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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.
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.)
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.
BEV cars go together pretty much like PHEV and HEV cars do. The drivetrain comes in as components. You put them together. Assembling a Tesla's not all that different from assembling a VW, and companies like VAG routinely go from Kuka/Comau/Kawasaki/Fanuc arriving on the floor to full mass production at design rate in a matter of months, because, unlike Tesla, they're experts are what they're doing. Even workforce training isn't as important as you think, because they're experts at that, too.
This isn't meant to be a Tesla slam, because if Tesla keeps at it, they'll eventually become experts, too.
--Jim (me)
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.
And also opens himself up to libel action, comments on a legal case (if there even is one!) outside the scope of his legal department, insinuates that his competitors have access to his supposedly secure network (trade secrets, et al presumably).
Honestly, there's a reason that people shut their mouths in certain situations and let the lawyers / HR people talk rather than themselves. Every employee who works near this guy will know who he is. Certainly if anything in this email is factually wrong, he would have basis to sue. Hell, if there's anything in this email that CAN'T BE PROVEN, he would have basis to sue (i.e. the supposed "confession").
This could prejudice a trial too... now a judge might need to find a jury who hasn't heard of Elon Musk and hasn't heard such a statement.
There's also - and this is critical - no need for it. You can send out a message about finding a potential saboteur, stating your suspicions that they aren't alone, reminding people of the need for security and confidentiality, and providing the line to allow whistleblowing, without mentioning half the details Musk has.
Like Trump, Musk "reacts" rather than acts. He just codifies his internal emotion towards something and sends that out to the world as a quotable company statement, rather than thinks or checks or moderates.
Anyone with a brain is just thinking "Well, you must have really poor source control, then".
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.