Leave it to Tesla CEO Elon Musk to turn seemingly harmless jokes and pranks and make something out of them. The under-fire CEO took a break from all his legal problems to show a “visual approximation” of Teslaquila, the company’s new tequila product. It’s unclear if Teslaquila is actually a real thing — it stemmed from an April Fool’s joke earlier this year — but considering that Musk once signed off on a flamethrower — that product netted Tesla $5 million pre-orders, by the way — it’s not unlikely that Teslaquila will be sold in liquor stores and groceries in the not-too-distant future.
We should have seen this coming, right? We all laughed when Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted an April Fool’s joke a few months earlier, announcing that Tesla would make its own hard liquor. He even called it Teslaquila, a play on the company’s name and the distilled agave drink. Not a lot of people took the joke seriously, though we probably should’ve considering that Musk is the same person who signed off on developing and selling Tesla-branded flamethrowers after someone dared him to do it.
Teslaquila, as it’s being reported, could follow that same business trajectory. CNET’s Roadshow reported last week that Tesla actually filed a trademark for “Teslaquila” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, identifying the name as either a “distilled agave liquor” or “distilled blue agave liquor.” For those who aren’t familiar with the label, either one of those two descriptions means the same thing: it’s tequila.
The "visual approximation" of Teslaquila appears to be its product label.
Given the lengths Tesla has gone to create the product, don’t be shocked if Teslaquila turns into a real product that you can buy online, in stores, or even order through Tesla. It wouldn’t be the first time the company has created unorthodox products in the past. The company famous sold merchandise to fund The Boring Company and who can forget the time it offered — and sold — flamethrowers. Tesla made a killing with those products so who’s to say that it can’t trap lightning in a bottle for the third time. Perhaps it can even use the Teslaquila bottle to catch the lightning. All possibilities are in play when it comes to Musk and his weird ideas. And it’s not like the auto industry hasn’t had a history with tequila and the companies that manufacture them. Remember Ford’s partnership with Jose Cuervo to make car parts from agave-based bio-plastic? Granted, that partnership came with a different scope compared to Tesla’s Teslaquila product, but the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.
As for what’s next from Tesla, we’re still waiting on that freeze gun, Elon Musk.
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