I’ve worked with a lot of engineers over the years, and they are almost always challenging from a marketing perspective. They tend to believe that marketing and public relations are superfluous. If you build the best product, they reason, the market will recognize that and your product will become the market leader. Marketing is a bastardization of the natural process.

I was reminded of that this week when I saw that Elon Musk has eliminated Tesla’s PR department. Sadly, Musk is confusing Tesla’s market cap for reputation and his Twitter account for marketing. That could spell in trouble as Tesla begins to be known more for failed customer service than being the only high-performing electric vehicle manufacturer.

Longtime Denver meteorologist Marty Coniglio was fired by 9News for a social media post that compared federal troops policing cities to Nazis. He explains his reasoning in a bylined article in Westword today:

“Better to be a good American than a good employee. Distilled to its most elemental expression, that is the reason why I blew up a 35-year career in broadcast media to add my voice to the alarms sounding about the current state of our Republic.”

“My former employer did the right thing in firing me. They set the rules, standards of conduct and guidelines for content. Break them and you pay. I did and I did.”

“To anyone gleefully saying that I got what I deserved, I agree, so let’s move on…back to our imperiled democracy.”