This last full week of 2018 was a lot more positive than the previous week when it comes to Tesla coverage in major media outlets. In fact, percentage-wise, it’s the most positive week since we started tracking in September. Two new board members greatly contributed to this, as did the cumulative effect of the Model 3’s amazing success story.
This past week, the stock market kept panicking, everyone was looking at what is going on in the White House, and the most positive major thing that happened was Elon Musk unveiling the first Boring Company tunnel. At the same time, there was a lot of negative news regarding Tesla: 10 stories related to the stock market, 10 about a few people departing Tesla, 6 about the spontaneous combustion of a Tesla Model S (whose battery was apparently shot — like, with a gun), and the rest on various other topics.
Another article attempts to discredit Tesla, this time targeting its financial practices.
I just published an article examining the FUD around Elon Musk supposedly terminating employees “on a whim” and what that may mean. This, however, isn’t the only recent FUD-based narrative that I feel is worth exploring at the moment.
I’m going to examine the narrative that Elon Musk terminates employees on a whim and what that might mean. This came back up after a Wired article that described “production hell” and how it felt to work at the factory during that time, and then was regurgitated into other articles by other authors.
Only a week to go till Christmas and Tesla failing seems to be on the wish list of certain journalists, but because their paycheck probably comes in part from fossil fuels, a lump of coal is all they will get for their troubles.
Some of the headlines that we saw this week were so outrageous that they have no place in the mainstream media, a tabloid maybe. This is what we mean:
As the title implies, the bulls and bears are back, even if the amount of “vocal” bears have diminished in numbers. At first glance, this might not be very visible. After all, there is less negative news this week. However, if you check the recurring headlines chart, the number of articles related to the stock market has gone up significantly. That doesn’t even include the articles that mention that Tesla might choose to pay off debt with stock.
As promised in last week’s #Pravduh about #Tesla report, here is a breakdown of all the publishers we track and how their coverage has changed over the past 3 months. We were also planning to release a breakdown of the authors. However, since this article is already quite long, we decided to postpone that till next week.
The number of articles about Tesla this past week and even this past month is quite low. Nonetheless, we do see something unusual in the raw data that you don’t see on any of the charts.
What is going on with Tesla? We have seen weeks with 283 articles of which there were only 29 positive headlines. This week, we have a total of 28 articles. As we said last week, this is probably a good thing — no distractions for Elon or other Tesla staff.
