THE MADURAI YOUTUBER WHO GOT ELON MUSK’S ATTENTION
One of South India’s biggest YouTubers wins this week for engaging Elon Musk in a Twitter conversation on India’s climate policy
Carmakers have already introduced electric vehicle variants for Indian roads but everyone’s excited to see whether a Tesla vehicle will join the bandwagon soon. Although the Elon Musk-owned electric vehicle company announced its entry into India this January, there’s been no clarity since.
So, several issues were cleared up when YouTuber and digital content creator Madan Gowri tweeted a shiny picture of a black Tesla, tagging Elon Musk, and the latter replied in a series of tweets.
“I’m a big fan of Tesla,” confesses
Madan, who has a 5.3 million-strong subscriber base on YouTube for his videos on history, social issues and environmental issues. “But I did not tweet with the expectation of a reply. However, Elon Musk is known to make big announcements with one-two tweets. I just feel great that it happened to be a reply to my tweet.”
Hours after tagging Musk on his tweet when Madan checked his phone, it had a barrage of notifications and missed calls.
“Elon’s first tweet was on energy policy which seemed a little controversial for me to reply to,” says the creator.
Musk pointed out that India has one of the highest import duties and that clean energy vehicles are treated the same way as petrol and diesel vehicles, which are inconsistent with India’s climate goals.
“The second half of the tweet is true currently because we have set ourselves a little unrealistic goal of quadrupling renewable energy capacity by 2030. Tesla is like the Apple of cars and innovation is their forté. With its autonomous driving feature, it will be a game changer, so the government and Tesla have to reach a midpoint,” adds Madan.
Elon added in the thread that if the import duties are lowered, a Tesla factory is “quite likely” in India.
shruti.nair@hindustantimes.com Follow @MissNair on Twitter and Instagram
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“I DID NOT TWEET WITH THE EXPECTATION OF A REPLY. BUT ELON MUSK IS KNOWN TO MAKE BIG ANNOUNCEMENTS WITH TWEETS.” —MADAN GOWRI