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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.
"Not our fault!" There must be some bad news coming out later this week, and he wants to get ahead of it with some sort of excuse to blame...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I remember the flat-out lies newspaper testreports told about the range of Tesla cars and that were uncovered by the logs the car had recorded about how it actually had been driven. To me there is no doubt that behind the scenes specialised agencies and perhaps even darker machinations are at work to throw monkey wrenches into Teslas attempt to build an market feasilbe electric car.
Systematic sabotage at Tesla? Really way more likely than most people would think, IMHO.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
About 25% of the stock is shorted (varies day-to-day, but it's a single-digit fraction of the total).
When you short a stock on margin and the price goes up, you have to add money to your margin account to cover the potential loss.
Tesla stock is up almost 100 points over the last month, roughly 35% ($370 up from $275).
Tesla short sellers are taking a bath right now, to the tune of $2 billion in the last month.
A fair number of those short sellers would be interested in throwing a pile of cash (say $100,000) at a disgruntled employee to damage the production line.
Anyone care to bet against that prediction?
(The next step will probably be to get the FBI involved.)
Tucker 48
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_48
But speculating that a big automotive competitor is possibly involved sounds nutty even if true.
No way. When the most shorted company in the world finds saboteurs it's nutty not to speculate.
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.
The EV market is just as large as ICE car market. The writing is on the wall and ICE is on the way out. It could be worth billions or even trillions to delay Tesla months or years by any number of parties. When you rock a multitrillion dollar boat, you better believe that there is plenty of incentive for sabotage.
However, the shortsighted shortsellers seem to be especially spurned by Tesla, so I would suspect one of them trying to make a big payday for themselves.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I must have missed where VAG built a factory capable of producing 5k EVs per week in 15 months from the start of tooling, on a brand new line with a newly hired workforce. Literally, the first 467 Kuka robots arrived, were placed, and workers were hired, in April-June 2017.
Hate to break it to you but the big auto makers build assembly lines with FAR larger production rates in shorter time periods than that routinely. It's normal for companies like Toyota to go from start of DESIGN to production in 20-30 months. Not start of tooling, start of design. They do tooling in far less than 15 months. And the process of assembling an EV isn't wildly different from a car with an internal combustion engine. A chassis is still a chassis. A suspension is still a suspension. I've seen them tool up an entire factory in under 10 months. (I work in the industry)
What makes Tesla struggle is that they don't have the institutional knowledge of a company like VW or Toyota and they are still building their production system procedures. They're having to learn it as they go and develop their production system from scratch which is genuinely hard to do. What Tesla has done is very impressive but let's not pretend they have mastered assembly better than companies that have been doing it for decades. Tesla is bringing a lot of awesome innovation to the party on the design and product engineering but to date they are still behind the curve when it comes to manufacturing prowess. If they survive I think they'll be fine in the long run but they have a bumpy road ahead of them for a little while. People tend to think manufacturing assembly is easy and it's actually one of the hardest things to do well you can imagine. I think Musk gets it and his job is just to keep the cash flowing until Tesla can get their production system scaled up and stable.
Standard Operating Procedures for Unions that are shut out.
What makes Tesla struggle is they thought they could design a much more automated assembly line.
That's an institutional knowledge problem. They just don't have the collective experience to know what won't work yet or where the boundaries of the technology lie. You can do a lot with automation but there are limits which a more seasoned company would understand. Experience can be a double edged sword because it can keep you from trying something new but it also can keep you from making mistakes.
The idea was to apply software agility to the assembly line, iterating rapidly and developing something better than everyone else.
That's not a new concept. You think nobody at Ford or Toyota or GM has ever had that thought? The difference is that they've already tried and figured out where it works and where it doesn't. Tesla is just reinventing the wheel here and learning lessons the hard way. To be honest they got a bit cocky and it bit them in the ass.
But like many agile projects, the end is hard to see and harder to get to by simply tweaking and tweaking. At least in a short time frame.
The software mentality can get you into trouble when you are making hardware. The economic and technical constrains are different as is the pace of iteration. It's relatively inexpensive to iterate in software and you can do it quickly. This is a MUCH harder trick to pull off when you are making physical goods.
Any other company, the first thing people would suspect is that it's unsafe working conditions which are causing the unusual number of fires, and the company/management is at fault for not devoting enough funds nor attention to worker safety. But since it's Tesla, it must be arson by a disgruntled employee, or sabotage by a competitor.
The thing most people don't realize is that Tesla is not the reason the industry is pushing towards electric cars. The California Air Resources Board is. CARB has a zero emissions vehicle mandate - every year a certain percentage of vehicles each manufacturer sells has to be a ZEV. The formula is a bit complicated, but for 2018 it's a little over 2%. For 2025 it's supposed to be 8%. If an automaker fails to hit the target percentage, they have to buy ZEV credits from someone who surpassed the target (e.g. Tesla). If they fail to do that, they are banned from selling cars in California and about a dozen other states which automatically adopt CARB's guidelines . These states comprise about a third of the U.S. by population, and no auto manufacturer wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S. market. So they are all rolling out EVs to comply with the ZEV mandate.
Tesla has nothing to do with it. Because of the ZEV mandate, all the other automakers would be working hard to make EVs even if Tesla didn't exist. If anything, Tesla allows manufacturers to delay rolling out their own EV, since they can just buy ZEV credits from Tesla instead (many low-volume high-end exotic car makers are choosing to do this). So it would actually be against the other automakers' self interest to sabotage Tesla since that would raise the market price of ZEV credits, and they'd have to pay more (mostly to Tesla) if they should fail to hit their CARB-mandated ZEV percentage. The only time sabotage would make sense is if they're selling enough of their own EVs that they don't need to buy Tesla ZEV credits (and feel they won't need to in the future), in which case there's no need to sabotage Tesla since they'd already be beating Tesla in the market. Musk didn't start Tesla because he thought EVs were the future and wanted to get in on it early (he may believe that, but that's not the reason he started Tesla). He started it because he realized that CARB's ZEV mandate would give an automaker who made only EVs an economic advantage in the market (other automakers would have to pay him for every EV he sold).
So there's no incentive for the rest of the auto industry to sabotage Tesla, or EVs in general. That's a self-victimization delusion created by EV advocates who can't comprehend why regular people don't want to buy EVs. Because they can't understand the motivations of regular people, they come up with a conspiracy theory about how the industry is responsible for holding EVs back. Believe me, the industry wants to sell EVs so they can comply with CARB's ZEV mandate, since California is in absolutely no danger of switching from a blue state to a red state. This is also the reason I'm not shorting Tesla stock. 8% ZEVs by 2025 is an extremely aggressive target. I'm not sure the other automakers can hit it. If they can't, and Tesla can survive that long, its current stock valuation may in fact be justified.