Approval is shrinking due to so many dedicated and valuable employees being being fired without cause, while allowing cliquish cronies that are nearly useless to keep their high salaries, including jv HR that let's anyone and everyone in.
Word of mouth is as powerful as ever.
When I state that I work at tesla after folks inquire, it's never met with anything positive, thus I can only assume nearly everyone in the upper Cali west coast region knows how a friend or family member had been treated by salaried Tesla, and I suspect everyone hears Elon grossly exaggerating 90% of the time, so who'd believe his or his elitists' explanations relative to anything under the sun.....
Lot of useless overpaid interns at Tesla too. They play all day long, nearly every day, and I'm not talking about dedicated, motivated engineers experimenting and researching useful solutions, which are in the trenches with the people that consistently do the actual work that puts Tesla autos on the road every day.
Just too much human fluff riding on others' hard work and dedication. That's the Tesla Cult in a nutshell