• tias@discuss.tchncs.de
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    4 days ago

    The people I know who bought one don’t give a shit about ethics. They stayed away from them for as long as they were socially unacceptable, but as soon as the storm blew over they saw their chance to buy one.

    Just… a data point. My experience is that at least 20% of a population doesn’t care about stuff like this. They care about their own social status, but not ethics.

    • 0tan0d@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Targeting 20 percent of the population isn’t the type of business model that puts your stock this far above all the established automakers though. The correction on the junk stock can’t come soon enough.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        I want you to be right, but I’m more skeptical. I see all over the place companies explicitly targeting a profitable subset: the biggest suckers of the available suckers. Higher margin, fewer whiny customers. Bonus points if it creates a cult-like fanbase (a lot of big brands manage to cultivate this).

        Saw a story where a company explicitly had a strategy of “increase prices by 10x, and it may scare off 90% of customers, but the 10% left will be a wonderful gold mine”. Particularly shortages in the tech industry swayed a lot of folks that advocated for high-volume, low-margin to low-volume, high-margin.

        So if 20% are ride-or-die for Tesla and Musk, then it might be a decent enough move to double down on those 20%.