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Elon Musk Calls Boss of Tesla Troll Who's Heavily Invested In Oil Industry (electrek.co)
Okian Warrior shares a report from Electrek, written by Fred Lambert: One of Tesla's biggest anonymous trolls/shorts has been doxxed as an investment manager heavily invested in the oil industry. He has now deleted his Twitter account, which he used to promote his blog posts about Tesla and attack anyone saying anything that could be perceived as positive on Tesla, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly called his boss to complain about his behavior.
We are talking about "Montana Skeptic" who has been using Seeking Alpha, a financial blog aggregator, and Twitter to push the bear case on Tesla for the past 3 years. Hiding behind his anonymous persona on social media, Montana Skeptic went beyond just pushing the bear case. He also used the platforms to send insults and attacks to Tesla bulls, bloggers, YouTubers, and reporters discussing anything that he saw as potentially being positive for Tesla, including [this author] on numerous occasions to the point where I had to block him. But now that his real identity has been revealed to be Larry Fossi, a managing director at Rahr Enterprise, which is reportedly heavily invested in oil, we learn that his motivations could have originated from other reasons.
We are talking about "Montana Skeptic" who has been using Seeking Alpha, a financial blog aggregator, and Twitter to push the bear case on Tesla for the past 3 years. Hiding behind his anonymous persona on social media, Montana Skeptic went beyond just pushing the bear case. He also used the platforms to send insults and attacks to Tesla bulls, bloggers, YouTubers, and reporters discussing anything that he saw as potentially being positive for Tesla, including [this author] on numerous occasions to the point where I had to block him. But now that his real identity has been revealed to be Larry Fossi, a managing director at Rahr Enterprise, which is reportedly heavily invested in oil, we learn that his motivations could have originated from other reasons.
1) Montana Skeptic has (via intermediaries) presented two entirely different scenarios for why he left Twitter. One was that he was just leaving to spend more time focused on his investments, and it had nothing to do with outside pressure. The other is that Musk called his boss and his boss made him quit. Given his penchant for spinning conspiracy theories... take whichever one you want with a grain of salt.
2) There's a heavy dose of irony, in that just a few days ago Montana Skeptic was part of the troll attacks against Pulitzer-prize winning auto journalist Dan Neil (mad that he wrote a glowing review of the Model 3 in the Wall Street Journal) which ultimately led to Dan deleting his twitter account. He wrote a gloating post after they succeeded, which is kind of funny in light of recent events.
3) Fun Fact: Fossi (aka Montana Skeptic)'s employer is Stewart Rahl - a guy often described as Trump's only true friend, inflappably loyal. His office is in Trump Tower, two floors below Trump's.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
Always examine the hidden agenda.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
most people are... musk is remarkably human.
Be aware that Montana Skeptic - famous for spinning conspiracy theories about Tesla and Musk that turn out not to be true - has given two conflicting explanations for why he deleted his Twitter account. In one of them, it had nothing to do with Musk, and in the other, it's all evil Elon's fault.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
Tesla has been hit with a torrent of fake news recently, trying to drive the stock down.
Most obviously and recently was the following:
1) Someone (not Tesla) posted that 23% of Tesla reservations have been cancelled.
2) Based on #1, an analyst downgraded the stock from "hold" to "underperform".
3) Tesla stock plummeted
4) Tesla notices #1 above and responded:
Dunno where this bs is coming from. Who knows about the future, but last week we had over 2000 S/X and 5000 Model 3 *new* net orders. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2018
(Note: Tesla makes about 6,000 cars/month, so an increase of 7000 cars puts them even further behind on reservations. And as noted in the link below, they have not started showing them in stores yet, so Tesla has yet to tap the "drive before they buy" potential pool of customers.)
Word on the street is that shorts are running scared, doing everything they can to drive down the stock price. Including insider sabotage, misleading financial spin, and online harassment such as the OP.
This is basically the last-ditch effort of Tesla bears to drive the stock down. Once the next two quarters financials are in, there will be no case for shorting Tesla stock whatsoever.
It really is an amazing car. . . I feel like a requirement to short the stock is one of the following:
1) You have never test driven a Model 3
2) You are a shill for some competing industry/company
Yes, I am sure there is some kind of "rational" intrinsic valuation argument out there for shorting the stock, but, at the end of the day, Tesla makes cash from selling cars, not stock. . . and their latest car is amazing. They will sell as many as they can make at the current price point. If they manage to get the price down (which tends to happen at high volume), no army of Montana Skeptic shills will be able to save the oil industry from having to write-off huge portions of their fixed assets. . . Buckle-up and get ready for a crazy ride. . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
It's clear in this world of misinformation and "fake news" that proof does nothing. That the only way to get an anonymous agent to stop spreading lies is to lift the veil of anonymity.
If someone wishes to criticize, they can either do so carefully and anonymously with cold hard facts. Or they can express their unsupported opinions openly and publicly. There is no middle ground.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Interesting. But it is ok for somebody to lie and cheat in an effort to destroy your company, but it is bad to tell has boss AND the SEC about said individual's action?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I've read MS as well for several years. He has many lies, that he was using to influence the stock market. That is criminal, which is why he kept it anonymous.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Someone else made a valid point about disclosing biases, so here is mine: I own Tesla stock, and I'm "long" on it.
I originally wanted to do some study of the stock market, and I purchased the stock to make the study "valuable" to me.
That turned out to be a lucky choice because Tesla is the hurricane eye of controversial stock market reporting. It's the perfect test case for deciding whether stock market news reports, statistics, and opinions have any informational value.
In any event, be aware that I own some shares and have an interest in seeing Tesla succeed.
The fantastically written headline actually says Elon Musk calls himself a Troll that is heavily invested in the Oil Industry
English, it's not just for Christmas!
You forgot something: an argument to support your point.
Let me guess: it goes something like "look at how many cars they made in the past year vs. their valuation"?
Great, except that's not how you evaluate a company's value. A company's value is based on where they're going, relative to the risk in them getting there and the timeframes involved. In the case of Tesla, they're in the middle of a scaleup that no "competitors" are even close to matching. We're talking an order of magnitude difference in production rates. Other automakers have big longer term plans, but in the next couple years, Tesla stands alone. So at the very least one should be evaluating relative to that timeframe, accounting for the risk.
What Tesla is working towards in the next couple years isn't the hundred-thousand-ish cars per year of last year. It's the half million to 1-million ish, depending on how their schedule and capital flows go with Model Y timing and how much "Tesla Time Distortion Factor" you account for. Plus Semis. Plus a grid battery market growing at an order of magnitude per year. Plus a solar roofing product market, only just now going to its very first paying customers, that could become massive. They're simultaneously attacking multiple markets each in the hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars.
Now, if you're a Tesla bear, obviously you think they'll never get there. And that's fine, that's your view - you don't need to reiterate your talking points as to why you think they won't, we've heard them all a million times, just like you've heard our opposing ones. You surely likewise understand that bulls believe it's likely that they will get there. But regardless of whether one thinks they will or won't get there, they should have an appropriate sense of what the values of these markets are, in the case that Tesla does get there. They're massive. Which is why bulls feel that, even accounting for the risk, Tesla is well valued or undervalued.
It's the same situation with Amazon. Stupid Amazon bears looked at past revenues relative to spending. Smart Amazon bears looked at future revenue potential, but just didn't believe they'd get there. Amazon bulls looked at future revenue potential, and did believe they'd get there. Amazon got there, the bulls profited, and both the stupid and smart bears lost. But at least the smart bears had a plausible argument.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
This guy, Montana Skeptic was out in full force trying to down Tesla stock and bolster Oil stocks. He is a manager of a hedge fund. Isn't that manipulating the market? SEC?
Back in 2009/2010 I followed daily why the barrel price would change. I would just use google new searching for oil, barrel price, etc. The articles written for the price change most often than not would have a bs feel like they may not tell the whole story. Once instance the price went fast at the beginning of the day because the oil supplies at the refineries had dropped, then turned right around and dropped below the start of the day due to the fact that the refineries were producing heating oil to be ready for the coming winter, a normal part of the business. About a week later the price went up again because it was report the supply last week dropped, without mentioning the logical reason why. Another instance the price of the barrel was regularly going up because the supplies were decreasing in December. The stated reason was likely because of demand. I finally found an article pointing out there used (not sure if still the case) be inventory tax on oil at the end of December. My better understanding of the market, I see the investors with a clue like how they can predictably make money from oil. That is why some don't like Tesla
More likely, having not spoken to a sound attorney, he's blowing smoke. If the SEC does get involved, there may be a lot of smoke, the scent of pants on fire, and lots of subsequent litigation.
Nut cases have a habit of digging in deeper, when they should be looking for cover. Obsessed, they carry on even as noose gets tighter.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
And Musk will pay for that stupid outburst. That's accountability. Hiding behind an anonymous account, not revealing the conflict that arises from your business interests when attacking another company, that is the opposite of accountability.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"Elon Musk Calls Boss of Tesla Troll Who's Heavily Invested In Oil Industry"
"calls the boss"
"calls up boss"
"phones boss"
"Elon Musk Phones the Boss of Heavily Oil-Invested Tesla Troll"
He's a troll because he hid both his identity and the fundamental conflict of his own position. Maybe he has some decent criticism of Musk and Tesla (though from what I can tell, a big proportion was pure BS), but abusing anonymity and not disclosing his own business interests pretty much makes him a textbook troll. That, and the SEC may have some interest in his activities.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yea his boss has reminded him of how many SEC violations he made over 3 years, and he left a papertrail on the internet with his Twitter account. Deleting it wont help because Twitter archives peoples accounts for a period of time afterwards for legal backtracking. Larry is about to get screwed and his company is about have the shiznit load of fines for violating insider trading rules. Larry might even cop some jail time for being an idiot for that long.
So, if I'm parsing that headline correctly:
Elon Musk called the boss of Tesla a "troll who's heavily invested in the oil industry".
Cool story.
Let me just look up who the boss of Tesla is... ...oh
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
What? That isn't what a troll is. A troll is a personally intentionally trying to get an emotional reaction by posting something. It has nothing to do with "not disclosing business interests". Good lord.
Manipulating stock market through spreading FUD is entirely legal. It's only illegal if you have privileged internal information.
I don't know.. being an oil guy commenting negatively on Tesla seems kind of like a nutritionist commenting negatively on McDonalds. If he holds TSLA stock, or is shorting it, or whatever... sure, making comments without disclosing the position is certainly ethically sketchy and may well be an SEC violation. If so, have at him. But if he doesn't have TSLA positions, I'm not sure there's a real issue.
Montana Skeptic always states he's short Tesla in his analyses.
The "scaleup" is entirely artificial, not market-driven. EVs are selling because California has mandated that a certain percentage of each automakers' sales are zero emissions vehicles. The target is about 2.5% for 2018, ramping up to 8% in 2025. There's no market basis for this; it's just CARB setting an arbitrary number. Every automaker has to either comply, or buy enough credits to comply from an automaker which exceeds their quota, or be banned from selling cars in California. Since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, this would result in the automaker being banned from selling cars to about 1/3 of the U.S. by population.
So every automaker, whether they believe in EVs or not, is busy producing EVs to comply. And if the market doesn't want enough EVs to meet the target, they run sales and incentives to make the market want enough (that's the scaleup you're seeing). Musk set up Tesla to take advantage of this, because he realized an automaker which produced only EVs would always exceed the quota, and thus could sell extra credits and make a profit, even if the vehicles were sold at-cost. Basically the system is rigged to force ICE sales to subsidize EV sales to hit an arbitrary production quota. That becomes harder to force as the percentage of ICE sales becomes smaller (profit margin on each ICE car has to be shifted to provide a bigger subsidy for EVs).
I don't short stocks because I think shorting is stupid. The most you can gain is the price of the stock at the time you shorted it; while the amount you can lose is infinite. It's the opposite risk/reward scenario of buying a stock. But it's quite obviously the Tesla fans who are buying into a fantasy here with Tesla's current valuation. Yes Tesla might eventually be worth that much. But they're still two orders of magnitude in production away from reaching that level. (Tesla is valued about the same as GM, and GM produces about 8000 cars per day vs Tesla's current production of about 6000 per month. Production being key here since you later cite investment in production as justification for lack of profit - clearly Tesla still needs a lot more investment in production if it wants to justify its stock valuation.) A *lot* can happen before Tesla's production capacity reaches that of GM's, so you're taking an enormous risk betting that it's going to be Tesla which finishes up on top of the EV race (or if EVs even represent the finish line, since it's CARB setting the goalposts, not the market)..
Amazon is a great example. Amazon pre-dated the dot-com bubble. They were one of hundreds of dot com companies which were overhyped and overvalued. The people who bought into Amazon (IPO in 1997) weren't prescient that Amazon was going to come out on top. They just got stupid lucky betting on Amazon instead of the hundreds of other companies which crashed and burned when the dot com bubble burst. For every "faithful" Amazon investor who was "smart" and picked a winner, there were hundreds of "faithful" investors who were just as "smart" and picked
Almost as bad as the "pedo guy" comment, even if he did finally come to his senses and apologize.
I've engaged with several of the most opinionated SeekingAlpha contributors who paint doom & gloom for Tesla and Montana Skeptic was by far the most cautious and reasonable one even if he was derisive of the cars and the overall plan.
As an experienced commercial lawyer, I imagine he felt that Musk was rushing headlong too quickly and accumulating too much debt to ever be profitable with Chapter 11 restructuring.
He was always clear in his articles that shorting Tesla is a dangerous game for the faint of heart and the foolhardy and that his own shorts were only by long-dated puts, early 2020 if memory serves.
There were other shorts who claim to have made fortunes shorting Tesla like frequent SA comment poster NYC1965 who claims to have made over 1/2 a million shorting Tesla.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The big "Ace in the hole" Tesla has over everyone else is their extensive Supercharging network. You can drive a Tesla on a road trip, even if you're going into parts of Mexico or Canada from the U.S., and the GPS automatically routes you to the Supercharging stations along the route, as needed, to keep you going.
With everyone else, you're relying on a hodge-podge network of mostly slower charging stations that make you sign up for accounts with each of them, in order to activate the charger and pay for it. I don't think the traditional auto-makers can really compete, even IF they build a superior EV to Tesla's offerings, unless they solve that problem -- building out their own fast charging networks that allow free charging (at least up to a certain amount per year).
While not explicitly insider trading (as I understand it), it seems dubious and borderline to, for example, short a stock/tell your company to short a stock while knowing that a smear piece of negative press is about to hit the internet in the next day (which you wrote).
While it may not be as surefire as shorting it in advance when you know the quarterly report is going to be worse than expected, once you gain a certain level of influence in the public eye, your posts ARE going to push the stock when they land. It would, for example, seem dubious if Trump sold a bunch of Exxon stock and then the next day announced that his administration was going to "seriously look" at cutting subsidies for oil drilling.
Don't laugh, but Congress and the Executive branch are explicitly exempt from the insider trading rules. There's a law stating just that.
I often wonder how he and others like him find time to live a meaningful life.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
"So every automaker, whether they believe in EVs or not, is busy producing EVs to comply."
Except there is no automaker which does not believe in EVs. The last holdouts have been convinced by Tesla's success selling cars, and everyone with R&D money to spend (read: everyone but FCA) is building or at least now designing more-than-compliance EVs. And every automaker INCLUDING FCA is in the process of "electrifying" their FULL LINEUP, meaning at least mild hybridization. That is much more convenient than building a full EV, since you can buy a fairly turnkey system from a supplier. But every single company knows the writing is on the wall for the ICE. It won't go away tomorrow, but it will go away. A few automakers are betting on hydrogen (GM, Honda, and Toyota, notably) but those are still EVs.
"Amazon pre-dated the dot-com bubble. They were one of hundreds of dot com companies which were overhyped and overvalued."
It's clear that they were neither of those things. It was not so clear at the beginning, of course.
"You can't look at a single company as an example of how a scenario could turn out. You have to look at every company which has been in a similar situation, and statistically evaluate how all of them did."
Nonsense. You only have to look at the similar companies. Tesla's similar to Amazon in several ways. The only one that really matters, though, is that they have massive cachet. That is what makes the losing-money-for-years model work. Tesla's market position is based on its legions of diehard fans, and the fact that they actually make compelling products so they can keep getting new ones. It's not imaginary. You don't need to predict the future to reasonably assume that Tesla will continue to succeed for at least some time. You only need to consider that they are producing a product people want, that they have plans to produce more of them, and that they have come through on all their non-schedule-related promises thus far.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't have Rei's boundless optimism for Tesla, quite the opposite in fact. But making money is not the only motivation a person can have. Finding acceptance, wanting to be proven right and spreading one's ideology are all valid non-monetary reasons to do things.
But even on the monetary side, let's say Rei has invested his entire life savings into Telsa, or even mortgaged his house to do it. It's still in his best interests to convince as many people as possible to buy rather than short. Tesla is very short on cash at the moment, and a higher stock price (and therefore valuation) makes raising new capital much easier and cheaper. This new capital could last it long enough for it to start turning a profit. So the positive sentiment that thousands of fanboys generate could be the difference between bankruptcy and actually making it.