That was a fairly famous situation. The reporter was very anti-EV, and trashed the car's crappy range and said it ran out of power on him with no warning.
Tesla released the logs showing that it popped up low power warnings and suggested places to charge several times, all of which were ignored. When the car reported 0% it was then driven to a parking lot where it drove around in circles (the whole time, suggesting a nearby charger) until it finally shut down.
The reporter was then fired.

The left never loved him. Neo-libs did, but they aren't left

As someone who is “left” we’ve never liked him. He’s always been an over privileged asshole bully born with a silver spoon and a lack of brains.

What we liked was the original EV that he tried to stamp his name on… the original Tesla roadster. That Tesla, however was only bought out (by getting enough Stock to have a controlling share) by and eventually mass produced by Elon. He didn’t found Tesla that was Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard.

I’d you read their Guiding principles, you can see how Elon trashed it… just like he’s doing with X. Except he was able to at least get the engineers to make something sorta useful with Tesla. Instead of firing them all like he did X.. we’ll, sorta, there were massive layoffs at Tesla as well.

I hated Elon before it was cool. 😝

Liberals loved him because they liked to pretend that electric cars are green, and don't require any change to their existing car-dependent lifestyle while still pretending they're saving the earth. Tech utopians loved him because "he's making humanity an interplanetary species". They all ignored his asshole behavior and worker abuse because their hero Steve Jobs (aka Apple Jesus) was also also a tyrant.

A significant aware sliver of them split off after the whole pedo cave thing, but there were a bunch who still would say things like "he's a flawed person but his contribution is too important." A significant segment of them still say this actually, especially the techno utopians who were cheering when his rocket blew up as if that was some kind of success.