In a weird tangent, I've been thinking about the TV Show "Ted Lasso", and why it's so popular lately. Ted Lasso is the exact opposite of Elon Musk, even to a fault. People don't care if Elon succeeds anymore, but they do want Ted Lasso to.
I hate to break it to you, but generally only other Tesla owners feel that way. Otherwise, I doubt the public does. In fact, I personally feel the opposite, that's it's a symbol of a "techbro".
Also people don't deserve to be judged by their car unless it is a modern german luxury car in which case they obviously are the kind of person who makes bad life choices.
In a way, that was my point, because I was responding to this: "Driving one meant you were forward thinking, that you were on the bleeding edge, and probably conscientious about the environment."
Even without "contamination", TSLA stock price collapsed by over $100+ because Elon Musk predictably sold $Billions of stock to pay for the TWTR buyout. Its not like $33 Billion came out of nowhere. Elon had to sell TSLA to get that money.
If TWTR keeps losing money, Elon will be forced to sell more and more TSLA stock to keep it afloat.
And this is all the legal / ethical way of doing things. No "contamination" in just selling stock to support another. Even then, we can see the huge drop in TSLA stock prices (compared to the rest of the market, which rebounded in the past few weeks on good inflation data).
SEC forced Elon off the board chair at least. But yeah, its a well known fact that Tesla's setup is full of conflicts of interest. It doesn't seem like the shareholders (or the board) feels like fixing it though.
Come to think of it, why does SpaceX need to advertise at all? Those who need to launch rockets already know who can do it.
I agree with you though that Musk’s brands are becoming too associated with his personality, which is mercurial and irksome. Caveat emptor.
I think this is inevitable.
One, Elon is trying to prop up Twitter by using SpaceX money to buy ads. He's dipping his hand into other companies to keep his new toy afloat for a while longer. I don't know if the word "contamination" is appropriate here, but it's pretty clear that Elon doesn't see any kind of sharp boundaries between his various enterprises.
And two, I think a lot of customers are going to start rethinking Elon's offerings. Tesla used to be a status symbol. Driving one meant you were forward thinking, that you were on the bleeding edge, and probably conscientious about the environment. Now, Tesla is "that company Elon owns." There is no way this doesn't hurt Tesla's bottom line, and there's no way investors don't realize this.
All Elon had to do was shut up and bask in the accomplishments of others, but he couldn't manage to take his own ego out of it. Will it ruin him? Probably not. We he still be the richest man in the world in a year or two? Also probably not.