Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been a consistent critic of the US response to the coronavirus pandemic, calling panic over the virus “dumb” last month and not something people should be overly worried about right now.
Well, that escalated pretty quickly.
Tesla’s earnings call on Wednesday started off with a standard rundown of the electric carmaker’s latest performance and miscellaneous fundamentals over the past 90 days. And then, all of a sudden it seemed, Tesla CEO Elon Musk went full-on MAGA after the presentation to analysts was a little more than halfway finished, with the brash billionaire ranting and even cursing to make a couple of points in response to the quarantines and shelter-in-place orders around the country as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Orders, he added, that are causing considerable worry at Tesla, which Musk said produces “the vast majority of our cars” in the Bay Area — where a stay-at-home order was just extended through most of the next month.
“The extension of the shelter-in-place or, frankly, I would call it forcibly imprisoning people in their homes against all their constitutional rights — my opinion — and erasing people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong, and not why people came to America or built this country… What the fuck?” (“Excuse me,” he added, as an aside.
