#musk

Ommm – ummmm

The first thing they drummed into me when I started as a copywriter for Volkswagen: “Never use superlatives. They only get you in trouble.” Now, Elon Musk is in trouble over who was first to fully pay back the government loan.

The tweet was true: As indicated on Tuesday, Tesla paid off its DOE loan on Wednesday. Nine years before the note was due, Tesla “wired $451.8 million to repay the full loan with interest,” as Reuters says.

Loans from the Department of Energy seemed to be a great idea at the time, now they are a millstone one wants to get rid of.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk found the perfect scapegoat for lost Tesla sales and a 13 percent drop of the company’s stock: John Broder of the New York Times. Musk told Reuters that “Tesla has lost about $100 million in sales and canceled orders due to the Times story, which said the sedan ran out of battery power sooner than promised during a chilly winter test drive from Washington D.C. to Boston.” Musk should look in the mirror if he needs a scape goat.

As a retired operative of the auto propaganda community, I watched the schoolyard brawl between Tesla’s Elon Musk and the New York Time’s John Broder with detached interest. I won’t re-hash it again. Unless you live in a monastery in Tibet, and your Samsung Note 2 was impounded, because you were caught masturbating to Google image search, it was impossible to escape the fallout from the war of tweets, blogs, and counter-tweets. To this day, bullets and barbs still ricochet through the Internet. Only hours ago, Musk was still seen tweeting about an “impressively out of touch NYT auto editor,” while the world at large is utterly confused. And that is the true tragedy. This after-action report is dedicated to the victims.

Tow truck delivers Model S to charging station

New York Times reporter John Broder told a harrowing story of a test drive from Delaware to Connecticut in a Tesla-supplied Model S. Broder wanted to review both the car and Tesla’s Supercharger stations along I95. The drive ended on a flatbed truck with a Model S that had run out of juice. The story landed Broder on Elon Musk’s shitlist.

Elon Musk offered Boeing Tesla’s help with its troubled Boeing 787 battery packs. He wants Boeing try the packs Tesla uses in its SpaceX rockets and Tesla cars. Ever the hipster, Musk announced the unsolicited aid via Twitter:

Elon Musk is known as a bigtime Barack Obama donor, and he is hoping he will get his money’s worth. Musk thinks (hopes? knows?) that government largesse for electric cars will continue unabated during the second term.

Even the most ardent EV proponents, like Nissan, think that by 2020, the market share of electric cars will be 10 percent.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has some better predictions