I do not think it overly naive, as it plays directly into answering one of the “What would I be promulgating were I to be sitting on Tesla’s BoD” questions with which I occupy a lot of my investment time.
Reuters, NYTimes, Bloomberg and all other responsible or heretofore responsible news organizations are accustomed to and, in my strongly deliberated opinion, justified in desiring, a corporation possessing a Public Relations department from which they can receive official information and to which they both can ask questions and request confirmation, clarification or denial of reports they have gathered from other sources. The more public a company - ie, a publicly-owned and -traded one being at the top of the spectrum - and the larger the company, the more essential and valuable such a department is.
I assert one of Mr Musk’s greatest and unforced blunders was to dismiss any nascent PR department Tesla may once have had. He either explicitly or at the least implicitly announced that he personally could function as PR. Of course, for now quite some years he compounded, in my opinion, what already was a terrible misjudgment by shifting essentially all public statements away from what traditionally are called Releases, or even the Tesla blog to which I refer below, toward tweets. I have had to sit on my hands for most of the past ten minutes to refrain from voicing my opinon about that platform; I will say nothing more than that shift coincided with my acknowledgeably tiresome mantra “I Hate Twitter.”
If we revisit the first large public relations problems with which Tesla had to contend - the ”Stalled out on Tesla’s Electric Highway” of February 8, 2013 by John Broder - Tesla responded. At least one response was on Feb 11 from Mr Musk’s Twitter account, and, although a cringing harbinger of what shortly would become that platform’s most infamous words “Fake News” (no, he did not use that specific combination, but it was close enough), it nevertheless was a useless denial of the article and its conclusions. HOWEVER, Tesla did follow up on Feb 19 with a cogent, appropriate rebuttal…BY Mr Musk, ON Tesla’s then active, useful and lamentably long-gone blog. It was effective, to an extent, in that other articles referring to range anxiety did use that communication in their own articles. That response, as well as others Mr Musk provided in those early years, demonstrated conclusively that he can write effectively; that he is not somehow limited by some much-broadcasted developmental impediment about which this thread, especially, has so lamentably often contained responses like "He is who he is. Deal with it."
Now and for many years prior, every responsible article or radio/television news story of importance regarding Tesla has contained a concluding line, almost invariable across each such article, that is - for Tesla and for each of us who cares deeply about the company - a 160dB long whistle blast across the bow of your yacht warning of impending danger: "Tesla did not respond when we reached out for clarification."
Are the news organizations nefarious in disseminating misinformation? Are they complicit with short-sellers? With high-frequency traders? With market makers? With their extant or possible or imaginary advertisers: other automotive companies, the petroleum industry, Wall St? It may or may not be so, but it almost does not matter. Were Tesla to be forthright in responding to news organizations' requests for information, there would be virtually no room for even a nefarious news service to manipulate.
