Tesla deliveries down 43% in Europe while EVs are up 31%

I'm having trouble thinking of even historical examples of a single person burning this much goodwill.

It makes me really sad when I think about it. We needed, and still need, the person Elon Musk was at least pretending to be when he founded SpaceX.

The French monarchy is probably a good comparison

Did they have goodwill to begin with?

No, not particularly. Aung San Suu Kyi, possibly? Went from martyr to democracy to defending genocide (and has since been detained by another military coup, but is getting somewhat less sympathy this time round).

This much? Hard to say. I'd say Kanye had a steep fall. Joe Rogaine is on his way, but a much slower trajectory. The ex-PM of Canada, Trudeau, definitely did some damage to his popularity over time.

But these are all kind of dime a dozen examples of brand destruction compared to how much Elon has hurt the Tesla brand, IMO.

I was about to type: the man could have done so much for this world. Instead he chose the dark side. What a sad story.

In my day, the term was “Osborne’d”.

“One of the unfortunate things about the ‘Osborne Executive’ was that the owners were unaware of marketing strategies. The ‘Executive’ was a computer that was a bit outdated, so Osborne decided to make an announcement of a future unit that was IBM compatible. The announcement caused a chill on the sales of this particular computer which eventually caused the company to go under. The Osborne Executive came out in 1982 and the company filed for bankruptcy in September of 1983.”

https://vintagecomputer.com/osborne-occ-2-executive.html

Joe Paterno?

It's beyond Tesla. The thing that really worries me is that he's linked the concept of space exploration and settlement to himself in many peoples' minds, discrediting the idea by linking it to inane 4chan /pol politics.

The human future in space is important and needs a better champion.

He's massively empowered the worst elements of the left and the right, which of course feed on each other. On the right he's reviving fascism and race science, and on the left he's giving tremendous ammunition to the "anti-everything" crowd. "See! human ambition is fascist! stop everything now!"

He was, for a time, the antidote to that, a liberal who built things and seemed to believe in a better future.

Just for what it's worth, the whole speech is a fairly insightful and approachable talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj9BZz71yQE, were it not the gaffe it'd have been viewed very positively.

Heliogabalus? That guy managed to be Roman emperor and was condemned to damnatio memoriae after his death. He did some very unpopular things such as trying to change the pantheon to a singular, sun-god entity. Didn't end well. And we're talking about him 2k years later

He's a bit different, more like superhero and supervillain at the same time. The Haber process has probably saved billions.

I'm not sure he was ever a liberal. Maybe a libertarian, for a time.

Today, he spends his time empowering the worst habits of the ultra right and ultra left.

We need modest centrists with no egos driving us towards things like space exploration. Not whatever dystopian space-time trajectory we're on today.

Kim Stanley Robinson owns Mars colonisation now and forever!

Well they had a lot of people on the payroll claiming they were literally chosen by God so they generated a similar amount of positive PR. There's suckers born every century.

It's difficult for people to comprehend in hindsight, but monarchies in Europe had a quasi-religious hold on the population. So not precisely good will, but definitely a cachet that can be burned down.

You're probably alluding to Marie Antoinette.

While her infamous quote "let them eat cake" seems to be falsely attributed to her and many stories about her seem to have been fabrications, she did contribute to the downfall of the French monarchy through her high personal expenses and hardline stance against reforms. I'm not sure her role in the collapse of the monarchy can be compared to Elon Musk's role in tanking Tesla though - views of the monarchy were and would have been unfavorable without her already and her behavior wasn't much of a deviation from before, just made more significant because of the poor financial state of France at the time.

The French monarchy also bankrupted France with lavish spending, and financing the American Revolution. France then had a massive drought and couldn't pay back their debts so they increased taxation across the board and caused the French Revolution...which then caused Napoleon to step in and kill it...so-lets pay off our debt so we can afford our social systems.

I'm not sure he could have. He operated almost entirely on hype. I think the reason he's so addicted to terribly stale memes is that memes carried his popularity during his peak but none of the "real life Tony Stark" comparisons were ever really justified beyond mundane superficialities.

He stylized himself as "founder" of PayPal and Tesla, and "chief engineer" at SpaceX, but he's none of the things and even the specifics of his supposed university degrees seem dubious upon investigation. He has also repeatedly demonstrated a lack of basic practical knowledge in domains he publicly talks about while allegedly having deep technical knowledge from committing entire sections of text books to memory. He knows how to seem like a genius without actually having the hands-on experience to back it up.

He has been widely successful as a hype man and somehow managed to keep things going while continuously ovepromising and underdelivering. But I find it difficult to imagine that resulting in a positive as long as the purposes are ultimately entirely self-centered. He seems to be desparately trying to look "cool" and be admired - even going to the lengths of pretending to be world class at a number of challenging video games by paying people to boost his accounts and by widely exagerating his real participation in competitive e-sports. He's extremely insecure and unable to handle challenges to his qualifications or authority.

I find it plausible that at one point he did have the aspiration to be the man who put the first man on Mars but it wasn't driven by the motives he has claimed (multiplanetary species etc) because that would require acknowledging the global requirements to sustain such a project over the long term. Instead it seems to have been entirely about creating a legacy and a perception of himself. I guess if his desire was to be mentioned in future history text books he has achieved that - but not for landing reusable rocket boosters.

> That guy managed to be Roman emperor and was condemned to damnatio memoriae after his death.

There were quite a few of these; Elagabalus is probably the best-known for it, but about 30 emperors received _some_ form of damnatio memoriae.

> And we're talking about him 2k years later

Well, clearly the damnatio memoriae didn't work very well, then, did it?