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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.)
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)
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.
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.
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.
Also, if there is any substance to this, the last thing he should do is communicate it in this fashion.
If you read the email, he's actually caught the guy and had a confession. Getting this guy, likely with the police arresting him (given the accusation) likely blew the cover of the investigation. There is no benefit from secrecy any more.
At this point he firstly deters any other conspirators by letting them know he knows. They are less likely to do damage during this crucial time. Secondly he warns other loyal Tesla employees to look out, and that's a real reason to give accurate information so that they are more likely to spot the problem.
Open communication is probably the right thing at this stage.
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!
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.
Yes how foolish that those early adopters bought things that work just fine.
There are not many vehicle manufacturers with as bad a reputation for QC as Tesla.
Now let's talk about reputation shall we?
Telsa has a QC reputation mostly built up based on incredibly stupid nit-picking with only one real major flaw to date: The doors on the Model X. Most of their quality control issues were along the lines of "OMG the gap in this pannel is 1mm wider than that other panel, oh woes me!" In the mean time customers are like "LOL this door has panel gaps? I didn't hear you over the sound of how fast this thing accellerates and how sweet the ride is!" Hell most early reviews about fit and finish which grilled the few minor nitpicks reluctantly then proceeded to say how absolutely awesome of a car was produced. Oh but the stitching on the leather wasn't perfect, so horrible, much upsetness!
But all in all QC isn't the issue here. We're talking about company responses. So what kind of a reputation does Tesla have there?
- They caught the world by surprise when they offered free feature upgrades over the air.
- They borderline no questions asked repair shit most companies need to get dragged to court over (my own experience with GM was having the ignition switch fail 3 days before the warranty expired on my Astra and them then waiting 3 days to get back to me so they could try and tell me it was out of warranty and charge me $400 for the repair, and towing as well. Fortunately I lived in a country where the regulator had teeth and they forced GM to not only tow and fix the car but also re-imburse me for the rental costs for delaying me as long as they did).
- Tesla invested in a mobile repair fleet sending people out to customer's houses for this kind of stuff.
- A consumer reports came out with a sub par rating for the Model 3 brakes. Tesla stepped up and fixed it.
- Telsa recalling cars with actual faults quickly and voluntarily. In the meantime what did an NHTSA rep say in a public hearing about Chyrisler? "In every one of the 23 recalls, we have identified ways in which Fiat Chrysler failed to do its job."
Yeah you're right. Fools and their money are easily parted. One day maybe the fools will wake up and actually buy from Tesla instead of risking their lives.