I’m not saying that it’s any better or worse for society, I’m saying that makes me not want to spend $75k+ for a product from a company that is being destabilized by their fuckboy CEO. When I’m spending that kind of money I want to spend it at a company that I can rely on.

Oh, in that case my comment doesn't really apply. I misread the OP and thought they were talking about the moral implications of supporting destructive or unethical companies. If you're just talking about trying to maximize the personal benefit of your purchases, I don't really have any strong opinions on that.

Your intuition is correct here. OP is wrong. An infinite set of branches of the wavefunction does not necessarily imply that everything you can imagine must happen somewhere in that wavefunction.

It’s always been a “pet theory” of mine that this reversal was due to Reddit becoming mainstream, and that it’s initial nerdy/techie user base preferred cats to dogs.

I have a competing theory. Dogs started to become wildly popular during the early to mid 2010s, when millennials were graduating from college and getting their own apartments/homes. It's well known that millennials are having far fewer children. I believe that millennials started getting dogs instead of having kids, and this caused a huge spike in the popularity of dogs. This is also consistent with everyone suddenly starting to refer to their pets as their "children" or "fur babies", because they are literally replacements for human children. Anecdotally, as a millennial, I have seen almost everyone I knew in high school get a dog over the past decade.

I think you're right about extra scrutiny being appropriate for more valuable purchases. However, you also have to consider the fact that most people buy a car every 8-10 years or so. When you compare the money spent on one car, versus money spent on 8 years of food, I think the gap is smaller than you might expect.

To the second point, yes, I think Musk is extremely petty. It's very grating and seems very obnoxious, but I don't think it necessarily follows that being spiteful is going to be worse overall for society than doing what's best for a company's "bottom line". If you look at a company like Nestle, everything they do is for their bottom line, and they're one of the most evil entities on the planet. Kind of the whole problem with large corporations today is precisely that their "bottom line" is in direct conflict with what's best for everyone else.

so your point isn’t valid and I won’t listen

You were so quick to put my comment into one of your predefined "wrong opinion on the internet" category that you've misread or misinterpreted it. Nowhere did I say the point wasn't valid. I think it's great to be mindful of one's purchases. I just pointed out that the logic should be applied consistently. Everyone hates Elon Musk so much that many of them are forgetting how bad the rest of the corporate world is, and consequently is letting them off the hook far too easily.

There is a difference between "other companies do this, so your criticism of Tesla isn't valid" and "other companies do this, so you should criticize them as well as Tesla". My position is the latter.

We’ve known for years that the owner is a lying, creepy, out of touch dipshit and that it’s a very flawed car and the company will cut costs to save money on safety items, every time.

Do know you know anything about the companies you buy from every day? Do you know the CEOs of all the food companies, the phone companies, the car companies, the apps you use, the coffee you drink, the clothes you wear? Most of them are just as bad or worse. The media likes shitting on Elon Musk so you hear most of the bad shit about him. If you think Musk is even close to being the worst CEO, you are grossly misinformed.

If your bar for not buying from a company is that the owner is a dipshit and the products are flawed, I hope you're ready to start a commune in the woods and become a subsistence farmer.