Can we ask for an investigation here? I'd like to know:
- Do the IPs of the 3 people who posted the articles match an IP of Tesla Motors?
- How did the 3 people discover the articles?
- How come they posted different urls, with different titles, to the same article?
If my intuition is correct, you might flag the accounts; but even more interesting is you might happen to uncover an deceiving behaviour from Tesla. Passionating!
Hopefully somebody smart enough will uncover another way to correlate this information back to Tesla.
I looked and found no evidence, not even a tinge, of the things you're asking about. Seems most likely that a bunch of people ran across the story on the internet and thought HN would like it. Tesla is one of a few strains of high-grade local catnip, so they weren't wrong.
Btw other users posted the article too but hit the dupe detector. The ones who varied the URL made it past the dupe detector, which is how it's designed to work.
Tesla's ASN is 394161 and I only see one block of IP's allocated to them 209.133.79.0/24. So that's obviously not enough IPs for the entire company.