I worry that what may kill Elon's ventures in the end will be the collective weight of many small moments of impatience or hubris compounding over time, which is sad because the broad strokes have been fairly well played so far.
And the plethora of USA Liar Laws such as the "Patriot Act", "Inflation Reduction" bill...
Until then, we live in a country owned by Marketers and Lobbyists, and Elon Musk can call his AI cars Self-Driving* as long as he likes
I don't care about Autopilot and instead want to comment on some of the rest of your list. What are you going on about?? Veggie Patty is not a marketing lie in the slightest. It's a patty. It's made of plants. That's about as straight-forward as possible. The mRNA vaccines do in fact make use of mRNA; no lie there. Almond milk is a fine name. It's milk from an almond in the dictionary definition of the word. Really struggling to understand what you're getting at here...
Tesla should be #1 in the definition of a marketing-first company. Why are they not? Their marketing!
Tesla does zero ads. They don’t even have a PR team (go ask journalists, they literally find nobody to talk to at Tesla).
They scaled from 3,000 cars to 3 million cars in just ten years. Back in 2011, I saw exactly ONE Tesla roadster in Santa Monica. Now, walk around for two minutes and you’ll see several S, 3, X and Y. Same in Switzerland. In 2016, I’d see one or two a day. Now you see several per hour. These cars are real, and they are changing the world around us.
How can you call that a “marketing-first company”?
Yes, they are getting attention. But they’re getting it for the things they are actually building.
They are also the place that attracts the most engineering talent. I have yet to find a Tesla job post for social media marketing.
Tesla’s main achievement is not marketing. It’s volume production (i.e. manufacturing). And building cars that convert people when they drive them. You can call that marketing. But I would call that engineering and product design.
I still can’t get my head around that anyone let them call it “Autopilot” from the get go - especially in a country that has manufacturers of microwave ovens put a warning on their product that its not suitable for drying their pet’s fur.
