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Comment by thisisit | Hacker News Reader

> Wow, the level of paranoia he's going into is impressive.

Exactly. It is surprising people pointing out - "Well, so many shorts etc so it's plausible". This kind of reasoning misses the bigger point - we need our leaders, political and otherwise, to refrain from actively pumping out conspiracy theories. If there is proof of malicious behavior present it instead of rumor mongering.

But given Musk's(Tesla) constant need to shift blame - car crash, negative news (Pravado), deflecting questions on financial situation of Tesla and now this, it is not looking good for Tesla.

I hope that next time there is a problem Musk stops at "we are investigating if this is a sabotage" instead of fueling the "it's Wall Street shorts" conspiracy.

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There are far more people aligned against him, so it's easy for him to feel defensive. I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if there was something bad going on with their finances, but I'd ALSO easily believe that there are actors very very actively working against him and Tesla. Google and Apple can grow without restraint because until they were massive they didn't affect anyone, Tesla from day 1 flew against the grain and is upsetting hundreds of thousands of jobs from corporations to unions. His company matters if it succeeds and anyone with common sense can easily imagine a mole.

> Google and Apple can grow without restraint because until they were massive they didn't affect anyone

Microsoft in particular lost an entire industry and way of doing business, partly (or maybe mostly) because of Apple and Google. It was only about 5 years ago that the “us vs them” mindset started to dissipate.

I don't think the comparison there is entirely apt. Microsoft was really killed off by the cycle rate of desktops radically decreasing as even decade old machines started to be good enough for everything except for extremely high performance usage like gaming, and mobile starting to advance enough to work as an alternative computing platform for many purposes. For direct competition in what was their bread and butter (desktop OS) - even Apple is still completely negligible.

Musk's competition against the automotive and space industry companies has been very direct, and his competition against the petrol industry has been at most with one degree of separation. And like others have said, there is a huge short position against Tesla that has cost people an immense amount of money, but also stands to make them an immense amount of money if Tesla tanks.

> there are actors very very actively working against him and Tesla

Remember when Top Gear joined in on the public-image sabotage?

http://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/12536/remember-when-top-g...

>we need our leaders, political and otherwise, to refrain from actively pumping out conspiracy theories.

This was the leader of a company asking his employees to look out for a very real possibility. Corporate espionage is very real,this is not a chem-trails rant.

> But given Musk's(Tesla) constant need to shift blame - car crash, negative news (Pravado), deflecting questions on financial situation of Tesla and now this, it is not looking good for Tesla.

I agree with much of what you are saying, but this line is really out of place. He needs to shift blame for car crashes? How many crashes do his cars have per 1,000 miles vs the others?

Deflecting questions on their financial situation? Which question from the shareholders meeting really went unanswered?

I agree that the handling of this incident is strange, but the rest of your narrative isn't as clear as the negative filter would have someone believe.

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