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Elon Musk reportedly cancelled the order of a Tesla Motors’ Model X, after the billionaire branded the customer “super rude.”
Musk, the CEO of the electric car company, made the decision to cancel Stewart Alsop’s order after the Californian venture capitalist penned a blog post, titled “Dear @ElonMusk: You should be ashamed of yourself.” In the post, which was published last September, Alsop bemoaned the length of time Musk had forced potential customers to wait at the Model X’s launch event, writing:
“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.”
However, in a new post Alsop has claimed that, after a phone conversation with Musk, the entrepreneur has now banned him from owning a Model X altogether. In a post headlined “Banned from Tesla!” Alsop continued his criticisms of Musk, writing: “Dear @ElonMusk: 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.”
Image Credit: Tesla Motors
According to Alsop, Musk was displeased with his blog post last year and therefore decided to cancel his Model X order, which disheartened Alsop as he was “excited” by the prospect of owning a Tesla. He adds: “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’s certainly rare for a CEO, especially one as high-profile as Musk, to personally stand between a customer getting their hands on one of their company’s products, no matter the criticisms Alsop lobbed in his direction. However, Musk believes that his actions have been blown out of proportion, tweeting 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
It’s uncertain whether Alsop did anything else other than pen the blog post in order to be branded “super rude,” but it seems that he’s well and truly off Musk’s Christmas card list.
