But musk fans only complain about it when it makes elon and the gang look bad...

please explain. it literally has $0 advertising budget.

let's be real. it is sensational journalism that is at work here. It's NOT masterminded by a corporation spending zero dollars on marketing.

What are you talking about? You can literally just go to Tesla's job posting website [1] and see that they have an entire department dedicated to marketing and spend plenty of money on it.

Just because you don't see banner ads for Tesla on the subway doesn't mean they spend zero dollars on marketing.

1: https://www.tesla.com/careers/search#/?department=8

So what is their marketing spent on? I receive an email from them maybe 1-2 times a year but that's it, and I'm a huge fanatic.

The Tesla website is basically one huge marketing platform/advertisement, so that's one thing. Every time there's an open house at one of their stores where they have talks by some celebrity is a marketing event. They often host events where you can come test drive their cars (they did a lot of these when "ludicrous mode" came out, and you could go test it out on a big empty racetrack) is a marketing event. Every press conference where they announce a new feature/product is a marketing event. This [1] is a marketing event. Another large part of any company's marketing is building relationships with media outlets to feed them information and build up hype. They also have a social media team as part of their marketing department, so there's a decent chance that some of the comments you see on reddit or HN or elsewhere are Tesla employees astroturfing.

Ironically, the entire myth that Tesla has a "$0 marketing budget" is the result of, you guessed it, good work from Tesla's marketing department. Marketing/advertising is much, much more than just commercials and billboards.

1: https://electrek.co/2018/05/15/tesla-model-x-electric-towing...

> it literally has $0 advertising budget.

Well, other than the $75MM it recorded in its last annual report for 2017 for advertising and marketing...

> please explain. it literally has $0 advertising budget.

Advertising budget is what you use to bypass media coverage decisions, not how you drive “free media”.