Tesla sues ex-employee for hacking, theft, and leaking to the press

That's actually more a matter of the rules of evidence. Generally extrajudicial statements are considered inadmissible hearsay for trial purposes unless one of a number of exceptions applies. In this case, the statement against (self) interest exception would likely apply. (Other exceptions to hearsay might also apply.)

How do you expect to join a company and get promoted within an year?

This feels like an unfair expectation to even begin with.

That may reflect the problems being upstream of final assembly. Maybe they need more than a week to accumulate enough parts to run final assembly for a week.

Because he made an easily-falsifiable statement. Either you believe in a massive conspiracy involving Tesla's bankers, Tesla's auditors, Tesla's employees, and members of the public pretending to be Tesla's customers, or you believe that Tesla actually produced X cars last week.

If you're going the conspiracy route, you're also assuming that Musk is willing to risk jail time for... what exactly? To satisfy his ego? It's not like he's going to run out of money if Telsa goes bankrupt.

I mean ... I laughed. Didn't you laugh?

> I often hear how Hackernews is such a bastion of objectivity and critical thinking.

That gave me another good chuckle.

They eventually do get realized, and that in a way that many people feel will benefit society as a whole.

For example: Zuck/FB don't care a flying fuck about their userbase and only about advertisers (e.g. chronological feed, the entire handling of the "fake news"/propaganda episode, Cambridge Analytica, handing the American democracy over to Trump) and Zuck is doing nasty stuff like buying his neighbors' houses only to tear them down.

Elon Musk, on the other hand, isn't in the game for personal richness (or at least, he doesn't shove it in the face of everyone standing less than a shovel length away). He could have lived in the Bahamas and sipping Pina Colada for the rest of his life already after Paypal, but no, dude puts literally all his fortunes into SpaceX and Tesla, and makes them succeed (SpaceX at, well, providing humanity with re-usable, affordable rocketry after the corrupt, expensive, Russian-dependent clusterfuck of ULA and Tesla at proving electric-only vehicles can exist and are viable), and then still has not enough and pours more money into The Boring Company, oh and meanwhile also releasing everything regarding Hyperloop as Public Domain. And not to forget he could still exit from all the companies and spend the rest of his life sipping Pina Coladas, but not doing so.

Yes, there are valid points to flame Elon Musk on (especially the allegations of working standards violations, with massive overtime requirements etc.), but in the end Elon Musk wants to advance humanity, and Zuckerberg wants to advance his cash. Not difficult to say who deserves more support.

Musk states that Tesla is investigating whether this person was receiving any outside impetus, and warning employees to be extra vigilant for signs of sabotage during the next few weeks, but that wasn't what OP claimed.

Any deliberate attempt by Musk at conflating these different events is up to interpretation, but note that this is an internal e-mail and not a press release. It's easiest to just interpret this message at face value.

Edit: since we've warned you before and you've done it repeatedly since then, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

And where in your Bloomberg link does it say anything of the sort?

HN has a lot of great discussions and smart people, but it also has a handful of armchair engineers who are eager to tear down highly successful ones like Musk. Your comment offers a rational explanation for his concern and behavior, so naturally folks pushing ulterior narratives won't like it.

Don't let downvotes get under your skin. It's way harder, more interesting, and more dignified to think and respond critically and put your name on a comment like you did, than to click a little triangle anonymously every time someone challenges your assumptions. When an earnest question like yours turns grey, it says much more about the HN community than it says about you.

Because some people may be looking for validation on their preconceptions (in this case, "Musk is making excuses") instead of engaging in critical debate.

Whistleblowing is not simply just telling random people, or media contacts, inner workings of companies that are protected and trade secrets. That's not how that works. There are specific ways to do it to protect yourself legally, or you can leak to Wikileaks or media outlets using TOR and other methods to keep yourself safe, but the latter method is illegal while the former method is legal, if not nearly as effective.

Munro & Associates did a complete Tesla 3 teardown and disassembly in order to sell what they've learned to Tesla competitors for hundreds of thousands of dollars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpCrkO1x-Qo&t=4828s)

So did some German engineering company (https://cleantechnica.com/2018/02/19/tesla-model-3-stuns-ger...).

Apparently there are plenty of companies interested in how Tesla's cars are made.

In reality, a lithium ion cell with a small hole will slowly have the electrolyte evaporate, the internal resistance will increase, and the cell will stop being useful. If that's one cell out of 10,000 on a car, it's no big deal.

"What the hell do you think you're doing??" "I just wanted to play DOTA"

Why? Because it's an off the charts volatile basket case.

You can't talk about shorts without talking about hedging, both stocks and (convertible) bonds. This is a complicated financial play. Unfortunately, as happens, retail chumps will get roasted either way.

Yet, their stock is valued like one of those startups.

Anyways, the actual wording, I think, is "he also wrote computer code to periodically export Tesla’s data off its network and into the hands of third parties" which is vague.

It could mean that he exported the data off of the network and then gave it to third parties (news outlets). It could also just mean that he uploaded the data to an AWS server, or to his Google Drive account.

It certainly doesn't imply that he was hired by an outside agency specifically for this purpose, which is what the original comment was wondering about.

Whistleblowing is not about doing harm, it is about preventing it.

Say you dated someone at work and it didn't work out. Say you then went on a tirade around the office indicating exactly what their problems were (true or not), even to people who have no interest in dating that person. More accurately, you'd also pass off any and all benign details (because the installed software was indiscriminately passing off information). Would that be whistleblowing or would that be slander? Say that a good friend indicated that they were interested and you warned them away in private - completely different story.