I don't want to be the conspiracy guy, but if I read the email the opposite way, I found out that the message is the sabotage first (yes), but the second point about ramping up the production to 5k is the second subject. I'm asking the question if this email could be a stunt to inform the investors their production state, to inform about the delays, etc. ? Simply wondering.
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
#502Everyone'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…
There is no evidence for any of the the claims being made. Unless we see a criminal investigation and charges this is nothing more than pr.
Musk does sound a bit like a paranoid crack head but the pr gambit is to distract from the recent string of tesla crashes and spontaneous combustions by floating the idea of sabotage.
Of course they cant directly allege sabotage because it is absurd but if you put the idea out there then people infer it.
Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very naive comment. There will always be a small handful of engineers that can push the button to move code into PROD or even change code in PROD live. Ideally, with mature controls, the people in this list is short. But to jump to the conclusion that Tesla doesn't use good practises is very short sighted. Who's to say that external parties didn't target this person specifically because of their role/influe…
Obviously, not all details are available, but the wording in the email suggests that the parent comment is anything but naive: > This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties. This sounds like something out of the 1990s, that dark and romantic era of version control when we…
We are talking about factory floor equipment, the kind that's designed to run air-gapped and where you find lots of old unpatched Windows 2012 installs because the machine was certified with that and patching would require recertification.
And I'm not joking - recently I was asked whether something (that was designed for a clustered Linux environment) could run on Windows XP because that's what was on the machine they wanted it to run.
Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self driving cars are both defense and security related.
Indeed they are. Beginning with the simple workflow: 1. Get many burner phones for cash. 2. Get many prepaid credit card for cash. 3. Sign up for many self-driving car services. 4. Targeted denial of service. (I'm avoiding the very-slow-cruise-missile scenario because nobody wants to think about it.)
Not sure if you've tried lately, but when you pay cash for a burner phone, most retail outlets require a driver license to scan your information into their system. When you activate it, you need quite a bit of personal information.
It used to be really easy, but law enforcement is cracking down on the ability to buy and activate these anonymously for obvious reasons.
Are there ways around these? Sure, but it's not nearly as easy as you're proposing.
Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee
#505I don't want to be the conspiracy guy, but if I read the email the opposite way, I found out that the message is the sabotage first (yes), but the second point about ramping up the production to 5k is the second subject. I'm asking the question if this email could be a stunt to inform the investors their production state, to inform about the delays, etc. ? Simply wondering.
5k/week was already the goal. He's just reassuring investors that it hasn't changed. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/tesla-delivers-1550-mod...
Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He's been blaming everyone else but himself for every single little mistake Really? I guess you glossed over him personally accepting responsibility for pushing Model X's falcon wing doors even though it was a mistake; and personally accepting responsibility for automating too much of the Model 3's assembly line which has caused massive delays. And those are just the two examples that spring to mind of him apologiz…
Where was that personal responsibility when he started slinging mud at the media for reporting on the issues his company has been very publicly going through? Or when he started insulting people in the Tesla earnings call? Or during the fatal autopilot crash? Or him linking to, again, a literal cult website and calling it good journalism.
I don't share your absolutism, but you're absolutely right that at least lately, Musk has been sending a lot of signals that he's becoming unhinged.
I wonder if, in trying to compete with people like Bezos, including by trying to become more macho, that he has overdosed on testosterone lately.
He used to be circumspect in his public comments. Now he seems to be increasingly paranoid and grandiose in his thinking, and bitter towards the "fake news" media that made him a celebrity in the first place.
And his proposals and estimates are likewise getting more detached from reality. He claimed rockets could be a good form of intercontinental travel, and his video showed a rocket outside a city with passengers boarding.
We can't put rocket ships outside of cities. His proposed BFR system would have about as much explosive potential as a Hiroshima nuke, and there'd be constant sonic booms and extremely loud engine blasts. One mix up, and you could incinerate Manhattan.
I do like his present goals of electric cars, reusable launch vehicles, solar power, and cheaper tunnels. But maybe take a chill pill. Ease up on the steroids or whatever.
Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee
#507Isn't this the plot in one of the episodes of Billions? If you are short a stock and a billion dollars is on the line, there are people you can pay who will "ensure" that a company fails and you win your B+ bet.
Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee
#508There'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 Yes, it's unthinkable. If a $10 billion short were to even marginally pay off, regulators would dig deep. Anyone with that kind of cash on hand is savvy enough to know that. Sabotaging a visible company, with lots of stockholders and lenders and bankers standing to benefit from the company's success, to pay off a short is someth…
Serious question: would the penalty for sabotage be greater if it came with a short-sale payoff? Is sabotage somehow considered insider trading? I can see some kind of vague fraud charge, but is there a specific law that punishes sabotage more harshly if one financially benefits from it?
Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would they dig deep? Tesla has had many documented, self-inflicted execution issues with nearly every single one of its mass-produced cars. Tesla's done far more damage to itself than a single saboteur ever could.
> Why would they dig deep? Whenever an outsized high-risk position pays off, multiple regulators--at the SRO, state and federal levels--investigate. Mostly for insider trading. Sometimes in response to investor complaints or broker arbitration proceedings. These are well-paid professionals at the SEC, CFTC, FINRA, state financial services regulators, Federal Reserve, OCC, Treasury, and a bajillion other acronym agenc…
Would sabotage qualify as insider trading? Has it happened before?
Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the email said that the guy admitted to it, and did it because he was denied a promotion. Not so invisible.
The boogyman isn't the sabeteur, it's the mysterious cabal of oil barons and short sellers that put him up to it.
This was a major plot arc in the show Billions - a hedge fund that was short a company (Ice Juice) so they paid some shady characters who sabotaged it to ensure that the hedge fund won their bed.
The idea was that if you needed things done and you had enough money there was a surplus of characters in NYC who could get those things done.
(This season a Russian oligarch character proposes murder in order to ensure his returns.)
I am unsure if they were referencing reality in the Ice Juice sabotage scenario in that or just dreaming up absurd scenarios for entertainment value.