I usually don’t read comments on Facebook posts where I’ve shared a link to one of my blog posts. It isn’t that I don’t care what people think about what I’ve written. It’s more that after I write something, I feel good that I’ve expressed how I feel about some subject, and now others are free to express how they feel about what I felt.
Today I made an exception.
My wife was driving us back to Salem from Eugene, where we’d visited our granddaughter, Evelyn, who is finishing her first year at the University of Oregon. Entertaining myself with my iPhone, after clicking on Facebook I was met with a post about my recent HinesSight offering, “Driving a Tesla around Salem with Full Self-Driving, I was super impressed.”
Noticing that there were quite a few comments on Facebook about this blog post, I checked them out. I was only mildly surprised to see that several people criticized me for seriously thinking about buying a Tesla Model Y, because Elon Musk is a billionaire jerk. They used other language to describe Musk, but “billionaire jerk” is a pretty good encapsulation.
What struck me is that I hadn’t said anything about Elon Musk in my post about the Model Y with Full Self-Driving. I simply thought FSD was way cool, something I’d like to have, and no other car company has anything close to it at the moment.
True, when Elon Musk was doing his DOGE thing in the early months of the second Trump administration, I vowed never to buy a Tesla. However, that was more because I thought a Tesla wasn’t a car that I wanted to buy. After all, my wife and I have been happy users of the Starlink satellite internet system that is run by Musk’s SpaceX company, and we thoroughly despise Musk’s political positions.
Everybody is welcome to their own opinion about whether a billionaire jerk owning a company means that someone on the other end of the political spectrum should buy a product from that company.
Me, I have no problem doing this. There’s a lot to like about Tesla, even as there’s a lot not to like about Elon Musk. Likewise, I’m a satisfied subscriber to the digital version of the Washington Post even though I don’t appreciate how Jeff Bezos, another billionaire jerk, has managed that newspaper since he bought it. I’m also addicted to ordering stuff on Amazon, a company founded by Bezos.
It seems to me that politics is intruding too deeply into areas of life removed from politics. Like deciding what car to buy. Tesla jump-started the electric car industry. Tesla has done a lot to reduce carbon emissions and create a Supercharger network that other electric car companies are able to use, albeit with some limitations. (The Superchargers at the Tesla dealership here in Salem can only be used by Tesla owners.)
When people were trashing Teslas at the height of Elon Musk’s infatuation with Donald Trump’s effort to slash government programs and personnel, that was reprehensible. There’s zero inherent relationship between loving a Tesla and loving Elon Musk. In fact, buyers of Teslas tend to be liberal and concerned about protecting the environment, which describes me.
I’m strongly opposed to looking at everything through a political lens. Yes, I’m highly political. I live and breathe politics. But when I visited Salem’s Tesla dealership last Thursday, what I found there was competent, pleasant employees helping people learn about, and buy, the world’s most popular electric car models. (BYD, a Chinese company, has surpassed Tesla in global electric car sales.)
No politics on display. None. Nada.
If someone feels that it is morally wrong for them to buy a product from a company whose CEO or founder acts in ways that they dislike, great. They’re free to boycott that company. However, if other people feel fine about buying products from that company, that’s their right also. Friendships and relationships shouldn’t hinge on any sort of political or moral purity test.
I’m not a bad person if I buy a Tesla. Having been a vegetarian for most of my life, I choose not to eat meat or fish. But when I see people chowing down a steak or a hamburger, I don’t judge them for doing something that, for me, is wrong. They’re doing what they believe is right. I’m all for vigorous political discussion and debate.
But when owning a certain car, subscribing to a certain newspaper, or buying stuff from a certain web site, comes to be viewed as a test of someone’s political virtue, that’s crazy. Again, it’s perfectly possible to love a product/service without loving the CEO or founder of the company that offers that product/service.
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