This is about defrauding people who bought a tesla, not investors. > In 2020, Musk told a crowd in Shanghai that he remains “confident” that Tesla will achieve “basic functionality for level five autonomy this year,” referring to the SAE’s rankings of autonomy. Tesla’s technology, in 2024, is still at level 2. This reminds me alot of the Thernos case where she tried to make the case not about fraud but about an overl…
Theranos claimed to already have created their magic machine, which was a blatant lie. They intentionally misled investors by pretending to put samples into a fake testing machine, secretly removing the samples to test them in a lab elsewhere, then putting them back into the machine to make it look like the machine was doing the testing. That's careful, calculated fraud, which was obviously a criminal act.
Musk, by contrast, never claimed to have something that he did not have. He made overly-optimistic claims about product development. There is no reason to assume that these projections were lies, given that everyone else in the space was making similarly aggressive projections.
Musk was wrong for selling FSD-related features before they were ready, and Tesla should obviously make that right. But pretending that being wrong (in good company) is the same thing as calculated fraud is just goofy.