Once Tesla starts advertising on Twitter, just you watch all those car companies will come right back.
From what I understand, they are going to wait until it's clear how much of a conflict of interest him being CEO of Twitter (in terms of advertising) + Tesla is.
why would it be a conflict of interest, unless the CEO of twitter is deliberately stopping car companies from advertising on twitter?
They don't have to start advertising, because they have never had to buy ads, people are willing to talk about them for free, and a lot of that discourse was due to Musk's tweets.
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Why didn't Tesla buy Twitter? Why could Tesla start spending massive amounts of money on Twitter Ads if it couldn't buy it?
SolarCity was in a related field, which was at least a fig leaf or minimal justification. There's no real justification to buy Twitter or buy ad space on Twitter.
Elon is not actually the god emperor of Tesla. He's been able to sell all of his decisions as improving the future of Tesla (and thus humanity). Of course I could be completely wrong here; I don't have a crystal ball.
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I think about how we might get to a post-scarcity society, and what post-scarcity means. People like Gene Roddenberry have done a great job portraying this future, but not how we get there.
Much of our political discourse is between people who disagree about whether or not we are living in a time of scarcity or post-scarcity. Many people in the city live in the low-scarcity mindset. Many people in the country live in a scarcity mindset. This isn't determinative, it's relative. Just being one place or the other does not dictate how you view the world, but it is indicative.
We don't talk about scarcity directly in political speech. It's a deep assumption about the world. It's so deep you may not have even realized that you had taken a side before now.
Are taxes and economic activity a zero-sum game? Obviously the other side is wrong, why would you even entertain the question?
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Why the fuck did I bring up Star Trek and post-scarcity? Because Twitter is a place where fights happen. I'm very happy that people are sending tweets instead of bombs, but we have to continue advancing our level of discourse, and I'm not at all convinced that online public speech is the way to do that; I'm especially not convinced that we can do that in short form; and I'm especially especially convinced that the process of advancing the discourse will not be funded by ads.
Literally no one I know with Teslas (and it's many many) even using Twitter.
Furthermore, there are many other high-profile companies that are extremely well known that simply opt not to advertise. Look at Costco. There's no Twitter mouthpiece and no advertising yet everyone either shops there or knows about it, but doesn't shop there.
I could believe, maybe, 'millions'. A hundred thousand dollars buys you a lot of ads on twitter.
The next time I have to buy a car, my decision to buy or not a Tesla will be heavily influenced by the information I already have, which comes from there (obviously, I'll also take other things into account and even pay a visit to the dealer - but still, I wouldn't consider it if nobody told me anything about the brand).
Boring Co used SpaceX and Tesla engineers for preliminary engineering work (and also for the Vegas tunnel) without reimbursing either company, and Boring Co used SpaceX's Hawthorne parking lot for its original test tube without leasing the land. BoringCo has not paid for the Teslas it uses, it received them for free. (As Tesla claims not to spend any money on marketing, giving these Teslas could not have been a marketing expense for Tesla unless they deliberately misrepresenting their financial statements, which is an entirely separate can of worms.)
Tesla didn't pay SpaceX to send a Tesla into space. (See above.)
Twitter used Tesla engineers, without reimbursement, to evaluate code just last week.