Tesla Tantrums: Consumer Choices in the Age of Performative Ethics
10th May 2025
Dealerships have been torched, vehicles vandalized, and owners accosted in parking lots by sanctimonious citizens, sneering moral condemnation.
It is not necessary to be a shareholder, Tesla owner, or admirer of Elon Musk to find this troubling. The issue transcends personalities or partisanship.
It is a symptom of a civic pathology, one where ideological grievance takes precedence over shared achievement, and where economic success is no longer a cause for celebration but a litmus test of political allegiance.
If Mr. Musk espouses views one finds disagreeable, there are democratic mechanisms to contest them.
But to vilify an entire enterprise—its workers, consumers, products—based on its founder’s political eccentricities is intellectual laziness masquerading as moral conviction.
It also prompts a deeper question, leading us to the heart of the matter: which corporations, if any, are so morally unblemished that we can consume their products without public disapproval? In an age increasingly saturated with virtue signalling and performative ethics, should we now consider our consumer choices as moral declarations?
If so, the standard quickly becomes untenable.