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Dear Tesla Ethicist:
My allegiance to Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been long-standing — at least until lately. I remember being excited at seeing my first sighting of a Model S in western Connecticut in the mid-2010s. It was sleek and alluring, and it gave me hope that battery-electric vehicles would inspire more people to awaken to the climate crisis that threatens our planet. I knew that Tesla’s mission was to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, and their goal was dependent on building products that replace some of the planet’s biggest polluters. Their products ever since have helped lower emissions. As late as 2023, Tesla’s customers avoided releasing over 20 million metric tons of CO2e into our atmosphere.
Throughout that remarkable decade Musk had presented himself as a constant driving force toward climate awareness and action. That all changed, it seems, with Donald J. Trump’s run for a second term as US President. For a reason I can’t quite figure — Even more public recognition? More $$ for a guy who’s already the world’s richest person? A US federal power grab for a non-native citizen? — Musk used his social media platform, X, to influence the presidential campaign in Trump’s favor. Of greatest concern to me is Musk’s failure to regulate accounts that distorted online conversations and diminished support for climate policies. A lack of X policies against the spread of misleading climate disinformation is well-documented; the platform fails to address climate misinformation, offers no substantive public transparency mechanisms, and provides no evidence of effective policy enforcement.
The climate crisis polled low in voter interest in the recent 2024 US presidential election. Musk’s online manipulation through bots and algorithms clearly was a factor in voter indifference at the ballot box. Numerous accounts that appeared to be bots on X generated over 4 billion views while amplifying climate disinformation. Calls on X to increase its moderation efforts and get better at enforcing its own policies against inauthentic activity were ignored.
Now we’re looking at four years of climate authoritarianism with Trump in the executive office.
The all-electric car company Tesla and Musk are inextricably tied. Musk’s toxic social media approach to the voices of climate science and reason makes him complicit in Trump’s professed “drill, baby, drill” approach to the fossil fuel industry. Should Tesla, as a prestigious corporation with a market capitalization of $1.22 trillion, disavow Musk’s moves to create a perpetual climate disinformation machine?
Signed, A former Tesla fan boy
From the Tesla Ethicist:
As a general rule, corporate chief executive officers who receive low rankings have presided over major declines in company financial performance, incompatible mergers, misdirected marketing strategies, or failed product lines. Tesla’s growth story from startup to multi-billion-dollar Wall Street favorite has been led in large part by its CEO. Your reasons for distancing Tesla as a company from its CEO don’t follow this thinking about in-house declines.
Perhaps your disillusionment with Musk might have arisen from his pivot toward building humanoid robots at Tesla or his laser focus on self-driving. Both of these could be argued as contrary to automaker trends to periodically release a new model to keep the vehicle line fresh. Tesla has toyed with, but not delivered, a new model other than the much-recalled Cybertruck.
But your argument isn’t actually Tesla-grounded: it’s more that the wide-ranging ethics of its CEO have a trickle-down effect on the company you’ve loved. Moreover, there’s a correlation for progressive voters to align themselves with clean energy initiatives. The Inflation Reduction Act is a shining example of climate activists’ recent advocacy achievements.
Then again, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence reported that Tesla and its oft-battery partner Panasonic were on track to receive about $1.8 billion in Inflation Reduction Act production tax credits in 2023. That’s no small amount for production credits, and with that in mind it’s hard to reconcile Musk’s turncoat allegiance to Trump. Even with the tease of co-leading a commission who’d study government fiscal accounts, with the goal to identify thousands of programs that could be decimated, seems too broad a reach for Musk as a clean energy visionary. Musk’s capitulation was startling, considering all the evidence at hand about bots and voter indifference. Research showed, in the weeks surrounding Trump’s first term announcement about withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, accounts suspected of being bots accounted for roughly a quarter of all tweets about climate change. Bots were not just prevalent then but disproportionately supportive of Trump’s announcements or skeptical of climate science and action.
As Viktor Pickard noted recently on Common Dreams, from sanewashing to false equivalence, from trivializing policy implications to fetishizing polls, the media had a real opportunity to emphasize what was at stake in the 2024 presidential election. Musk chose to lean to the other extreme, not just offering both sides of issues but supporting the alarming policies Trump has proposed.
Your point about Musk’s ability to rein in non-human bots that spread disinformation and which clearly prompted voter indifference is appropriate. Researchers confirm that automated accounts can distort the climate conversation online. Journalism used to be known as the Fourth Estate — it would monitor and make transparent the inner workings of governments as a public-oriented mechanism of accountability. That day has largely come and gone. Instead, most media outlets assume that the commercial nature of journalism is inherently tied to capitalism, hence its occasional cognitive dissonance.
But not everyone agrees. Many people feel strongly that today’s media systems far too often privilege profit over democratic concerns. Ascendant platforms like X that foster voter indifference weigh heavily on climate and other activists.
You seem to want the Tesla board to reinvent themselves and for Musk to moderate his love of grandiose spectacle. You and many others would like to see Musk refocus on making the once-dominant all-electric car company shine again as a beacon of climate vision. You want Musk to rise up against vote suppression by rejecting disinformation, which has a long provenance in the US.
Is Musk “weird?” Mercurial? Self-involved? Fascinated by the new cronyism? You know it.
But Tesla shareholders and its board, it seems, want to keep Musk in place. Shareholders seemed not to listen to Musk when endorsed the antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, wondered why no one tried to assassinate the Democratic nominee for president, and reiterated his belief that the country and its Constitution could not continue to exist if Trump weren’t reelected. While Musk’s pay package was the topic of much conversation and controversy in the lead-up to the 2024 Tesla Annual Shareholders Meeting on June 13, the shareholders ultimately approved the highest compensation ever for a CEO. Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick in Delaware has now invalidated the compensation package twice.
Until such a time that Tesla fails to produce profits because of Musk’s unethical and idiosyncratic behavior, the Tesla board seems unlikely to make any move that would jeopardize their stake in the cascading company cash that flows their way. Voter indifference about the climate crisis doesn’t seem to rank high on their interest list at all. In fact, voter indifference, at least in part, has fueled the Tesla stock price to soar to $384 today. That’s a motivation that many persons will find difficult to reject.
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