Over the last few decades (i'm an online oldie) I have watched as the conversation spaces changed broadly from "places where we engage with ideas and argue our values" to "places where we pretend to debate people we don't agree with for attention from our own side" to now, "places where we viciously rip out the throats of people in our own groups because it's so much easier to purity-test your kinsmen than it is to actually go try to change someone's mind."

This is kinda silly and sad on its own, it becomes horrifying when you realize that most of these people, left and right, have this idea that they're going to someday "win" and that "someone is going to do something." And as a result don't ever pause to think about the fact that even if everything went our way tomorrow, we would still have to live next to millions of people who don't agree with you and nothing is going to end unless we actually do hard things like talk to people we've been taught to hate.

I believe the part they consider performative is just the expectation that people who already have them need to get rid of them, sustaining a really big personal loss with no direct benefit in terms of hurting teslas bottom line. But I can see how their exact phrasing could be ambiguous what they really mean