Read this bit on Medium by Stewart Alsop about his experience with Tesla.

So hard to believe that Tesla has decided that this passionate, heavily invested, even groveling user of their product can no longer buy one.

Back in the day, Stewart wrote a tech industry newsletter. I'm probably one of about a thousand people left who remember it. He would write open letters to tech CEOs. It was one of my inspirations for blogging, when I started in 1994. He's a good writer, and his experiences with products are worth listening to, even if sometimes they were totally off the wall. ;-)

There are good tech companies around who will use that kind of feedback, soak it up, ask for more and possibly use it to guide their product decisions. At its peak, Microsoft was like this. Their CEO, the famous Bill Gates, set the tone for the company. He was very curious sometimes in kind of an angry way, but you definitely knew he was listening. Same with Jeff Bezos at Amazon. There are counter-examples. I could see Steve Jobs banning someone as a user if he didn't like their attitude. On the other hand, I had a big complaint about Apple while he was running the company in 2007, and they responded really well even though I was blogging publicly about it. 

I think Musk and Tesla owe Alsop: 1. An apology. 2. The car he paid for (obviously). 3. Some kind of gift to show they understand that their job is to please people like Stewart, not ban them. Ridiculous that this is the kind of culture people tolerate in tech these days. Fix this, OK?

PS: I don't own a car at all so I'm not worried about being banned by Tesla, but I hear they're pretty cool, and overall I like the way Musk leads.