Reporters say Tesla is shitty. But reporters often lie and even more often exaggerate.
Musk says he cares about safety and all accusations are wrong. But CEOs often lie and even more often are uninformed or delusional.
If anyone has advice about how I can develop some trust in one side or the other, please let me know.
* Intentional underreporting of injuries.
* Disallowing the use of yellow tape at the factory.
* Disallowing audible warnings ("beeps") on forklifts.
"Outside of the statute of limitations" is very different than "proved wasn't true."
Gaining true knowledge about a situation is not possible without establishing a chain of trust. Whose reporting do you trust ? Each person in the chain needs to be evaluated individually and re-evaluated when new information comes to light.
Right now I rather trust what Tesla says when I hear horrendous claims like until proven otherwise. Especially since news media are not independent. They rely almost entirely on advertisement which is a direct relation to "most eyeballs moved away from other 'free' options", which is directly related to the impact of the headline.
And on the other side you have a guy who is stepping down as Tesla CEO after fraud charges, and who's being sued for losing his temper and calling some random cave-diver a paedophile, twice.
Personally I trust the news organisation more.
Do you have any evidence to back this up? Citations, studies showing reporters lie .. often?
And generally speaking, if it's to the point of multiple articles written on a subject, there's almost certainly a fair amount of truth there.
After reading this article, I’m of the opinion that Tesla is intentionally trying lowball their workplace injury numbers. The article mentions 48 were reported, but the fired medical professional says the actual number was probably twice as much. Let’s say that this estimated actual number is indeed true and there were 96 actual injuries. How many factory employees does Tesla have compared to and conventional car factory and what are injury rates there (pick something in the same state to keep workplace injury laws the same). It makes no sense to me to underreport this number and risk serious repercussions as opposed to report accurately, give injures employees sufficient medical care and support, and improve the manufacturing process thereby reducing the rate of injuries. Yes, Tesla is burning a lot of money, and doing the right thing would cost them more. The question is how much more compared to the risk of getting caught underreporting.
This entire situation reeks of “Move fast and break things” applied ad nauseum to where Tesla is becoming its own worst enemy as opposed to its short sellers.
For a site that prides itself on it's intellect and knowledge, it's unsettling how often I'm seeing people jump to "fake news" type of commenting.
By the way, this also explains why prosecutors sometimes lie or exaggerate.
Furthermore, some reporters want to influence public opinion in a certain way because of their personal beliefs or peer pressure.
I do not claim any of this applies to Reveal. I just want to point out why money from views isn't the only mechanism for misleading reporting.
A really good news organization may create pressure against reporters overstepping the bounds in pursuit of a story. But IMO it takes an incredible effort to counteract the human tendency to bend the facts to help make a point.
Of course, CEOs have even more obvious reasons to mislead people: maintainging good corporate and personal image. This is compounded by the fear subordinates have in telling the CEO that they are wrong. Also, the more successful the person, the more likely they are to be a bit delusional by believing everything they do is right, and ignoring any criticism.
The regulators will insure that corrections take place if the company is really misidentifying, mistreating, and underreporting injuries.