free advertising? Only if you agree with the rule that "it doesn't matter what they write about you, it only matters that they do write about you". I don't.
Yes, Tesla themselves.