Absolutely. If Martha Stewart went to jail for much less, a certain CEO[1] should be doing some hard time for ludicrous claims over the past 8 years. Some back-of-the-napkin-math: If we focus on the 4m Model 3 (& Y) vehicles sold that had these claims attached and assume that there was a peak uptake rate of 46% declining to 11% as these claims became obviously untrue. On FSD @ an ever-increasing price of $6000-$12000 USD per vehicle. Let's say take the declining rate difference as indicative of the group that was misled. 35% of those taking FSD took the feature because of erroneous claims, generating about 2Bn in high-margin revenue collected pumping the stock and causing investors to pile on creating even more validation of this claim. Pumping the stock also created massive tranche payouts for Musk for hitting certain valuations that should only have been hit when the automaker was truly a runaway success. Musk is incentivized to use this reality-distortion field & cult-like persona to continue lying about Tesla's future for personal and corporate gain.
We all need to remember Musk wasn't the founder. He was an early investor that forced the founders out. We can argue about whether the founders would have been more/less successful but he didn't found Tesla.
I have an even funnier one for you: That viral video of when he was bald and bought that very expensive McLaren... "It's the highlight of my life" he said shortly before totaling the car with no insurance.
Forget Twitter fuup because he made some bad decison and he is trying to build again
Forget pedo comments on diver because may be he tweeted in the heat of the moment
Forget blaming an engineer at spacex initial days for the launch failure and notacceptimg it later when the truth was known because may be he cares more about the company which is err...
Forget not taking seriously about Tesla safety and firing who brought attention because he genuinely thought it's really not a big deal.
But the following can never be forgiven. Considering the way he projects himself a savior of civilization.
He does not value other human life.
Hiring surrogate mother for his then girlfriends second* child. His probably 9th or 10th child.
How is this ethical. That too it's not like he doesnot have any children.
Lets take those one at a time. So Twitter he fired a bunch of people and it works better than ever with more innovation. He called a guy a pedo who may be one and was talking smack way before Elon was. Maybe he misattributed some failure to someone? Okay, who hasn't done that? You say he went easy on Tesla safety.. with the cars with the best safety ratings of any car that exists.. still not getting it. You are mad he wants to save civilization also, okay... and that is bad again why? Because he is actually doing it by popularizing electric cars that can run on sustainable energy, or by giving internet to those who don't have it and could never have had it before? And supposedly you say he doesn't value human life, according to who? Why do you care how many children another person has, He has the money to have 10000 children and treat them all better than most millionaire children. Your question of "How is that ethical?" How is it not? You gave literally no reasons that don't scream an emotional attachent to hating him.
I should have been clearer. Sorry about that. My point is you can ignore everything but not hiring the surrogate mother.
It's not justified as he has plenty of kids and it's unethical because the mother does not get to see the kid ever. Not saying it's illegal. If you don't see any problem in it, then I have nothing to say.
I was a huge hero worshipper of Elon until I learn d about the surrogacy. He is just like any other rich ass hole.
That’s only part of the problem. They’re specifically investigating claims Elon made himself where he said the car drove itself without human input. He’s repeatedly made claims like this.
Haha I like the Fool's Gold analogy because his family owned an Emerald company in Zambia:
"During that time," said Errol, speaking to Elon's college years, "I managed to send money I made from emerald sales to him and [Elon's brother, Kimbal Musk] for living expenses."
"Self driving" means something. There are industry standards for that phraseology that pre-date Tesla's (mis)usage.
"Autopilot" may have been colloquially misleading (because of the public's unfamiliarity with aviation), but I don't think that name was problematic. Autopilot in planes can historically look like a basic cruise control.
However, some of the associated statements and demonstrations at that time were problematic. (e.g. "The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.")
I think Martha Stewart went to jail for insider trading idk how similar that is. With OTA updates still could claim this could happen.
This imo is less than both Theranos and insider trading like the FSD has disclaimers right? Unless the argument is Tesla is only valuable because of FSD and not best in class EV experience
The pay package being declined by a Delaware court and now this couldnt have come at a worse time for Musk though. Billionaires got their problems too huh
> Unless the argument is Tesla is only valuable because of FSD
That's not how fraud works. Fraud doesn't require that the false claim us the only source of value of the product, it only requires that the false claim is material to the decision to purchase the product at the price offered.
It's going to be hard to prove fraud when literally everywhere you buy it it said it is not currently available and gave no timeline to when you would receive it.
"Stewart was found guilty on charges including conspiracy and obstruction of justice" [1]. She sold shares on inside information. She went to jail for lying to investigators about it.
There was no insider trading. She thought she was in trouble and made up a story for the investigators that it was a limit order, which she was convicted of.
While lying is bad, this was a case of overzealous prosecution because it was a high-profile case and an inappropriate use of resources. Instead of prison, they should have just had her do some cheezy PSAs and enter in to a deferred prosecution agreement.
I find the members of congress consistently beating the market to be much more troubling.
"Martha Stewart, the founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, also became embroiled in the scandal after it emerged that her broker, Peter Bacanovic, tipped her off that ImClone was about to drop. In response, Stewart sold about $230,000 in ImClone shares on December 27, 2001, a day before the announcement of the FDA decision" [1].
It’s far from fact that she did not trade on inside information.
"Insider trading" doesn't have a well defined boundary. The SEC sued Mark Cuban [1] for "committing securities fraud by engaging in illegal insider trading" under similar circumstances. But he kept his mouth shut, didn't destroy evidence, and didn't lie to the FBI. Did he trade on "inside information"? Sure. But the Jury found him not guilty of insider trading.
> "Insider trading" doesn't have a well defined boundary
Correct. In our courts it’s ambiguously defined.
Colloquially, Stewart got a tip-off that arose from the non-public outcome of a drug trial. Whether she committed insider trading is open; whether she traded—knowingly or unknowingly—on material non-public information is pretty clear.
It was third-party hearsay. The stock tip came from her stock broker, who also happened to handle transactions for people with inside knowledge. The broker didn't know the details about the FDA trials, only the movement some of his clients were making.
This is why she wasn't tried on insider trading, but instead on the story she made up to cover the fact that she was given this knowledge indirectly.
> stock tip came from her stock broker, who also happened to handle transactions for people with inside knowledge. The broker didn't know the details about the FDA trials
Source? Not disputing the broker was facilitating others’ insider trades, but if they were, it takes the suspicion to a whole new level around why this broker is so comfortable with his clients with potential insider status making large bets just ahead of corporate events.
Agreed. I don't think she knowingly insider traded. After the fact, the authorities were going after her broker and she erased a voice mail message to protect the broker. They were upset that she deleted evidence and went after her because she was high profile.
> were upset that she deleted evidence and went after her because she was high profile
She also previously held securities licenses. That takes entire categories of innocent error out of the picture. I hold securities licenses. I’d be held to a higher standard because plausible deniability is removed.
>A certain founder should be doing some hard time for ludicrous claims over the past 8 years.
I don't think "hard time" is appropriate for white collar crimes. Money is how you speak to these people. Martha Stewart is still worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Hard time costs humans the same amount whether they're rich or poor - insofar as the justice system is equally accessible and you can't just lawyer your way out if wealthy or get screwed by a disinterested public defender if poor, of course.
Money is amoral. It quickly becomes a calculation of ROI to violate the law. We've been reluctant for some reason to index fines against the wealth of the offender, but what would be a ruinous fine for a poor person is irrelevant to a wealthy person (eg. $1000 gag order violations). Also, the wheels of justice turn inexorably but slowly, and if first-to-market matters a lot with new there may be no fine that could restore things to the way it should have been if everyone acted within the law.
Strongly disagree with both claims. Fraud of a sufficient degree causes harm at a scale that is equivalent (in economic terms at least) to the consequences of murder. And jail time absolutely speaks to wealthy people, given the amount of money and effort wealthy people will spend defending themselves to avoid it.
Disagree. First, it wouldn’t be $10 split evenly amongst a billion people, some people would end up losing significantly more than others. Second, we can’t speak to the real world consequences of massive fraud in this particular case yet, but in the case of the Bernie Madoff fraud, multiple people are known to have killed themselves as a result of their loss, so we can only assume similar outcomes here.
What’s money when you have billions? Isn’t jail worse then? I’d be prepared to pay a very large amount if it meant I could avoid going to jail. There is a much much much smaller amount (if any) of jail I’d accept in return for money.
No but that what I mean, I have nowhere near billions and I’d be prepared to pay much more money to avoid going to jail than I’d be prepared to spend in jail (time wise) to keep all my money.
Therefore, I’d think losing money hurts less than spending time in jail no matter how much or how little money you have.
If someone steals something, taking the thing they stole back is of course the first step.
Other than that, the next step depends on what you think the point of the court/prison system is. If the point of the system is to prevent criminals from harming people: white collar criminals do crime at scale. They can hurt many more people than blue collar criminals.
If the point is to reform people, it seems like white collar criminals have an easier time lying to themselves and justifying their actions, because they don’t physically take things from people, it’s all very abstract. So that seems like a harder project that might take longer.
If the point is to prevent others from following their example, there are lots of reasons to punish white collar criminals more harshly. Their crimes are more difficult to work out, so getting caught might be harder. Plus there’s less of a de-facto preventative aspect—with blue collar crimes, depending on the crime, there’s likely a chance the victim might be physically present and quite irate, so they might fight, potentially even kill, the culprit.
Of course there are some reasons that blue collar crimes can be more serious (muggers might physically hurt somebody). But I don’t think hard time is inappropriate in either case.
The size of white collar crimes, measured in financial damage, and the large number of victims of many white collar crimes, not to mention the damage to the economy, institutional reputation, etc. makes a car theft ring that would get 10 years look like piffle.
I'm not sure Martha Stewart actually did "hard time" - she spent what, a few months in jail? Try 10-20 years.
I'm also not arguing for against jail time for white collar crimes, just disputing that she specifically did hard time. Maybe the FTX guy or Enron guys are more appropriate for a comparison.
> I'm not sure Martha Stewart actually did "hard time" - she spent what, a few months in jail? Try 10-20 years.
From what I recall of studies, and also from what I've heard from criminal defense lawyers, sending someone to jail for even very short amount of times is likely to have a meaningful effect on their behavior. Even sending a white-collar defendant to jail for a few hours can win a lot of cooperation from them; and studies seem to indicate that there's no meaningful difference between a year in prison and 20 years in prison.
The issue is the fines aren't a big deterrence as they're not that big. A lot of fines are less than the money the company made or saved with the illicit activity so it just becomes a line item cost more than an actual penalty.
>The issue is the fines aren't a big deterrence as they're not that big.
So make them big?
What would you and/or society gain if Musk goes to jail for 10 years? Another mouth to feed in prison, while he continues to accrue wealth in off-shore accounts.
Can we legally get fines large enough that it would actually hurt Musk or people of his economic stratum financially? The Supreme Court has put some pretty hard limits on civil damages awards over the years and they've just gotten more business friendly since those courts.
Hard time seems much more severe than fines and penalties, and the damages caused are much more severe than petty theft (which gets you jail time.) it seems totally appropriate to jail these people to me.
This is about defrauding people who bought a tesla, not investors.
> In 2020, Musk told a crowd in Shanghai that he remains “confident” that Tesla will achieve “basic functionality for level five autonomy this year,” referring to the SAE’s rankings of autonomy. Tesla’s technology, in 2024, is still at level 2.
This reminds me alot of the Thernos case where she tried to make the case not about fraud but about an overly optimistic CEO promising something and being wrong about that. here Musk has clearly said that full self driving would be available many years ago.
So I guess we're trying to figure out how much lying is ok by a CEO before it becomes fraud to the buyer.
I purchased FSD in 2019 on the promise of self driving. 5 years later and still no self driving. There was also the promise of the car being able to self park. I would be happy if I got my money back for a feature that was never delivered.
If old navy CEO asked me to pay $5000 up front for jeans that can't wear out and that wash themselves, and had been saying that it'll be here next year for five years, I'd be pretty skeptical too. I also would encourage refunds or investigation when I buy it and the features are never delivered.
same. at least we got in before the price jumped? We don't even have a hope as the new MCU doesn't even support getting backported to our car even if we were willing to pay for it.
Pretty sure it cost me more than the $2500 I paid. I tried smart summon one day. Instead of backing out of the space, it just ran forward up the curb on to the sidewalk. Couple years later the left strut failed costing me $2k.
As the article explains, wire fraud is about defrauding consumers, and securities fraud is about deceiving investors. Tesla is under investigation for both.
Wire fraud is nowadays just a catch-all for "crime involving money". Regardless of all other specifics of the case, it is a certainty that at some point someone sent a text message or used a computer, so that's what the feds will go after.
Ran a scammy crypto exchange out of the Bahamas? Took money from investors for a failed blood testing company? Raised money for a political campaign but spent it on hookers? Paid a hitman to kill your spouse? All wire fraud.
Yup. It's a straightforward consequence of how society has evolved over time. "Wire fraud" specifically means using electronic communication channels to defraud something. Since most business is conducted over electronic communication channels nowadays, it all falls into that category.
IANAL, but I doubt that there's any great alternative that doesn't involve rewriting 100 years' worth of legislation and case law, which generally distinguishes categories of fraud by the medium over which they occur.
And pretty much everything a public company does is securities fraud: [1]
To oversimplify, a company is required to disclose risks, and everything is a risk, so it's security fraud if it's not in the disclosure, or if it's misrepresented in the disclosure.
Not just a computer but just using the phone is also a wire fraud trigger too. It is basically any fraud these days though given how much communication happens through some 'wire'.
> This reminds me alot of the Thernos case where she tried to make the case not about fraud but about an overly optimistic CEO promising something and being wrong about that.
Right, and that fell apart with, well, many things, but the one that stands out to me - upcoming FDA inspection, and Holmes (in something out of a cartoon) literally had someone put a filing cabinet in front of the door to the lab where they were doing actual work to hide it, and direct inspectors to a faked up lab, i.e. outright fraud and deception.
She wasn't convicted of... whatever that was (extremely low-effort obstruction of justice?), though, she was convicted of defrauding her investors. Notably, she got off on the charges of defrauding her customers, for, truly, it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get in trouble for injuring the general public.
We're actually seeing how much people can read into words too much. There was zero promise by Musk just some guesses and when you buy the car itself it has all sorts of lack of promises.
No, this should be about defrauding people who bought FSD for their Tesla. Most Tesla owners do not care about FSD, according to the estimates of subscription rates.
If we started prosecuting CEOs who don't meet goals/expectations, they'd all be in prison. You have to prove Elon was intentionally lying, which I suspect many on this forum are sympathetic to that view, but in a fair court system that is a difficult standard. You'd have to have emails or some other hard evidence where he acknowledges he knows he's being untruthful. Short of that kind of evidence coming out, they are most likely going after him for political reasons.
There is an obvious difference between lying and being wrong.
Theranos claimed to already have created their magic machine, which was a blatant lie. They intentionally misled investors by pretending to put samples into a fake testing machine, secretly removing the samples to test them in a lab elsewhere, then putting them back into the machine to make it look like the machine was doing the testing. That's careful, calculated fraud, which was obviously a criminal act.
Musk, by contrast, never claimed to have something that he did not have. He made overly-optimistic claims about product development. There is no reason to assume that these projections were lies, given that everyone else in the space was making similarly aggressive projections.
Musk was wrong for selling FSD-related features before they were ready, and Tesla should obviously make that right. But pretending that being wrong (in good company) is the same thing as calculated fraud is just goofy.
By this reasoning it would be OK for a car company to market a car with an automatic transmission, yet the clutch was still required to be used on gear changes at delivery. You paid a large premium for the automatic clutch as was marketed by the CEO of the company to be delivered "next year". This claim you bought into was now made over 8 years ago and what the CEO stated has still not been delivered. Your car now has over 120k miles on it with a feature that is only half delivered.
This doesn't seem fraudulent, FSD was an additional optional feature you didn't have to buy not a required featured. Then when you bought it there was plenty of disclaimer about how there is no timeline for release. So your claiming that because the CEO said something at random speech - that was technically correct anyways, that apparently that overrides all of the disclaimers you have to sign when actually buying the car?
You also had the option to not buy automatic transmissions for a lot of time automobiles have been sold. The example is relevant.
I think you're misunderstanding that Elon has not made this statement just once. He's literally said it every year multiple times per year and he still has not delivered. At this point it truly is fraudulent.
That's the question: is there any calculated fraud here or was he just vastly overly optimistic?
... but even if there is no calculated fraud, I think some Tesla buyers are owed refunds or other compensation. If a company promises me X, I pay for it, and years later has not delivered X, eventually I need a refund.
After 7 years or whatever you can’t keep being “overly optimistic”. At some point it becomes clear it’s just not ready and you need to give people their money back and stop selling it until it is.
If all FSD things were sold with a “really will be in 2 years or 80% of your money back” clause that would be different in my mind.
But taking money and just never delivering is flat out fraud. No matter how many times you say “just one more year”.
> Musk, by contrast, never claimed to have something that he did not have.
IIRC, wasn't the video that claimed to demonstrate a full trip conducted by FSD actually like 100 different splices? That right there would be a claim of something that didn't exist.
> Theranos claimed to already have created their magic machine, which was a blatant lie.
And to this day, you can go on Tesla's website, configure a car, and be offered the option to purchase "Full Self Driving Capability" which does not offer a fully self driving vehicle.
Shouldn't fraud (for the end user/customer) be determined by claims made about the product at the time of sale, and not promises of what might be possible a few years from now?
If you want to say promises of future features is fraud, then surely that would only be in relation to investors?
In 2016 Tesla claimed that "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver":
The definition of fraud is going to vary slightly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but generally the core elements are:
* Falsity: did the person knowingly make a false statement?
* Materiality: was the false statement something that could reasonably influence someone's decision to agree to a contract?
* Reliance: did the other party actually use the false statement to decide to agree to the contract?
Claims of future capabilities are necessarily going to be evaluated differently from claims of current capabilities, since it's going to be harder to demonstrate all of these points. But for Tesla's FSD promises, we're at 7-ish years now of "coming soon" promises, with marketing materials outright saying it's only regulatory reasons that a driver is needed. Materiality and reliance are slam-dunks at this point; the only out Tesla really has at this point is falsity. Essentially, Tesla has to argue that its engineers were all high on their own hype (which I have to admit it as at least plausible).
"Almost ready" as a claim is pretty meaningless. It's a statement of feature status, not a prediction of when 100% completion occurs. In software, "almost" can last years or decades.
"a Tesla", not "all Teslas". And of course "should" not "will". And so on. If his press releases are to be treated like contracts that he can be held to, then the verbiage needs to be parsed as if his words were contracts.
That's just not going to go very well for the people litigating that he made false claims. Which gives the impression that the litigation isn't so much about punishing the wrongs he has committed, as they are about punishing the person that no one likes.
Maybe there are other tweets that are better examples of your argument, I'll wait to see if they come up in any of the umpteen fluff articles we'll see over the next few months. In the meantime though, this seems more than a little unfounded.
In 2019:“ I think we will be feature-complete full self-driving this year, meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention — this year. I would say that I am certain of that. That is not a question mark." [1].
When you are charging people extra for the features you're promising will exist in the future, it seems reasonable to call that fraud if you never deliver.
Of course not, a huge number of (if not most) contracts contain agreements regarding future delivery of product or services. This is valid and normal arrangement. The contract is a promise to deliver that. If you don't deliver, you have breeched the contract.
Elon Musk signed contracts claiming he would deliver this in the future? There are verbal contracts, so what you're really saying was that he was in the room with each buyer, individually or with a group of them (such that he was aware of the identities of those he was contracting with), and made a legally binding verbal contract where he told them he would deliver these software features, under what conditions they would be delivered (time, location, other details), and then shook their hands?
Stretching contracts in the way you'd do it wouldn't be good for anyone.
I'm making a bit of a comparison, since the above was a pretty general statement. Yes, literally, marketing is generally not regarded as contract offers... but the rationale for laws prohibiting false advertising is that the product delivered should be the product promised. Technically the difference between whether something would be breach of contract or false advertising or fraud is a very fine line dependent on the specifics.
My point was just to say that "future promises" are not something that can just be disregarded.
This site[1], which is a pretty comprehensive list of claims Musk has made and how long it’s been, made the rounds on HN a few times. It’s really incredible how much exaggeration comes out of the guy’s mouth. I don’t think it all counts as fraud, but at some point you gotta say Dude, Stop Talking.
Last month he stood before the SpaceX staff in Boca Chica and outlined how he still believes that he will get 1 million people on Mars by the 2050s. U til they can start producing 100’s of Starships, this is not even remotely realistic. Sending thousands of people to Mars in the next 5 years is not a serious or realistic idea.
I mean, what those 1 million people would be even doing there? What would be their purpose there? Definitely not resources, because getting anything from Mars would not be economical.
I do understand to have an international base of few dozens to few hundred scientists on Mars who will be studying it 24/7. But that's about it.
- "The investigation, which was first reported in October 2022 but has been going on since at least late 2021, involves federal prosecutors in Washington and San Francisco who..."
Just to clarify, this is the same one as this HN thread from October 2022,
The basic idea here is that you lied, the share price went up because of your lies, and that makes it security fraud. From one viewpoint it’s a useful tool to punish fraudsters and con men, and from another view it’s an overreach by the FTC. Maybe a more reasonable view is somewhere in the middle—it’s both a good tool and an overreach.
I had a feeling this was coming. I bought FSD in 2020. It was $10K, and they were claiming in one year you could summon the car to come to you from across town or rent it out as a self-driving taxi service. I figured it might work, and in the meantime would be a fun toy, so I bought into it as a speculation. On an individual basis this was just poor judgement on my part, but when you multiply that by how many other customers thought similarly to how I did, maybe it does become a government issue then.
Unfortunately for me, I soon discovered that I did not like the car driving me around. No matter how good it got, I would almost always have made a different decision in most traffic situations. So it was a huge loss, but for me it doesn't even have to do with the fact the technology doesn't do what their hype claimed. It has to do with the fact that letting FSD drive is more stressful than if I just drive the car myself.
There isn't even a point to it if it requires you to keep your hands on the wheel and not look at your phone. I would want to use it so I could conduct business while the car took care of driving. If it still requires me to pay strict attention to the road and keep both hands on the wheel, then it's just a novelty to show off to passengers for a quick giggle, but not actually solving a problem.
None of those claims were claims by them, they were claims you hoped for. If you look at what was actually said it was all at random interview or podcasts, rarely if ever even at a Tesla release or event. PLus it was all "I Think.." if you want to fault a CEO for being optimistic, literally every CEO in the world should be in jail. Do you know how many "World's Best Burger" restaurants there are? The only actual claims that could be considered valid are those by the website when the purchase of the car was actually taking place, which promised exactly none of that.
I'm surprised it's taken this long, though I supposed you needed some technical knowledge to know that it was obviously a fraud a while ago. Without that you might believe it was actually possible (hence people actually buying FSD).
The latest self driving is getting really good. My main problem is being a front seat driver and taking action because I’m not sure of it’s thought process but it ends up getting things correct.
I think all these systems* could benefit from earlier braking to give the “supervisor” more piece of mind.
agree, half the people in this thread havnt used it. i think it's probably clear to most FSD testers that end-to-end NN trained on video will get you L5 eventually.
agreed. so his prediction was wrong. who cares. think about how much has changed in AI in the past 1.5 years. The timeline is off, but Tesla will achieve autonomy first.
Is FSD an awesome technology? Yes. But I've watched enough YouTube videos of it, including by superfans, that I know if you set the navigation and climbed in the back seat, that car is not making it to its destination without getting in an accident.
That's why the safety vs no FSD comparisons are so silly: you have a person intervening. How would it look if you didn't? Guess we'll find out!
Securities fraud again, funny that the guy who "bought Twitter" and shut down free speech ended up getting sued himself due to his own tweet (lying about # of Teslas being produced).
It's like a bully trying to chase someone but tripping over their shoelace in the first step, love it.
On self-driving: For several years the guy has been saying "next month" "next year" it's been like 10+ years at this point. He's a bigger grifter than the Ashes of Creation guy (8 year long Kickstarter MMO that never launched and still collects payments to this day). Wonder why anyone falls for it, feel bad for the gullible.
1) Linking to Tweets still exists, and doesn't require that you're logged in to view them.
2) According to their own released numbers (which you may or may not trust), the usage of the platform is at a record high.
3) They've unbanned many accounts that were previously banned and seem to display a wider tolerance for free speech on the platform. The innovative community notes feature is sometimes helpful to point out misinformation, but misinformation thrives on the platform.
4) They've pushed back on various foriegn governments requesting data on users and requesting users or posts be banned (see the ongoing dispute with Brazil.)
> 4) They've pushed back on various foriegn governments requesting data on users and requesting users or posts be banned (see the ongoing dispute with Brazil.)
But not in India, nor Turkey, there Twitter under Musk has abided by the requests to silence people.
Why is that is a good question, it could be political alignment (Modi and Erdogan are from a different political stance than Lula), it could be because Musk seeks to exploit Brazil's lithium, we can't know but he's been pretty selective in where to pick a fight so we can only assume is due to other circumstances than anything to do with freedom of speech.
"Twitter accounts from over 100 prominent politicians, activists, and journalists in India and abroad have been blocked in India at the request of the government. On Monday, the account of the BBC News Punjabi was also blocked — the second time in a few months that the Indian government has used Twitter to throttle BBC services in its country."
"At the time that Musk took charge of the company, it had a mere 20 percent compliance rate with Indian government requests. Following massive layoffs that reduced 90 percent of Twitter India’s staff, the platform appears to have become far more obliging in the face of government pressure, as its actions to censor its critics now show."
Regardless of whether or not that statement made is true - the problem is that of misinformation distribution. Social media isn't socially useful if it's being leveraged to influence ideas that are not factual.
Given that the owner of the platform has pushed misinformation and also sells products that don't align with what he's promised, at least to me, would lead me to question the statistics that are self-published and unable to be publicly validated.
And after years of publicly looking like a lying car salesman, why would he still listen to those employees? I don’t think it’s the line employees that are lying here.
The CEO is still responsible for their own employees, CEO hired them or directed them to be hired, the CEO (especially this CEO) runs the company.
Lying about features or the number of cars being produced etc. can't be limited to mere optimism because they mentioned specific numbers in a public way that were not true.
> fired for underperforming
The irony, since Musk destroys every brand and product he's ever touched. I've never seen a more polar opposite to the Midas effect at work. It has to be intentional.
Why should a CEO be responsible for their employees if they could instead take a huge pay package which they are obviously entitled to given they have to work around their lying employees?
That too was sarcasm :-)
You shouldn't be too hard on Musk regarding the "destroys" though: Many people are so incompetent you don't even get to hear about their failures! And others loot professionally without you ever getting to know about it. You have to ignore a lot to state "it has to be intentional".
True. Sometimes the disconnect bothers me more, sometimes less. There's the hilarity of having fanboys agree with me, which happens sometimes when Tesla's on the menu.
This is irrelevant, he is public CEO and has tons of responsibilities. Basically lying to millions of customers in very public manner is a serious issue.
FSD, in its current iteration, is not what Musk has promised since 2016. FSD is not autonomous or even remotely close to driverless operation as he's claimed it would be. FSD is ultimately a marketing gimmick.
Citation needed. The platform is more open and vibrant than ever, even going so far as to reinstate free speech that old Twitter shut down at the request of the US government. If anything, he liberated free speech and it shows.
What you claim is clearly incorrect. First, major news outlets all over the world are still linking to twitter posts daily, not least because most of the worlds journalists are still actively using twitter, so obviously this feature still works. Also, there has never been more product development on Twitter/X than since the Musk takeover. Examples include community notes, creator revenue sharing and the features tied to the purchased blue checkmark (eg. Posts longer than 280 chars).
The major handicapping of the platform compared to earlier is that only the post linked to is now visible to non-users, whereas the whole thread it was part of was previously visible.
A lot of people are really defensive about this. What's the big deal if X does well? Why are people so personally invested in pretending like Elon didn't do the world a huge service by removing Twitter from the control of possibly the most politically extreme and anti-constitutional subculture in the entire country?
> the control of possibly the most politically extreme and anti-constitutional subculture in the entire country?
What are you trying to refer to here? Because the most politically extreme and anti-constitutional subculture I can think of right now is QAnon, which has not (nor is not) in control of Twitter.
Everyone must remember that "they" and "their side" are capable of the same evil as their enemies. The existence of a truly open discussion must be sacred, or we might as well dismantle it all.
Or, if your goal is to dismantle instead of building or fixing things, remind me to never let you have any power.
I can tell by the upvote/downvote dance on the parent comment - people love their celebrities. They get really mad if you talk bad about Elon Musk lol I find it quite pathetic personally.
I of course disagree - I don't see the "huge service". Everything from defrauding investors, customers, speaking out of school (saying he's a physicist in the early days), hanging out with Ghislaine Maxwell, stealing then tanking Tesla, destroying Twitter, he's a walking disaster to the point I believe it's intentional.
I'm not sure how you'd see the "dance" but anyway...
I'd hold the "visited decisive politics" hypothesis at a much higher probability over "celebrity parasocial loyalties" for down and up voting in this case.
That said, trying to guess at the motivations of the diverse crowd here is fraught at best.
Really you've never seen a comment of yours bounce around negative and positive on polarizing issues? It's kinda cool to see, makes this platform feel more solid than others.
It was in response to the insufferable worship happening in comment sections everywhere. I wonder how much he was paying for PR each month back then, and what agency he uses. At any rate, that there was a good meme.
I have seen mine be down voted at times and then later up voted but not in a responsive sense. Have I missed a feature or maybe you're using an outside reader?
Regardless, I've only noticed for my own account. Perhaps you own both accounts?
I completely miss all the memes as a rule, thanks for sharing.
I posted the parent comment. Referring to the parent comment of MisterDizzy's.
I only have 1 account, though I probably should create a burner for certain topics... it seems that just 1 bad take here can destroy a career. Can't wait til this authoritarian phase is over, just want to share opinions again and it not matter that much.
Thanks for clearing up my confusion, sorry for it.
Turning otherwise intelligent people against one another is an old and battle tested control and mitigation strategy but yeah, it feels bad. Turns out nothing inherently keeps us from just doing better.
> people love their celebrities. They get really mad if you talk bad about Elon Musk lol I find it quite pathetic personally.
People have strong opinions about celebrities they don't know, don't have any control over and have zero material stake in; news at eleven. (The last is the only one that isn't sometimes true about Elon.)
I’ve seen the same meme over and over again in many different youtube videos: Elon musk assuring self-driving is just around the corner, just another few months…
The investigation doesn’t interest me much. He has gotten slaps on the wrist before. Wake me up when he gets jail time.
As someone with a tesla and with a parent who bought the fsd beta package, I’d be very interested if there’s some kind of payout for consumers/customers!
There was this thread[0] around here about one buyer of FSD who took Tesla to small claims court and Tesla settled with them. Looks like it's easy enough to do.
It's just that Tesla demands gag clauses in the settlement which may be accepted by many people and we might never know how many settlements are out there. Thankfully the author in this instance knew they were going to win and there would be no gag clauses then. So why accept them in the settlement? Tesla caved, because they knew this too.
I don't know if there are still a lot of Tesla shorts, but I wonder if they could offer to fund one of these settlements and then pay for any fines for the person to then breach the gag order. Maybe there are not enough FSD customers for this to have a material impact in terms of dollars but I'd have to think it would impact reputation.
You know as well as I do that you're using hypothetical incidents to justify hypocrisy and censorship. Please read the HN guidelines before posting too as repeatedly attacking someone's point as "playing stupid" has no place here.
[1] Edit: Founder -> CEO