They allowed you to buy the "car can drive itself" capability and never fully delivered. It's not like this was just a promise, it was something you could pay for years ago.
Yeah, but that isn't a crime. You can pre-order things. They still claim they will deliver it. Seems like maybe you could do a class-action or something to get your money back, but not argue that actually it was reasonable to believe you already had it and therefore are not liable for a crash or whatever.
> Yeah, but that isn't a crime. You can pre-order things.
It actually is. When accepting a preorder you have to provide a fixed delivery date, or it is assumed to be no later than 30 days after sale (or 50 days if you offer in-house financing). The fraud case here is actually very straightforward.
IANAL but I think you could call it fraud if you never had any intention of delivering. E.g. if I kickstart a perpetual motion machine and then move to the Bahamas with the funds.
What's ironic is that despite his image as a genius no one ever holds Elon to account for his failure to accurately predict the state/progress of his own technology. He's either not as smart as people think or he's knowingly lying, but I think you have to pick one.
