This Guy Had His Model X Order Cancelled After An Online Rant
These days, it’s pretty easy to have a rant online and have your voice heard. However, it backfired for Stewart Alsop. He’d placed a $5000 deposit on a Model X, but wasn’t happy about the launch event, which had started late, had apparently focused too much on safety, and didn’t provide him with the opportunity to drive the car he’d been expecting.
He posted a lengthy tirade about the event titled ‘Dear @ElonMusk: You should be ashamed of yourself’- and it seems to have hit its target audience. According to an update post from Alsop called ‘Banned By Tesla’, Tesla CEO Elon Musk rang him up personally to cancel his order:
“I heard from our phone conversation that you feel that my post, “Dear @ElonMusk: You should be ashamed of yourself”, was a personal attack on you. I also hear that you are not comfortable having me own a Tesla car and have cancelled my order for a Tesla Model X.”
Musk even appeared to reference the affair on Twitter yesterday.
Whether or not you agree with Alsop’s rantings - which do have a whiff of first world problems about them - “denying service” to him does seem a little like unnecessary power tripping. Alsop appears to be able to see the funny side of it at least, referencing one of Musk’s other ventures: “I guess this means I probably won’t be allowed to buy a SpaceX Dragon, either.”
Source: Stewart Alsop via The Guardian
Comments
Here’s the original post.
https://medium.com/@salsop/dear-elonmusk-you-should-be-ashamed-of-yourself-ca3d266882a4#.dnkct9452
Yeah. If it we’re me I’d be reasonably pissed too. Highly unprofessional, if anything a post on the internet- no matter how rude or insulting, is still a post on THE INTERNET. A place where childish bashing is only a comment section away. This is ESPECIALLY true if you have already taken $5000 of the damn jerk’s money.
My opinion is this:
If the customer started trash talking for no reason, then sure remove his order, publicly shame him.
However when you run an event late and over sell the event and refuse to apologize to the customers and visitors, hell thats a bit rude. Elon musk gets alot of kudos from me because he has spaceX, im not a fan of tesla personally. He does however need to take a page out of Jimmy Carr’s book, he arrived 1 hr late to a show because the train service shut down the rail during his journey, so he got all the people at his show free drinks and apologised thoroughly, its called being a decent human being and its how you keep peoples respect.
However, i do not own SpaceX or Tesla or part time owners of PayPal….so my opinion doesnt matter.