We will have to wait to see how much this matters, because while it feels significant, it might be just online fuss that passes. Loads of people buy things from companies or places they don’t like, knowingly or otherwise, all the time, and saying you’re not going to is about the easiest thing you can do.
I’m not buying anything Russian at the moment, but given that I wasn’t likely or able to anyway, it turns out that’s a doddle and makes no difference – something that Tesla might note about the kinds of people currently planning to protest against Musk outside its US retailers.
And while I know that I would prefer to be seen in a Jaguar than a Tesla, the company with the Oval Office’s chief scruffbag will sell 1.5 million or more cars this year, while the one with the pink advert will sell none.
So it’s rather hard to argue that what’s known as virtue signalling – the root cause of the ‘go woke, go broke’ cliché – feels a less cringy or controversial thing to do than it did only a couple of years ago.
Still, call it a hunch, a bit of Spidey-sense or whatever, but the ethics, principles and actions of companies seem to have been thrown into wider focus.
It should be possible to distinguish between a company employee’s politics and the company itself. We’ve all met people who have some pretty rum viewpoints, they’ve all worked somewhere and we can usually dissociate the two.
The thing about Musk is that he makes that so difficult. Other companies don’t. Witness a letter to The Telegraph’s motoring advice page in January, in which a man said he would like a replacement for his MG, electric, preferably flat-floored and which would fit his dogs but importantly not something made by the Chinese, thank you very much.
To which our friend Alex Robbins, the paper’s car agony uncle, delicately pointed out that not only was his current car, with its famous British nameplate, made in China but by a brand wholly owned by the Chinese state.
