“Hi David, this is Juno from Tesla. I’m seeing this Munro article. Why didn’t you call me. I’m five days late to respond on this piece now!” began a rant from Tesla’s PR person (whose name isn’t really Juno). From there, the conversation started to become a complete disaster, forcing me to firmly shut it down. But this was the Tesla PR department in a nutshell: overworked, paranoid, and oftentimes just unpleasant.
Welcome new members to our regular “Exhaust Leaks” member-only feature in which we tell you an “inside baseball” story about the car journalism world. This time, we’re talking about the now-defunct Tesla PR department, which was in place when I started as a journalist back in 2015, but was — in an industry-first move — dismantled in 2020.
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Ooh, I remember her. Bless her heart. I never got in her cross-hairs since I mostly covered race cars and hoons, but I hope she moved on to more peaceful, less authoritarian pastures.
I’m with Matt on the dissolution of the PR office: that job sounded impossible. You have to *want* a working relationship with the public (or the press) to do public relations. Even with other comms roles that came up at Tesla when I was looking for work, my response was always “oh hell no” because of the pressure-cooker reputation.That was eons ago, in the “before [the general public] knew he was crazy” era.
Anyway, I can’t imagine being in Juno’s place post-sieg-heil. Yikes.