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By Ed Browne
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Elon Musk has launched yet another marketing stunt by releasing a Tesla whistle that is in such high demand that it is selling for several times its original price on eBay. Musk announced the "Cyberwhistle" in a tweet on Tuesday night. The stainless steel whistle resembles the shape of Tesla's Cybertruck electric vehicle, hence the name.
Described by Tesla as a "premium collectible," the whistle was available on its website for $50 before quickly running out of stock. Tesla says the product is final sale, so it will not be listed again. Musk plugged the whistle on Twitter in what appears to have been a reference to whistleblowers.
"Blow the whistle on Tesla!" he wrote, just weeks after an employee at the company's Fremont factory in California launched a lawsuit against the company in which it is alleged that she experienced sexual harassment by co-workers, according to an excerpt from the lawsuit published by ArsTechnica.
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"Don't waste your money on that silly Apple Cloth, buy our whistle instead!" he added, in an apparent reference to Apple's $19 polishing cloth.
The Cyberwhistles have been listed online at several times their original price, and some people are paying hundreds of U.S. dollars for them.
eBay's advanced search function shows that one Cyberwhistle auction ended with a winning bid of $325 on Wednesday after a 43-bid race. Another sold for $299 and others sold for less, but all could be considered a high price for a stainless steel whistle.
Some sellers are being particularly optimistic about the speculative value of the whistles. A number of them have decided to list their whistle at a Buy It Now price of $420.69—a reference to the meme numbers that Musk sometimes tweets about—while others start their bids there. Other sellers have simply aimed high and put their whistle up for sale for $1,000.
Newsweek could not find an example of a Cyberwhistle that had sold for a price this high. Almost all of the sellers appear to have taken a photo of the whistle off of Tesla's website, meaning it's unclear whether or not they do actually own it. One such seller has zero percent feedback on their accounts. Others have posted what appear to be screenshots of their order confirmation page.
It's not the first time that Musk has pulled off a marketing stunt that has ended up being successful. Through his underground tunnelling project The Boring Company, Musk sold 20,000 "flamethrowers" in 2018 for $500 each—which were eventually renamed to "Not-A-Flamethrowers"—in addition to 50,000 The Boring Company hats at $20 each.
Similarly to the whistles, CNBC reported in 2018 that The Boring Company hats were selling on eBay for several times their original price.
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