70% of his followers and/or who saw the poll said it didn't. Hardly a valid survey by any best practice among pollsters.
If by "do this all the time" - you mean pander towards a specific affinity group, then I agree. Patagonia's politics are well known.
What's less common is for CEOs to reverse polarity and publicly declare loyalty to a party in opposition of the products alleged mission.
Take at a look at the list of US states by vehicles per capita or vehicle miles driven per capita. Red states at the top. If you're trying to get people to buy electric cars and stop burning oil, those are the ones you need to convince.
Aside: do you believe that Elon's actions are motivated by the desire to reduce gas emissions in red states, or is this more of a thought experiment? My hot take is that his frustrations with Covid lockdowns in California kicked his animus toward Democratic party politicians into high gear.
They do when they run a charging network.
Also, it's easier to sell an electric car to someone who is going to put a lot of miles on it because of the lower cost per mile, and does more good if the goal is to reduce CO2.
> do you believe that Elon's actions are motivated by the desire to reduce gas emissions in red states, or is this more of a thought experiment?
It's a counterpoint to the notion that progressives who live in cities and ride mass transit are the people the CEO of a car company has to appeal to. Whether the goal is to make more cars electric or just to sell more cars.
> My hot take is that his frustrations with Covid lockdowns in California kicked his animus toward Democratic party politicians into high gear.
That's probably not irrelevant.
The problem with politics right now is that everyone sucks and instead of trying to do better they all just want to tell you that the other side sucks worse, which causes aggressive polarization when most people are only listening to one side's pundits or the other. Everyone is being told that they need to vote against the enemy without ever being told what they're voting for.
People (Musk not excluded) then end up in one bubble or the other and the people in the other bubble are obliged to hate them out of tribal loyalty. Which especially rubs people the wrong way when it's someone who isn't squarely in one tribe or another.
Nobody blinks an eye when a Texas oil billionaire takes the conservative position on some issue.
> the Twitter acquisition followed a period of Twitter (and most other social media) banning a lot of conservative accounts for publishing truthful reporting (New York Post)
The NY Post's Twitter has been banned multiple times, including the most recent one that happened in March 2023, well after Musk's takeover of the company.
> or actual satire with the disfavored political leaning (Babylon Bee)
Yes. Twitter had terms of use. And posting hateful and targeted attacks misgendering people was against their terms. This wasn't some "THEY'RE PERSECUTING ME FOR MUH CONSERVATIVE BELIEFS!". This was just flat out them being unambiguous assholes.
They were, in particular, suspended immediately prior to the 2020 election over a story that was substantially accurate.
> Twitter had terms of use.
Everything has terms of use. All of the terms of use are purposely written so that anything the company wants can be construed as a violation.
But also, "misgendering people" is a point of political dispute. "We prohibited the opposition's politics and then banned them for it" is in fact what they're objecting to.
If I ask you to call me Bill and you keep calling me William, you're an asshole. I don't know how misgendering people is any different. Just call people what they want to be called. You don't have to turn this into some ideological battle.
If your gender is like your name, which you can choose yourself, then it can't be bound to anything you can't change, like your chromosomes or the hormone levels you had during puberty. In other words, it can't map to biological sex. Which, okay, that's kind of the idea, isn't it? Someone wants to have sex male but gender female.
Except that then nobody really cares about gender at all. When you want to have things like women's sports or prospective dating interactions in which people may want to have biological children or anything else where sex differences actually matter, what people want you to declare is not your gender but your sex.
This then becomes the motte and bailey where gender is supposed to be different than sex but somebody who has reason to actually care about sex is then told that they have to accept gender instead or they're a bigot, as if they aren't different. And that is the point of political contention.
The difference with pronouns/gender is that they depend on and proclaim external facts. ("She" is used for women and by going by she, I am a woman.) And by asking someone else to say that I am a woman, then really, aren't I forcing someone to change their definition of "woman"/"man"? Why do I have the right to force someone to do that?
Out of curiosity, if someone asked you to use plural pronouns for them, would you? (This is hard to ask in English, because "your" is used for both singular and plural subjects, and "they" has also commonly been used for both singular and plural as well, but imagine) What about pronouns in other languages? Do you really think that in communication, the other speaker shouldn't have any say in any of this?
I don't appreciate comments that suggest that someone you're discussing is an "asshole" for doing something you disagree with and don't think that contributes to the conversation.
You’re omitting that they had to make targeted attacks to be banned. You could talk in the abstract all day, as so many did, and never have a problem - it was only when they started targeting specific people who didn’t consent to some kind of debate. This is like going into a gay bar, yelling in some dude’s face that homosexuals are going to hell, and then whining about oppression when the bouncer tells you to leave.
I'm not quite sure that Trump's publuc would rush over to buy Teslas.
This does not tell me anything. Maybe the republicans just have better arguments this time. Or the other way around. And then the losing side after elections may have to grind their teeth for a while. That is the way it is supposed to be.
Companies do this all the time though. The trade off is, of course, that you get more support from customers the other side.
> But the guy's principles is "big business is right"... I'm not sure what he wants to achieve.
This is not an accurate representation. For example, the Twitter acquisition followed a period of Twitter (and most other social media) banning a lot of conservative accounts for publishing truthful reporting (New York Post) or actual satire with the disfavored political leaning (Babylon Bee), at which point Musk did a Twitter poll asking the entire site if Twitter adheres to the principle of free speech:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1507259709224632344
70% said it didn't, so he bought it.
This upset a lot of people (not least the people who liked the preexisting system that tended to ban their political opponents) and they've been characterizing everything he does in a negative light since. So then you'll get a lot of stories about a left-leaning account being suspended with the implication that he's just doing it the other way now, with no investigation into whether the suspension was deserved, or just characterizing the unavoidable false positives and false negatives in moderation as a willful bias etc.
That isn't to say he's a saint, but the impression you'd get from reading a lot of this coverage is that he's the devil.