Title
Elon Musk and the Tesla Backlash: #TeslaTakedown through the Lens of #TSLAQ
Abstract
Long
seen as an entrepreneurial icon and favorite of both the tech elite and
the environmental movement, Elon Musk changed course around the time of
his acquisition of Twitter in 2022, and since then his increasing
association with Donald Trump and related right-wing causes has led to a
backlash among Tesla owners. This new counter-narrative – loosely
organized under the social media hashtag #TeslaTakedown – threatens to
undermine the pro-Tesla, growth narrative that has made Elon Musk the
richest person in the world. This talk will interpret #TeslaTakedown
through the lens of a series of prior threats to the Tesla narrative
known as #TSLAQ. The two social movements share common concerns, but
#TSLAQ was all but extinguished by the tremendous runup in the price of
Tesla shares during and following the COVID-19 pandemic. Will
#TeslaTakedown meet a similar fate? Or will Elon Musk finally be held
accountable by his customers? While we cannot yet answer these
questions, understanding the fate of #TSLAQ and the role of corporate
computational propaganda (CCP) in supporting the pro-Tesla narrative
when it was under threat may help inform our understanding of
#TeslaTakedown and indicate the factors and metrics on which we should
train our attention going forward.
Biography
David
A. Kirsch is Associate Professor at the Robert H. Smith School of
Business and the College of Information Studies (by courtesy) at the
University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses on the
intersection of problems of innovation and entrepreneurship,
technological and business failure, and industry emergence and evolution
and has appeared in leading management, strategy and entrepreneurship
journals. He has a long-standing interest in the preservation and use of
digital business records, especially large-scale organizational email
corpora. Formally trained as a historian of technology, Kirsch has
published two books, one on the history of the electric car (_The
Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History_ (Rutgers University Press,
2000)) and a second on the problem of speculation around technology in
financial markets (_Bubbles and Crashes: The Boom and Bust of
Technological Innovation_ (Stanford University Press, 2019)). In 2020
and 2022, he was a Visiting Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford.
