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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.