Musk, Bezos brands hurting
The Onion recently reported, “Despondent Jeff Bezos Realizes He’ll Have To Work For 9 Seconds To Earn Back Money He Lost In Divorce.”
And that may be the best publicity Bezos received recently. His Amazon arm has been taking repeated public relations hits.
Wall Street Journal: “Don’t Just ‘Buy Now’! When Shopping on Amazon, You Need to Pay Attention/ People shopping on autopilot must beware of overpriced bulk items, sub-prime Prime deals and questionable ‘Amazon’s Choice’ choices.”
Market Watch: “Amazon is prime territory for drunk shoppers/ Women are slightly more likely to shop while drunk, but men spend more money on their drunk purchases, a survey found.”
Bloomberg News: “As Amazon Leads Cashless Charge, States and Cities Push Back/ Critics say stores that don’t accept cash will further marginalize America’s homeless and working poor … Legislators around the country agree with [homeless counselor Rebecca] Esparza and are taking steps to halt or slow the steady march toward a cashless society.”
Fatherly: “Amazon Gets Blasted For Selling Disgusting Pedophile Onesies. … On Amazon’s American site … two infant onesies [were] for sale with disgusting slogans. The black onesie read ‘Daddy’s little fuck toy’ while the white one read ‘I just look illegal.’”
Nevada’s other corporate welfare baby is not doing much better, though Bezos recently hired a fired Elon Musk vice president, Rajeev Badyal, who went from the Musk space program to the Bezos space program along with some other team members.
Musk’s poor publicity is more personalized to his legal difficulties and scandals, to the point that journalists sympathetic to him run stories under headlines like “The rules on CEO tweets weren’t made for Elon Musk.”
Bloomberg ran a piece, “When Elon Musk Tried to Destroy a Tesla Whistleblower,” that reports Tesla was was junking or reworking 40 percent of raw materials used at the Storey County plant in Nevada at a cost of $150 million, a story allegedly leaked by a worker named Martin Tripp. It can be read at https://bloom.bg/2XUAGPb.
In a separate incident, Bloomberg reported that Musk accosted a departing worker, “swearing at him and telling him to leave immediately, according to people with direct knowledge of the incident who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. Musk made physical contact with the staffer in a heated confrontation that drew the attention of other employees and spilled into a hallway and later the parking lot, the people said.”
CNN/April 2: “Get ready for a big drop in Tesla sales.“
ExtremeTech/April 5: “Like a Rock: Tesla Sales, Worldwise and US, sank in Q1.”