What they have is an admitted saboteur and code that exports data to third parties. It quacks like a duck. A disgruntled employee succumbed to or sought out people who wished to do harm to Tesla.
There's plenty of evidence of similar things happening. (edit to fix words)
If you work in the defense industry you get things like this drilled into you as regular required training. It's not paranoia, it happens regularly.
He's a bit odd in how he addresses the problem, and calling out potential threats was perhaps an unusual choice, but not unwarranted.
American companies have overthrown governments to benefit their business, stealing secrets and sabotaging a competitor isn't exactly out of the ordinary.
> American companies have overthrown governments to benefit their business
Care to elaborate?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...
CIA plans and arranges Iranian overthrow of PM (along with UK) over interference with a predecessor to BP (concisely detailing who owned what is hard)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
So much of the turmoil and violence around the world today is fallout from meddling by western powers over the last couple centuries. Want to understand the modern middle east? Got to dig into the US overthrow of Iran's government, the background of the British rise to prominence (WWI and the Sykes-Picot agreement), etc. Want to understand trouble in just about any part of Africa? Dig back to what the European colonizers did to the place, and hoo boy wait till you learn the truth about Belgium.
You really cannot even begin to pretend to have a hint of a grasp on modern world politics and conflicts without understanding this stuff.
That and an impression that Iran “wants to do bad things” (like human rights violations and irresponsible ownership of nuclear weapons), and doesn’t like world powers keeping those plans at bay.
It's also instructive to pay attention to the names. Some of them are going to jump out at you, and at least a couple times you're going to think "wait, isn't he the bad guy" when, once upon a time, some recognizable name was "on our side" (but really was on his own side all along, and willing to play at doing a major power's bidding in order to get funded/armed/maintained in power/etc.).
And some of the names of the foreign-policy wonks are going to get eerily repetitive, and you'll wonder how these guys managed to stay cozy with administration after administration despite their track record of literally leaving desolation around the world. Worse: you're going to read their bios and find out some of them are still in positions of power and being taken seriously today.
Enlighten me.
Leopold's Congo was so horrifying that when he gave up personally ruling it and let it be turned into "just" an ordinary colony where the colonizing government and its companies worked hand-in-glove to ruthlessly exploit the place at the expense of the locals... that was actually better than it had been under Leopold's direct rule. Under personal rule by Leopold, estimates of the death toll in the Congo range at least into the millions and possibly over ten million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Kingdom_of_Ha...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/1998/nov/08/observerbus...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company
But I’m sure you can find instances where oil companies heavily influence politics in governments all over the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Bunau-Varilla#Separat...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/628408.How_Wall_Street_C...
It is not paranoia if they are really after you.
(A British multinational company, but US did the overthrowing)
Much more importantly, Musk made very concrete allegations, the truth of which should come to light in short order. I remember the insinuation SpaceX made during the 2016 incident, which was much more circumspect. If this allegation proves false I don't think people will be as forgetful about the attempt at blame shifting.
"People invested deeply in something" describes the management of fraudulent companies far more than it does short sellers. There's a quote from David Einhorn's book (that I think he attributes to Warren Buffet) that is something to the effect of: "When you're short a fraudulent company, you'll be surprised at the ends they'll go to defend themselves. Because to you this is 5% or whatever of your portfolio, but to them it is everything."
Where do you get these stats?
Is there some place where we can see how many people are shorting different stocks?
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/04/15/tesla-has...
Note 'Shares Sold Short', multiply by value of stock.
So many industries that were threatened or upended went though similar exercises. Tobacco being one of the best examples. We also went through a huge mid-century renaissance in public transit that was abruptly put to an end due largely to gas and car companies. Trains got replaced by buses because tire and oil companies felt threatened. Remember the EV1?
There's a (mediocre) documentary on Netflix about Bill Ackman's famous Herbalife short. In there they detail the hundreds of $1000 spent just defending his short position through hiring former Herbalife people, funding legal campaigns, funding support groups. If you're short to the tune of a few $100 million - a few $100k is pocket change for these guys.
You are describing entirely legal actions. Sabotage and (this form of) industrial espionage are very much illegal. There's quite a difference there.
> a few $100k is pocket change for these guys
But a few billion dollars of market cap and a few years of jail time are the price of being found guilty of what Musk is insinuating.
That's not a small leap.
If I stood to lose $100M, I wouldn't do the dirty work myself, I'd hire someone else to do it for whom taking that risk for $100K (or whatever) is worth the risk - that could be several years (tax-free) pay for some people.
I'd use several levels of anonymization or maybe redirection to try to keep my identity hidden (and I doubt I'd be successful, but it takes a certain level of arrogance to hire someone to sabotage a company because you bet against it and might be losing)
It would be a lot harder to plausibly deny paying some third party for explicit sabotage; as far as I know, companies don't normally pay third parties to cause harm to a competitor for legitimate business reasons.
In terms of the actual espionage end of things, it’s covered by EEA 1996 - and the prosecutions there have always gone for the hand, not the head, and the fines have been in the thousands, not millions, of dollars range.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Espionage_Act_of_19...
As for actual jail time, here [1] is a single engineer in California (same jurisdiction as Tesla, presumably) that was sentenced to 15 years. Also, $28 million in fines, which is what he earned for his espionage. Another engineer got 2.5 years for the same incident [2]. And this was the very first instance of people being convicted under the Economic Espionage Act you mentioned. Further reading: [3].
I don't think the facts support your position.
[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-espionage-sentence-dup...
[2] https://www.law360.com/articles/571212/ex-dupont-engineer-ge...
[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-individuals-and-company-f...
Had a friend high up in Bear Stearns tech department, all the way until the end, that had the exact opposite experience of you. His experience evokes an ethos of "get ahead at all costs".
No doubt there are more Billions-esque shady practices out there in the wild than you know.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/04/15/tesla-has...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Committee_on_the_ECH...
ECHELON was reported on several times in the decades before that, and in much more credible outlets than chemtrails have ever been.
That seems... unwise.
According to Paul Graham in his article How to Disagree an ad hominem attack is the second weakest form of disagreement, only a little better than calling someone mean names.
However, in the case of calling someone a conspiracy theorist, I would argue that it actually is an example of name calling as well. It is a negatively charged word. Name calling, according to Paul Graham, is the weakest form of disagreement.
From a logical fundamentals perspective, calling someone a conspiracy theorist has never held water. It can't hold water, unless talking about the character of a person, because it tries to attack the character of a person, rather than refuting their ideas.
Wikipedia, citing conspiracy theory as an example of ad hominem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
It is an error of logic to support that the fact that an ad hominem attack doesn't hold weight means that a thing is right or wrong. The entire point of understanding fallacy is to realize that there is a disconnection between ground truth and any claims reached via their use.
In this particular case, people are talking about Elon being a conspiracy theorist, because he suspects there might be outside actors involved on the basis of known data exportation, known sabotage, and profit motives. These are examples of things tied directly to the question of whether Tesla is experiencing corporate espionage.
9/11 truthers, birthers, JFK assassination theorists, Illuminati/Satanist/New World Order types, pizzagaters, ZOG-believing antisemites, flat earthers, hollow earthers, etc. all have common rhetorical tactics and modes of argumentation that are distinctly "conspiracy theorist".
Conspiracy theories tend to be unfalsifiable claims without counter-explanations, while later-revealed conspiracies have tended to unravel based on credible counter-explanations from the beginning. Yes, the US government imported drugs into inner cities, just as the San Jose Mercury News spelled out, and it's a tragedy that the government then hounded that journalist to suicide before finally admitting it was all true.
In the meantime, hundreds or thousands of claims have been made that have no basis in reality, nothing other than "the world ought to make more sense than it does."
Our planet isn't flat because the US government tested drugs on poor black people without telling them. The latter was consistent with known facts all along, while the former is the result of Dunning-Kruger nonsense.
That oil companies and auto manufacturers are sabotaging Tesla, while competing rocket companies sabotaged SpaceX, is not impossible. It is, however, far less likely than that production is difficult, and that employees treated as Tesla employees are reported to be treated sometimes become disgruntled. So I won't be surprised if there does turn out to be evidence worth charging somebody with, but I think reason suggests that it's less likely than Musk is claiming.
Added to that corporate espionage and disgruntled employees are not opposites. One provides opportunity for the other.
For example, to me it's pretty clear that Putin is trying to destabilise the West. This is a theory about a conspiracy, but it's supported by plenty of evidence from multiple sources, and it makes sense, because Putin really hates NATO. But there's no credible evidence that the moon landing was a hoax, and the theory is insane, because the USSR would have had to be in on the hoax and help the US defeat them in the space race.
So what about Tesla? Are there people and organisations that have reason to feel threatened by Tesla? Is there evidence that they're trying to sabotage Tesla? And are these cases unconnected or is there actual coordination? (Otherwise it's still not a conspiracy.)
Exactly. It is surprising people pointing out - "Well, so many shorts etc so it's plausible". This kind of reasoning misses the bigger point - we need our leaders, political and otherwise, to refrain from actively pumping out conspiracy theories. If there is proof of malicious behavior present it instead of rumor mongering.
But given Musk's(Tesla) constant need to shift blame - car crash, negative news (Pravado), deflecting questions on financial situation of Tesla and now this, it is not looking good for Tesla.
I hope that next time there is a problem Musk stops at "we are investigating if this is a sabotage" instead of fueling the "it's Wall Street shorts" conspiracy.
Remember when Top Gear joined in on the public-image sabotage?
http://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/12536/remember-when-top-g...
Microsoft in particular lost an entire industry and way of doing business, partly (or maybe mostly) because of Apple and Google. It was only about 5 years ago that the “us vs them” mindset started to dissipate.
Musk's competition against the automotive and space industry companies has been very direct, and his competition against the petrol industry has been at most with one degree of separation. And like others have said, there is a huge short position against Tesla that has cost people an immense amount of money, but also stands to make them an immense amount of money if Tesla tanks.
This was the leader of a company asking his employees to look out for a very real possibility. Corporate espionage is very real,this is not a chem-trails rant.
I agree with much of what you are saying, but this line is really out of place. He needs to shift blame for car crashes? How many crashes do his cars have per 1,000 miles vs the others?
Deflecting questions on their financial situation? Which question from the shareholders meeting really went unanswered?
I agree that the handling of this incident is strange, but the rest of your narrative isn't as clear as the negative filter would have someone believe.
Literally the next paragraph. It would be irresponsible of him not to look into the possibility.
Millions of people have been murdered over money let alone sabotaging a company.
Lets not call others paranoid when it's actually naivety of these problems that is the issue.
Help me out.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/24/politics/fbi-economic-espiona...
This is so typical of any discussion about Musk - anyone who dares point out that he often just makes things up is met with derision from True Believers who are unable to accept that he isn't the superhero his PR team make him out to be.
That’s pretty much claiming that Elon is selling dodgy products that aren’t fit for purpose, and running off to Tahiti with the money. Yet we have Teslas that are widely loved by their owners, with many owners buying a second one because the other car is perceived as a punishment after driving the Tesla.
Perhaps you would be met with less derision if you weren’t out to portray Elon as a real life Lyle Lanley. I know, it’s a pretty far fetched idea to suggest that you can look at Elon’s promises as coming from an enthusiastic leader inexperienced in a particular field: he’s confident that the goals will be achieved but is extremely optimistic about time. He promised the Model 3, it is here. He promised feature parity for AP2 and it’s pretty much there. He promised ramping production and that is coming.
No other manufacturer is producing electric vehicles in the same volume as Tesla, and no other manufacturer has ensured that the infrastructure is available to support common use cases for personal vehicles.
And here you are accusing Elon of being a con artist intent on siphoning money from gullible investors, then crying victim when you don’t receive the adoring praise you were expecting.
What have you accomplished with your life while Elon has been shooting rockets to Mars, solving South Australia’s electricity problems, and weaning the transport industry off oil?
Have you taken into account the massive empire he has already built - if he were truly as nefarious as you seem to imply, its hardly likely that he would've been able to effectively build rockets that land themselves, cars that drive themselves, alternatives to the oil-addiction we're all suffering under, etc.
I mean, put some balance in your argument: What has Musk done right, in your opinion? Anything at all?
In fact, as an aside, I would argue that Tesla's marketing is disgustingly misleading - their website loudly proclaims that all Teslas are equipped with every piece of hardware necessary for fully autonomous self-driving, and in a much smaller, much quieter voice they subtly admit that none of their cars are capable of actually doing that yet.
You may handwave that away as marketing fluff, but if you asked the average person in the street whether Teslas can drive themselves, 90% of them would say yes, of course they can, when in reality they're merely on par with other makes and models that have had the exact same driver assist features for years.
It's misleading at best, and lethal at worst - lives have been lost because drivers blindly placed their faith in autonomous driving features that simply do not work as implied. Go ahead and chalk that up to the drivers not being attentive enough, of course they share the bulk of the blame for not being in control of the vehicle they're driving, but it's hardly a surprise that many Tesla drivers have been lulled into a false sense of security by Tesla's marketing.
But again, nobody is arguing that Musk is running a straight up scam or that the products don't exist, the criticism is that he is constantly making promises and predictions he can't fulfil, constantly making claims that sound impressive until you look beneath the veneer, and whenever he is challenged to back up his assertions he either messily dodges the question or launches into yet another Twitter rant, and all the while his fans eagerly accept whatever he says without any care for objective reality.
This predilection towards 'maximum correctness, always' seems to me to be a thinly veiled attempt at justifying totalitarianism. You don't get to the moon by doing everything you can not to break things - you get to the moon by not minding if things break, if it means you can improve conditions in life. We wouldn't have gotten to the moon, maybe, if the Apollo 1 incident didn't occur - perhaps if it hand't been so serious, it would have hamstrung the program later on in history. But, we learned from the incident, redesigned things, and radically improved the state of the art at the time.
The same is true now, of Elons' efforts - certainly he has made many big leaps in terms of projected goals and plans, but - so? Have you, with as much visor as you profess, not noticed the many, many times that Musk&co. have learned from their big mistakes, fixed things, and radically improved things as a result? How many times do there have to be big booms on the pad to satisfy your lust for self-introspection?
Nobody ever gets anywhere by saying "you know what would be good - if we just did the mundane, boring, safe things ..."
With that kind of mentality, we'd all be running Windows.
"Objective reality" is a fallacy. Objectively, we should've just stayed up in the trees. Subjectively, I'm glad there are individuals out there to push our species above the fray, all the while ignoring the sanctity of the mob.
Why is it so difficult to hold any kind of honest discussion with Muskovites on the subject of his intentionally misleading claims and absurd pie-in-the-sky overreaches? What drives you to make excuses for a loudmouthed anti-worker billionaire who has so constantly and consistently failed to live up to his promises?
The deaths that have occurred have been due to people misusing the product, and one of those occurred in exactly the same situation as other fatalities involving vehicles being operated by attentive humans, with clearly define causes that have not been addressed by the maintainer of the roads.
The reason it is hard for you to have honest discussion with “Muskovites” is that you are intentionally exaggerating every failure and distorting every fact you touch, and making every argument an ideological statement.
You are the problem, not everyone else.
The roads go without saying.
Any outrageous ambition I set for myself, fail and end up achieving 10x along the way is better than routinely setting mediocre goals and succeeding all the time, but achieving way less than the prior scenario.
'Failing upwards' has been a thing for a while now.
Rational behavior is to reward those who make ambitious but realistic goals. Not those who get support on unrealistic lies.
Just because it feels good does not mean it is any less lie.
Either its never too late to opt out of any cause.
He simply reinvests the company's overall profits from each of Amazon's business lines into new business ventures.
Anyone basing their opinion of Musk purely on his role and publicity from one of these companies when they are both so very public is the height of confirmation bias, in either direction.
You imply intent. There was no intent to deceive.
they will never be trained to handle
that no previous generation has ever handled
What we are watching unfold across any and every issue, are symptoms of people breaking down due to that overload.
To handle this new over saturated info environment (which up until now has been sold to everyone as a good thing) one must look to professions that are trained specifically to handle such overload. And there are many.
Here are my own 2010 suggestion for helping deal with information overload: https://web.archive.org/web/20130514103318/http://pcast.idea... "This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."
Another version of that proposal: https://web.archive.org/web/20160206184804/https://www.newsc...
Some thoughts by me on applying that to health sensemaking: https://web.archive.org/web/20161104203536/https://www.newsc... https://github.com/pdfernhout/health-decision-support-tools https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1897006&cid=34459370 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openvirgle/QukA-eEPX... https://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sense...
Anyway, still plugging along on all that in some of my spare time.
Another aspect of the challenge is having a mind tuned for a scarcity of something like information being having difficulty coping with an abundance of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published ... in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today's densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in animal ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today’s most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets"
"The Acceleration of Addictiveness" http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html "Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
"The Pleasure Trap" http://web.archive.org/web/20160418155513/http://www.drfuhrm... "Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orienting_response "In his 2007 book The Assault on Reason, Al Gore posited that watching television affects the orienting response, an effect similar to vicarious traumatization."
And how this overload is even harder on young children, as described by Victoria L. Dunckley, M.D.: https://drdunckley.com/reset-your-childs-brain/ "Because electronic screen media is unnaturally intense in terms of sensory, cognitive, and psychological input–designed to keep the user engaged–it tends to overstimulate nervous system. The brain interprets all this stimulating input as a form of stress. ... Over time, these changes lead to chronic stress, resulting in blood flow shifting from the more developed part of the brain (frontal lobe) to the more primitive parts of the brain. Because the frontal lobe governs emotional regulation, attention, creativity, and social behavior, any of these areas can become impaired. Chronic stress also raises cortisol levels, which complicates frontal lobe functioning even further. High cortisol impairs the hippocampus (needed for memory), disturbs sleep, and eventually causes atrophy (shrinkage) of the brain. ..."
More and more we need a browser-like tool to protect us from the web and (anti-)social media. These would be tools that are designed to work within human limitations. They would help people deal with being sprayed in the face with a firehose of information designed by highly-paid specialists to trick us and exploit our basic reflexes for someone else's gain (e.g. filtering out or summarizing news tickers or videos with scene changes every few seconds that exploit the orienting response, or summarizing those clickbait headlines tuned to exploit our primal drives, and so on).
Something like uMatrix is just the beginning. It shows where browser vendor's loyalties are (even Mozilla's) that such tools do not come built in. Very recently there is the Brave browser with some ad blocking and also Google turned on a limited default adblocker within Chrome -- but those are small steps and don't address the bigger picture of information overload even when not looking at obvious ads.
People need a whole suite of related FOSS tools for dealing with the web, email, social media, and so on -- to help filter and organize it for ourselves according to our own priorities and respecting our human limitations.
I comment from my bias as a software toolmaker though. Alternatively, a high level of self-discipline and healthy routine can also help manage information overload. And the professionals you reference probably can supply some of that (e.g. Alan Lakein's 1973 classic on setting priorities "How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life").
Hopefully the day will come where we don't have to become grad level psycologists to handle our new info environment. The professions I was thinking about were air traffic controllers, soldiers, pilots, cops etc whose training involves coping with constant high noise environments. We have lot of lessons to learn from them and their training systems.
I have a feeling psychologists("choice architects"), socialogist etc with software experience will soon start making an impact in dismantling some of the misguided pieces of the current architecture.
Although at least for police, there are some issues of their typical training creating excessive false positives when interrogating suspects -- as discussed in a chapter of this book: "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts -- 2007 -- by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson" https://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010...
Musk is apparently interested in dealing with information overload of questionable media with his new crowd-sourced "Pravduh" idea -- so we'll see how that effort pans out. https://fair.org/home/elon-musks-latest-brainstorm-takes-aim...
Some more criticism of that is here: https://quillette.com/2018/06/04/the-trouble-with-technocrac... "For a consumer-run media to work, mass participation is necessary. This isn’t unfeasible with the internet being so widely available. However, the quality of that participation is also important. If just anyone—troublemaker or pure hearted—can rate the news and influence the opinions of other readers, the problem of fake news is only likely to be exacerbated. Truth is not defined through consensus. There is an abundance of examples of popular opinion being incorrect. And personal biases will certainly decide how people rate what they read. Disagree with the conclusion of an article? Downvote. Didn’t read the whole article but were offended by a particular line? Downvote. Already hate Fox News? Downvote. A culture which decides truth by way of numbers is flawed. Not everyone, and perhaps no-one, is capable of setting aside their political prejudices to make an informed critical decision on a piece of political writing. Perhaps the more polarizing and obvious forms of fake media will be suppressed by Pravda, but at what cost? ... Pravda assumes the role of government in the age of totalitarianism—control over the media. Those who administer the website will have to decide which ratings are worthwhile and which are useless. But who will these regulators be? ..."
It's a tough challenge. And one that will likely be solved by some mix of meshwork, hierarchy, and interfaces (see Manuela De Landa) as I mention here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17366004
Robert Steele, ex-CIA Analyst and champion of "Open Source Intelligence" also has a lot to say on the general issue across what he calls "the seven tribes of intelligence": https://phibetaiota.net/about/ "This site does NOT advocate political action or any specific policy, but rather seeks to empower the public with sources and methods of what has been called in modern times Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), so that our Collective Intelligence can be applied with structured ethical diligence to produce public wisdom in the public interest. This is the heart of what is called Reflexive Practice–Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World. Since the new book, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust was published in 2012, we have morphed into being a proponent for Open Source Everything combined with True Cost Economics and Holistic Analytics. The PUBLIC is the political body–this site seeks to serve the public by nurturing public intelligence in the public interest. We intend to help the public to eliminate information asymmetries and data pathologies, and end the rule of secrecy. We support the Collective Intelligence of the public in such as way as to create a direct democracy, collaborative economics, and a prosperous world at peace."
just read the economist or NYT or whatever you like and stfu instead of thinking you're going to somehow to a better job gathering and exploring information than that
He does sound on edge, but there's apparently been a major breach, so... probably appropriate.
Whereas my reading suggested a moderate and cautious response was being exercised.
There is a lot of wealth resting on this and similar projects not succeeding.
> And amazing how close his speech is moving (in form) to Trump's: it is all about "rumors", "alleged", "witch hunt", "unfair"
'all about' ? I'm not seeing the similarities at all.
He used the word rumour, but you've introduced alleged, witch hunt, and unfair into the above quote.
> Most of the time, when there is theft of goods, leaking of confidential information, dereliction of duty or outright sabotage, the reason really is something simple like wanting to get back at someone within the company or at the company as a whole.
This email from Musk isn't at all the same as what we hear from the Trump camp. Sure he's talking about a conspiracy, but it's pretty reasonable, unlike the Trump conspiracies.
And his debt is backed by Tesla shares. If he ever gets margin called on his debt he’ll lose everything as he has to sell shares to cover his debt which will drive the price down more so he’ll have to sell more etc
As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die. These include Wall Street short-sellers, who have already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more. Then there are the oil & gas companies, the wealthiest industry in the world — they don't love the idea of Tesla advancing the progress of solar power & electric cars. Don't want to blow your mind, but rumor has it that those companies are sometimes not super nice. Then there are the multitude of big gas/diesel car company competitors. If they're willing to cheat so much about emissions, maybe they're willing to cheat in other ways?
Wow, the level of paranoia he's going into is impressive.
And amazing how close his speech is moving (in form) to Trump's: it is all about "rumors", "alleged", "witch hunt", "unfair"...