Tesla “will try some publicity,” says Elon Musk

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Elon Musk said Tuesday that Tesla will roll out commercials for its electric vehicles, a first for the company founded two decades ago.

“We’ll try some commercials and see how it goes,” Musk said in response to a question from a shareholder at by Tesla investor day, drawing the applause of the public.

The auto industry is a major investor in advertising, but Tesla has largely eschewed the conventional advertising and instead relied on word of mouth and incentivized referrals.

Tesla fans and shareholders have expressed some frustration that the wider public was often unaware of the automaker’s features as Tesla ramps up production for a mainstream audience.

In a follow-up Twitter Spaces interview with CNBC’s David Faber, he added that Tesla would be interested in running ads that were informative, aesthetically pleasing, and beautiful.

Asked for more details, she said: ‘I just agreed; I don’t have a fully formed strategy.”

Musk answered questions for more than an hour during the two events, in which he extolled Tesla’s driverless technologies, argued that working from home is “morally wrong” and said China must be taken at its word sees Taiwan as an integral part of the country.

Musk, who has promised for years that Tesla’s “fully autonomous driving” efforts would soon allow Tesla owners to lease their vehicles into a fleet of robot taxis, earning them money, once again said the technology should be available this year.

He said Tesla will soon have “a ChatGPT moment,” a reference to the OpenAI tool that was widely adopted just days after it launched last fall. “Suddenly 3 million cars will drive themselves. And then 5 million cars, and then 10 million cars”.

Meanwhile, Musk admitted that Twitter Advertising, the social media company he acquired last year, is having problems. In the interview, he said Twitter recently lost $40 million after “two big advertisers” got upset when their ads were verified and labeled as misleading by Community Notes, a crowdsourced feature to verify tweets, including the ads.

He recently took over Linda Yaccarino, the former head of advertising at NBCUniversal, to replace him as CEO of Twitter, while focusing on the more technical aspects of the platform. He has also continued his prolific tweeting habit since he took over the company and has given no indication that he was willing to quit.

“I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is the loss of money, so be it,” he told CNBC’s Faber.

The South African entrepreneur has long said he’s against employees working from home — he even has remote work banned on Twitter since he took over. On Tuesday, he called it “kind of like that fake Marie Antoinette quote, ‘let them eat the cake,'” as white-collar workers could stay home while expecting others to deliver their food and produce their goods.

When Musk was asked about geopolitical tensions involving China and the United States over Taiwan, he said, “there is a certain inevitability of the situation,” as “China’s official policy is that Taiwan should be integrated.”

Musk agreed that China taking Taiwan would not be good for Tesla, “or any company in the world,” but also suggested that decoupling from China was not a realistic policy option. The company has a plant in Shanghai capable of producing 22,000 vehicles a week, about four times the capacity of Tesla’s Texas plant.

“The Chinese economy and the rest of the global economy are like Siamese twins: this is the gravity of the situation. And it’s actually worse for other companies than for Tesla. I mean, I’m not sure where you’re going to get an iPhone, for example.