Elon Musk kills Tesla marketing program with Costco, says ‘didn’t approve it’

Elon Musk said that he killed a Tesla marketing program in partnership with Costco in Taiwan. He didn’t explain why other than the CEO “didn’t approve it.”

For most of its existence, Tesla has had limited marketing and advertising efforts as it relied primarily on its own customers to promote the brand.

This hasn’t been enough as of late.

Tesla’s deliveries have been down year-over-year for the last two quarters, and the automaker has been focusing on advertising and new marketing efforts to try to reverse the trend.

One of these new marketing efforts is a partnership with retail giant Costco in Taiwan. Costco has a car division that sells vehicles to its members with perks and discounts with automakers.

Unlike other Costco car programs, there were no discounts offered, but Tesla would offer a few perks to the first 50 people to buy through Costco, including free Supercharging miles, charging accessories, and more.

However, the program was short-lived as CEO Elon Musk announced on X that he “canned” this program with Costco after it started to make the rounds on the social media platform:

The CEO didn’t explain why other than he did not “approve” of the new program.

Electrek’s Take

Why? Costco wouldn’t be a bad partner for Tesla.

It does look like Elon, who is on X almost all day based on his number of daily tweets, found out about a new Tesla marketing effort on X and decided to kill it because he wasn’t aware of it.

He is a part-time CEO. There’s no way around it. He is the defacto head of Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, X, and xAI, on top of tweeting a dozen time a day.

Even if he works 100 hours a week, these are all part-time jobs.

I think Tesla deserves a full time CEO that is fully behind its mission to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy.