India’s Musk — and his EVs — need to be less combustible

By Andy Mukherjee

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 October 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.