Which is because he is in the media a lot.
I can understand the impact on your brand as things are, but it would be interesting to see how well other manufacturers would stand up to scrutiny.
> musk wasn't tesla's face and main profiteer of any purchase.
The face bit of it makes sense.
As for "main profiteer", he is the single largest shareholder, but its about 13% shareholding - 87% of the profits belong to other people.
And since the compensation is equity, comparing it to profit, which is cash, makes no sense. One can discuss if the market price of the equity is too far removed from current profit, but surely even Elon doesn’t have any influence over what millions of investors around the world choose to pay for Tesla shares.
Should majority owners of a business not be able to vote on compensation?
I do find it surprising that such ridiculously generous pay was approved by shareholders and think it rather prove what GK Galbraith said: "The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself".
On the other hand there are limits, and at this point I wonder whether shareholders will decide he is a liability and not pay him so well in future. If I was a shareholder I would want to sack him.
I didn’t realize people still believed this?
He placed his hand over his heart and then waving out to the crowd followed by saying “my heart goes out to you,” words which mimic the motion.
It’s been on video since the day it became a story.
It's not just that I live in a city with small brass plaques on the pavement, in memory of those who were made to disappear last time[0].
It's not just that protestors projecting the image of the guy himself in the middle of that salute, on the walls of his own factory in Brandenburg, was enough to warrant an official investigation because such symbolism is unlawful in Germany[1].
He tried to support to the AfD political party in Germany, who were already suspected of being an extremist party (and have since been officially determined as such), and where several party members had already faced legal problems for using banned Nazi slogans[2] while their former friends at the EU level dropped them for trying to rehabilitate the image of the actual SS[3].
This is who they were before Musk chose to support them. And you trust his word on the innocent interpretation?
It's not like Musk has otherwise got a reputation for being particularly trustworthy — Musk got away with calling someone a pedo by claiming it was a joke; he's been punished for claiming that an offer to buy Tesla for 420/share, which can only be interpreted as a joke, was serious, and that he's really upset to be accused of saying anything untrue; he's mislead people about how close his cars are to full self driving, leading to out-of-court settlements[4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-musk-tesla-nazi-salute/a-71403...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/german...
[3] https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/european-parl...
[4] https://electrek.co/2023/11/07/tesla-owner-wins-10k-settleme...
While I think Musk seems to have duplicated Jobs' Reality Distortion Field*, the second CEO-ing of Jobs didn't strike me as quite as severely attaching Apple to Jobs as all of Musk's businesses are now with Musk. For example, quite a lot of the industrial design of that era is (and was) strongly associated with Jony Ive, not Steve Jobs.
I think at best, out of all of Musk's business empire, the closest you get to a Jony Ive-esq "it's not Jobs" is that Gwynne Shotwell is well regarded and seen as being highly competent in her own right; the second closest is that Linda Yaccarino gets named a decent amount in the news, but even then she's very much in Musk's shadow. The public perception of Neuralink and The Boring Company is just "Musk announced his company, [Neuralink|TBC] did ${thing}".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field — and apparently I'm nearly a decade late in making this connection
If the board of that company additionally wants to do everything they can to shovel $50 billion to that known "problematic" CEO - well, that's not something non-fascists are going to like.
Doing multiple hitler salutes in public on stage should have consequences - and when a company is tied that much to your personal image and is viewed as your, and only your, "masterpiece", that company is obviously going to become synonymous to whatever horrible thing you do.
Tesla has always been about trust in musk and always had a bit of a Führerkult. And now they're noticing why that might be a mistake.
Case in point: My company (in the PV-space in germany) recently decided to modernize their fleet and would have bought a couple hundred teslas if musk wasn't tesla's face and main profiteer of any purchase. But in the current situation, that would be insanity and toxic to our public image, so we went with something more "politically quiet".
Tesla has essentially become a political statement now, I'd say.