OT: Sad how difficult it was to find this. The media avoids linking to primary sources. For example, Engadget's 3 paragraph article contains no less than 5 links back to engadget.com and not a single mention of this source.
Anyone can setup a real time account for free.
Also the WSJ article pretty clearly used the press release as a source, so mentioning that is a separate issue from whether it is a good or bad source.
(unless you think the WSJ called Tesla and verified specific facts like "4,820 Model S and X vehicles were in transit" vs "The company said 4,820 vehicles were in transit at the end of the quarter")
You can still pay for premium services (via Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, etc) but subscribing to company news releases can be easily done by just visiting a company's investor relations website.
Of course, in this case it's a bit hard, since the only insight into Tesla's production goals is what they report externally, barring leaks and whatnot. A press release from the company is pretty much the best we can get. But just because it's the best doesn't mean it's necessarily good.
They did not reach their goals. No need for paranoia.
In any case it's not paranoia. No matter what the law is, a press release is a first-party source. It is inherently biased toward the company. By no means should it be compared to an independent source, such as a report from an auditor or independent regulators.
If they did so, that would be securities fraud, by definition. What about their projections, which were publicly stated and published in the past, or their actual production, which was publicly stated in the article (both of which are subject to SEC regulation review and legal recourse) are inherently biased toward the company?
That's Engadget's house style. They forbid external links the the body of an article, only allowing links within their own site. The best you can hope for is a single hard-to-find link at the end.
They've done it this way for years. It sucks. It's one of the reasons I never read anything on Engadget except by mistake.
The comment was not regarding the quality of Google's search engine results for given keywords.