Slashdot Mirror
Elon Musk Emails Employees About 'Extensive and Damaging Sabotage' By Employee (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent an email to all employees on Monday morning about a factory fire, and seemed to reference possible sabotage. Now, CNBC has learned that Musk also sent an e-mail to all employees at Tesla late on Sunday night alleging that he has discovered a saboteur in the company's ranks. Musk said this person had conducted "quite extensive and damaging sabotage" to the company's operations, including by changing code to an internal product and exporting data to outsiders. In the email, Musk said "the investigation will continue in depth this week" to "figure out if [the saboteur] was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations [that want Tesla to disappear]." You can read the full email via CNBC's report.
Sure it is. Just not short term. Companies do actually think 5 and 10 years into the future. Tesla is extremely disruptive. Get rid of them, and electric cars can be stalled for another 10 years. That is more than worth sabotage. As it is, most companies are having to move into electric cars, and all of them are being dragged kicking and screaming.
Since he apparently has something of a confession by someone I have to assume that something real happened.
But speculating that a big automotive competitor is possibly involved sounds nutty even if true. He should have quit when he was ahead and left that out.
Even if Tesla hits all their numbers and all their sales are directly subtracted from any one of the established competitors the net result is really tiny. I haven't done the calculation but less than %1 tiny I am sure.
So the motive just ain't there. The ROI is just not there to justify the risks involved.
If Tesla hits its production quotas in 2019, they should sell about 500,000-750,000 cars. The entire US car market is about 17 million cars. So that's about 3-5% of the US car market. But 30% of buyers have said that they are looking at an EV for their next car. And right now it costs the traditional automakers about $47,000 to make an EV but it only costs Tesla about $28,000 (assuming they are making 10,000 model 3's a week). If the model 3 sales queue just keeps filling up during 2019 the ICE auto makers are in a very tough situation.
That's going to be a hard ramp up for the auto makers. They face at least 5 years before they can make EVs at the same scale for the same price point as Tesla. That gives Tesla 5 years to grow their production and establish their dominance in the EV space. That would be disastrous for pretty much all the companies that sell cars in the US (GM, Ford, Toyota, Daimler, BMW, etc). While some of the companies are in a better position than others if this happens, none of them are in a good place at that point. Their stock prices will take a beating which will raise their price of capital. Most of their factories will have to be overhauled. New competencies will have to be learned. In short, many of them won't make it. Now that's a lot of ifs, but really all it depends on Tesla being able to make cars (not that hard) and people being willing to buy them on-line (which probably has already been proved). What would you do in that situation? Oh, and don't forget the car dealerships, the Oil companies and the auto unions. Elon/Tesla has a long list of enemies. Doesn't mean he isn't also paranoid or that there is a real conspiracy here.
the shorters made the mistake of assuming that stock price would be tied to real world performance the company the stock is for.
I don't think they would be in position to do that, if they wanted they could pick any other company as well.
I have to wonder though, on what basis are people buying Tesla stock right now? it's highly valued for what it represents already and the company is likely to need more cash infusion to survive. I am aware of however that the stock can go up even in such a case, because people "like" it or like the guy running the company.
like, look as this news _should_ run the stock down and what is actually going to happen is that it's going to go up, because bizarro(and the people buying it are just buying it as if it were making apple like profits any day now).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You're just dabbling in the same High-finance bullshit as the shorters.
Ford marketplace- big
Tesla marketplace- tiny
Ford goes out of business- hundreds of thousands unemployed.
Tesla goes out of business- Panasonic puts their equipment in shipping containers and hauls it to China.
At least in the USA, every other manufacturer of EVs has not realized what is Tesla's massive advantage and what it takes for practical long distance EVs.
The Supercharger network.
There is no other charging solution in the USA that is close to the Supercharger network. You can buy a Chevy Bolt today, but driving across country in it: that's going to be slow and difficult.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I'd love to see their QC stats as well. New line, new workers, new robots, new procedures, new process. I'm pretty sure they're not hitting Six Sigma
You can get general stats for free with just a short search on the internet. You can pay for detailed ones. It's not hard to get that information. NOBODY is hitting six sigma quality in auto assembly. Even the best suppliers don't reach that level of quality except in rare cases. Too many products with too many stacking tolerances for that to be possible. But the big auto makers are all really quite good, even the worse ones. Companies like Toyota and Honda have a well deserved legendary reputation for their quality systems. I've been in their plants myself and can confirm this first hand. They are REALLY good at quality.
But your mistake is thinking that they do it all from scratch. That's the thing is that once you have a part of a production system that works you don't redesign it all from scratch. The big automakers have proven technology and production systems which they just have to reconfigure and reorganize. They make incremental improvements which accumulate over time. Tesla just hasn't had the benefit of years and decades of iteration. In time they'll get there (hopefully) but you can't accelerate the process beyond a certain point. Tesla doesn't get any bonus points for trying to do it all from scratch. That just means they have a lot of places where things can (and will) go wrong.
Disclosure: I'm an industrial engineer (and an accountant) and my day job is running a company that makes auto parts. I literally build assembly lines for a living so I'm actually talking about something I know pretty well here.