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

cnbc.com

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

#541

Post by gamblor956 »

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.

Have participated in corporate debt structuring before.

Standard terms allow for debtholders to call in a debt before it matures if they have reason to believe the debtor will be unable to pay back the loan at the end of the term. With Tesla's long-standing liquidity concerns, it would be absolutely shocking (and could even constitute legal malpractice for the debtors' lawyers) if the debtors didn't have the right to call in the debt under such circumstances.

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

#542

Post by gamblor956 »

XorNot wrote: post #463
adwn wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They could try to issue new debt. But who would want to acquire debt in a company that is about to be forced into bankruptcy by its creditors?

The second round of debt would be subordinated to the original round of debt, meaning that new debtholders would make back pennies on the dollar, if that.

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

#543

Post by [deleted] »

XorNot wrote: post #462
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#544

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ballenf wrote: post #508
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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?

Not sure. My point is one's odds of being caught go way up if the sabotage is twinned with securities transactions.

Nobody scans for sabotage. Many agencies scan for insider trading. After a corporate event, e.g. an earnings revision or surprise, thousands of automated systems look for trades that were unusually (a) profitable and/or (b) large.

To make sabotage worth it, one would need to enter into trades that are (a) small and unusually profitable or (b) large and usually profitable. Those trades will get flagged by systems designed to catch insider trading. That, in turn, will result in a human trained to spot unusually-clairvoyant trades reviewing the case.

There are many reasonable motivations for sabotage. But for all of them, the gains must outweigh the operation's cost and risk. Short-selling gains don't make the balance.

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

#545

Post by internetman55 »

robotresearcher wrote: post #106
internetman55 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i thought we already solved that; it's called journalism 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

I'd like to do that. But every time there is a story about something I really do know about, it is so wrong as to be highly misleading.

But is there any evidence that whatever you come up with will be better than simply reading a reputable newspaper or magazine?

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

#546

Post by kchr »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #482
twblalock wrote: post #70

I have no problem believing that a disgruntled employee sabotaged part of the production line. But I do have a problem believing that all of the problems since the Model 3 started production were caused by sabotage. I also have no problem believing that the disgruntled employee simply wanted to take revenge by sabotaging his/her employer -- that's not uncommon, and it should not be difficult to prove if it really hap…

> But I do have a problem believing that all of the problems since the Model 3 started production were caused by sabotage. On reading your comment I re-read the letter to confirm that he doesn't imply this anywhere.

Sure, but he seems very eager to steer the thing towards external interests and sabotage rather than this being an isolated incident. Sounds to me that he is fishing for scapegoats in general...

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

#547

Post by kchr »

erikb wrote: post #452

I can't really put my finger on why, but this looks like a quite stupid move. Usually in such situations this person gets fired and sued and then the top management tries to put silence over that topic. An email to the whole staff is the opposite of that and makes me wonder if Elon tries to cover some own missteps. Any hints in that direction?

Exactly my thoughts too. It makes little sense to put this in a sabotage context if they can't provide such evidence.

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

#548

Post by tlavoie »

arcticfox wrote: post #495
mieseratte wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone actively tries to circumvent the policy or the process, odds are that most software shops would fall victim to the same thing. Too often the focus is entirely on outside attacks, with little consideration given to insider attacks. Previous job was at a cyber security firm. We'd routinely come under attack from criminal and, we believed, occasional nation state attacks as our researchers attributed a few…

> Then you'd come back from lunch and find the mantrap doors propped open, or someone left a workstation unlocked with root access to something important, or random guests just wandering around. It's a miracle we never were compromised by a disgruntled employee (of which there were many). Maybe not the most technical solution to this, but one of my previous employers had a workplace culture of setting the desktop bac…

Yup, we had two approaches. You could send out an "I love purple flowers" email to everyone, or the victim would be "Hoffed." That meant setting the desktop background to that picture of David Hasselhoff, nude with strategically-placed pups.

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

#549

Post by finnthehuman »

rndgermandude wrote: post #531
finnthehuman wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that changes the scenario from a "small handful of engineers" that can all do it unilaterally, to needing at least one person from N different teams to collaborate. And in my specific case, the group with the singing keys is also the group paid to tell us "no" whenever a release is blocked by process reasons.

My guess is that most people with access to signing keys or prod environments would have enough skills to code in some sabotage bugs before deployment or siphon off some data, so a lone devops person with (physical) access could probably a lot of harm just by themself.

Sure, I’m just saying our commitment to process is strong enough that the technical systems are a funnel into following a reasonable process.

I got dragged into defending my technical solution, but my point was that if the ability isn’t needed, don’t have it. You can break the glass when when you need to. Good process make deviation from it more visible. Our code signing keys belong to a team we already need wet ink signatures from to release software.

I can go into the biohazard labs with shorts on easier than I can leverage our technical disaster recovery. I’ve only ever had to do the latter.

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