Elon Musk's questionable behavior

Image source: VG⩘  via Teslarati⩘ 

Updates

These are updates to my original post: Elon Musk's questionable behavior⩘ .

• Ongoing: Musk's behavior has become such an utter shit show that it's not worth noting individual examples anymore. What an embarrassing person.
  A few exceptions:
  
  • May 24, 2025: Expert calls Musk's 'Doge' involvement 'one of the greatest brand destructions'⩘  by Ramon Antonio Vargas, The Guardian.
    
    • "The prominent US marketing professor Scott Galloway says Elon Musk's decision to implement brutal job and spending cuts within the federal government on behalf of the Trump administration was 'one of the greatest brand destructions' ever.
    • "Speaking on Friday's episode of the popular Pivot podcast, which he co-hosts, Galloway said Trump's billionaire businessman adviser alienated the customer base of his electrical vehicle manufacturer Tesla – one of his most important holdings – while aligning himself with a president whose allies aren't interested in the kinds of cars the company makes.
    • "Galloway then cited polling which suggested Tesla had fallen from the eighth-most reputable brand in 2021 to 95th."
  • Jul 5, 2025: 'The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it': the terrifying truth about why Tesla's cars keep crashing⩘  by Sönke Iwersen and Michael Verfürden, The Guardian.
    
    • "Musk has given the world many reasons to criticise him since he teamed up with Donald Trump. Many people do – mostly by boycotting his products. But while it is one thing to disagree with the political views of a business leader, it is another to be mortally afraid of his products. In the Tesla Files, we found thousands of examples of why such fear may be justified."
    • Related: Tesla skepticism continues to grow, robotaxi demo fails to impress Austin. Worse, fewer and fewer consider the brand safe⩘  by Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica, Jul 22, 2025.
  • Jan 2, 2026: Gee, I wonder why? Tesla sales fell by 9 percent in 2025, its second yearly decline⩘  by Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica.
    
    • "Deadly doors, a busted battery bet, and a toxic owner: What's not to like?…
    • "And the cars are getting a bad reputation. According to extensive reporting⩘  by Bloomberg's Dana Hull, at least 15 people have burned to death in Teslas when the doors became inoperable after a crash, half of which occurred since late 2024. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into the topic earlier in 2025. China's regulators have also taken particular issue with Teslas's door handle design, which does not fail in a way that allows it to be opened in an emergency; from January 1, 2027, that design will be banned⩘ .
    • "More bad publicity followed when some of the victims of Tesla crashes—which far outnumber those killed in Ford Pinto fires⩘ —won a $329 million judgment⩘  in a wrongful death lawsuit in August."
• Oct 3, 2023: How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson⩘  by Elizabeth Lopatto, The Verge. "While Isaacson manages to detail what makes Musk awful, he seems unaware of what made Musk an inspiring figure for so long. Musk is a fantasist, the kind of person who conceives of civilizations on Mars. That's what people liked all this time: dreaming big, thinking about new possible worlds. It's also why Musk's shifting political stance undercuts him. The fantasy of the conservative movement is small and sad, a limited world with nothing new to explore. Musk has gone from dreaming very, very big to seeming very, very small."
• Sep 23, 2023: What makes Elon Musk tick?⩘  by David Runciman, The Guardian.
• Jun 21, 2023: I stopped posting these updates a couple months ago. Musk has turned into such an incredibly idiotic shitshow that I couldn't be bothered anymore. But today I was struck by two things. First, I saw reference to his stupid post on Shitter saying he would at least temporarily ban anyone who used the terms "cis" or "cisgender". What an arsehole. I immediately jumped into my account on Mastodon and posted "Cis" just to give him the finger.
  Next I read the following: Musk refused to pay annual bonuses promised to Twitter employees, lawsuit says⩘  by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica. What a fucking shyster.
• Apr 8, 2023: The World's Smartest Man Doesn't Want You to Read This on Twitter⩘  by A.R. Moxon, The Reframe. "Let this sink in."
• Apr 6, 2023: Special Report: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars⩘  by Steve Stecklow, Waylon Cunningham and Hyunjoo Jin, Reuters. "Tesla Inc assures its millions of electric car owners that their privacy 'is and will always be enormously important to us.' The cameras it builds into vehicles to assist driving, it notes on its website, are 'designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.' But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers' car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees."
• Mar 7, 2023: Elon Musk Laughs at Twitter Worker Who Asked If He Still Had a Job⩘  by Jody Serrano, Gizmodo.
  
  • See also:
    
    • Worker asks Elon Musk on Twitter: Have I been fired?⩘  by James Clayton, BBC, Mar 7, 2023.
    • Haraldur Þorleifsson Sweeps Person of the Year Awards⩘  by Erik Pomrenke, Iceland Review, Jan 2, 2023.
    • This is a website; I made it for you⩘  by Haraldur Thorleifsson (Þorleifsson)
    • Elon Musk backpedals after mocking disabled Twitter worker in tweet 'storm'⩘ , Associated Press, Mar 7, 2023. "Thorleifsson's next move: 'I'm opening a restaurant in downtown Reykjavik very soon,' he tweeted. 'It's named after my mom.'
• Feb 19, 2023: Why the Tesla Recall Matters⩘  by Caroline Mimbs Nyce, The Atlantic. "More than 350,000 Tesla vehicles are being recalled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration because of concerns about their self-driving-assistance software.… 'We have never been in a more dangerous place in automotive-safety history, except for maybe right when cars were invented and we hadn't figured out brake lights and headlights yet.' – Missy Cummings, a professor in the computer-science department at George Mason University and a former NHTSA regulator."
• Feb 17, 2023: I Watched Elon Musk Kill Twitter's Culture From the Inside⩘  by Rumman Chowdhury, The Atlantic.
• Feb 10, 2023: Elon Musk Wants to Relive His Start-Up Days. He's Repeating the Same Mistakes.⩘  by Peter Marx, Disconnect. "Since the beginning, Musk has been a terrible boss who expected his workers to be, as he calls it now, 'hardcore.'"
• Jan 20, 2023: Here's a good overview of Musk's casual abuse of the concept of truth: Musk told Tesla staff it was fine to stage self-driving demo⩘ .
  "If there was any doubt that Tesla CEO Elon Musk knew the company's much-watched 2016 self-driving demo was staged, emails obtained by Bloomberg should lay that to rest. 'Just want to be absolutely clear that everyone's top priority is achieving an amazing Autopilot demo drive,' Musk wrote in an email. 'Since this is a demo, it is fine to hardcode some of it, since we will backfill with production code later in an OTA update.'
  "As we now know from Tesla's head of Autopilot software, Ashok Elluswamy, the parking demo actually saw the Model X SUV crash into a fence. A 2021 New York Times article—now mostly confirmed by Elluswamy's testimony in a lawsuit into the death of Walter Huang—also alleged that the car drove over a curb and through some bushes before finding the fence.
  This is not the first time Tesla has shown a difficulty in working with facts. In 2019, we discovered that the company's repeated claims that Autopilot reduced crashes by 40 percent were bogus, and in fact, the system may have increased crashes by 59 percent.
  That same year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had to tell Tesla it was misleading customers by claiming that NHTSA had labeled the Tesla Model 3 the safest car it had ever tested."
• Dec 18, 2022: This article sums it up nicely. Elon's stale playbook⩘  by Linette Lopez, Business Insider. "At Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk was a jerk with a grand vision. At Twitter, he's just a jerk."
• Nov 30, 2022: As I continue to follow the chaos at Twitter via Twitter is Going Great!⩘  and the regular press, I find myself in near disbelief. If I had read something like this in a novel, I would scoff and think it was not credible, yet this is what is unfolding in full view. Accounts that were banned by Twitter's previous moderation team for infractions like abuse, misinformation, and violent conduct are being restored by the tens of thousands. Employees are being treated like unappreciated serfs. And at a time when the pandemic is still killing hundreds of Americans each day and burning across the globe, Twitter is no longer enforcing its COVID-19 misleading information policy. It's like a dystopian nightmare.
• Nov 19, 2022: I never imagined I'd see anything like what has been happening at Twitter under Musk. What a shitstorm. I feel particularly sorry for the employees and contractors going through this, those who were let go, those who chose to go, and most of all, those whose circumstances force them to stay (visa status, financial situation, etc.), as well as for people who used Twitter for legitimate purposes to build a community.
  
  • Today I came across a site that is keeping track of the unfolding shitstorm on a timeline: Twitter is Going Great!⩘ .
  • "The timeline is incomplete but captures a lot of the chaos. It more or less begins with Elon's first appearance at Twitter HQ after the purchase was finalized, sink in hand(s)."
  • "Who is behind this? A collection of people who care about Twitter perhaps a little too much."
  • "Why are you doing this? Because we care about Twitter, and the communities we've found or forged on the site, we want to highlight the damage being done to the reputation, quality, and experience on the site. We also care about the treatment of the Tweeps who built Twitter and who tried to make it a safer place."
• Oct 31, 2022: Like Trump, Elon Musk reveals a vapid mind super-charged by wealth and ego⩘ , opinion by Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Guardian. "This goofy collection of dorm-room-bong-hit-level ideas is taken deeply seriously among the rich boys of Silicon Valley. While, like the libertarianism that intersects with it, longtermism is easy to dissect and dismiss, it is also dangerous because it's so attractive to the rich and powerful. The short-term implications of longtermism include a tolerance, if not embrace, of chaos agents that might include antisemites, fascists, misogynists, tricksters and trolls."
• Oct 30, 2022: As I read about the Tesla engineers who are descending on Twitter to review their codebase, I can't help but think about all of the Tesla Autopilot fail videos I've seen … right, like Tesla can afford to lose the productivity of some of its senior engineers.
• Oct 30, 2022: The meltdown continues: Elon Musk tweets misinformation about Paul Pelosi⩘  by Sara Fischer, Axios. "It's been just two days since Elon Musk officially bought Twitter. Already, the billionaire businessman is using the platform to spread misinformation to his 112 million followers—about the biggest U.S. news of the weekend."
• Oct 15, 2022: Elon Musk's behavior seems to be getting more and more erratic. What has been happening with his on-and-off-and-on again Twitter acquisition is simply baffling. I had already had enough and wanted nothing to do with any of his companies when my Starlink reservation finally came to the front of the queue after a very long wait, so I canceled. But the real tipping point for me is his erratic behavior towards Ukraine, first supporting them with Starlink capability, then advancing a "peace" proposal that would have almost entirely capitulated to Russia's illegal and barbaric invasion, then threatening to pull his support for the now crucial Starling capability. WTF? I definitely don't want to have anything to do with any Musk enterprise anymore.
  "For Ukraine, the stakes are staggeringly high: The satellite service offered by Starlink is now a primary mode of online communication in the country, a consequence of Russia's sustained attack on Ukraine's online infrastructure. A satellite cutoff could cripple Ukraine's military and hand a major advantage to the Kremlin."
  Musk suggests openness to continue funding Starlink access in Ukraine⩘ , The Washington Post.
• Aug 8, 2022: Elon Musk Is Convinced He's the Future. We Need to Look Beyond Him⩘  by Paris Marx, Time. "The tech industry enjoys casting itself as our savior, delivering empowerment and convenience, but along with it has come an unprecedented expansion of surveillance, an erosion of workers' rights, and the empowerment of white nationalist and fascist groups."