This bumper sticker is almost meaningless unless you only bought an early Model S. It was pretty apparent even by the time the Model 3 came out Elon was a gigantic piece of shit, and would be running the company into the ground. Reminder that him calling a rescue diver a pedophile was 6 years ago, and that was only the most public first example of his douchebaggery.
He was technically a founding member, but left the company. Literally all of this is because he’s jealous he can’t pull a Tesla and claim all the credit for another tech company.
This is also what a lot of people forget how it was at the time, thinking “if only” they had been early adopters and how they’d be millionaires. I was one, and had found it was great for traveling said “trade route”, but also watched when Mt Gox collapsed and tanked the price 75% while stealing millions from people, and decided to take my winnings and leave the table.
How many people would see that shit and be like “Yes, I’m going to hold onto this for the next 10 years when it’s worth something” and then sit through the number of 50+% loss events that happened?
You would have done exactly what 99% of early adopters did, and considered yourself incredibly lucky that you managed to make 1000% returns and sold.
And now we’re inventing the shittiest “rail line” between Ann Arbor and Detroit on 94. All the hassle and expense of rail travel, with none of the efficiency!
My dude, even legacy stocks that pay dividends like fucking Costco and Microsoft are up 250+% the past 5 years. The market has been absolutely bonkers the past 5 years, and acting like Tesla is some incredible investment and not just a meme gambling stock is pretty hilarious.
I can tell you working at an OEM we see far crazier notes like this coming in
Except, much like crypto, they were heavily marketed to be just like stocks and other legitimate securities (but the future, because internet stocks!), instead of just speculative gambling on completely unregulated assets. Sure, you could do a modicum of research and see that they did include in the fine print they were explicitly NOT regulated securities, but your Average Joe has no clue what that means and just sees someone he trusts (don’t ask me why, but people absolutely do), telling him he’ll be super rich if he buys some C-list celebrity’s monkey JPEG.
Do I still think people like Average Joe are idiots for buying them? 100%. But that doesn’t make it okay that people are taking advantage of their financial naiveté either.
I work on automotive software, and honestly have no issue with issues like this being portrayed as a big deal. I’m sick of how often I’m seeing management push shit software deliveries with the line “We’ll OTA it later, it’s fine for now.”
Screens have been in cars for a very long time at this point, there’s absolutely no reason we should be seeing issues like this aside from half-assed software being shoved out the door because we’ll hopefully fix it later via OTA.