15 Reasons to Boycott Tesla

Over the past few years, it’s become clear that Elon Musk is harmful and dangerous to individuals and the world as a whole. At the same time, he has become the richest person in the world, and also one of the most powerful. That’s a toxic and threatening combination. Given he derives most of his power from owning a large amount of Tesla, the only way to really reduce his power is to boycott Tesla.

This is more important than boycotting Twitter for three reasons: 1) Twitter is only a small portion of his wealth. 2) Musk has already done such great damage to Twitter that it has no chance of making a profit under him, and has already lost most of its monetary value. 3) There are now 30 good electric car alternatives to Tesla, but there’s no good alternative to Twitter for human rights activists, journalists, democracy organizers and others working to improve the world. Thus it’s best to avoid killing it, so it can be sold to a white knight who will reverse the Musk changes.

With that in mind, it might be ideal for people to keep their accounts, but mostly use them for important, world-improving things. The results would be: A) Traffic drops by 40% to 60%, so Musk still loses a ton of money. Keep in mind that most of his losses have already come from advertisers not wanting to be associated with racists, hate-mongers, insurrectionists and other vile people he’s restored. A 40% traffic drop on top of that will cause so much bleeding that Musk will be forced to sell. Even with no traffic drop, he’d eventually be forced to sell due to the exodus of advertisers. B) A lot of the most necessary good uses of Twitter continue. C) Potential white-knight buyers are willing to buy it because there are still a large number of users, who still partially use it. In a nutshell, make it bleed badly, but don’t kill it.

But whatever you decide to do with Twitter, we strongly recommend boycotting Tesla because that is where is power really comes from. And as this list below makes clear, Musk’s damage to people is far bigger and wider than wrecking Twitter.

The electric vehicle market will do better with less of a Tesla monopoly

People should know that boycotting Tesla will actually help the EV marketplace and climate change, and not the other way around. This is because the current, irrational “cult of Tesla” is hurting the market for EVs in multiple ways:

A) It has given Tesla a monopoly in North America and other countries. Monopolies hurt competition. A lack of competition results in higher prices, lower quality and less innovation.

Tesla now has 73% of EV sales in North America. When something like that occurs, even despite … ADD MORE.

B) The monopoly hasn’t been justified. The Tesla fad has been kind of similar to when things like Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch kids and other products were fads based on irrational psychology. A few years after the Beanie Baby fad passed, prices for most of them dropped 5-fold to 10-fold. That means that during the irrational fad, prices were on average 500% to 1,000% higher than a little after the fad. Did the quality of the Beanie Babies massively drop? No, not even a little bit. In fact, the prices of Beanie Babies made during the craze also dropped 5-fold to 10-fold, so quality had zero to do with the craze. It was complete irrationality and group think.

We’re not saying that Teslas are bad cars. But we are saying that there’s been a large amount of irrationality and group think. For example, Tesla’s are among the worst in build quality and the number of issues that owners have during the first few years of ownership.

C) If it continues, it will hurt the transition to EVs. For a transition to EVs to occur, it’s key that all automakers invest heavily in EVs, including large-scale manufacturing of them. But if they come out with high quality cars, as they have, and not enough people buy them because they irrationally “desire” only the thing they see as “in,” those car companies will scale back their transition to EVs and reduce their plans for creating manufacturing for EVs.
There are NNN million drivers of vehicles in the world. At present only N% of them drive EVs. That means that if the world is to transition to EVs by 2035, during the next 13 years, NNN million EVs need to be made. Tesla is not going to be able to do 50% of that.

D) Diversity of brands and models is key. People have a huge range of tastes and preferences. In order to get most people or all people to switch to EVs by 2035, a truly wide variety of models are needed at a wide number of price points. If a major auto company is not selling enough of a model, they discontinue it. Thus, even though they have been coming out with many new models, if early adopter consumers blow them off, they’ll be discontinued – and that will also hurt the transition to EVs.

E) Lower price points = less carbon emissions. Tesla’s lowest priced model is basically $NN,NNN. Making a car like that generates far more emissions than making a car that is 50% less expensive. Thus, early adopters making a fad out of Tesla are currently contributing to higher emissions both through their own ownership and also through social influence on others.

F) Wait times of 6 to 12 months to get Teslas result in more emissions than driving an EV sooner.

Action steps

This section still needs to be done. Items will include:

– JOIN OUR EMAIL LIST

– POST ON SOCIAL MEDIA TO SPREAD THE WORD

-POST IF YOU SELL YOURS OR IF YOU BUY A DIFFERENT VEHICLE

– LIKE / FOLLOW US

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A huge number of reasons

There are so many ways in which Musk is harmful or off-track that we couldn’t fit many of them into this list of 18 reasons. This could possibly be called 18 reasons to boycott Elon Musk. But given the fact that he derives most of his power and wealth from owning a large amount of Tesla, the best way to boycott him is to boycoutt Tesla.

This is more important than boycotting Twitter for three reasons: 1) Twitter is only a small portion of his wealth. 2) Musk has done great damage to Twitter even without a boycott, so it’s already lost most of its monetary value. 3) There are now 30 good electric car alternatives to Tesla, but there isn’t a good alternative to Twitter for human rights activists, journalists, democracy organizers and others working to improve the world.

It is a very important information exchange. add more here, including examples …

So without further ado, here are the many reasons to boycott Tesla and Musk.

1. Long-term blatant, harmful racism at Tesla

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2. His vehement opposition to billionaires paying higher taxes that would reduce taxes on the middle class and poor

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3. Aggressive opposition to public transit

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4. Gigantic amounts of lying

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5. $70,000 electric vehicles don’t solve climate change

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6. Musk wants to replace most human jobs with robots

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7. Being vicious towards others

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8. Musk has treated his wives poorly

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9. Musk makes false accusations against innocent people

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10. Giving dangerous, false hope that living on Mars is an acceptable alternative for humans if climate change wrecks earth

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11. Heavy-duty demonization of unions

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12. Dangerous self-driving experiment letting untrained people test out the self-driving software that’s not ready

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13. Breaking the law by firing 50% of Twitter without proper notice or severance

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14. Gutting moderation at Twitter, resulting in 400% increases in hate speech and racism

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15. Re-instating harmful people for no reason other than a hasty, unscientific 24-hour Twitter poll

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COPY OF NEWS ARTICLE ABOUT TESLA RACISM

Warning: This story quotes several racist slurs allegedly directed at Black workers at Tesla’s California plant, according to a lawsuit filed against the company.

The N-word and other racist slurs were hurled daily at Black workers at Tesla’s California plant, delivered not just by fellow employees but also by managers and supervisors.

So says California’s civil rights agency in a lawsuit filed against the electric-vehicle maker in Alameda County Superior Court on Thursday on behalf of thousands of Black workers after a decade of complaints and a 32-month investigation.

Tesla segregated Black workers into separate areas that its employees referred to as “porch monkey stations,” “the dark side,” “the slave ship” and “the plantation,” the lawsuit alleges.

Only Black workers had to scrub floors on their hands and knees, and they were relegated to the Fremont, Calif., factory’s most difficult physical jobs, the suit states.

Graffiti — including “KKK,” “Go back to Africa,” the hangman’s noose, the Confederate Flag and “F– [N-word]” — were carved into restroom walls, workplace benches and lunch tables and were slow to be erased, the lawsuit says. ….

The lawsuit comes in the wake of Tesla’s billionaire chief executive, Elon Musk, moving the company’s headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin, Texas, where he is building a major new assembly plant.

The state’s lawsuit suggests the relocation to a state known for looser enforcement is no coincidence, declaring it to be “another move to avoid accountability.”

California lawsuit against Tesla

Not only were Tesla’s Black workers subjected to “willful, malicious” harassment, but they were also denied promotions and paid less than other workers for the same jobs, the suit asserted. They were disciplined for infractions for which other workers were not penalized.

In an interview, DFEH Director Kevin Kish said the lawsuit is the largest ever brought by the state for racial discrimination in terms of the size of the affected workforce since the agency gained prosecutorial powers in 2013.

Before that, complaints were handled by an agency administrative law judge rather than in court. But as more employers have forced workers to sign arbitration agreements preventing them from taking complaints to court, “government has the only effective enforcement mechanism to remedy broad pervasive violations in a workplace,” he said. ….

“Tesla markets its vehicles to the environmentally- conscious, socially responsible consumer,” the lawsuit states. “Yet [that] masks the reality of a company that profits from an army of production workers, many of whom are people of color, working under egregious conditions.”

…

California’s crackdown on the carmaker, which has 36,200 employees in the state and 80,000 worldwide, has been a long time coming. Black workers’ complaints of racial harassment and discrimination at the Fremont plant, which employs 15,000, date from 2012, the agency said.

Black workers make up 20% of Tesla’s factory assemblers, but there are no Black executives and just 3% of professionals at the Fremont plant are Black, the lawsuit said.

In 2017, the California Civil Rights Law Group, a Bay Area firm, filed a class-action lawsuit against Tesla on behalf of 1,000 Black workers. It has interviewed more than 100 who make claims similar to those in this week’s DFEH lawsuit. But that private lawsuit, still in court, covered only workers employed by staffing agencies that did not make them sign arbitration agreements.

Like many companies now, Tesla requires its directly hired employees to sign arbitration agreements, relegating any complaints to secret proceedings with private judges and without any option to appeal. After the 2017 class-action suit, it also required its staffing agency workers to sign agreements waiving their rights to go to court.

Government agencies are not required to respect arbitration agreements, which opens the way for California’s broader lawsuit.

….

Besides the N-word, harassment at Tesla, according to the DFEH lawsuit, included slurs such as “Monkey toes,” “banana boy,” “hood rats” and “mayate,” a Spanish word for dung beetle.

But the Tesla cases are “very unusual,” Organ said, because “Tesla doesn’t enforce its alleged zero tolerance policy for racist conduct.” He added that he had sued the NUMMI auto plant, which occupied the same factory before Tesla, many times for employment cases “but never for racial harassment.”

At Tesla’s Fremont factory, Black workers’ complaints were “ignored or perfunctorily acknowledged and then dismissed” by management, the lawsuit alleges. Those who complained were subject to “retaliatory harassment, undesirable assignments and/or termination.”

Musk, who grew up in South Africa, responded to the 2017 class-action suit, which called the company “a hotbed of racist behavior,” with an email to employees describing company culture as “hardcore and demanding.” Anyone who makes an ”unintentional slur” should apologize, he wrote, and the recipient should “be thick-skinned and accept the apology.” ….

At least 160 worker lawsuits have been filed against Tesla since 2006, according to Plainsite, a court document transparency organization. The last two years have seen a major uptick in racial and sexual harassment suits against Tesla. At least five have been filed in the last six weeks.

One was lodged by a female Black employee who said her female white boss struck her with a hot grinding tool and called her “stupid” and the N-word and insulted her intelligence. The suit says the supervisor was fired but later rehired.

Another was filed by a man who said he wrote directly to Musk to complain about racial harassment and was then told to report to human resources, where he was fired.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-02-11/la-fi-tesla-race-discrimination-lawsuit