It's distressing that every time something negative about Tesla comes out, there is a knee-jerk reaction like "this is merely a ploy to manipulate the stock or destroy the company." Yes, news agencies are often wrong. And yes, there are occasionally manipulators. And although Tesla might be doing great work, it is unquestionable that they may, at times, be causing significant harm to individuals. To dismiss the potential of Tesla's wrongdoing immediately and out of hand feels deeply cult-like to me.
> "this is merely a ploy to manipulate the stock or destroy the company."
Well, the most favorable thing you could say about $TSLA is that Musk hasn't managed to destroy the company, in spite of his well-known and recurring antics.
Given that they’re currently producing over 90,000 cars per quarter, and that their products have consistently been the benchmark EV for eight years, I think there are plenty of other favourable things you could say about them?
I’m not remotely a fanboy of that company but your comment does seem to be out of whack with the scale of their success despite gargantuan odds.
“They sell more EVs than anyone else, because they are willing to lose more money than anyone else” is perhaps the most charitable thing I could say. I believe they’ve gone through about $20B in cash and lost $6.5B of it. “Not quite the WeWork of cars” is another.
> Looking purely at BEV sales (according to data from EV-Volumes), Tesla leads the way
That first chart that confirms your beliefs measures both EV and Hybrid. I seriously doubt anyone is conflating those two things here. Additionally, considering both EV and Hybrid, the difference between Tesla and BYD is less than one percent. Your arguments would be much more persuasive if you weren't so clearly biased...
In the link above they are at ~200k units vs 36k for the second place (Chevrolet). Nobody said “world”, and even there they are tied up with BYD which has it easy with a giant billion-people closed market and local manufacturing. What are you trying to prove?
Really? Tesla is spyware on wheels. The first time I can remember hearing about their consumer products was about someone finding their car remotely disabled because they'd found an ethernet port in it and plugged into it.
I mostly see it referenced in a mocking way about conspicuous consumption and weird corporate antics. They were even made fun of on the TV show Silicon Valley.
We have an EV at my household (a nissan leaf) which we like very much. A tesla would never have been a consideration. Googling briefly shows that worldwide leafs outnumber tesla on the road by a significant margin.
I do not understand how people can confirm their beliefs so quickly with such little effort. If a stat makes you feel good, you should probably look into more than usual.
When considering globally, 200,000 Leafs were sold in the first 5 years on the market. The Model approaches that number in a single year (2019) in a single country (US). It's _somewhat_ possible, that for a brief period of time in early 2018, it was true there were more Leafs on the road than Teslas, but that's a bit like being a Nokia fan on January 10th, 2007 saying "Oh, but there are far more Nokias than iPhones in the world". Certainly not a "significant margin".
It's totally and completely fine to dislike Telsa - and I don't disagree with the spyware comment, but please don't decide a thing, and then go google to find evidence of that thing you decided.
It's a little hard to make an apples to apples comparison because tesla was apparently taking money-down preorders for years while Nissan was actually shipping cars. Shipping obviously results in installed base advantages, but preorders obviously result in sales rate advantages.
I'll take your word for it that there are just now more tesla on the road although articles at least as recent as two months ago state otherwise-- but that doesn't really contradict my comment above that the statement that the claim that tesla is the 'benchmark ev' is odd to me.
Hi. I'm the person who described Tesla as making the benchmark EV. You're all completely missing the point talking about sales—the benchmark product in any given category/market is rarely the one with the highest global sales volume anyway. Most people don't want the best in a category, they want the nearest, cheapest or most convenient.
The benchmark product in any given category isn't even necessarily the best product (leaving aside the spurious nature of "best") although that's more often true.
Tesla's EV products have been the benchmark product which other EVs inevitably get compared. And we know this because every time anyone announces or releases a new EV, most commentators will benchmark it against the nearest Tesla competitor.
Their competition for those years has been companies that only producing compliance cars for the California market. Are you really the benchmark when no one else has been trying?
I do think the Model 3 caught everyone's attention though, but I'm deeply skeptical that Tesla has any significant first mover advantage. Car companies aren't exactly unique.
You don't think Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, Hyundai, or GM couldn't do any of these things too? They're some of the largest industrial manufacturers in the world.
It took what, a few years for Tesla to get to what is hays now? You saying Hyundai and Toyota couldn't do that in the same amount of time or less. We're talking about Tesla competing with some of the largest industrial manufacturers in the world, and you think a few years heads start is a significant first move advantage?
In "The PayPal Wars" [1] I read about his destructive behaviour as X.com / PayPal CEO. Because he became CEO of the merger of X.com and Confinity (owners of the PayPal brand back in the days). See e.g. [2]
I don't get what is "stunning" here? Maybe I am missing some context?
Someone called Tesla to advise that Tripp was heavily armed and coming at the Gigafactory.
Tesla called the police, which then looked for Tripp and found the information to be false.
Subsequently, the police tried to identify who placed the initial call, and found that the caller was just "a concerned friend", as they knew Tripp to be unstable and shaken by his firing from Tesla and thus concerned he could do something like that.
Ultimately from the report we don't know who placed the call, either it is indeed from a "concerned friend" and there is nothing interesting happening here.
Or it is from someone from Tesla trying to harass Tripp as a payback for his leaks, as I have seen suggested on twitter, however nothing in the report even alludes to that, so what am I missing?
This is a reasonable, yet generous reading of the situation. But the situation stinks. Tripp raised what seemed to be sincere concerns, yet was retaliated against by Tesla in an exceedingly heavy-handed manner. Tesla's current claim is that he caused them over 100 million dollars in damage. The trouble in my mind is that Tesla escalated and has continued to escalate an incredibly unpleasant situation involving Tripp. This situation, and others, seem to strongly suggest that company that runs deeply on principles of fear, going so far as to use incredible amounts of energy on going after a low-level engineer with a possibly reasonable complaint.
A more enlightened response from Tesla, in my mind, had the complaints by Tripp been untrue, would have been to have been to quietly dismiss him, address his claims in a press release, and use gentle language to address him, identifying him, sincerely, if possible, as a genuinely useful member of the team with whom Tesla had an irreconcilable disagreement.
Tesla is not taking this route, however. Their handling of the situation suggests that they may have something more serious to hide or, at minimum, that they are not committed to deeper humanistic means of engaging with individuals that challenge them (though Musk must not be exclusively defined by this, is it so surprising given the terrible names he called one of the Thai rescuers?). Tesla has and are continues to attend to Tripp with tremendous force (legal, and perhaps otherwise -- as suggested by this link) as opposed to just moving on and letting things be. They are proactively seeking to proactively discredit and arguably harm Tripp as opposed to contending with his contentions head on.
Were they genuine concerns, though? The overall impression from available sources is that he was overreacting to a situation that, while perhaps unusual, was basically par for the course given that Gigafactory itself is a newly-built facility, and one that's still largely under-construction. Why would you expect things to be 100% perfect and with zero unnecessary waste? Screwups happen all the time, most of the time it's totally normal and not a big concern.
Moreover, even if they were legitimate, was the press a legitimate place to raise them?
Generally, if you want to whistleblow you should blow the whistle to the regulators. Probably the EPA or a similar agency for any supposed environmental concerns, and the DOT, NHTSA, or a similar agency for any safety concerns related to vehicle's battery packs.
You don't get to leak to the press in violation of your NDA just because you disagree with your employer. Maybe it becomes legitimate if you think that the government and your employer are conspiring to keep issues secret, but I don't see any suggestion of that here.
Definitely, I agree that they may have been invalid claims and that screwups do happen. What concerns me is that may have been Tripp was truly sincere if not misguided. Tesla's 100 million dollar lawsuit, however, sends a chilling message that if you harm Tesla, they may go after you with incredible force.
Nope. It's pointless to sue a private individual for 100 million dollars. Even if those losses were real, there's no way to recoup them from an unemployed engineer. Tesla is going to spend a lot of money on legal fees with no potential upside -- except that they can fuck up Tripp's life.
It's pretty clear that the goal of these lawsuits is not to recoup losses, but instead to silence critics, and to attack someone that alledgedly "betrayed" Tesla.
This is not normal corporate behavior. Normal companies don't try to swat their ex-employees. Normal companies don't start lawsuits on the whim of their CEO.
Normal companies either don't talk at all about employees that make crazy allegations, or they make a press release thanking the whistleblower, stating that they investigated the allegations and determined that there are no problems and everything is fine!
I didn’t say it was acceptable. It’s also not acceptable for alligators to bite humans, but the appropriate solution isn’t necessarily to kill all the alligators.
Like the biology of a crocodile, this is the natural behaviour of a capitalist corporate entity under current US law. We have this set of incentives for corporations and we’re all surprised when they follow them to the letter.
Tesla's Head of Investigations told the police they were able to verify that he was armed, but he wasn't armed so looks like someone somewhere is not telling the truth
Tesla claimed that someone called. Has the call been released? To me it looks like one of Musk goons tried to have a whistle blower shot by the police...
These are extremely bold claims. So it would require some solid proof.
From the report the police officer did not seem to doubt the existence of the call.
Also, for this to be true, at least Musk, the head of security, and the person working at the call center, would have to be ok with participating in a scheme to try to get someone killed.
You need some very solid proofs for this to be taken seriously, do you have any? Or at least any tangential circumstantial evidences more than "it looks to me.."?
What I wrote doesn't imply at all that Musk may be on it, or that the person in the call center even exists. What I claim is that with the elements I have, it looks like the head of security maliciously set the cops on the whistle blower.
It would have been easy for Tesla to release a recording of the call, and if it exists the malicious call could be traced.
He could easily have been shot, police being what it is in the US...
You would have to prove intent as is the case in the story above.
If the person calling had some legitimate fear of him actually shooting up the place they were justified in making a warning call even if it wasn't based on any solid proof (although the call should have been to the police and not to Tesla).
If Tesla security had credible information that a recently fired employee who has already damaged the company greatly by leaking information to the press, is inclined to shoot up the place, it would be monumental incompetence on their part if they didn't report this to the police.
And it would be monumental incompetence on the part of the police if they didn't investigate it.
BTW: this wasn't swatting. Swatting is making false, anonymous 911 calls about active, armed threat.
It wasn't anonymous and it wasn't false. Tesla security presented the evidence to the police and the police (not the SWAT team) followed up on that. Let's give the police the benefit of the doubt and assume that they found the evidence credible enough to investigate it.
The police reports in the screenshot do not indicate that the police verified these claims. Rather, they suggest that they took the word of the security personnel from Tesla.
It’s perfectly fine for the police to presume that information given is accurate until proven otherwise! However, it was false information. The police confirmed that the suspect wasn’t armed.
The most charitable reading here is just that the Tesla employees were mistaken, but nothing here says that Tesla presented evidence; so it’s not exculpatory.
My question was what would lead us to believe (from those reports) that they did try to have him swatted versus someone actually concerned making the call.
"Little birds sing?" WTF is that, we're in the Mafia now? I'd call it self-aggrandizement by (I can't help but imitate the capitalization) GOUTHRO, were it not for the fact that they are apparently using literal mob-style intimidation tactics, now to include this SWATting attempt. Filing a false police report is a crime and so is retaliation against a whistleblower.
The linked tweet is nothing more or less than a direct dump of a police department's response to a FOIA request, along with the remark "it's stunning." Is your thesis that the police want to help drive down Tesla stock?
