Elon Musk says Tesla will ‘try to do a little advertising’

Elon Musk said Tuesday that Tesla will launch ads for its electric vehicles, a first for the company founded more than two decades ago.

“We’ll try to do a little advertising and see how it goes,” Musk said in response to a question from a shareholder at Tesla’s investor day.

The automotive industry is among the biggest spenders on advertisements, but Tesla has largely avoided traditional advertising and has instead relied on word of mouth and incentive referrals.

Tesla fans and shareholders expressed some frustration that the wider public was often unaware of the carmaker’s features as Tesla ramps up production for a mainstream audience.

In a follow-up interview with CNBC’s David Faber on Twitter Space, he said Tesla was interested in running ads that were informative, aesthetically pleasing and beautiful.

Asked for more details, he said: “I agreed to it; I don’t have a fully formed strategy.

Musk answered questions for more than an hour during two events in which he promoted Tesla’s driverless technologies, argued that working from home is “morally wrong”, and said China needs to live up to its word. What needs to be acknowledged is that it sees Taiwan as integral. Country.

Musk, who has promised for years that Tesla’s “full self-driving” efforts would soon allow Tesla owners to lease their vehicles to robotaxi fleets, which would make them money, once again said the technology this year Must be available.

He said Tesla would soon have a “ChatGPT moment” – a reference to the OpenAI tool that was widely adopted within days of its launch last autumn. He said, ‘Suddenly 30 lakh cars will drive themselves. And then 5mn cars, and then 10mn cars.

Meanwhile, Musk acknowledged that advertising on Twitter — the social media company he acquired last year — is experiencing trouble. He said in the interview that Twitter recently lost $40 million after “two very large advertisers” had their ads fact-checked and labeled misleading by Community Notes—including ads that were fact-checked. A crowdsourcing facility for investigation tweets.

He recently hired Linda Yacarino, former head of advertising at NBCUniversal, to replace him as chief executive of Twitter while he focuses on the more technical aspects of the platform. He’s also kept up his prolific tweeting habit since acquiring the company, and shows no signs that he’s ready to stop.

He told CNBC’s Faber, “I’ll say what I want, and if it results in a loss of money, then so be it.”

The South African entrepreneur has long said he was against employees working from home – he has even banned remote working on Twitter since taking office. On Tuesday he called it “a bit like that fake Marie Antoinette quote, ‘let them eat cake,'” because white-collar workers could stay home while expecting others to deliver their meals and make their own stuff.

When Musk was asked about geopolitical tensions involving China and the US over Taiwan, he said, “there is a certain inevitability of the situation”, because “China’s official policy is that Taiwan should be unified”. .

Musk agreed that taking Taiwan to China would not be good for Tesla, “or any company in the world”, but he also suggested that breaking away from China was not a realistic policy option. The company has a plant in Shanghai that can produce 22,000 vehicles a week, nearly four times the capacity of Tesla’s Texas plant.

“The Chinese economy and the rest of the global economy are like twins – such is the gravity of the situation. And it’s actually worse for other companies than Tesla. I mean, I’m not sure where you’d find an iPhone, for example.