Lawmakers in New York state are moving to shut down Elon Musk’s Tesla dealerships in yet another blow to the billionaire CEO.
New York State Sen. Patricia Fahy and other lawmakers are fighting to remove a waiver that allows Tesla to operate five in-person dealerships in New York, instead forcing the company to sell their vehicles through dealer franchises, The New York Times reported Sunday.
“No matter what we do, we’ve got to take this from Elon Musk,” Fahy said in March when she first introduced the bill against Tesla. “He’s part of an effort to go backwards.”
She wants the company to relinquish its 5 licenses and instead distribute them to other EV manufacturers, such as Rivian, Scout Motors, and Lucid.
While I totally see where you’re coming from, let me try and steelman the counterargument a bit:
There have been signs that Elon was a shit person for a very long time. Even some ten years ago when I personally thought “well he’s kinda doing cool stuff in space” I had people telling me: “look at the way he treats workers”.
If you did your due diligence, you should know the kind of person you’re working for. So either these companies were negligent in their responsibilities, or they knew what they were signing up for and went ahead anyways.
The people who can afford to start a car dealership aren’t exactly the ones struggling to know where their next meal is coming from, or how to pay rent. These are well off people that were carless or took a gamble, and it didn’t pay out, and they deserve the hardship for their negligence or poor conduct.
I don’t think it was ever a real surprise that he was a asshole and a very hard to work for, at least it wasn’t to me. You’re right that if you looked at all it was there and not really hidden.
But this is way beyond that.
Edit: oh and he’s always been vindictive and petty as well.
I guess I just don’t understand what makes these dealerships different from any other others. They’re being singled out because of who he is and what he is doing right now. I don’t think the counter argument really says a whole lot to be honest.
Ultimately we have to look at their reasoning and it doesn’t feel very sound. It just feels like “we are retaliating because of the owner’s other activities,” nothing related to Tesla. That’s a very dodgy approach that opens a very wide, troubling door
Like what do we mean by “due diligence”? They wouldn’t have granted Tesla a license if they knew musk was a bigoted asshole back then? Fat chance.
But the reason Tesla is different is that they don’t work that way. For other car companies a rich family buys a franchise license and sets up “Jones Honda”, Tesla isn’t like that. Tesla owns the dealership and that makes their dwaler license different. With “Jones Honda” if they lose their dealership license, the Jones are SOL and Honda is just fine. With Tesla, they’re all essentially “Musk Tesla” dealerships so only Tesla loses out.