Elon Musk cancels customer’s order, apparently he doesn’t like bad press
Words: Alex Woodhall
Tesla founder and billionaire Elon Musk reportedly just cancelled a customer’s order because he penned a negative blog post about the South African entrepreneur. In a petty response to venture capitalist Stewart Alsop’s words on Medium, where he described a poorly-managed event that was delayed by nearly 2 hours, Musk decided to personally pull the plug on Alsop’s purchase of a Model X – Alsop had decided to order the car despite how bad he felt the launch of the car had gone.
In his rant on the blogging platform titled “Dear Elon Musk: You should be ashamed of yourself”, Alsop said:
“It’s bad enough that your event producers couldn’t actually produce an event? – ?the so-called Model X Launch Event. Starting a 7:00pm event at 8:50pm is simply unacceptable, particularly when the invited guests are actually your customers! But for you to stand up at 8:52pm and not even acknowledge that you have wasted your own customers’ time was insensitive and poor judgement. You should have apologized right then, but you didn’t.”
Musk, who was supposedly the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr’s portrayal of Tony Stark in the Iron Man films, apparently called Alsop after reading the post. The Tesla CEO felt that the words were a personal attack and was not “comfortable” with Alsop owning a Tesla car and cancelled his order – according to a second post from Alsop.
Publicly, Musk’s only response to the story has been a post on Twitter:
“Must be a slow news day if denying service to a super rude customer gets this much attention.”
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