India's Musk - And His Evs - Need To Be Less Combustible

2024-10-13 08:16:26

(MENAFN- Live Mint) (Bloomberg Opinion) -- By constantly referring to one of the world's youngest billionaires as“India's Elon Musk,” the media has done a disservice to Bhavish Aggarwal. The 39-year-old founder of Bengaluru-based Ola Electric Mobility Ltd. seems to have started believing that hurling insults online is how tycoons must deal with pesky naysayers, folks who just can't grasp their uncommon vision.

Well, the past week
ought to have taught
Aggarwal a lesson: Not everyone gets to play
the world's richest man.

An online spat between
Aggarwal and Kunal Kamra, a popular
Indian stand-up comic, has had India riveted. Earlier this month, Kamra
shared, with his 2.4 million followers on X,
an unflattering image
of what appeared to be a graveyard of
electric vehicles. The scooters
were seen gathering dust outside an Ola facility, possibly awaiting repair or replacement.

After one of its two-wheelers caught fire in March 2022, the company recalled a batch of 1,441 for inspection in what it said was a preemptive measure to deal with an isolated incident. In the past year, though, the national consumer hotline has received more than 10,000
complaints about quality and service, according to media reports. Ola hasn't disputed these numbers in public, nor has it challenged
the authenticity of the picture posted by Kamra.

“Do Indian consumers have a voice? Do they deserve this? Two wheelers are many daily wage workers' lifeline,” Kamra wrote.“Is this how Indians will get to using EVs?” he asked, tagging the road-transport minister and the department of consumer affairs.

Ola's chief executive officer chose
to respond. After all,
the comedian had published
atop of one of Aggarwal's posts
that showed a picture of
the automaker's gleaming
giga factory for cell manufacturing, the EV maker's pride and joy. Funding its
expansion was one of the goals of the company's very successful $733 million
initial public offering
in August. So, on Oct. 6, Aggarwal took to X:

“Since you care so much
@kunalkamra88, come and help us out! I'll even pay more than you earned for this paid tweet or from your failed comedy career.
Or else sit quiet and let us focus on fixing the issues for the real customers. We're expanding service network fast and backlogs will be cleared soon.”

This evokes Musk's playbook, if not
the level of rancor or insult of
the Tesla Inc. boss's online spat with a
British diver helping in
the 2018 rescue of the schoolboys trapped in a Thai cave. Musk had sent engineers and a vessel
to aid
the
effort, but after
Vernon Unsworth rejected the offer as a“PR stunt” and suggested in a CNN interview that
the billionaire“stick his submarine where it hurts,” Musk called him a“pedo guy” on Twitter. Unsworth sued for defamation, but lost. Musk testified that his remark was meant to be an insult; he wasn't really accusing Unsworth
of being a pedophile.

High-profile corporate leaders have public roles and responsibilities. They aren't as free to speak their minds as the rest of us.
The advice that a major Tesla shareholder gave Musk during the Thai cave-rescue episode
applies to Aggarwal, too:“If something really upsets you, go for a walk around the factory ... Get an ice cream cone. Just don't use Twitter.”

Instead, Aggarwal doubled
down, sharpening his attack in subsequent posts that urged the comic to“earn some real skills for a change.” A job at the Ola service center will
“pay better than your flop
shows,” he said.

In the court of public opinion, the comedian won. Apart from a few voices of solidarity with the CEO,
the replies from bystanders to the slugfest mostly came from
people who didn't like his arrogant tone. Many shared
their own -
or other customers' - frustrations
with Ola's product quality and speed of servicing.

I have a ton of patience for the startup widely
seen as a proxy for revival of
India's stunted manufacturing
ambitions. Given the country's abysmal record of female labor force participation,
Ola's
women-led EV factory is a remarkable
initiative.

As I have written before, the SoftBank Group Corp.-backed EV
maker
is also a test case for
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's industrial-policy push. His
government
has awarded not one, but two sets of production-linked incentives to Aggarwal.
For the first time in two decades, a major Indian automaker has made a stock-market debut.

Being important,
however, is no excuse
for bad behavior. Or
a license to sell
products that so many consumers find to be defective.

According to the newspaper
Mint, Ola is handling as many as 80,000 consumer complaints a month. Amid shrinking sales volumes, the Indian government
has
ordered an audit to verify if the automaker
is maintaining its service centers and honoring the warranty to consumers, Reuters has reported. I asked the corporate communications team if the reports were
accurate. I didn't hear back.
In an Oct. 7 announcement to the stock exchanges, Ola said it had received a show-cause notice from the
Central Consumer Protection Authority. Ola's shares have fallen
from a post-IPO-high of 146 rupees to 90. Aggarwal has many real-world problems.
So why's he making them worse by tilting at social-media windmills?

Having lashed out at Kamra, it was still possible for Aggarwal to do damage control
by borrowing a leaf from
Musk's strategy of
JDART, as his legal team once described
it in court. The clunky acronym stands for“joking, deleted, apologized-for, responsive tweets.”

When I last checked Friday, the Indian billionaire hasn't
deleted his
posts, nor had he apologized for them. That's a mistake.“Olan
Musk,”
as Kamra has started
calling Aggarwal, needs a longer fuse. He also needs to understand that“serving one's country” - the
lesson he says
he learned from his backer Ratan Tata, the Indian corporate titan
who died last week - takes many forms.

Ola scooters catching fire
may be an expensive, but
fixable, operational challenge. The
CEO blowing his
top at someone who's out to make
1.4 billion people laugh by confronting their daily reality is a PR disaster, with serious consequences.