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David Kirsch

David A. Kirsch is Associate Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship in the M&O Department at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. From 1996 to 2001, Kirsch held various adjunct and visiting appointments at the Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles. He received his PhD in history from Stanford University in 1996. His research interests include industry emergence, technological choice, technological failure and the role of entrepreneurship in the emergence of new industries. In 2000 Rutgers University Press published his revised dissertation, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History. His work on the early history of the automobile industry has also been published in Business History Review and Technology and Culture. In 2003, his co-authored article on the Electric Vehicle Company received the IEEE Life Members Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. Kirsch is also interested in methodological problems associated with historical scholarship in the digital age. With the support of grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Library of Congress, he is currently building a digital archive of the Dot Com Era that will preserve at-risk, born-digital content about business and culture during the late 1990s.

Elon Musk and the Tesla Backlash: #TeslaTakedown through the lens of #TSLAQ

Long seen as an entrepreneurial icon and favorite of both the tech elite and the environmental movement, Elon Musk changed course around the time of his acquisition of Twitter in 2022, and since then his increasing association with Donald Trump and related right-wing causes has led to a backlash among Tesla owners. This new counter-narrative – loosely organized under the social media hashtag #TeslaTakedown – threatens to undermine the pro-Tesla, growth narrative that has made Elon Musk the richest person in the world. This talk will interpret #TeslaTakedown through the lens of a series of prior threats to the Tesla narrative known as #TSLAQ. The two social movements share common concerns, but #TSLAQ was all but extinguished by the tremendous runup in the price of Tesla shares during and following the COVID-19 pandemic. Will #TeslaTakedown meet a similar fate? Or will Elon Musk finally be held accountable by his customers? While we cannot yet answer these questions, understanding the fate of #TSLAQ and the role of corporate computational propaganda (CCP) in supporting the pro-Tesla narrative when it was under threat may help inform our understanding of #TeslaTakedown and indicate the factors and metrics on which we should train our attention going forward.

Rethinking Entrepreneurship is a research project at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and generously supported by the Carlsberg Foundation. We explore the dynamic and evolving discourse of entrepreneurship, its impact on society, and its role in shaping the future. With a team of dedicated scholars, we delve deep into the question how the way we understand entrepreneurship links to our ability to address societal change and frames our thinking about society in past, present and future.

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