Ross Gerber, President and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management and a Tesla Inc TSLA investor, attributed the alleged misinformation surrounding the EV giant to its lack of a public relations department.
What Happened: On CNBC’s “Last Call” show, Gerber said media inquiries to Tesla often go unanswered.
“How would the headlines be correct if they don’t correct them?” Gerber asked while adding that Tesla fails to proactively provide correct information to consumers and investors, particularly referencing recent events such as reports of Tesla “recalling” over 2 million vehicles.
“How is it okay that every day the headlines are misleading about what’s happening at your company but you don’t make any effort to fix the problem?” he said.
CNBC anchor Brian Sullivan agreed with the analyst and noted that the public relations team of Ford or General Motors reaches out to him in case he says something wrong or misleading but Tesla does not have a PR department or even a person.
“So easy for ‘bad’ info to float around. Seems easy to fix, no?” Sullivan wrote on X later.
Earlier this week, Tesla responded to a report by The Washington Post on the safety of its autopilot driver assistance system via a post on social media.
Why It Matters: Unlike most companies that actively engage with the media, Tesla does not respond to media queries. It has reportedly not had a dedicated public relations department since October 2020. Benzinga has reached out to Tesla several times but failed to get a reply.
The broader communication strategy of Tesla relies heavily on CEO Elon Musk and various Tesla handles on X, formerly Twitter, which he also owns.
In fact, the billionaire entrepreneur made his disdain for media queries clear when in March, after his Twitter takeover, he decided that all inquiries to Twitter's press email address will be responded to with a poop emoji.
In response to recent media reports about Tesla recalling over 2 million vehicles, Vice President Rohan Patel pointed out how the term, when applied to what are simply over-the-air software updates does not make sense.
Musk himself has slammed the usage of the term as "anachronistic and just flat wrong!"
Check out more of Benzinga's Future Of Mobility coverage by following this link.
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