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Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

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Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#461

Post by twayalways »

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #68

Everyone's reaction to this seems to be "He is crazy / paranoid". He gave very specific examples of things this person did. If you were someone with a large position against Telsa, or a competing manufacturer, or an oil / gas company finally picking things up after a terrible oil price collapse, yeah maybe it makes sense to go mess things up subtly enough that the company slips a little bit closer to bankruptcy? I'm…

>Everyone's reaction to this seems to be "He is crazy / paranoid".

He also investigated "sabotage" when a SpaceX rocket exploded in 2016.

>or a competing manufacturer, or an oil / gas company finally picking things up after a terrible oil price collapse

This is borderline ridiculous. Are you really convinced that Tesla is on the verge of upending the entire energy world? That any minute now they are going to put Big Oil out of business? Companies like Exxon and BP are doing far more R&D into renewables than Tesla is. They aren't even thinking about Tesla. Other auto manufacturers are spending more on R&D and working hard to get cars out. They are behind, but they are succeeding.

Outside of the coastal elites or tech junkies, Tesla is practically unknown and is a rounding error to competitors. The data shows they aren't "growing like gangbusters". Model S/X are stagnating, SolarCity is installing far less per quarter (and essentially laid everyone off recently). Read the financials.

There are tons of competitors in both renewables and cars, but they all decided to pick on Tesla, did they?

>but when you're working at this level as CEO I feel like you have to at least consider the possibility.

So you say it in an email and leak it to the press before any investigation is done?

I called this a long time ago, on these forums: if/when Tesla blows up, everyone is going to point to some conspiracy, rather than lack of execution. Silicon Valley has completely lost touch with reality.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#462

Post by XorNot »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #401
XorNot wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't sound like a technical control though?

You can enforce it on your git server. My experience is with Bitbucket but I'm sure Github has the same options. You could set up something like: nobody can push to master except through the PR UI, all PRs must have a reviewer, no PR can be merged to master without being approved by all reviewers. That way you guarantee that everything on master can be tracked to a dev + a reviewer giving sign off.

Sure but who admins the git server? At work it's actually me (and my team) - we have backend access to the git repos as a necessary result of that. While it would be tricky to hide changes, if people only merge via PR it would be easy to bury a few extra commits no one worries about provided they don't break anything.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#463

Post by XorNot »

adwn wrote: post #265
gamblor956 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oil and gas companies have a far easier, and legal way to destroy Tesla: they could simply buy up its outstanding debt and call it in. That would immediately bankrupt Tesla. As it so happens, a number of the oil and gas companies have recognized that oil and gas are the past, and have transitioned to calling themselves "energy" companies and are spending billions on alternative energy industries.

> they could simply buy up its outstanding debt and call it in They could try to buy it up, and they might succeed, but they can't call in the debt willy-nilly before it matures.

Also even if they did...Tesla can issue new debt to fund it - which would be more valuable to the debt holders because the'd now know there's a good chance they can sell it on.

The market can remain irrational a lot longer then you can remain solvent - and no one company is big enough to ignore this.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#464

Post by twayalways »

flyingswift wrote: post #65

I made this same comment on the other discussion. I find it concerning that one person was able to push malicious code to 'production'. To me, this suggests that Tesla, a company building highly sensitive software, does not employ basic branch policies. How is is it that these changes could have made it through a code review process and get deployed? If a company like Microsoft or Google announced that a disgruntled…

>I find it concerning that one person was able to push malicious code to 'production'.

On a vehicle that claims to be able to adjust the strength of your brakes over-the-air, no less.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#466

Post by twayalways »

0x4f3759df wrote: post #33

There's $10B in TSLA short positions, when the numbers get this big its not unthinkable.

>There's $10B in TSLA short positions, when the numbers get this big its not unthinkable.

Once again, much of the short interest is not naked shorting, but is in fact people and institutions hedging their long bet on a stock that is very volatile.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#467

Post by justinclift »

dingaling wrote: post #258
SolarNet wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand. Even with code review policies, there is still a short list of people who can push to production without going through code review. Not from a policy standpoint but from a security and access perspective.

The chain we had in ${BIGCORP}: Programmers: read-write to repository Staging team: read-only on repository, read-write to test servers and staging zone Deployment team: read-only on repository and staging zone, read-write to production It wouldn't prevent malicious code going out but at least would require a chain of cooperation between employees, which would be harder to achieve.

As a data point, in most of the ${BIGCORP}'s I've worked there are also infrastructure roles most people don't see or think about, which have access across wider environments.

* Storage engineers: Generally have access to most storage (all of dev/test/prod) in their group. Sometimes their access is silo'd, sometimes not.

* Backup engineers: Generally have read/write access to _everything_, and all historical versions of it, as backup systems need to be able to do both read/write. Fairly often there are ways for this access to be "unlogged" too, so the actions aren't captured into any system auditing logs (otherwise it can screw things up). I've not (yet) seen access for backup engineers ever be silo-d, but some places might be doing it and I've just never seen it. :)

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#468

Post by erikb »

rich-w-big-ego wrote: post #195
Fricken wrote: post #29

Ahh, the little man again. The little man has been giving Elon and Tesla problems for a long time. Early on Musk thought Henry Fisker, who led the design on the Model S then left to start his own EV company was the little man, so he launched a lawsuit against him, but it turned out Henry wasn't the little man, and the lawsuit was meritless. The little man talked Musk into building falcon wing doors into the Model X,…

This is an absolutely vile personal attack. This is the poison contained in the blooming flower of the internet.

apparently being rich and having a big ego doesn't prevent one from being hurt from things other people say, now does it.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#469

Post by twayalways »

acover wrote: post #96
flyingswift wrote: post #65

I made this same comment on the other discussion. I find it concerning that one person was able to push malicious code to 'production'. To me, this suggests that Tesla, a company building highly sensitive software, does not employ basic branch policies. How is is it that these changes could have made it through a code review process and get deployed? If a company like Microsoft or Google announced that a disgruntled…

I know in Microsoft it would be relatively easy to push destructive code changes. It depends on the product though. I was able to connect to production machines. There was someone running torrents in the past.

>I know in Microsoft it would be relatively easy to push destructive code changes.

So why did it never happen? Or if it did, why did Bill Gates not leak an email saying they found the culprit, and that they believe he was hired by those unscrupulous companies, Lotus or Oracle?

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#470

Post by jcranmer »

FortNightLord wrote: post #262
jcranmer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the standpoint of anyone trying to sabotage Tesla, the risk/reward ratio is extremely high. To claim that someone is trying to do so is an extraordinary claim, and we all know the saying about extraordinary claims...

Uh it says the guy admitted to it...and gave reasons...a confession is more than enough evidence.

There's no evidence that the guy was paid to sabotage Tesla by any competitor or anything other than a purely personal grudge. That an upset worker intentionally sabotages a production line isn't the extraordinary claim; that your competition is paying some workers to sabotage your production lines is.
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