Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a "utopian socialist." He lies about being a "free speech absolutist." He lies about which companies he founded:
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world
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He lies about being the "chief engineer" of those companies:
https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla
He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:
https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband
The fundamental laws of physics don't care about this bullshit, but people do.
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Answer (1 of 14): No. Elon Musk got one of the most talented people in the game for Space X. He only had a vision, just like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have a vision (so there is nothing much special), and then he focused on getting the greatest team to execute. For an example, reusing rock...
The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible - as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn't a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a *mule* named "Ole Bub":
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Previous tech barons had "reality distortion fields," but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn't doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There's an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk's public lies:
But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he's much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he's been promising "full self driving...next year."
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He's hasn't delivered, but he keeps *claiming* he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/
Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn't its cars, it's Tesla's business arrangement, the #TeslaFinancialComplex:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat
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Once you start unpacking Tesla's balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling #CarbonCredits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy
But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla's got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to *1600x* its profitability:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles
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That valuation represents a bet on Tesla's ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla's batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don't *own* that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:
That's just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for.
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You don't own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla's shareholders:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update
To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car's software without Tesla's permission. This is the root of all #autoenshittification:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
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Tesla has remotely disabled driver assistance features on a used Model S after it was sold to a customer, Jalopnik reports. The company now claims that the owner of the car, who purchased it from a third-party dealer — a dealer who bought it at an auction held by Tesla itself — “did not pay” for the features and therefore is not eligible to use them.
This is #technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek #rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50
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But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.
Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there's no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device's software lets a company run *overt* scams on you.
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For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.
But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, #Section1201 of the #DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legit purposes. That means your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how the surveillance works, the maker can be incredibly sloppy with the personal info they harvest:
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All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:
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DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember #Dieselgate? #Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.
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The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn't have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users' privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal.
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A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and #NorihikoShirouzu for #Reuters reveals how Tesla created its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/
The root of the deception is simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can't attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.
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But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you'd immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.
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But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out, you'd figure something was up pretty quick - say the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.
So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren't getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.
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But there's a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can't go anything *like* that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.
This creates a problem for *Tesla*: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there's nothing wrong with the car. It's performing exactly as designed.
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So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren't broken.
This new unit - the "#DiversionTeam" - was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn't defrauding them.
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When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs's "You're holding it wrong"):
https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/
The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren't just lied to, they were also punished.
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There’s an old joke about a man who visits a doctor, complaining that his arm hurts whenever he moves it a certain way. The doctor’s response? “Stop moving it that way.” That pretty much sums up Apple’s response to the people who have complained that holding the iPhone 4 in their left hand can cause \[…\]
The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car's range was no longer able to book a service appointment for *any* reason. If their car malfunctioned, they'd have to request a callback, which could take several days.
Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.
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The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.
Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing *any* remote diagnostics on drivers' cars.
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A source told Reuters that "Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car" without any diagnostics being performed.
Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions.
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But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the *most* inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.
Other countries' regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than *half* of the claimed range.
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Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively - think of #ThomasEdison, archnemesis of #NikolaTesla himself. The difference here isn't merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being - but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil.
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The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren't just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed - they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.
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Image:
Steve Jurvetson (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg
CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
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Reuters: "Correction: Original article failed to contain anecdotal experience of users. This version has been modified to note the experience of one driver who once got 95% of the advertised range"
News org investigates company that gaslights its customers. Their 100-pack of widgets as delivered often contains as few as 50 widgets for many customers. Problem is so prevalent company has a large team devoted to fielding those calls and punishing customers who complain.
Hey now! I once got 95 widgets when I ordered. This article is so unfair.
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