“ ‘Ripping society apart with bile-filled outbursts is the polar opposite of what the world needs to meet the challenges of the future. Grow up, Elon. It’s time to act like an adult, not an overgrown baby.’ ”
That’s CleanTechnica blogger Steve Hanley reconsidering his purchasing plans for a new Tesla TSLA, +1.56% Model Y in a fiery takedown of Elon Musk on Wednesday.
Hanley said he has, for many years, had a “sneaking suspicion” that the Tesla boss is “an arrogant ass.” Specifically, he took issue with the misleading “Autopilot” label for his cars, as well as Musk’s “frankly stupid” decision to tweet about the company’s stock price, to name a couple.
The latest dust-up with Alameda County over public-health directives, in which Musk threatened to move his company out of California, is just the latest example.
Hanley said it comes across as “the actions of a self-important jerk who believes he can defecate in the middle of a crowded room and pretend nothing out of the ordinary happened.”
Read: California assemblywoman hits Musk with an F-bomb
The issue for Hanley goes well beyond the assembly lines at the Tesla factory.
“Such shenanigans have a deleterious effect on other members of society,” he explained. “It is becoming fashionable now, as the coronavirus crisis drags into its 9th week, for some people to claim — loudly — that all health directives, whether at the city, county, state, or federal level, are unconstitutional violations of their personal liberty.”
And we’ve seen plenty of that, ranging from the armed protesters at the Michigan state house or the raucous bunch in Southern California marching for the right to access beaches.
“Elon would never acknowledge this, but his actions encourage such outrageous behavior,” Hanley wrote. “If Musk was a private citizen on an island in the Pacific, no one would care if he walked around naked throwing hand grenades at the local fauna, but a person who thrusts himself into the public eye should expect to behave with some decorum.”
From there, Hanley directed his rant toward the White House.
“America is currently ruled by petulant people who behave like two-year-olds with full diapers,” he wrote. “Liberty doesn’t mean being able to do any goddamn thing you please.”
Tesla representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
While Musk continues to be a controversial figure during the coronavirus pandemic, there’s no assailing the performance of Tesla’s stock, which has nearly doubled since the beginning of the year while the S&P 500 SPX, +1.15% is down about 12% over the same period.
CleanTechnica claims to be the No. 1 cleantech-focused website in the world, reaching some 7 million readers globally each month. Apparently, it can count Musk as a reader, considering he retweeted the website’s story earlier this week about Tesla employees returning to work.
