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Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?


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13 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

When you have a better product, you compete in the marketplace. When your product is worse, you compete in the courtroom. Obviously there are legitimate reasons to sue a competitor but this appears that Elon wants to consider broad functionality as IP.

So should Boeing sue SpaceX?

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On 7/4/2023 at 8:45 AM, Francisco 2.0 said:

Yeah, Zuckerberg sucks, but Elon needs bitch slapped over his Twitter moves with a valid competitor.  Blue Sky and the like may get there someday, but they aren't ready.  Meta can handle the load until something better comes along:

 

https://www.threads.net

 

 

Lulz.  He's going after him with a dot-net.  I like it.

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1 hour ago, Neonmoon said:

Threads hasn’t even launched in Europe yet. Mosseri said it would be a while 

Really interested from a engineering and design perspective how different the development of each app is - threads is a greenfield(ish) development, twitter is pushing 15 years old and it's initial design was to accommodate SMS only interactions. 

I'm sure GDPR compliance is much easier for meta to build in, but I imagine it's also pretty far flung from their typical data and business model

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Wonder if Elon will respond with a poop emoji.

https://www.statesman.com/story/business/technology/2023/07/06/tesla-austin-nhtsa-national-highway-traffic-safety-request-records-full-self-driving-autopilot-beta/70388784007/

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Tesla is being asked by a federal safety regulator to send new, expansive records as part of a federal investigation into the Austin-based company’s Autopilot software.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency for transportation safety that sets vehicle performance standards, is requesting the new records as part of an investigation it started in 2021.

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Under the new request, which was sent in a letter to Tesla on July 3, the federal agency said it wants more information on Tesla software, hardware, data or related technology, particularly those related to the Autopilot software.

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The request pertains to cars sold, used or leased in the United States between model years 2014 and 2023, and any date when a Tesla vehicle was admitted into Tesla’s Full Self Driving beta software program. It also asked for the names of certain employees, communications, documents and other information related to the Autopilot software.

Tesla has been asked to respond to the letter by July 19. The letter also said that if Tesla fails to respond promptly, truthfully or in full, the company could face fines of up to $26,315 per violation per day, with a maximum of $131,564,183,996.

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On Thursday, the agency also posted a separate letter related to Tesla, saying it is reviewing a petition submitted by Ronald Belt, an automotive safety researcher. Belt asked the NHTSA to reopen a separate investigation related to “sudden unintended acceleration” of Tesla vehicles stopped or in motion.

 

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Meanwhile, at Twitter:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/7/23786988/twitter-ads-placeholder-bug-amazon-sky-tv

 

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Some of the ads on Twitter aren’t looking quite right. Several users on the platform’s mobile app say they’re seeing an image of Twitter’s logo in place of the advertisement paid for by Amazon, Sky, and the sportswear company On Running.

The ads affected by this issue show the advertiser’s name, along with what looks like the intended caption. However, instead of linking to the advertiser’s website, the busted ads link to Twitter.com and have “DPA_Placeholder” as the heading for the link. In advertising, DPA stands for “dynamic product ads,” which suggests there might be an issue affecting Twitter’s ability to display the right ads.

 

 

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So far, the issue only seems to be affecting ads on mobile from the main Amazon account and its Amazon Fashion sub-brand, along with On Running and Sky. A search for “DPA_Placeholder” on Twitter revealed that a New Balance ad was also affected by the issue in August 2022.

Some of the ads from Amazon received over 15 million views, according to users’ screenshotted view counters, while ads from On Running and Sky reached over 1 million people. It’s not clear how many people saw the ads without the right content or exactly what is causing the problem. Either way, it’s not a great look for a platform that’s attempting to court advertisers and just hired longtime ad executive Linda Yaccarino as its CEO to repair those frayed relationships.

The Verge reached out to Amazon, Sky, and On Running with requests for more information but didn’t immediately hear back. Twitter responded to The Verge’s email with a poop emoji.

 

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10 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:
Quote

a maximum of $131,564,183,996.

What an oddly specific number lmao

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4 minutes ago, totallynotabuttpirate said:

Humor Boomer GIF

from the Ars comments:

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As for being overcharged? Of course Musk was being overcharged! You don’t hire Wachtell if you don’t want to be overcharged.

so to be clear - board approved something, executives signed off on something, money was paid 9 months ago and you are trying to claw it back just now?!

also, i'm sure this is going to make you look even better in all the articles about this:

bt2zwn46elab1.jpg

 

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46 minutes ago, totallynotabuttpirate said:
33 minutes ago, NoName said:

so to be clear - board approved something, executives signed off on something, money was paid 9 months ago and you are trying to claw it back just now?!

World's richest man desperately trying to claw back $90 million that was *checks notes* paid 9 months ago.

Interested GIF by reactionseditor

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World's richest man desperately trying to claw back $90 million that was *checks notes* paid 9 months ago.
200.gif

I’d presume that one of the many, many people/businesses being stiffed by Twitter would slap a garnishment or similar mechanism on any award or settlement Twitter might get.
So, in summary, it’s nice to see Elon finally working to get some of Twitter’s creditors paid!
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4 hours ago, NoName said:

Humor Boomer GIF

from the Ars comments:

so to be clear - board approved something, executives signed off on something, money was paid 9 months ago and you are trying to claw it back just now?!

also, i'm sure this is going to make you look even better in all the articles about this:

bt2zwn46elab1.jpg

 

They must have no liquidity at all. That's the only explanation for any of these bizarre moves.

I skimmed the legal complaint. Not sure how New York lawyers representing a Delaware corporation (Twitter pre-Elon) in a Delaware court (where they had to sue Elon for trying to welch on the acquisition) are expected to obey California laws, or even why X decided to file the case in San Francisco where I assume everyone hates Elon.

I think $90M is high but it's also less than 1% of the value of the $44B deal. If the size of the deal or the quality of the results can be taken into account when deciding whether an attorney fee is excessive, I'm not sure if any reasonable person would call call a success fee of under 1% of the entire deal's worth to be excessive.

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12 minutes ago, Pig Bellmont said:

That thing is so fucking stupid 

I love the massive windshield wiper that won't be sold in any auto parts stores.

And the tires matching the hubcaps.  I'm sure that didn't cost extra.

And like the little gaps (I know, they are covering up the front, but still).

F0eS2dyXgAAIqng?format=jpg&name=large

 

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I’m a week late on this thread explosion, but I do want to make a comment to the discussion on how musk will be fine because Tesla will become a charging station company. 
 

Yes, the Tesla charging station is huge, a big deal, and standardization and adoption will be a consistent revenue stream for them, most likely. that being said the problem for Tesla is that for a decade it’s been viewed not as a car company, or a charging station company, but as a tech stock. That’s why its stock price is so high, compared to other car companies. Once it’s shown without a doubt there is no more technical innovation coming from Tesla, the shares will return to the mean. And that is a massive drop in stock value and wealth. 

Edited by SydneyCarton
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13 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

I love the massive windshield wiper that won't be sold in any auto parts stores.

And the tires matching the hubcaps.  I'm sure that didn't cost extra.

And like the little gaps (I know, they are covering up the front, but still).

F0eS2dyXgAAIqng?format=jpg&name=large

 

 

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tesla-buffalo-new-york-solar-plant-1b634b9e

 

TL;DR.  NY spent a boatload of cash on a building for Elon, to produce solar roofs.  Elon oversold the demand for solar roofs to the state, investors, whatnot.  Most of the employees at the facility today analyze self-driving data, to meet the minimum number of employees necessary for tax breaks.  Tesla has to stay in the building until 2029 for $1 a year.

 

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New York spent nearly $1 billion over the past decade on Elon Musk’s ambitious plan for what was supposed to be the largest solar-panel factory in the Western Hemisphere, one of the largest-ever public cash outlays of its kind.

“You almost have to pinch yourself, right?” New York’s then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at a construction ceremony for the factory in 2015. “That this is too good to be true.”

Eight years later, that looks like a pretty good assessment. 

 

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New York state paid to build a quarter-mile-long facility with 1.2 million square feet of industrial space, which it now owns and leases to Tesla for $1 a year. It bought $240 million worth of solar-panel manufacturing equipment. Musk had said that by 2020 the Buffalo plant each week would churn out enough solar-panel shingles to cover 1,000 roofs.

The Tesla solar-energy unit behind the plan, however, is averaging just 21 installations a week, according to energy analysts at Wood Mackenzie who reviewed utility data. The building houses some factory workers, but also hundreds of lower-paid desk-bound data analysts working on other Tesla business.  

 

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The suppliers that Cuomo predicted would flock to a modern manufacturing hub never showed up. The only new nearby business is a Tim Horton’s coffee shop. Most of the solar-panel manufacturing equipment bought by the state has been sold at a discount or scrapped.

A state comptroller’s audit found just 54 cents of economic benefit for every subsidy dollar spent on the factory, which rose on the site of an old steel mill. External auditors have written down nearly all of New York’s investment.  

“It was a bad deal,” said state Sen. Sean Ryan, a Democrat who represents Buffalo. “A cautionary tale is you can’t give governors too much power to get on the phone with egotistical billionaires.”

 

Spoiler

The former governor’s spokesman defended the project, saying the factory site has more jobs on it now than when it was an empty lot where a steel mill once stood.

Jason Conwall, a spokesman for the state agency overseeing the project, said: “Tesla has made substantial contributions to the local economy, aligning with the region’s overall economic revitalization.”

The state has agreed to amend the terms of its subsidy 12 times over the years, including by reducing the number of jobs to be created in manufacturing and shifting deadlines to accommodate the company.

Although there aren’t as many manufacturing jobs as the company and politicians had forecast, Tesla reported in February it has created 1,700 positions there, enough to meet its obligations to the state and avoid a $41 million annual penalty.  

Musk and Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Cuomo declined to be interviewed.

America’s governors are swept up in an arms race of awarding packages of taxpayer money to attract industrial megaprojects. Contributing are President Biden’s federal subsidies to build up U.S. manufacturing, particularly for electric-vehicle battery and semiconductor plants, some of which require states to kick in additional incentives. 

Last year, states gave each of eight company facilities more than $1 billion in tax breaks and other aid, according to Good Jobs First, a subsidy tracker funded partly by labor unions. Until then, there had never been a year with more than three such deals. 

In Wisconsin, a factory by Taiwan’s Foxconn that was to employ 13,000 workers in exchange for some $3 billion in state subsidies sits mostly empty. Suburban Virginia offered tax breaks to win a competition for Amazon.com’s “second headquarters,” but much of that project is on hold. 

Musk’s electric-vehicle maker Tesla and space-transportation company SpaceX have received more than $4 billion worth of tax breaks and other government subsidies since 2006, according to a Wall Street Journal review of state and federal records. Nevada has provided financial incentives, including a $330 million tax abatement this year, to help Tesla build and expand a vehicle factory complex outside Reno. 

In Buffalo, the state spent cash to build the factory, instead of offering tax abatements that stretch out over years. Cuomo, a Democrat, billed it as the centerpiece of what he called the “Buffalo Billion.”

“In building and equipping the Tesla solar-panel plant, the state became a direct investor in that project under the worst possible terms,” said E.J. McMahon, founding senior fellow at the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank. “In terms of sheer direct cost to taxpayers, this may rank as the single biggest economic development boondoggle in American history.” 

Rather than the high-tech factory workers the state intended, more than 700 of those working at the site are data analysts who review “real-time driving data that trains the AI” for Tesla’s autonomous-vehicle software, the company reported to the state in February. Others assemble components for vehicle-charging stations and backup switches for battery systems. “Tesla continues to manufacture Solar Roof,” Tesla reported about the solar-panel shingles product, but it provided no specifics.

Empire State Development, the state agency overseeing the subsidies, doesn’t keep track of what is being produced at the Tesla factory, or any others the state has supported, said a spokeswoman, Pamm Lent.

Tesla’s deal with the state requires it to stay in the factory, for $1 a year, through 2029.

Buffalo, once an engine of manufacturing, has stagnated for generations as industrial companies headed south. Previous efforts at renewal largely fell flat. In 2012, Cuomo said he wanted to spend $1 billion in state taxpayer money to turn Buffalo around, and regional leaders tapped the think tank Brookings Institution to outline an investment strategy. 

Central to the plan, laid out in a 2013 policy paper, was to avoid directing too much state aid to a few large companies. New York’s publicly stated goal was to incubate a handful of small startups in promising economic niches.

Cuomo’s adviser on the Buffalo project, State University of New York nanoscience professor Alain Kaloyeros, recruited solar-panel startup Silevo and LED lighting company Soraa to anchor the planned high-tech hub. The state said it would spend $100 million to build Silevo’s plant, in exchange for the company creating 1,300 jobs.

As it was finalizing that deal, Kaloyeros learned that SolarCity, then the country’s leading solar-panel installer, was considering acquiring Silevo. Musk was SolarCity’s chairman and largest investor. His cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive ran the company.

Working the phones, Kaloyeros tried to ensure that SolarCity would commit to keeping Silevo in Buffalo when they announced the acquisition, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Without alerting Cuomo, Musk and his cousins wrote in a blog post that the Buffalo factory would manufacture enough panels annually to produce one gigawatt of electricity. That is the equivalent of more than three million solar panels, according to the Department of Energy. “We are in discussions with the state of New York to build the initial manufacturing plant,” Musk and his cousins wrote, vowing to start operating “one of the single largest solar panel production plants in the world” within two years.

Cuomo was irate at being upstaged by Musk, according to the people familiar with the talks and email correspondence reviewed by The Journal. Kaloyeros told the governor’s staff in an email that Musk had “jumped the gun” in stating a goal of producing one gigawatt of power. Kaloyeros assured the administration that Cuomo would soon have his own news to break.

“The actual deal being considered is much bigger..5 GW to 10 GW..with 5,000 jobs..and that is being saved for the governor,” he wrote. Rather than scold Musk for frontrunning Cuomo, Kaloyeros wrote, “I prefer to shame Musk instead into joining the governor in announcing the much bigger deal asap.”

In September 2014, New York agreed to spend $750 million on the solar project, more than seven times its initial commitment.

Because the SolarCity project was to be so big, New York bumped its other original Buffalo tenant, Soraa, promising to find it another home. Soraa has since left New York.

At the August 2015 construction ceremony, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said the new facility, called Riverbend, would soon churn out 10,000 solar panels a day and create 3,000 jobs.

That October, SolarCity persuaded the state to remove the term “high-tech” from the jobs agreement, and reduced, from 900 to 500, the number of jobs that would be required to be in “manufacturing operations” at the Buffalo plant. 

By the summer of 2016, SolarCity was about $3 billion in debt and nearly out of cash. Tesla acquired it. Some Tesla shareholders sued, alleging Musk was using the carmaker to bail out another of his interests. A Delaware judge ruled in Musk’s favor last year, citing an increase in Tesla’s share price as evidence the SolarCity acquisition hadn’t harmed investors.

Musk’s vision for the Buffalo facility was that it would make a new kind of solar product. “It’s not a thing on the roof, it is the roof,” he said in an August 2016 SolarCity earnings call. “I’m pretty excited about what we’re doing in Buffalo.”

Many of Musk’s employees, as well as bankers advising Tesla on the SolarCity transaction, were blindsided by his focus on solar roof tiles, a product that was only in the early design stage. Responding to the exasperation, one executive wrote, “It’s Elon’s world. We all just live in it,” according to an email later disclosed in the shareholders’ lawsuit. 

In April 2017, Cuomo secured another $500 million for the project, about half of which went into the Tesla facility, bringing New York’s total investment in the factory to $959 million.

For a few years, the Buffalo site hummed with manufacturing, but it was carried out by Panasonic, Tesla’s supplier of solar cells. The Japanese company employed about 400 people in Buffalo before deciding in early 2020 to pull out.

Musk acknowledged in a June 2019 deposition for the shareholders’ lawsuit that he hadn’t been focused on solar energy for much of the previous two years because of the pressure to mass produce Tesla’s long-delayed affordable electric vehicle, the Model 3. He said he had redeployed every solar worker he could to Model 3 duties, which weren’t being carried out in Buffalo. “Just a little bit longer and then we can focus on solar, and you’ll see a dramatic turnaround,” he said.

At present, what was supposed to be a solar-panel factory is mostly populated by Tesla data analysts.

“In all honesty, they needed the jobs” to avoid paying the state penalty associated with the deal, said Will Hance, a 24-year-old data analyst who has worked at the Tesla Buffalo site since October. “As a whole, we are the biggest department there.”

Hance is part of an effort to unionize the factory, led by Tesla Workers United, which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union. Labor leaders have been wary of Musk’s involvement from the outset, given his companies’ opposition to unions.

To prepare for Tesla’s arrival and a wave of solar-manufacturing jobs, Buffalo built a $44 million training center on the city’s economically disadvantaged East Side. The training center, which has graduated about 500 people in its four years of operation, has sent about 20 people to work at Tesla, most of them as equipment-maintenance technicians, its executive director said.  

Thirteen students have graduated from a separate solar-manufacturing training program started by Buffalo’s public schools. A spokesman wouldn’t say how many of them have been hired by Tesla.

Tesla has said little about its solar production in disclosures to investors. Musk has made no public appearances in Buffalo.

Democratic State Sen. Liz Krueger, chair of the senate finance committee, said the state should invest in infrastructure and worker training instead of “spending billions of taxpayer dollars pretending we’re very good at being angel investors.” 

State Sen. Ryan last visited the site just before the Covid pandemic. He and another public official who was on the tour later said that the activity they witnessed didn’t look like full-scale manufacturing work.

“We still want to wake up tomorrow and hear that Tesla is really going to invest in this factory, and we’re gonna have the jobs and the ripple economy that we were promised,” Ryan said in a recent interview. “So, everyone’s reluctant to dance on Tesla’s grave because we still want it to happen.”

Tesla’s troubles with solar in Buffalo were overshadowed by a federal corruption probe into the construction of the factory. Kaloyeros and others, including one of Cuomo’s closest aides, were convicted of rigging the bid process to award the construction contract to a politically connected local contractor. The convictions were subsequently vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

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1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

TL;DR.  NY spent a boatload of cash on a building for Elon, to produce solar roofs.  Elon oversold the demand for solar roofs to the state, investors, whatnot.  Most of the employees at the facility today analyze self-driving data, to meet the minimum number of employees necessary for tax breaks.  Tesla has to stay in the building until 2029 for $1 a year.

The employees are analyzing self-driving data.  Which, FSD is just not going to happen on newer Teslas, at least not if Elmo keeps radars off the cars, so they (those employees) are just a drain on Tesla.

It's still crazy - if you said one of the world's richest men was investing $44 billion into something, you'd think that if they were old, they were going Bill Gates and doing something to improve the world and leave a legacy, or if they were younger, they were investing it into something that was revolutionary (or at least evolutionary) that would generate that $44 billion back and then some, with some revolutionary product.  

Instead, he sunk it into a social media platform that only broke even a few times, that will never ever recover that $44 billion, or anything even approaching that in his lifetime, and he is trying to keep catturd2 happy and reposting bullshit conspiracy theories while restricting the amount of traffic to the site (and he needs that traffic for the advertisers to be happy).

I don't know why people take him seriously any more - there is nothing he has done since taking over twitter to make you think "wow, he's a business genius who is going to make twitter not only profitable, but he's going to grow the user base and make it a top-10 social media platform instead of hanging in there in the top-15!"

Homer Simpson Animation GIF by FOX TV

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2 minutes ago, Willfully Horn said:

Posting pictures of mayonnaise in support of Elon Musk seems on brand.

And here comes the miracle whip. Just take a moment to reflect and appreciate that he didn’t post a TikTok embedded in a tweet as the vehicle to share his wisdom with you. 

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9 minutes ago, Willfully Horn said:

Posting pictures of mayonnaise in support of Elon Musk seems on brand.

A few months ago, got in a FB discussion with some relatives/friends about mayo for some reason, and I mentioned that I loved mayo, tuna, and hard-boiled eggs mixed together and made into a sandwich and it was one of my favorite meals as a kid.

My mom chimes in with "I was feeding you all mayo/tuna/egg sandwiches because that's what we could afford, but I'm glad you liked them!"  Thanks mom!

That's my mayo story.

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This argument is as regarded as my dumb ass somehow having enough money to buy Coke, and people saying, "Look, people are still drinking Coke a year later! He can't be doing that bad of a job!"

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1 minute ago, aggie08 said:

Exactly what percentage of credit does Elon get for Twitter's current market share? Is it getting better or worse?

Dude is a spectrumy narcissist and spent money you can’t fathom but essentially doesn’t pinch him in any way. I am sorry if I am not exactly tracking your question or how it relates in any way to you guys filling the Elon thread with embedded tweets. The tweet embed feature has always been one of the most brain numbing aspects of this board. Outside the sports forums it’s just stifling. 

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  • immamac changed the title to Elon Musk: [Fraud] Official or unofficial piece of shit?
  • blacklab changed the title to Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

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