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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!
When will he start collecting his urine in jars and not letting people into his office anymore?
So much for retiring on Mars.
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.
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.)
From: Elon Musk
To: Everybody
Subject: Some concerning news
June 17, 2018 11:57 p.m.
I was dismayed to learn this weekend about a Tesla employee who had conducted quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations. This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties.
The full extent of his actions are not yet clear, but what he has admitted to so far is pretty bad. His stated motivation is that he wanted a promotion that he did not receive. In light of these actions, not promoting him was definitely the right move.
However, there may be considerably more to this situation than meets the eye, so the investigation will continue in depth this week. We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations.
As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die. These include Wall Street short-sellers, who have already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more. Then there are the oil & gas companies, the wealthiest industry in the world — they don't love the idea of Tesla advancing the progress of solar power & electric cars. Don't want to blow your mind, but rumor has it that those companies are sometimes not super nice. Then there are the multitude of big gas/diesel car company competitors. If they're willing to cheat so much about emissions, maybe they're willing to cheat in other ways?
Most of the time, when there is theft of goods, leaking of confidential information, dereliction of duty or outright sabotage, the reason really is something simple like wanting to get back at someone within the company or at the company as a whole. Occasionally, it is much more serious.
Please be extremely vigilant, particularly over the next few weeks as we ramp up the production rate to 5k/week. This is when outside forces have the strongest motivation to stop us.
If you know of, see or suspect anything suspicious, please send a note to [email address removed for privacy] with as much info as possible. This can be done in your name, which will be kept confidential, or completely anonymously.
Looking forward to having a great week with you as we charge up the super exciting ramp to 5000 Model 3 cars per week!
Will follow this up with emails every few days describing the progress and challenges of the Model 3 ramp.
Thanks for working so hard to make Tesla successful,
Elon
(copied from https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/18/elon-musk-email-employee-conducted-extensive-and-damaging-sabotage.html)
Tucker 48
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_48
For the modern age
Saboteur was shorting TSLA, now shorting a Supercharger.
Saboteur at fault for fire, now on fire due to electrical fault.
Saboteur meant to retire to Sun City, went way of SolarCity.
Saboteur trying to halt Model 3 production gets overrun by Model 3.
Just sayin', lots of people hate him about now.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Sounds like a crime was committed.
Sounds like maybe someone should be prosecuted.
Was a police report filed? Has someone been jailed?
I'm calling shenanigans until we git a pic of someone in cuffs.
Remember when one of SpaceX's rockets exploded, and they thought one of their nearby competitors sabotaged it?
Quite.
git blame.
And, sorry, but if your data got out, do you not have some kind of data control and audit?
These things are supposed to be life-critical systems. If you can't immediately point the finger at the author of every line of code, but send public emails about it, I'm calling bullshit.
Gosh, if only you also ran, say, a space company with thousands of tons of liquid fuel strapped to a rocket, which would give you the necessary protocols and procedures to ensure that code is managed properly and secrets don't slip out.
Ford has a big market share now, but what of the trend for the future? Let's add some more to the list:
- Electric car market share increasing, prices decreasing, range and charging time improving, Ford works in a saturated market.
- Pressure to reduce the use of fossil fuels. Ford cannot just discard their current production lines and go all electric due to many factors, not least of which being internal politics.
- Electric cars and large batteries work well with wind and solar electricity generation and renewable energy has a steep increasing trend.
I can add more, but anyone can get the idea that while Ford dominates now all trends chip away at that domination and Tesla is perfectly positioned to benefit from those trends.
Remember the stages: "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you ..." Tesla has passed now the first two stages, so the fight is shaping up.
You do realize where we are in the timeline for this event....
I expect your curiosity will be satisfied soon... or maybe you'll be moving the goalposts before then?
This is a perfectly normal looking company email from Musk. One can argue that he writes them knowing that they'll leak, but there's nothing about the style in this one that's different from any of the numerous others over the years. They're generally a mix of "here's the problems/issues we currently need to address ASAP" and a pep talk.
I was watching this thing on TV about some guy named Hitler. Someone should stop him!
Oh no, I can see it now. The falcon heavy about to launch. 007 is looking for a way out without getting too singed.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Whom he claims shot his rocket to make it explode. /s
- Do not use inside Tesla factories.
changing code to an internal product
This makes me wonder about their change control procedures. How was somebody able to push bogus code to production for as long as they did without getting caught? He was either very sneaky or they have lax controls.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
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.
From: Elon Musk
To: Everybody
Subject: Some concerning news
June 17, 2018 11:57 p.m.
I was dismayed to learn this weekend about a Tesla employee who had conducted quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations. This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties.
The full extent of his actions are not yet clear, but what he has admitted to so far is pretty bad. His stated motivation is that he wanted a butt fucking that he did not receive. In light of these actions, not butt fucking him was definitely the right move.
However, there may be considerably more to this situation than meets the eye, so the investigation will continue in depth this week. We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations.
As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die. These include Wall Street short-sellers, who have already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more. Then there are the oil & gas companies, the wealthiest industry in the world — they don't love the idea of Tesla advancing the progress of solar power & electric cars. Don't want to blow your mind, but rumor has it that those companies are sometimes not super nice. Then there are the multitude of big gas/diesel car company competitors. If they're willing to cheat so much about emissions, maybe they're willing to cheat in other ways?
Most of the time, when there is theft of goods, leaking of confidential information, dereliction of duty or outright sabotage, the reason really is something simple like wanting to get back at someone within the company or at the company as a whole. Occasionally, it is much more serious.
Please be extremely vigilant, particularly over the next few weeks as we ramp up the butt fuck rate to 5k/week. This is when outside forces have the strongest motivation to stop us.
If you know of, see or suspect anything suspicious, please send a note to [email address removed for privacy] with as much info as possible. This can be done in your name, which will be kept confidential, or completely anonymously.
Looking forward to having a great week with you as we charge up the super exciting ramp to 5000 Model 3 cars per week!
Will follow this up with emails every few days describing the progress and challenges of the Model 3 ramp.
Thanks for working so hard to make Tesla successful,
Elon
(copied from https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/18/elon-musk-email-employee-conducted-extensive-and-damaging-sabotage.html)
Tesla can't meet demand at the moment, where as Ford is cutting models due to lack of it.
Wow is that a false equivalency if I've ever heard one. Tesla sells a few tens of thousands of cars each year. Ford sells millions. These are not equivalent situations. It's easy to exceed production capacity when you barely have any capacity and you only sell to a niche segment. Ford makes and sells nearly as many F150s every month (50-80K) as all of Tesla's models combined per year. That's with just one vehicle model.
It's hard to say how big Tesla's market share will end up being once they can get production up to speed and fulfil all the pre-orders.
In the short run it isn't hard at all. Their market share will be slightly bigger than it currently is which is to say tiny. In the long run (talking 10+ years) it's hard to predict because it's not even clear yet if Tesla will survive. If they do their future looks bright but they aren't going to overtake GM anytime soon if that is what you are implying. But I could see them being a steadily growing and influential automaker over the next decade if they can survive the next 2 years.
But it seems certain that Tesla will become a major player in the market now.
"Certain"? No. The odds are good they will become a significant automaker by marketshare IF they can survive the next 24 months and come to profitability. That is anything but certain right now. There is reason for optimism but to pretend they are out of danger is to ignore reality. Tesla needs to become profitable soon or their financing is going to dry up. If that happens they are screwed.
Musk isn't stupid and knows well that any company-wide email like this is going to leak so you can't exactly blame him for using the opportunity to hype the idea that Tesla is finally going to reach the goal of making 5k Model 3's per week. Particularly not when he's in the middle of fighting short sellers who would like to see Tesla floundering as hard as possible rather than reaching production milestones.
Still, the talk about short sellers I can understand as Tesla's not the only company short sellers have tried to mess with recently, but the unsubstantiated talk about fossil fuel companies and competitors still mostly making petrol and diesel cars being behind this does make him look like a bit of a loon in my eyes. If anyone wants to spy on Tesla, it's their Chinese rivals in the electric car market, not Ford or General Motors. Sure, General Motors has a history of being assholes, but mostly to the environment and their own factory workers.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
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.
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.
Well, as the saying goes if you pay peanuts you will get monkeys..
Not only that, with that much shorting, the short sellers themselves can drive up the price as they try and cover their contracts.
Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do, we do!
Who keeps Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do, we do!
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do, we do!
Who robs cavefish of their sight? Who rigs every Oscar night? We do! We do!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I want to hear more about the "Tesla Manufacturing Operating System".
L'Idiot
I'd like to see you scam the taxpayers so well. It's not as easy as you would think.
When your so delusional you believe your own BS, how could you tell the difference between sabotage and incompetence?
How soon we forget the suspicious "shadowy figure" on a rooftop, or, sabotage by the competition causing SpaceX explosion in Oct, 2016.
Who's being blamed next? The ghost of Jimmy Hoffa because they installed the third assembly line over his unmarked grave?
How hard is it to just hire competent people though? Tesla's problems are notable, perhaps critical, but not difficult to overcome.
You're sayin that the Model 3 is 90% complete?
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Nah. Elon's gotta hold it together until he takes over as dictator of Mars City One. Then the story gets real interesting.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
That's adorable. It's completely wrong, it's contradicted by mountains of data. It's directly contradicted by official public disclosures to shareholders by Tesla themselves--and lying to shareholders is a crime. Not a "oops" kind of crime, but a "you're going to jail" kind of crime.
But it's adorable that you want to believe it so badly. Like a kid believing in Santa Claus.
Is the world changing too quickly for your little mind to adapt?
Yes, we're past the point where cops should be involved. We're almost certainly past the point where somebody should be under arrest. We know that because company management is openly discussing the issue.
It's either that or Musk is disregarding the advice he should be getting from the company lawyers.
1. Tesla is at the forefront of a few different industries that are undergoing radical change (automotive & semi EV, automotive & semi self-driving, utility & home batteries, utility & home solar) collectively representing trillions of dollars.
2. The majority of people who are betting against Tesla are doing so for irrational reasons, specifically: (a) they don't like Elon Musk, and (b) they don't like change.
I don't normally bet on individual stocks. I knew Apple was going to be wildly successful when Jobs came back and launched the iMac, iPod, iPhone--but I still didn't bet on them. But in this case it's just too damn easy. Taking money directly from TSLA shorts is the easiest money I've ever made.
I worked for a company making high-end electronic instruments in the 1980s. There was a RIF due to the market for those going titsup and an entire batch of systems had to be trashed due to someone putting incorrect info into one of the part sequencing systems that fed the pick/place and part auto-insertion systems. At the time the company estimated the cost to be a few million $$. Industrial sabotage seems to go hand-in-hand with layoffs and other "HR actions".
Organization? You must be joking..
I see references to Tucker so here's an interesting lecture:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?...
University of Central Florida professor Yanek Mieczkowski taught a class about some of the people who challenged the status quo of the U.S. auto industry from the post-World War II era to the present day. He discussed the successes and failures of people such as Harley Earl, Preston Tucker, John DeLorean and Elon Musk.
Mieczkowski said Musk is not in good company considering these previous auto mavericks all failed. However, Musk has billions to spend where the others do not. Let's see how this plays out (and the drama is unfolding daily!)
mfwright@batnet.com
Personally, I take the simplest possibility: this was a disgruntled employee who decided to lash out at Tesla. However, if we're going to indulge in conspiracy theories, there are other factions with axes to grind that Elon didn't mention. One is labor, particularly the United Auto Workers (UAW), and the contentious fight about unionization of the NUMMI plant. Increase "safety" issues at an overworked plant to try and drive a narrative of why Tesla autoworkers should unionize to stand their ground against Elon Musk. He has of course mentioned short traders, auto manufacturers, etc.
Yeah because it's not as if the major auto companies ever conspired with tire and petroleum companies to destroy competitors.
Bullshit.
Try lying in a publicdisclosure of finances, or a contract, or you taxes.. none of which are under oath.
Claiming the 1st protects lying is just stupid, to stay the least.
> You do realize that TSLA loses money on every vehicle it sells - BEFORE you account for R&D and capital expenses (which pushes it further into the red), don't you?
This statement is directly contradicted by your own link:
Total Revenue: $3.4 B
Cost of revenue: $2.95 B
These are the numbers that scale linearly in the number of cars they sell. If the cost of revenue is higher than the total revenue, then you could claim that "they lose money on every car sold"--because your clear and intentional implication is that they are selling cars at a loss.
They clearly make 15% in Gross profit on every car they sell; if they hold those margins and sell more cars, then they'll amortize the fixed costs "Selling General Admin, etc." and then they'll be profitable as a business.
It includes all costs which are directly proportional to the number of cars Tesla is manufacturing--that's the whole point. There are other costs that are fixed, un-related, or maybe scale sub-linearly with car production--but all of those will be amortized by higher volumes (and/or higher margins).
Early in Ford Model T production you would have had very similar ratios. You just have to sell a *lot* of cars before you pay back the initial investment and cover fixed & sub-linear costs. Tesla has like $15B worth of back-orders without yet paying a cent on advertising--so there's good reason to believe they can sell every car they build.
It turned out Ford did pretty well, but I'm sure there was some idiot at the time betting on buggy whips instead because they had a better looking balance sheet.
But please, by all means, short TSLA. Short them by a lot. I've made thousands of dollars over the last couple months extracted from geniuses like you who don't understand the difference between a mature business and a rapidly growing business.
You do realize that this disclosure means he loses money if TSLA succeeds. Its equivalent to saying 75% of my net worth is invested in TSLA shorts.
I have neither a long nor short position on the company. I have posted numerous times here on slashdot that I think TSLA is good company but a terrible stock. It's ludicrously overvalued but it isn't a good short candidate either because the pricing isn't even vaguely rational so it's difficult to predict when it might come back down to earth. I wouldn't touch that stock with a barge pole, long or short.
Its manufacturing, not rocket science (that's SpaceX).
Amusing that you think manufacturing isn't the difficult part of rocket science. Your condescension towards manufacturing pretty clearly shows you know nothing about the subject. Manufacturing a device like an automobile at scale is actually one of the most challenging activities known to mankind.
I'm sure they will figure it out, what the GP hasn't figured out is that ICE car companies can't make EV batteries and haven't even bought the land to make a battery factory yet.
Apparently you are unaware that Tesla is partnered with Panasonic which is the company actually doing the heavy lifting on Tesla's vaunted gigafactory. You know, Panasonic aka the largest battery manufacturer in the world. Please note that Tesla is not on the list of largest battery makers. Panasonic provided most of the funding and operational expertise on the project. If you think companies like GM cannot find a similar partner you are mistaken. (GM gets their batteries from LG in case you wondered)
that the only way to make a car at an attractive price point is to own your own battery factories and invest heavily in battery R&D.
Or to just buy a company already doing that. There are LOTS of companies making batteries and investing it battery R&D. It's not clear that Tesla has any insurmountable advantage here though I agree that their strategy is a sensible one.