> What's the deal with the recent flood of anti-Tesla news?
At the end of March Tesla had $2.6bn of cash on its balance sheet [1]. Against that they have (a) $1.8bn of current debt (i.e. due within one year), $1.2bn of which is recourse (page 24) and (b) between investments and operations a cash burn of $1.1bn in Q1.
Tesla needs to raise new capital. That is as obvious to investors as it is to bankers. So the latter are getting ready. I've received a call every week for the past months from Morgan Blergh or Goldman Go-away sounding me out for exotic hybrid debt products. After those calls, I dutifully searched for and read a few articles. Publishers saw the views. So we get this.
From a utilitarian perspective, the financial press is informing investors about something they will need to dig into soon. From a stupid perspective, we have the bandwagon.
This article [+] explains it pretty succinctly, with as little bias as possible (TL;DR Tesla is the most shorted stock in the US, while also endangering entrenched interests).
EDIT: below content moved up to this comment from danso reply in order to be more concise as well as to keep signal to post ratio high:
I do my best to provide non-biased sources/citations, as well as provide arguments without any intellectual disingenuity. If you can find something that is inaccurate or subjective, please point it out.
It's fairly obvious that the data used by Reveal was manipulated in their sensational Tesla piece, and I'm happy to continue to aggregate additional sources that bear that out. You left out the next six paragraphs that explain why there is no basis in fact for what Reveal wrote.
Note: I have friends and acquaintances who work at Reveal; I used to work at ProPublica, and the social circle of nonprofit journalism is pretty small.
That said, I'm not making an a priori argument that Reveal is right. My objection was to you claiming the DK post has "as little bias as possible", when it seems to be a vigorous defense of Tesla, by a Tesla owner. Again, nothing wrong with stated bias -- I'm objecting to your characterization.
For example, the author has time for rhetoric like this:
> Of course, Reveal has shown no interest whatsoever in fact checking. If you have anything bad to say about Tesla, by all means, give them a call. They'll write an article about whatever you tell them.
Yet this objective article you tout fails to note that Tesla -- about a month after Reveal's initial investigation that Tesla "left injuries off the books" -- belatedly added the injuries that Reveal called out:
> Tesla Inc. recently added more names to its list of injured employees after Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting raised questions about whether the company was counting all of its work injuries, records show.
> The electric car company added 13 injuries from 2017 that had been missing when Tesla certified its legally mandated injury report earlier this year.
Again, feel free to trash Reveal's overall aims and ulterior motives. But an objective critique of their investigation should probably note that Tesla moved to fix the errors that Tesla had previously denied.
I've just left a voicemail with Cal/OSHA and am waiting to hear back. If my statement you replied to turns out to be incorrect, I will post a retraction if my edit window times out.
If it's true that Tesla is hiding workplace industries, this is of course something that I will want to find a way to get answers to at the annual meeting. That is unacceptable regardless of organization.
I appreciate the followup. Note that I'm not defending the Reveal investigation as a whole, for the sake of this argument. The complaint that Reveal is unfairly or disproportionately criticizing Tesla is not for me to decide. My main point is whether the investigation's primary claim -- that Tesla is undercounting reportable injuries -- is valid.
> Step up Reveal, an “independent journalism organization” to start “reporting” on Tesla. Quotation marks are normally considered to denote sarcasm, and boy do I ever mean it.
Sounds like an article committed to defending Tesla. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but "with as little bias as possible" is debatable.
I don't see how you take the writer saying "These people are reporting outright falsehoods and their falsehoods appear to closely match the talking points of a PR campaign" as an indication that they're committed to defending Tesla. If those facts are true, that seems like the sort of thing an unbiased analysis would explain.
Yes, but this purportedly-unbiased analysis does not explain these assertions, and resorts to strawman arguments:
For example:
> The first of their “personal stories” was about how a person involved in developing the factory was told that they can’t use yellow caution tape or beeping forklifts because they offend Musk’s sensibilities. The lack of these things, according to Reveal, could be to blame for the “high” rate of injuries.
You can argue about whether Reveal should have talked to Tesla's former safety lead, but the story doesn't assign blame to lack of yellow or whatever for the rate of injuries. In fact, the story is not about Tesla's "high" rate of injuries. The story notes that Tesla's injury rate in 2017 fell steeply. The point of the story is that, according to Tesla's own internal log, injuries that are mandated to be reported were not listed on the official report.
According to a Reveal followup a month later, Tesla's official injuries report has been amended with the injuries that Reveal accused Tesla of hiding:
The dailykos article doesn't have to agree that Reveal was overall in the right to investigate Tesla, but an objective analysis would note Tesla's actions in response to the investigation.
In fact, if you read the Reveal followup, you'll see that the added injuries don't even make Tesla a particular outlier:
> The additions raise Tesla’s 2017 injury rate to 6.3 injuries per 100 workers, just above the 2016 industry average of 6.2.
So noting the followup, and the adjusted stat, is well within the comfort zone of an article that attempts to objectively defend Tesla. Yet the dailykos writer seems to have completely missed reading the followup and can only throw insults at Reveal. That does not seem like an "unbiased" analysis to me.
Ex-journo perspective: One of the reasons why you'll see a flood of negative news about a company is that once one well-reported piece comes out about potential wrongdoing, more reporters will take a look at a person/company to see if they can find something wrong. Negative reporting on Tesla, especially its labor practices, is nothing new. (See Caroline O'Donovan's work for Buzzfeed News.) Part of the reason for this is that investigative work takes time, and you have to know where to look. Barking up the wrong tree too much is costly and unproductive.
In addition, you'll often see more negative reporting come about after one story as people who have inside knowledge choose to share their stories after initial reporting. I had people reach out with additional information, unsolicited, to both my former colleagues and me following the publication of a piece. It's generally along the lines of "oh, you think that's bad, have a look at this."
All that happens because it's very rare to see isolated incidents of bad behavior inside an organization. When there's smoke, there's usually fire.
I feel like it's the natural flow of reporting. Tesla spent a long time releasing exciting products and getting positive press coverage because of that. As that exposure increased, interest in them as an organization, as well as the amount of information & sources available also increased. With that increased exposure, it's almost inevitable that it would lead to problems being uncovered.
I'd like Tesla to succeed in terms of mass produced electric cars, but their self driving program in particular is reckless, and the way they treat their own customers after their product kills them is just horrific.
They really should just cut their losses on autopilot and focus on figuring out their production line.
as an amateur Musk-mythologist, I would guess something we can't see is going on behind the scenes. Since around the time he started dating Grimes, Elon's general tone has gotten more combative. Whether he's deliberately courting bad press or it's a byproduct of something else isn't clear to me, but I would hazard a guess that it's part of something larger.
Part of why I find the Elon Musk story so fascinating is because we're seeing in real time how the 'great man' and 'great forces' narratives of history can both be applied as filters to understand what's going on. I would think the flood of bad press is better explained by the 'great forces' filter, but I don't understand that filter intuitively enough to usefully speculate what's changed.
His earlier company PayPal was also pretty customer hostile locking up money for indeterminate amounts of time. They also played the "were not a bank even though we look a lot like one" card.
I have thee theories, any of which could be true independently of each other. From a long-term perspective it seems obvious to me that Musk is aligned with some kind of progress-friendly coalition, and that this is part of a greater pattern of sabre - rattling between Elon's faction and a more conservative rival which many of the legacy media outlets belong to. On a smaller scale, it could be that the labour and automation issues are pretty well sorted and he's baiting shorts. Finally, it could be that since he's entered a new romantic relationship recently, he's simply undergoing a personality change and more easily combative.
Yup, the media cycle. While usually starts from actual incidents, you can bet that they wouldn't repeatedly make the front page except by intention. I have a hard time knowing whether this, anti-FB, anti-Goog, anti-Twitter, anti-whatever is the result of a conspiracy or if it's just the simple fact that by building a furor the media can generate views. Surely the latter, but it's annoying and when it rains it pours for these companies. Props to be able to see the pattern though it doesn't necessarily discredit the content, just its prioritization.
There's a third option that you're not considering: these companies receive significant scrutiny from the press because of their size and power, especially as it relates to our daily lives. That scrutiny leads to the disclosure of wrongdoing and controversy where it's found. In my experience with journalistic outlets, they're not writing stories out of a cynical desire for pageviews, or because of some massive conspiracy, they're writing because they believe there's an important story the public should be aware of.
In order for a media conspiracy to work, you would need to convince dozens if not hundreds of individual, competing journalists (who are not exactly known for their conformity) to go along with a scheme. I don't believe that should pass Occam's Razor for anyone.
That option doesn't explain the ebb and flow. You are talking about the content, I am talking about prioritization. I also doubt the conspiracy, but we can't ignore the glaring coincidence of anomalous anti-X deluges that occur all at once. And we can't explain it away as simply a result of increased scrutiny. In fact, often the articles these outlets run are disguised op-ed pieces with no new information and the reader can have a hard time telling the difference.
I'm long on Facebook and wholeheartedly share the anti-FB sentiment that's prevalent among people who value privacy, democracy, and facts.
In my opinion, the company needs what Uber got: a radical leadership change. It may tank the stock for a few quarters, but it'll make the company stronger in the long-run.
well Elon went an an anti-news tirade on twitter a few days back, that probably accelerated things a bit.
but Model 3 pricing still being higher than promised, and not being produced fast enough, and Model S running into things while on autopilot was also helping before that.
There’s no need to posit conspiracy nonsense. Tesla has received glowing uncritical coverage for a long time, this is just the correction.
It appears from the comments that the Cult of Elon can’t handle this. Elon is perfect, anything negative about him or his interests are conspiracies to destroy him.
