When the US electric car manufacturer Tesla reached a production goal of 5,000 Model 3s per week and exceeded its intended productivity by 2,000 engines weekly, its founder and CEO Elon Musk rushed to Twitter to share the good news.
Minutes after the celebratory post appeared, the Chairman and CEO of Ford Europe Steven Armstrong shared the message to tease the innovator and remind him who runs the house in the car industry.
While Armstrong’s regular posts get hundreds of likes, maximum, trolling Musk has drawn 2k comments, 5k retweets and 22k likes so far.
However not all of them were friendly ones, as some users rushed to defend Tesla and its owner. Some claimed that Ford is doing worse than Tesla in the market.
Others just trashed the Ford, slamming it as a “dinosaur”…
…or mocked the Ford CEO.
Ford’s online trolling came just days after a media feud between two companies. After Musk in an interview with The Wall Street Journal said “there's a good vibe” and “energy” in Tesla while a Ford factory “looks like a morgue,” Ford's vice president of communications Mark Truby fired back on Twitter.
The manufacturing target for Tesla Model 3 Musk boasted about in his post, came six month late and behind schedule.
Additionally, CNBC reported that he recently wrote in a letter to his employees about "extensive and damaging sabotage" against the company on the part of one of its workers. This reportedly included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties. In June, Tesla also announced a broad restructuring, cutting at least 9 percent of its workforce. The Tesla's Fremont factory had suffered from at least four fires since 2014, including one in April that shut down production.
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Ford’s 2017 revenue in the automotive segment totaled $145.7 billion, which is $4 billion more than in 2016. According to the company’s annual report, it sold approximately 6,607,000 vehicles at wholesale throughout. Tesla’s 2017 revenue totaled $11.8 billion, reflecting 67.98% sales growth, with about 93,000 purchased vehicles.