Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk speaks at the SATELLITE Conference and Exhibition, March 9, 2020, in Washington.
“This has some merit,” he said to the shareholder at the meeting at Tesla’s factory site near Austin, Texas. “We’ll try a little advertising and see how it goes.”Tesla famously has avoided paying for advertising like its competitors, relying a lot on Musk’s ability to generate free publicity — he has 140 million followers on Twitter, the social media company bought for $44 billion last fall.
Tesla says on its website that the cars can’t drive themselves and humans must be ready to intervene at all times. The company also has been forced by U.S. safety regulators to recall the software because it didn’t obey traffic laws in some cases. The problems noted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are to be fixed with an online software update.
“Tesla is not immune to the global economic environment,” he said, predicting that the company will get through the period and do well, even when a lot of companies will go bankrupt.