Tesla & Musk — Tied at the Hip, and the Mouth

Last Updated on: 14th June 2025, 04:16 pm

The following is a long reader comment published this week in response to an article about Elon Musk’s political activities and expectations. It includes brilliant insights and deserves extra attention here as a standalone “letter to the editor.” Enjoy.

By eveee

Tesla leadership is not just about political naïveté. Elon Musk gravitated towards conservative libertarianism long ago. That got him going in that direction. That is the source of his comments like ‘free speech absolutism’.

Like many libertarians, the definition of things like this is applied to them personally, because the emphasis is on individuals and egos. This Ayn Rand version of let anyone do what they want has roots in American history, the pioneers, etc. It’s not all bad, but anything pushed too far becomes its own worst enemy, no exception here.

Let’s take a look at some of its manifestations shall we? As an individual, he runs his company like it was three people and he owns it. On top of that, there is an extreme paranoia about anyone else taking power or credit away from him, and his response to any challenge is often swift, brutal, and unyielding. It is an ‘I own everything, the heck with you’ philosophy. So other people, human values, employee rights, are subject to his whim and discretion, while he has been consistently and compulsively dismissive of authority and regulation, to put it politely.

Take a look at this in the perspective of European sales. Right now, with all the focus on his recent political actions, the perspective of how his personality affected outcomes is buried. This is unfortunate, because it hides how his overall personality has affected the company well before that happened.

During the early phases of his public persona, most people had scant notions of who he was and what he was like personally. For most, his quirky persona was just icing on a cake of environmental benefits of electric vehicles and technologies that might deal with global warming another issues. The idea that his personality would overshadow all of that was not at the forefront, because the expectation of companies is that the CEOs may be spokespersons perhaps, but the technology speaks for itself. Likewise, few would have foreseen that a company would be so deeply identified with its founder that they were inseparable in the public mind.

Now, the situation is reversed. The technology does not lead the company in the public mind. That makes it harder for the company to lead itself forward with tech only. Worse, the founder is still behaving like a founder, no longer interested in the now large company, and distracted by speculative goals for the future. The company should have switched to a more seasoned large company veteran long ago, but now the disadvantages of a founder in a mature company are showing.

But back to personalities. Before an a awareness of his political flaws showed, Tesla was failing in Sweden, because Elon had no use for unions, or a notion of Sweden’s cultural tie to collective bargaining. He failed to see just how deep this went. Sweden is a country with more collective social networking than the US. It’s not just a trend, it is inherent in the society. As a result, public perceptions of Tesla soured badly when Elon showed a corporate response, with an attitude that he would simply run them over. The result was that way before Germany, France, and the UK rebelled against Elon’s fascist salutes and AfD support. Sweden had already gotten a dose of a corporate anti-cultural message and Tesla sales tanked.

The Sweden experience presaged later events and showed that the Tesla CEO’s connection with Tesla formed public opinion, which turned against both him and the company. Now, Tesla and Elon can no longer be separated in the public eye. His tarnishing of Tesla’s image will remain after he leaves for some time. This is the price of connecting a personality with a company and the reason most companies do not do this. To run a company and sell products, you want blandness. It’s like selling a house. Everyone loves to look at better homes and garden glossy pictures of brilliant hued houses with decorative interiors — that is look, not buy. When it comes to buying, people want white or beige walls in muted colors, and a house that presents itself in an inoffensive way that they can modify to their own tastes. The penalty of a uniquely decorated house is that only a small fraction of the customers will be attracted to that unique style. To get the most customers, make the product customizable to the widest range of customers, and/or make it appeal to the most people. That does not necessarily mean it physically has to have the characteristics they want. More often it means that whatever slogans or image the product has in the public mind is adaptable to fit whatever they believe. If EVs mean independence to them, well done. If EVs mean efficiency, good, those will sell. If EVs mean environmental stewardship, that works.

But if the company is associated with extremes, and values contradictory to the society it serves … good luck with that. We already have seen what happens in Sweden. The CEO already eschewed a PR department, and runs HR like he heads it, not to mention engineering, despite having no ability to do so. Now it needs an HR department. It needed one long ago. Now it’s too late. The public perception is now permanent.