Elon MuskVerifierat konto

And yet, journos are very willing to pursue stories that burn advertisers and other financial benefactors. The @WSJ published the investigation that destroyed Theranos, even though Rupert Murdoch was Theranos's biggest investor ($125M)

An exception that proves the rule

No, it's the rule.

We don’t. The media is reporting someone else saying that Tesla advertised. It is untrue.

If he doesn't pay others to run it, then they don't need to earn his advertising business by running $TSLA-favorable stories.

I agree on that. But the lawsuit referenced above says he has misleading "marketing and ads." To which Musk says "Fake news, we don't even have ads!" which might be technically true, but is a diversionary tactic.

The point is that @Tesla marketing campaigns don't generate ad revenue for news outlets. Those news outlets' customers are gas/diesel fuel and vehicle manufacturers. Thus, the conflict-of-interest and reasonably suspected preferential treatment of gas/diesel in their stories.

Once upon a time, @Tesla was a classic upstart, david-vs-goliath story and news outlets benefited from telling it. Now that's old news, and it appears a lot of people are looking for the hero to fall. So those are the stories that would draw eyeballs (and make $$$).

Still... the mob is fickle. And if @Tesla does pull through with Model 3 production, this will be water under the bridge until the next production crisis. Which will certainly happen because @elonmusk will keep pushing the envelope. Then we'll be back here again. And so on...

this is real lazy criticism yo.

Uh, this is Twitter. How many characters do you want?

@elonmusk our website allows for way more characters than twitter...

With all due respect, you're completely wrong about how this works. Negative coverage of Tesla has *nothing* to do with journalists sitting down and weighing the ad dollars their employer gets from various interest groups.

Recall that press coverage of Tesla was overwhelmingly positive for years. There was hardly a company more celebrated by the media than Tesla. I wrote numerous glowing stories about Tesla and its products myself, because there was much about the company that I found admirable.

There still is much about the company that's admirable. But the continual broken deadlines, outlandish promises (some of which are fulfilled, impressively), intolerance of criticism, and defensive attitude on both worker and driver safety have eroded trust.

When you have a potentially revolutionary but also scary new technology (e.g. autopilot), and someone dies in a horrific fiery accident while using it, that's going to make headlines—I don't care what industry you're in or how much you spend on advertising.

It's fair to ask for that negative coverage to be modulated with an evenhanded assessment of the positives that the technology could bring, and the lives it could save. The media could & should be doing a better job of that. You could certainly help by releasing more data.

But when one of your customers dies using your product, and your primary response is to go on Trumpian rants about how the media can't be trusted or is in the pocket of Big Oil, that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence from anyone except your most loyal superfans.