Elon Musk Cancels Blogger's Tesla Order Over Critical Blog Post

Talk about petty. It has been reported that Elon Musk personally cancelled a Tesla X order because the customer is a blogger who wrote a less-than-flattering post about the Tesla mastermind. The customer in question is venture capitalist Stewart Alsop who wrote a blog post on Medium entitled “Dear @ElonMusk: You should be ashamed of yourself.” In the post, Alsop described a poorly managed event, in which Alsop drove over two hours only to wait because the schedule was running late. In addition to that, when Musk did appear after almost two hours later, he didn’t even apologize.

It’s bad enough that your event producers couldn’t actually produce an event — the so-called Model X Launch Event. 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.

The writer didn’t even get to see a Model X, saying “I feel like I was mislead and mistreated. I had been handed a badge that would let me test drive the model, but my badge number was 1,344. If you started the event one hour and 22 minutes late, I could only imagine that having 1,343 people in front of me to test drive a Model X would have kept me there until, I don’t know, 2:00 AM.” Not only that, but this series of unfortunate events caused Alsop to question Tesla’s customer service, saying “Should I wonder if there are other problems in managing Tesla as a company? Is this a marketing failure or do you treat your customers like this after they get their car?”

Well, Alsop ordered a Model X anyway, but Musk took it upon himself to cancel the order. Consequently, Alsop took to the blogging platform again to write about how he is “Banned by Tesla.” In the post, Alsop reiterates his respect for Tesla and how “I am mostly sorry not to be able to participate in the automobile revolution that Tesla started… I must also admit that I am a little taken aback to be banned by Tesla. When I wrote a blog post about my BMW X1 called ‘My Car Makes Me Feel Stoopid,’ the CEO of BMW didn’t take the car back. And in the many articles and posts I have written criticizing products, companies and people, I have never been banned from doing business with any of the companies!”

It should come as no surprise that this made news outlets around the world, prompting Elon to tweet the following:

Must be a slow news day if denying service to a super rude customer gets this much attention

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2016