Quite a bit of the blame he gets is well deserved.
His management is crap. He has driven off mid and upper level management, he lies constantly about production.
While there is some cool tech in the cars, expensive handmade parts made of expensive composite materials that don’t fit the car properly are not cool. Finish quality is lacking for a car in the price range. Waiting weeks and months for parts is common.
There are a lot of unhappy Tesla owners that you aren’t hearing about. They aren’t getting air time. Not PC.
Yes, the Volt is a disaster, to put it kindly. But Tesla is burning 5 billion a year of handouts and incentives paid for with money confiscated from us. Musk is a snake oil salesman who runs Ponzi schemes and can’t run a business for profit. Taking “deposits” and using that money to run day to day operations (along with free government money) is fraud. Every Tesla investor who is going to get burned deserves it.
“Taking “deposits” and using that money to run day to day operations (along with free government money) is fraud.”
My brother had a friend that would find cool cars at auction, tell his friends and whoever about them.
“So I can get the Lotus for $15,000, but it needs X,Y,Z and that will take me $10,000 to take care of that.”
Of course the $20k up front soon started going towards over-runs on previous cars that he had to bid at $2k more, and put in $3k more for repairs.
He ended up in prison for a little bit, and then a lot of work-release type stuff. I can’t recall if my brother got any of his money back. I know he didn’t get the car. And lost a friend.