Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 627 posts

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

#141

Post by madaxe_again »

smadge wrote: post #136
madaxe_again wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jail time? The SEC will just do the “this individual/corporation is important to the economy” thing and fine them some pocket change. The downside is far more limited than you might hope.

Can you provide examples of explicit corporate sabotage (e.g. criminally stopping production in a factory) being lightly punished by the SEC?

No, because corporate sabotage is outside of their remit. They would only look at it within the realms of market manipulation and insider trading, for which the punishment is a) usually light and b) usually deflected onto a fall guy.

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...

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

#142

Post by GreenPlastic »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #131
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 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…

You seem to have a great deal of faith in regulators. In most cases, they're under resourced, outgunned by corporate lawyers, and may have a bunch of different incentives to look the other way. Even if they do find egregious wrongdoing, many times bad actors will get a slap on the wrist or it'll be blamed on a single individual.

If you're curious, read Fooling Some People All of the Time by David Einhorn, who ironically, is short Tesla.

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

#143

Post by Ataraxy »

notacoward wrote: post #59
ucaetano wrote: post #34

We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations. 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 T…

I was thinking the same thing. Maybe these allegations will turn out to have some merit. On the other hand, Musk has been sounding a bit like Trump lately ... and I don't just say that because I'm not a fan of either. There's a similar "I'm here to blow up the corrupt order and everything bad that happens is because of them conspiring against me" narrative at play. For Trump it's the Deep State. For Musk it's Big Oil…

Just as eery are the 5 comments in a row I just read comparing him to Trump.

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

#144

Post by whalesalad »

ucaetano wrote: post #34

We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations. 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 T…

Nothing paranoid about this. Data exfiltration and corporate sabatoge is very real. There are entire departments at large companies dedicated to protecting against things like this.

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?

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

#145

Post by colechristensen »

ucaetano wrote: post #34

We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations. 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 T…

It doesn't strike me as paranoia. Thinking that industrial espionage doesn't happen seems naive.

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.

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

#146

Post by falcolas »

SolarNet wrote: post #120
sanderjd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There is really no reason for this to be the case. Certainly all code that actually runs on the car can be required to go through review and be verifiably built, even if server code standards are more lax.

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.

Which indicates a different problem if the sabatuer was on that short list. And in this day and age of cryptographically signed commits, the number of people who could do this should go down even further.

Given this, I think it’s much more likely there were few or bad controls, than a person in an incredibly privileged position working in the margins.

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

#147

Post by Denzel »

jshaqaw wrote: post #124
anonu wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't suggest this to be paranoia. It's simply reality. Wall Street profits from the stock cratering right now. Its not unfathomable that some hedge fund would go to extreme lengths to embed a mole into the Tesla team to cause sabotage. 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…

Friend, I work in hedge funds. This isn’t Billions. Musk going over the deep end far more plausible than a hedge fund saboteur.

There's a great big world out there. Just because you work in hedge funds doesn't mean you've seen everything.

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.

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

#148

Post by icantdrive55 »

jethro_tell wrote: post #127
manicdee wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a huckster he’s doing a damn good job of fake shipping fake cars to fake customers who fake drive them in fake public. Excellent scam, would invest again.

There's a huge difference between shipping a product and doing it profitably.

Like the rest, he will eventually move manufacturing overseas, and all will be happy.

If I had the money, I would be happy just to be on the waiting list. It's got to be a good feeling you're waiting/driving to a American made vechicle? A vechicle that payed the help(blue collar workers) a living wage? Or, close to a living wage?

I'm a Musk fanboy I guess?

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

#149

Post by noobermin »

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…

Don't like Musk at all but to be fair, the email was leaked, it's not like he meant to share it publicly AFAWK.

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

#150

Post by noobermin »

EGreg wrote: post #125
cottsak wrote: post #84

Earlier 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…

Why is it naive to expect there not to be a single point of failure like that? Code reviews are a thing.

What if they pushed it without asking anyone?
Post reply on HN