True story: When I won the Nobel Prize in 2008, Princeton quickly set up a special event on campus and reserved a parking space for me in front of Robertson Hall. But when I drove up in my 2004 Jetta, the security people frantically tried to wave me away. They clearly didn’t find it plausible that a laureate would be driving such a modest car.
I’m still driving that car today.
The point is that I’m not one of those people who cares much about what he drives. (No doubt I act out my egotism in other ways.) But many people do, in fact, use their cars to symbolize their status — indeed, their identity.
There’s no point being censorious. Conspicuous consumption is a very human thing, going back as far as civilization itself. Over time, however, the form has changed. These days it’s relatively hard to tell how rich people are by the clothes they wear, which gives other status markers like cars a more important role. Also, in modern times people use consumer goods to display their values as well as their wealth. A fancy pickup truck sends one kind of message; a Tesla sends another.
And yes, speaking of Tesla, today’s newsletter is partly about Elon Musk.
As I wrote in my last newsletter, the main reason to believe that Tesla’s huge market value doesn’t make sense has little to do with Musk’s antics at Twitter. The problem instead is that Tesla’s dominance of the electric vehicle market is already fading as we speak, so the company is unlikely to generate the kind of extraordinary long-term profits that would justify its stock price.
That said, Musk has indeed been acting very oddly — and in ways that seem almost perfectly calculated to drive away his best customers.
After all, what does it mean to buy a Tesla? It’s a luxury car, but there are other luxury cars. What’s special about a Tesla is that it’s an electric, zero-emission luxury car — one that purports to be a glitzy ride to a sustainable future.
Also, until just the other day, Musk himself was widely seen as a cool guy. And cool in a futuristic sense: His company sends rockets into outer space; he was living with a popular musician who released an album inspired by the science-fiction novel “Dune” (a book that, by the way, was recently made into a terrific movie).
So what message was someone sending by driving a Tesla? Basically — I don’t think I’m being unfair — it was: “I’m rich but I’m woke.” Mock that stance all you like, but it really did increase Tesla sales. And it means that many Tesla buyers are probably also Democrats.
I’m not just guessing here. The other day a friend of mine who writes under the nom de internet Invictus used New York State data to compare county-level political leanings with Tesla registrations. Sure enough, in 2020, counties that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump — they do exist, even in New York — purchased far fewer Teslas per capita than those that voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden.