Venture capitalist Stewart Alsop learned this week that Elon Musk is not the type of CEO to forgive and forget after Musk called to tell him that his Tesla order had been cancelled as a result of a published complaint about a Tesla event last year.
In a Medium post titled, “Dear @ElonMusk: You should be ashamed of yourself,” Alsop detailed a Tesla event last September which started late, was too crowded and neglected customers like Alsop, who had made the $5,000 deposit to order a new Tesla Model X:
“Starting a 7:00pm event at 8:50pm is simply unacceptable, particularly when the invited guests are actually your customers! But for you to stand up at 8:52pm and not even acknowledge that you have wasted your own customers’ time was insensitive and poor judgement.
“You should have apologized right then, but you didn’t.
“It probably won’t matter that you screwed up this event completely. It would still be nice if you showed some class and apologized to the people who believe in this product.”
This week, Alsop published a follow-up post titled “Banned by Tesla!” which revealed that he spoke to Musk on the phone to learn that his Tesla order had actually been cancelled by Musk himself because of his complaint:
“Thank you for reaching out to me. I heard from our phone conversation that you feel that my post, “Dear @ElonMusk: You should be ashamed of yourself”, was a personal attack on you. I also hear that you are not comfortable having me own a Tesla car and have cancelled my order for a Tesla Model X.
“I understand that, by writing this post, I am making certain that I will never be able to buy a Tesla.”
Lesson learned — Elon Musk certainly reserves the right to refuse service to anyone, especially complainers.
Musk did acknowledge the coverage of his little faceoff in a single tweet:
Musk is, of course, correct — it is a slow news day.
