11 ms·

I'm not sure creating a multibillion dollar vaporware fraud shell company and being a dick on Twitter are comparable sins.

MrPatan 5y ago
The sin is the same: Being successful when I'm not. Off with their heads!
- Cederfjard 5y ago
  You know the thread your posting this in is about one of them being indicted for fraud, right?
xkjkls 5y ago
I'm not sure you are following the Elon-Solar City case if you think Elon's only sin is being a dick on Twitter. Or the original $420 funding a share saga. Elon Musk's repeated fake-it-till-you-make-it behavior and the unwillingness of regulators to crack down on it spawns Trevor Miltons.
- djmips 5y ago
  This has been going on since time immemorial. A part of me thinks it's a necessary evil in a world where people won't fund revolutionary ideas. However, that also means Milton and Holmes etc.
  - xkjkls 5y ago
    I would agree that fraud is always going to happen; how much though is up for debate, and I would tend to argue that more fraud makes the world worse at funding revolutionary ideas. More revolutionary ideas happen and get funded in the US, which while I believe has become rife with fraud over the past decade, is no where near the scale the number of frauds in China or Africa or less well monitored markets. Trust is fundamental part of markets and is basically its own interest rate. The more people can trust one another, the riskier investments people are willing to partake in.
- slownews45 5y ago
  The SEC did enforce against tesla - when Elon tweeted "Tesla’s stock price is too high imo" - they began an investigation and subpoenaed records because they felt this this had not been approved by attorneys (it wasn't - elon claimed it was his personal opinion). So they went after him for this. They also went after him for a lot of other stuff. Note that they haven't gone after folks for failure to deliver issues on sales which is usually caused by shorting stocks such as Tesla's and others. Even though you'd think the basics of a regulated market is that folks selling shares actually own and will deliver them if someone buys them.
  - xkjkls 5y ago
    > They also went after him for a lot of other stuff. Like lying about a buyout offer for his company. Which he received a incredibly small punishment for.
    - TheParkShark 5y ago
      Are you sure he was lying?
      - xkjkls 5y ago
        I mean, similarly to my certainty Donald Trump was lying that his taxes are under audit, and thats why he can't release them. Do I have exact knowledge of Elon's head state, no, but I can make inferences from all his actions since. If a buyer truly existed to facilitate that transaction, that would be public knowledge at this point.
        onethought 5y ago
        If you muck in the private equity world at all you'd know that this isn't true at all. Lots of deals and nearly deals happen everyday and they only reach the public sphere if the parties want it too.
        5y ago
belter 5y ago
Lets see some of the quotes and think if we could get away with it... Aug 7, 2018 "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." Elon Musk Aug 7, 2018 "Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private" After paying 20 million dollar fine referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission tweets: "Just want to that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work," "And the name change is so on point!" 2018 "I want to be clear: I do not respect the SEC, I do not respect them," 2019 “By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware, feature complete, at a reliability level that we would consider that no one needs to pay attention,” October 21, 2019 "Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road," "The fleet wakes up with an over-the-air update. That's all it takes." 2020 "All Tesla cars right now have everything necessary for self-driving available today. All you need to do is improve the software."
- javierluraschi 5y ago
  What's wrong with the latest statement? Technically all cars have a proper GPU (Tesla's "GPU") and 360 cameras, the reliability is probably in the 90%-99% (which, yes, is pretty terrible to be considered fully autonomous, but impressive from a technical standpoint). Technically is correct to say that all they have to do is to "improve the software". That will be a lot of work, sweat and tears, but still correct.
  - ac29 5y ago
    Until it actually works, how can you say the hardware is sufficient?
    - javierluraschi 5y ago
      Historically, there have been significant bottlenecks on algorithms, I'd argue software plays a bigger role than hardware; especially during inference. Going back to AlexNet, while GPUs helped the training process, it included significant software improvements that made a huge difference: training with dropout, convolutional neural networks, using rectified linear units, etc. Also, training hardware is much more relevant than hardware for inference. Tesla's cars do not include hardware to train the neural network but just for inference. The training hardware is actually a server cluster that Tesla owns. So if hardware is insufficient, Tesla might have to buy a larger training cluster, but not necessarily upgrade the inference hardware. That say, I do agree that there is some risk in requiring a hardware upgrade for inference, but to me that seems very unlikely.
makeitdouble 5y ago
From my point of view as a peasant without any shares anywhere, multibillion dollar vaporware companies have very little impact. We could argue this investment could have gone into better companies who could have made the world a better place, but it's purely hypothetical (the money could have gone to a worse company, or political lobbying as well...). Basically, from afar, it's a "rich people lost some money" drama.
- californical 5y ago
  That’s about as valid as saying “robbing someone’s house is legal as long as the victim has a high net worth, after all, they can afford it”. That’s not how laws and society work — theft is theft, no matter who the victim is.
  - LordDragonfang 5y ago
    That may be how "laws" work, but it's not how society works. There's a reason why "Robin Hood" is a parable. Legally, not all theft is treated the same, either - wage theft is largely ignored compared to other kinds, despite accounting for an order of magnitude greater amount. And for that matter, not everyone agrees what theft even is. Leftist will say that wage labor is theft, and the far right will tell you taxation is theft. It's all relative.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    The point was on "sins", so I didn't comment on the legal basis, but the moral one. To me robbing someone of 1% of their capital doesn't look worse than CEOs throwing around their social weight and followers against random people for fun. The real world consequent of the latter might actually be worse, like whole life ruined levels of worse.
  - sellyme 5y ago
    Even ignoring the extremely explicit Robin Hood example that's already been pointed out, there's a hell of a lot of fiction centered around going to the lair of a dragon that does nothing but hoard gold, and killing it. Possibly you missed the subtext when reading those stories, but the gist of it is that society is totally fine with not caring about an extremely rich person losing a tiny fraction of their wealth.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

MrPatan 5y ago

The sin is the same: Being successful when I'm not. Off with their heads!

Cederfjard 5y ago
You know the thread your posting this in is about one of them being indicted for fraud, right?

xkjkls 5y ago

I'm not sure you are following the Elon-Solar City case if you think Elon's only sin is being a dick on Twitter. Or the original $420 funding a share saga. Elon Musk's repeated fake-it-till-you-make-it behavior and the unwillingness of regulators to crack down on it spawns Trevor Miltons.

djmips 5y ago
This has been going on since time immemorial. A part of me thinks it's a necessary evil in a world where people won't fund revolutionary ideas. However, that also means Milton and Holmes etc.
- xkjkls 5y ago
  I would agree that fraud is always going to happen; how much though is up for debate, and I would tend to argue that more fraud makes the world worse at funding revolutionary ideas. More revolutionary ideas happen and get funded in the US, which while I believe has become rife with fraud over the past decade, is no where near the scale the number of frauds in China or Africa or less well monitored markets. Trust is fundamental part of markets and is basically its own interest rate. The more people can trust one another, the riskier investments people are willing to partake in.
slownews45 5y ago
The SEC did enforce against tesla - when Elon tweeted "Tesla’s stock price is too high imo" - they began an investigation and subpoenaed records because they felt this this had not been approved by attorneys (it wasn't - elon claimed it was his personal opinion). So they went after him for this. They also went after him for a lot of other stuff. Note that they haven't gone after folks for failure to deliver issues on sales which is usually caused by shorting stocks such as Tesla's and others. Even though you'd think the basics of a regulated market is that folks selling shares actually own and will deliver them if someone buys them.
- xkjkls 5y ago
  > They also went after him for a lot of other stuff. Like lying about a buyout offer for his company. Which he received a incredibly small punishment for.
  - TheParkShark 5y ago
    Are you sure he was lying?
    - xkjkls 5y ago
      I mean, similarly to my certainty Donald Trump was lying that his taxes are under audit, and thats why he can't release them. Do I have exact knowledge of Elon's head state, no, but I can make inferences from all his actions since. If a buyer truly existed to facilitate that transaction, that would be public knowledge at this point.
      - onethought 5y ago
        If you muck in the private equity world at all you'd know that this isn't true at all. Lots of deals and nearly deals happen everyday and they only reach the public sphere if the parties want it too.
        5y ago

belter 5y ago

Lets see some of the quotes and think if we could get away with it... Aug 7, 2018 "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." Elon Musk Aug 7, 2018 "Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private" After paying 20 million dollar fine referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission tweets: "Just want to that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work," "And the name change is so on point!" 2018 "I want to be clear: I do not respect the SEC, I do not respect them," 2019 “By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware, feature complete, at a reliability level that we would consider that no one needs to pay attention,” October 21, 2019 "Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road," "The fleet wakes up with an over-the-air update. That's all it takes." 2020 "All Tesla cars right now have everything necessary for self-driving available today. All you need to do is improve the software."

javierluraschi 5y ago
What's wrong with the latest statement? Technically all cars have a proper GPU (Tesla's "GPU") and 360 cameras, the reliability is probably in the 90%-99% (which, yes, is pretty terrible to be considered fully autonomous, but impressive from a technical standpoint). Technically is correct to say that all they have to do is to "improve the software". That will be a lot of work, sweat and tears, but still correct.
- ac29 5y ago
  Until it actually works, how can you say the hardware is sufficient?
  - javierluraschi 5y ago
    Historically, there have been significant bottlenecks on algorithms, I'd argue software plays a bigger role than hardware; especially during inference. Going back to AlexNet, while GPUs helped the training process, it included significant software improvements that made a huge difference: training with dropout, convolutional neural networks, using rectified linear units, etc. Also, training hardware is much more relevant than hardware for inference. Tesla's cars do not include hardware to train the neural network but just for inference. The training hardware is actually a server cluster that Tesla owns. So if hardware is insufficient, Tesla might have to buy a larger training cluster, but not necessarily upgrade the inference hardware. That say, I do agree that there is some risk in requiring a hardware upgrade for inference, but to me that seems very unlikely.

makeitdouble 5y ago

From my point of view as a peasant without any shares anywhere, multibillion dollar vaporware companies have very little impact. We could argue this investment could have gone into better companies who could have made the world a better place, but it's purely hypothetical (the money could have gone to a worse company, or political lobbying as well...). Basically, from afar, it's a "rich people lost some money" drama.

californical 5y ago
That’s about as valid as saying “robbing someone’s house is legal as long as the victim has a high net worth, after all, they can afford it”. That’s not how laws and society work — theft is theft, no matter who the victim is.
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  That may be how "laws" work, but it's not how society works. There's a reason why "Robin Hood" is a parable. Legally, not all theft is treated the same, either - wage theft is largely ignored compared to other kinds, despite accounting for an order of magnitude greater amount. And for that matter, not everyone agrees what theft even is. Leftist will say that wage labor is theft, and the far right will tell you taxation is theft. It's all relative.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  The point was on "sins", so I didn't comment on the legal basis, but the moral one. To me robbing someone of 1% of their capital doesn't look worse than CEOs throwing around their social weight and followers against random people for fun. The real world consequent of the latter might actually be worse, like whole life ruined levels of worse.
- sellyme 5y ago
  Even ignoring the extremely explicit Robin Hood example that's already been pointed out, there's a hell of a lot of fiction centered around going to the lair of a dragon that does nothing but hoard gold, and killing it. Possibly you missed the subtext when reading those stories, but the gist of it is that society is totally fine with not caring about an extremely rich person losing a tiny fraction of their wealth.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]