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Comment by craig1f | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that most unbiased news sources have been corrupted. Reddit has fallen, and hackernews is about all that's left. That means that the trolls have begun showing up here.

Trolls have gotten more skilled, and are able to convert new trolls without people realizing they have become trolls. You just have to get people angry a few times, and they'll do anything you want. Once they've calmed down, they'll continue doing the same thing for the sake of consistency.

Musk has pissed off the media by calling them out on their lack of ethics, so a storm is coming for Musk that will look very similar to what happened to Gamer-gate when they called out the media. The media literally branded them as women-haters with zero evidence and it stuck.

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There are legitimate criticisms of Tesla that shouldn't be hand-waved away as trolling.

Few and far between. Whenever I hear this, it's always "oh, they take subsidies".

The only ones I've heard that haven't been trolling are concerns about their financial reports, which are always "concerns about financial reports" with no additional information.

Ok, go ahead and be concerned that the stock is inflated. It's not a real conversation.

Like, for example, look at what happened last week. We were bombarded by an avalanche of negative Elon/Tesla articles. It was consistent. "Tesla Factory is HELL". Like, I must have read "HELL" 3 or 4 times last week. This followed by a failed coup attempt to oust him from the board of directors. Turns out that there were billions of dollars invested in shorts that Tesla stock would plummet.

There was a coordinated effort to tank Tesla and oust him as CEO last week that failed. The result was that stock spiked and the short-sellers lost like 1.5B.

This is the kind of shit that goes on week after week with Tesla.

> Few and far between. Whenever I hear this, it's always "oh, they take subsidies". The only ones I've heard that haven't been trolling are concerns about their financial reports, which are always "concerns about financial reports" with no additional information.

I would add to that concerns about the current state of their automated driving implementation, as well as the way they are marketing it. I think a lot of those concerns are justified, and I say this as a pretty hardcore fan.

(I don't disagree with the rest of your post.)

They have also been handling the response to the autopilot glitches pretty terribly. Someone should just tell Musk to shut up when someone dies in one of his cars and not immediately rush in to defend the technology. And especially don't twist the truth to make the dead guy look worse. Either suck it up and admit that the technology remains a work-in-progress, or ... perhaps a better choice ... say nothing at all beyond "our sincere condolences to the family of so-and-so"

His strategy is to fix the issue quick, and to prevent people from capitalizing on these opportunities to sink his company. You don't think Ford is throwing money at anyone who will bad-mouth Tesla?

NHTSA will spin their wheels for a year on an investigation, and accomplish absolutely nothing.

I don't recall Ford, or any other manufacturer of note, publicly bashing a victim of a crash of one of their cars. Like telling the whole world that he had his hands off the wheel in the moments leading up to the crash while knowing that it had been nearly 20 minutes since he had been warned about it. Musk tried to use misinformation to deflect from his own knowledge [which was not yet public] that in fact the car erroneously switched into a lane-that-is-not-really-a-lane and then accelerated.

I know you're spending a lot of time white-knighting for Tesla on HN today, but c'mon, quit being so disingenuous about this. They are not at all perfect and in fact have made some spectacular missteps.

I agree that there are concerns. I just don't think any of my concerns ever start with a news article. Every time I read an article like this, and think "Oh no, a legitimate concern" it ends up being overblown.

If this layoff article ends up being a legitimate source of concern, it'll be the first time out of like hundreds of articles a month.

And yeah, I'm with you on the state of driving implementation. I think the criticism that calling it auto-pilot is misleading is a legitimate concern, for example. I would call it co-pilot until it's fully automated, and call it auto-pilot once you can take your hands off the wheel. That would be consistent with the naming-scheme they have chosen, wouldn't diminish brand value, and would be more accurate.

But again, it's just every time I read one of these articles, the comments are saturated with anti-Tesla hate that is either coming from Russia, Big Oil, or some day-traders trying to bring the stock down $10 so they can buy a turn a quick profit for the day.

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