This already happened as the update at the top of the article notes. HN Discussion: [0](238 points, 309 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40038549

Pure anecdata - I bought a hyundai instead of a Tesla because of Elon. And I know 2 people who hate EVs because of Elon.

Brands matter and when the brand is tightly bound to someone who emits untrammeled narcissism that can't be other than detrimental to the bottom line.

My least favorite thing about owning a Tesla is the association with Elon.

You know something is wrong when you consider buying the bumper sticker that says "I bought this before Elon went crazy".

This is the Elon I bought from: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/31/elon-musk-threatens-to-leave...

It’s a good point. There was a point in time where he was, at least in the public eye, a risk taker and arguably visionary, or at the very least having a whole lot of vision for what the future of the space/auto sectors. Now he seems to be just another victim of internet/media culture war rage.

Right on the money! You are not alone.

I think it's even more stupid than that - the people who buy EVs in bulk are normally a certain group, fiscally and socially, yet that's the group he spends most of his time demonising on Twitter. The group that buy EVs is definitely broadening nowadays but I think that I'm still mostly correct.

Just personally: I don't get this behavior.

Like I don't care about the politics of the employees of companies I buy from. I'm not sure how that could be important to me. Yes, Elon is very visible. But there are a lot of employees at every company. Do you really know that there are no "bad people" working at Hyundai?

I feel sad that this is the place the word has come to. I assume that, like everything, it is just a cycle that will go the other way at some point.

Most people don't want to buy from someone they don't like - I mean this is where cult worship and brand image are important. It is not for no reason Forbes creates a list of most valuable brands every year https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/

Other way to look at it is, would you care if the seller employs child labor, slavery etc?

> Do you really know that there are no "bad people" working at Hyundai?

Elon does not just "work at" Tesla. He is the CEO, the face of the brand. He is actively creating a personal brand that is incredibly polarizing, and Tesla is tied to that personal brand.

Similarly, Zuckerberg is the face of Meta. His personal branding efforts are around him doing MMA and stuff like finding cancer cures and educating poor kids via the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The CEO's personal branding will usually impact any consumer product.

It seems like a pretty understandable position to me... A company is its employees. Their politics will affect the companies decisions long term. Additionally in America corporations have a lot of political power and giving them money ("voting with your wallet") allows them to lobby/bribe politicians onto their side of the political spectrum.

I don't care about politics behind companies but he annoys me so much and seems so wild that I'd feel buying one could be a risk re: long-term service. Which is pretty true in Sweden with his whole Unions debate here.

> I don't get this behavior

Cars have always had massive social signalling value. Brands, e.g. every sports car driven by a non-professional driver, are built on this.

Like, if you drive a spotless custom-coat sawed-off muffler F-450 in New York City or Palo Alto, people might make assumptions about you based on that information. Same, now, for a Tesla. For many people, this is immaterial. For a few it is decisive. For most, it’s a marginal signal. In a crowded car and even EV market, the switching costs are low.

We (in the US, anyway) live in a capitalist society. A consequence of this is that every dollar we spend is like a vote telling that company "I like what you're doing, keep it up."

If a company appears to be doing things that I don't like, whether or not it has anything directly to do with the company's product or service, it's entirely reasonable to withhold my "vote" from them.

In a capitalist society, voting with one's wallet is one of the only actions of power one has.

I don't need the top-to-bottom employee structure of an entire org to be 100% with me on all political or social issues. That's unreasonable. All I really ask for is enough plausible deniability that I'm not directly funding people who would seek to have my friends harmed in the name of their social projects. Unfortunately this is getting harder and harder to manage as everyone is now their own brand manager and feels the need to publicly and financially support their preferred political party, politician, or organization.

You can feel however you want about it. Everyone has a line to draw in their own plot of sand with regard to what they're willing to tolerate and what they're not on this axis. That said if, for example, you don't believe women have the right to their bodies, that people don't have the right to express themselves, those sort of baseline "human" things, then you can very reliably count me out on supporting anything you make if I can possibly avoid it.

> that people don't have the right to express themselves

Actually, that's exactly what I do believe. That was the gist of my comment.

It was? I don't think I understood your comment, then.

What do you think it means that "people should be allowed to express themselves"?

Perhaps we're talking about different comments here. I thought I was responding to this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40055668

Yes. My point is that I don’t believe in being punitive toward people for expressing opinions different than mine. My original comment follows pretty logically from that belief.

Which is why I asked you what you thought it meant to say, “people should be allowed to express themselves”.

> My point is that I don’t believe in being punitive toward people for expressing opinions different than mine.

I mean, it depends on the opinion. If we're talking differences in the number and spacing of tax brackets or whether or not the Government should fund beautification projects for the highway system and not just rote maintenance, yeah. I wouldn't say you should be punished for expressing those opinions.

If on the other hand you think certain groups of people shouldn't be allowed to exist with their full set of rights or in some other way, demonstrably less equal than others, well, that's not really a difference of opinion I'm prepared to entertain. You're wrong. I can't change your mind but I find your viewpoint corrosive and you yourself as a person less appealing, and so I'm disinclined to do business with you.

This is a bizarre kind of entitlement to be honest. "I don't discriminate between people based on their viewpoints so you shouldn't discriminate against me for mine." But like... that's not an understood level playing field. Again, the context is crucial. What is our difference of opinion? It's easy enough to play status quo warrior when the status quo doesn't harm you, but that's an entirely different world for the person it does.

And like, even if it's a low stakes issue to you, like for example, the planning and maintenance of a sewer line, if your hypothetical opposite person is someone who lives near where that sewage line is currently flooding the back of their property with dangerous grey water, they're going to have a MUCH stronger opinion on the maintenance of sewer lines than you, and if you say something like "this really doesn't warrant this kind of aggression" they're probably going to punch you in the face because you're minimizing an active threat to their home because it doesn't directly affect you.

And to be clear, that would be wrong of them to do, but I also would understand why that aggression would come out. If someone else has a problem that's benign and forgettable to you because you don't deal with it every day, if you're sitting in front of them telling them it doesn't matter and they're being ridiculous for getting so upset, well, I think them not wanting to patronize your business is pretty reasonable.

> "I don't discriminate between people based on their viewpoints so you shouldn't discriminate against me for mine."

It's strange you put quotes around that -- but that's not a quote from my comment. And I didn't say it at all.

All I said was that I believe in "freedom on expression" and so I don't behave punitively toward people that hold different opinions. You chose to do what you want.

> If on the other hand you think certain groups of people shouldn't be allowed to exist with their full set of rights or in some other way, demonstrably less equal than others, well, that's not really a difference of opinion I'm prepared to entertain. You're wrong. I can't change your mind but I find your viewpoint corrosive and you yourself as a person less appealing, and so I'm disinclined to do business with you.

I wish you could see how awful this sounds to someone who doesn't believe themselves to be "moral beyond reproach" -- which you seem to. The hard line in both parties (in the US) today take such a "you agree with us or you are an evil person" approach to policy that the foundations of society feel like they are on more tenuous ground than I ever remember them being.

I hope it is just a phase. I fear for our future.

> All I said was that I believe in "freedom on expression" and so I don't behave punitively toward people that hold different opinions. You chose to do what you want.

Difference without distinction. Everyone believes how they behave is the standard by which most people should behave, that's just human nature. You don't need to explicitly say "I don't think you should discriminate against me for mine" for it to be strongly implied in your sentiment. If you didn't think it was the optimum way to behave, you wouldn't behave that way, therefore at least some endorsement of that behavior to others is a natural implication of your statement.

If indeed you have zero issue with it in other people, then why leave this comment at all?

> Like I don't care about the politics of the employees of companies I buy from. ... I feel sad that this is the place the word has come to.

If you don't care, truly, then why do you feel sad?

> I wish you could see how awful this sounds to someone who doesn't believe themselves to be "moral beyond reproach" -- which you seem to.

I guess it's your turn to put words in my mouth then? Except nothing I said follows logically to what you've stated here. I don't believe I'm beyond moral reproach at all, far from it. I'm, in my mind, a reformed libertarian. I still believe many of the things I originally believed, the scales have simply fallen from my eyes with regard to the innate superiority of capitalism and markets. Those things, of course, have a place but I believe they are grossly overstated in our current world and I empathize with the people who suffer from that as a result.

> The hard line in both parties (in the US) today take such a "you agree with us or you are an evil person" approach to policy that the foundations of society feel like they are on more tenuous ground than I ever remember them being.

I mean, sure. But my thinking of them as evil people (which I don't, more on that later) rests on the fact that their policies are demonstrably harmful, that damn near everything wrong with our current world both in the United States and abroad can be laid at the feet, at least in part, in one way or another of extremely liberal economic policies with regard to trade and, alongside that, a massive movement towards privatization of public good services and the destruction of the welfare state, has left people acutely vulnerable to the sorts of violence and grotesqueness we now suffer under daily.

Conversely, their opinion of me being evil rests in heavily propagandized, inaccurate and evil versions of socialism and/or communism (which despite being two different things are used interchangeably, reinforcing the lack of true understanding on their part but I digress) conflated with basic pro-social, pro-worker policies that are not out of place in numerous other developed nations, which up until barely a generation ago had broad support even here in the United States and basically boil down to "maybe people shouldn't be completely subjugated to the wills of their employer who has fundamentally different motivations actually" and "maybe being broke shouldn't be functionally a prison sentence without a release date, or worse, a death penalty."

For example: Are you aware that what became the Affordable Care Act (or as the Republicans coined it, "Obamacare") was originally a pilot program established in Massachusetts by Republican Governor at the time Mitt Romney? But of course because a Democrat had suggested it, the fact that it was mostly a Republican idea didn't matter because the Republicans no longer govern with principles, they govern with rage and so we had a whole new round of propaganda that any amount of relief for people who didn't have insurance was communist and was going to destroy the West as we know it and yadda yadda yadda.

Like, I understand the across-the-aisle belief system inherently. I believed it, for a long time. But fundamentally as the American Right-wing drifted further and further away from actual conservatism which, while being an ideology I disagree with on most points, has an agenda and has principles it adheres to, I could no longer stand by it because it was so fundamentally opposed to all my own personal ethics with regard to the actual freedom they espouse belief in... while simultaneously advocating for massive government overreach and control to fight all the things in the world they feel inadequate compared to.

That was a bit of a tangent on my part, but the point is: I don't view my opposition as evil. Evil is a force of myth, of some unnamed power that holds influence over people. The right even now is not evil, it's an astroturfed movement full of well-meaning, frightened, and heavily, heavily misinformed people backed by an absolutely stressful amount of corporate funding to prop up what is, fundamentally, a broken ideology who's ideas have left vast swathes of the world objectively, measurably worse off.

I don't believe they're evil people but I do believe many of their ideas can definitely be categorized as evil, if someone is feeling poetic. I would use more precise language, like socially corrosive, misinformed and a result of coordinated monetary spend from powerful organizations and people trying to shift public policies in directions that allow them to accrue more power and money. And at the very least, I don't think it's unethical in the slightest for me to decide if a local coffee shop has an All Lives Matter sticker in the window, then that's not a shop I would like to spend money at.

Choosing not to spend my money with a particular company is not being punitive. It's not me denying people the right to express themselves on any level -- everyone can continue to express themselves as they wish.

"Freedom of speech" means people have the right to speak their minds. It doesn't mean everyone has to act as if they didn't hear the speech. Me exercising my right to choose who I will or will not associate with doesn't impact anyone's freedom of speech.

Also feel the need to drop a note here about the incredibly bad-faith conflation of "freedom of speech" with "freedom from consequences of speech." The government does not and should not have the right to imprison you for saying shit, even the worst shit I've ever heard. That being said, if saying it loses you your job, your business clients, your friends and family, and whatever else because they now think you're an asshole of an incredible caliber, I have zero issues with that at all.

If you find it inconvenient to hold shitty principles, I'd suggest you find better principles, not uselessly get upset with other people who no longer want to put up with you.

Why is it being punitive to not buy a car? To call it punitive implies that I'm taking something away. It's the opposite: Tesla has to earn my money, and it's failing to do that.

Or perhaps more simply: I'm choosing to express myself, just like Elon does. And I choose to express my dislike of Elon's antics by not giving him or his companies money.

This happened already right, with the 10% let go yesterday?