I'm not sure creating a multibillion dollar vaporware fraud shell company and being a dick on Twitter are comparable sins.
That’s not how laws and society work — theft is theft, no matter who the victim is.
And for that matter, not everyone agrees what theft even is. Leftist will say that wage labor is theft, and the far right will tell you taxation is theft. It's all relative.
To me robbing someone of 1% of their capital doesn't look worse than CEOs throwing around their social weight and followers against random people for fun.
The real world consequent of the latter might actually be worse, like whole life ruined levels of worse.
But, I'm convinced the stock brokers at pension funds are also playing the market a lot, because better results is better for them.
A wise investor reduces volatility by diversification, rather than by concentrating on low-volatility assets.
It's not like if without Nikola all of this money would have gone to one other thing. Sure some of it might have got wasted, but realistically most of it would have gone to productive uses.
Aug 7, 2018 "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." Elon Musk
Aug 7, 2018 "Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private"
After paying 20 million dollar fine referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission tweets:
"Just want to that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work," "And the name change is so on point!"
2018
"I want to be clear: I do not respect the SEC, I do not respect them,"
2019
“By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware, feature complete, at a reliability level that we would consider that no one needs to pay attention,”
October 21, 2019
"Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road," "The fleet wakes up with an over-the-air update. That's all it takes."
2020
"All Tesla cars right now have everything necessary for self-driving available today. All you need to do is improve the software."
Technically all cars have a proper GPU (Tesla's "GPU") and 360 cameras, the reliability is probably in the 90%-99% (which, yes, is pretty terrible to be considered fully autonomous, but impressive from a technical standpoint). Technically is correct to say that all they have to do is to "improve the software". That will be a lot of work, sweat and tears, but still correct.
Going back to AlexNet, while GPUs helped the training process, it included significant software improvements that made a huge difference: training with dropout, convolutional neural networks, using rectified linear units, etc.
Also, training hardware is much more relevant than hardware for inference. Tesla's cars do not include hardware to train the neural network but just for inference. The training hardware is actually a server cluster that Tesla owns. So if hardware is insufficient, Tesla might have to buy a larger training cluster, but not necessarily upgrade the inference hardware.
That say, I do agree that there is some risk in requiring a hardware upgrade for inference, but to me that seems very unlikely.
However, I'm NOT stating that this won't ever work. I do believe that FSD will work in the future. Are there risks? For sure. But I'm very optimistic.
I'm trying to communicate that, even with current in-car hardware, this should be sufficient. Why? Cause driving the car with a neural-network is actually quite trivial. Now, training the neural-model is actually REALLY hard. But the training does not happen in the car, car just collects data and sends it to a data center with GPUs that trains the network. If any hardware will need upgrade, is the data center were training happens, not the actual in-car hardware.
Are you really saying that FSD will never work? Cause that's a pretty bold claim.
This claim is quite obviously true, because despite the claims of Tesla's people, we don't know of any vision system that works without relying on general intelligence. Human/animal vision in particular is only accurate because we inherently use our knowledge of the world and physical intuition to resolve ambiguity. Put a human (or other mammal or a bird) in a fully artifical environment, without recognizable objects and without shadows, and you'll see that they are about as bad at vision and navigation tasks as many current algorithms. The effect will be even worse if you recreate realistic objects but with unrealistic proportions and behaviors.
Since we can't hope that computers will gain animal level intelligence in understanding the world (no one is even really working on the necessary problems), the only path to self driving is through more advanced sensors, as everyone but Tesla has realized for a long time. This is why Waymo has self-driving cars on the road today (in perfect ideal conditions), and Teslas can sometimes barely navigate an empty intersection without a human driver intervening.
This is an extremely bold claim. You're also ignoring the fact that driving is an extremely heavy tailed distribution. We know that both processing heavy tailed distributions is difficult (not training, but pre-processing) as well as we see a strong correlation between larger networks and performance on heavy tailed distributions (more normal like distributions can get away with substantially smaller networks). But larger networks means more MACs. More MACs means slower inference. There's still a tradeoff between accuracy and speed. In driving you need both.
> Are you really saying that FSD will never work?
No one here is saying that. Everyone here is calling you out on your BS that we _know_ that FSD will work on _current_ hardware. We don't _know_ that. Maybe it will, but it's not a pony I'm willing to put money on.
So it's a bold claim given what we know. It's also clear that next generation hardware will be safer regardless of if the previous generation "works."
Training is the process of generating the parameters for the neural network, it usually takes significant resources to train and is a very hard process.
Inference is the process of using a pre-trained neural network to perform predictions.
Tesla's car have hardware to perform inference. From working on the field for several years, I do believe that they have hardware capable of performing inference (driving a car).
However, the hardware that trains the neural network is comprised of hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands of GPUs, that hardware lives in Tesla's data centers (or some other cloud provider).
The really hard part of this project is on training, not inference. So while there is some risk that the car (inference) hardware might require an upgrade, this seems very unlikely to me.
While you're right, inference is not training but accuracy and inference speed is still important and hardware dependent. YOLO still can be faster and more accurate. Everything I said still holds true. You want to do inference on larger images because larger images have more information. More information helps you get better accuracy. You want bigger networks because bigger networks correlate strongly with higher accuracy. If you read any object detection paper you will see different sized models showing these tradeoffs. You want faster hardware because you still want your algorithms to be fast. Inference is still done in the car. Better hardware still makes all that perform better.
> The really hard part of this project is on training, not inference.
If you pay attention to the YOLO series or other real time object detection you will know that inference is still something being worked on. Inference speed matters. Throughput (different metric) matters. Hardware helps with both even if we use the same pretrained network. A network will have faster inference and higher throughput on an Ampere card than on a Kepler. So I'm not sure what you're debating here, it really feels like you're just trying to tell me you know machine learning but missed strong clues that you're talking to someone else who is aware.
TLDR: hardware still matters.
From the outside I’ve wondered if the missed schedule targets around autonomous driving is because we’ve conflated “solving” the perception problem with solving self-driving. Just curious what your take is on that
Since it has never been done we still don't know what's needed, so even if you worked in the field that's only intuition, a bit light for big commercial claims IMHO.
> "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."
Yet the original "HW1" computer was replaced by "HW2", which was replaced by "FSD Computer 2.5", which was replaced by "FSD Computer 3".
If you want to activate the Full Self-Driving package today on a Tesla you just bought in early 2019, they'll tell you that your "FSD Computer 2.5" is not capable enough for even today's level 2 autonomy features, you first have to replace it with "FSD Computer 3". And if your car's a bit older, but still sold as "has the hardware needed for full self-driving", you have to pay $1000 for that upgrade before you can pay for the "full self-driving" that isn't self-driving.
How many times does Tesla have to claim the hardware is good enough, but then change their minds a year later, before any reasonable person stops believing them?
To give you an example, ImageNet for image classification required for many years a descent computer and GPU to run inference. Today, an improved version called MobileNet, runs in phones with no GPU from advancements in AI training with half-precision and why not.
So, how can we be so sure that FSD can't EVER be ported back to HW1?
It doesn't matter whether it can't ever be ported back. It doesn't work today, and that's all there is to it. Musk lied. And it isn't the first time he does so either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista
Just like you can't be a little bit pregnant you can't have a little bit of FSD. You either have it or you don't. It's a boolean, and it's embedded in that word 'full'.
Windows Vista and software in general are not even remotely comparable: they are not sold today with the promise of features tomorrow - they are generally sold when they're ready. Even pre-order games are usually refunded if they incur too huge delays or ship with significantly altered features (see Cyberpunk 2020).
Are you saying that the possibility is enough to prove they didn't cheat people?
If, some day, Tesla hypothetically says "we have determined it is technically possible to backport FSD, but we aren't gonna, because we like making money, not spending it" is that enough in your mind to demonstrate they didn't defraud anyone way back when?
Or do they actually have to make it run to fulfill the original promise?
That said, if it doesn't happened this year, it doesn't mean it will never happen.
The first problem they need to solve is FSD. If they can't solve FSD even with latest hardware, then well, that would be bad on its own.
The question is, what happens once they solve FSD, do they port? Maybe, I don't think it will be nearly as hard. Now realistically, it's probably cheaper to give free upgrades to everyone and not have to do the port. To me that feels fair, is like "hey, I promised you FSD on HW1, is gonna be a pain to port, but here, take this free HW upgrade", I'd be OK with that.
Now if they don't compensate HW1 users to some degree once FSD is solved, I do feel that would not be cool.
But my point here is that, we are jumping to conclusions, we don't know yet. We can't claim (yet) that FSD will or will not happen.
Okay, compare accuracy of MobileNet to ViT. ViT has 90.45% accuracy and 1.843Bn parameters and MobileNet has 79% with 5.47M parameters (2020, v3 is 75% with 5.4). [0]
These two networks are nowhere near equal. If you could put ViT on a phone and run real-time inference you would. But you can't, so you take a major cut in performance to get what you can.
There are multiple metrics you need to look at when evaluating networks. "Being able to perform on a dataset" is not even that useful of one.
[0] Have fun https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-classification-on-imag...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28002731
It's verbatim from Elon Musk on Autonomy Day 2019, per this article:
https://www.engadget.com/2019-04-22-tesla-elon-musk-self-dri...
This is the same event where he promised a million Tesla robotaxis on the road by 2020.
No, that was NOT a verbatim quote. Here is the exact quote with me adding emphasis on the critical (but oft omitted) qualifier:
"All Teslas being produced right now have this computer. We switched over from the Nvidia solution for S and X about a month ago, and we switched over the Model 3 about ten days ago. All cars being produced have the all the hardware necessary, compute and otherwise, for full self-driving. I'll say that again. All Tesla cars being produced right now have everything necessary for full self-driving. All you need to do is improve the software."
https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=5663
> This is the same event where he promised a million Tesla robotaxis on the road by 2020.
That is, in my opinion, not a contextually correct reading of what Elon said. Within the context of the speech it's clear (to me) that for him, "robotaxi" is used as shorthand for "vehicles with the hardware capable of being a robotaxi." Obviously I cannot prove this, and I recognise that responsibility ultimately lies with Elon to be clear.
I do agree Elon did say multiple sentences that are absolutely misleading when read in isolation, but his actual words in context (and with some recognition that this is a forward looking statement made with optimism) were far less egregiously wrong than the snipped quote implies on its own. You can watch him say it in context and make up your own mind:
Same thing with the robotaxi quotes. Elon was very clear on autonomy day and the days surrounding it. The promise was not shorthand for "vehicles capable of being a robotaxi", it was Tesla vehicles, and I quote again, "operating robotaxis next year with no one in them", and "I feel very confident predicting that there will be autonomous robotaxis from Tesla next year — not in all jurisdictions because we won’t have regulatory approval everywhere.". You don't need regulatory approval for hardware alone.
In another investor presentation Elon Musk made in 2019, per a reporter covering it, they were promising the Tesla Network to allow Tesla owners to send their functioning robotaxis out to pick people up for money would launch in 2020.
> Starting next year, owners will be able to flip a switch inside the Tesla app, and send out their car to pick up and drop off passengers autonomously, earning an estimated 65 cents per mile in fares. By Tesla’s estimates, owners might be able to earn $30,000 in gross revenue from their cars per year, or more than $300,000 in revenue over the 11-year lifespan of their car.
Not included in your response, I should note, was any acknowledgement that you misrepresented a quote as being verbatim was in fact not verbatim. This makes me entirely disinterested in further interaction.
So what's wrong with the statement is it fits a pattern of statements with reckless disregard for the truth.
Elon Musk's repeated fake-it-till-you-make-it behavior and the unwillingness of regulators to crack down on it spawns Trevor Miltons.
Trust is fundamental part of markets and is basically its own interest rate. The more people can trust one another, the riskier investments people are willing to partake in.
They also went after him for a lot of other stuff.
Note that they haven't gone after folks for failure to deliver issues on sales which is usually caused by shorting stocks such as Tesla's and others. Even though you'd think the basics of a regulated market is that folks selling shares actually own and will deliver them if someone buys them.
Like lying about a buyout offer for his company. Which he received a incredibly small punishment for.
These funds are looking to diversify away from oil - so for them a play in EV space makes sense.
The Saudis in particular planned to do an IPO in oil industry - but that ended up not happening which really changed their decision making. If it had they were explicit about desire to diversify (smart in my view).
It wasn't a $100B deal. Many larger investors would rolled their holdings into the private entity - Elon alone would have. $40 - $50B. If debt is in mix equity portion even smaller. It would have been the deal of the century.
"Saudi’s Public Investment Fund built the undisclosed stake of between 3 and 5 per cent of Tesla’s shares this year, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
At Tesla’s current share price the position is worth between $1.7bn and $2.9bn. The stake, which is below the 5 per cent threshold that requires public disclosure, makes the PIF one of Tesla’s eight biggest shareholders, according to Bloomberg data.
The PIF, which has more than $250bn in assets, initially approached Tesla and chief executive Elon Musk to express interest in purchasing newly issued shares in the electric vehicle company.
However, Tesla did not act on the interest, one person informed on the matter said. Instead, the Saudi state fund acquired the position in secondary markets with the help of JPMorgan."
- Financial Times.
Someone's just chased down $2B of your stock on SECONDARY market - yeah - that's actually more interest than many deal talks even get to.
And yes - discussions like this happen with some frequency - and it's not a scandal if the deal doesn't close - you just don't usually read about them. Elon says he wanted to talk to Apple about buying tesla as well, he's on twitter more than most. That said, folks on the deal side - there tends to be movement in stock prices 3 days before deals are announced - so someone is making money on the normally secret considerations.
He was "thinking"? That's not funding secured. Why have all of these institutions specifically denied having discussed it at the time too? Either it wasn't these institutions, or funding was very far from secure at the time he claimed it was.
> It wasn't a $100B deal. Many larger investors would rolled their holdings into the private entity - Elon alone would have. $40 - $50B. If debt is in mix equity portion even smaller. It would have been the deal of the century.
If you are going to get investors for something like this, you're also going to roll over all the debt/options that you have on your books as well. It would have been close to ~100 billion, the largest LBO ever done.
> And yes - discussions like this happen with some frequency - and it's not a scandal if the deal doesn't close - you just don't usually read about them.
You don't read about them because the CEO doesn't announce they secured funding for one in the middle of trading. You know, the responsible thing to do.
His blog post on the rationale for his potential move is here: https://www.tesla.com/blog/taking-tesla-private
Anyone who bought in at this news would have been buying in for < $84 per share (split adjusted). Current stock price is 600 per share+.
The problem the SEC has had in trying to charge him is that folks feel like the SEC really ignore some of the clear scam behavior by big players. Fail to deliver? No issue. Broker bad behavior and theft? Light FINRA slaps on the wrist. Complaints about Madoff? Investigate the complainers. CEO talking about potential to take a company private publically - all out WAR by SEC!
He said he is considering something. It was not definite. Stock price didn't jump to the "buyout" price the way it normally would on a real buyout. So we have clear market data that folks didn't not consider his tweets a statement that a buyout was occuring.
Yes - people want to make this into a huge crime. But he explained in his tweets pretty transparently to most what his thinking was.
And they did go after him for this and everything else. Hey says Stock price too high in his opinion - BAM - they were on him. And they went after him for this.
if you read between lines - the contempt court case got a bit of an eye roll from the judge involved.
$420 funding secure indicates he already had financing ready. Why has this mystery funder never materialized.
> Anyone who bought in at this news would have been buying in for < $84 per share (split adjusted). Current stock price is 600 per share+.
This is hugely problematic as a response. Elon Musk's behavior is unethical whether Tesla stock went up or down. The stock price should not be used as justification for previous lies. If we accept that, then we accept markets where people can gamble on a lie and things are fine if their gamble works out. That's not the business culture I want to create. People should be honest about risks so that they can be properly evaluated.
> The problem the SEC has had in trying to charge him is that folks feel like the SEC really ignore some of the clear scam behavior by big players.
Elon Musk is literally the second biggest player! Ignoring his malfeasance creates more people willing to emulate him.
> Fail to deliver? No issue. Broker bad behavior and theft? Light FINRA slaps on the wrist. Complaints about Madoff? Investigate the complainers. CEO talking about potential to take a company private publically - all out WAR by SEC!
You won't find me giving a kind word to the SEC's currently regulatory practices, but we need to recognize that corporate culture is made from examples. When someone like Elon Musk publicly flouts all responsible corporate behavior, and doesn't have an example made of him, then that is going to breed people willing to make the exact same decisions.
> He said he is considering something. It was not definite.
"Funding secured" is definite.
> Yes - people want to make this into a huge crime. But he explained in his tweets pretty transparently to most what his thinking was.
It is a huge crime. In the middle of trading, he decided to fraudulently claim he had a buyout offer for his company. That screws over not just short sellers, but any one who had calls above the $420 a share price. There is no universe where that is healthy for our markets.
> if you read between lines - the contempt court case got a bit of an eye roll from the judge involved.
He's currently in a court case for his buyout of Solar City, where he announced a fake product, used it as reasoning for his one public company to buy a company that he, his brother, and his cousin's had the largest stake in, and he, his brother, and his other companies (Tesla and SpaceX) were the largest bondholders in. This is a cartoonish set of conflicts of interest here. But apparently that shouldn't matter, because "stock price."
The short sellers around tesla have been pathetic. Note I don't own any tesla stock, but the short seller hype train is just ridiculous around tesla. How there has been no action there is mind boggling.
He's a crazy guy willing to take crazy risks - look at SpaceX -> they are operating COMPLETELY outside all norms.
Despite these "huge crimes" - no prosecutor anywhere is prosecuting. The SEC efforts basically fell pretty flat - their contempt attempts also fell flat.
The conflicts with solar city were crazy - they were also public. I thought it was a terrible deal - but that was public too. If you think Elon is bad for tesla and you own stock vote him out by running your own board slate. But he has a vision for a fully integrated solar and powerwall type product no barriers. You get an app, the sun charges the battery. They had and have ideas around charging cars mixed into that. Not sure if it's a good idea - plenty of competitors coming for Tesla, but they may be able to deliver something here with their solar / energy AND car companies. And the trend is towards this type of integration - so he gets to take a crack at it.
And a heads up, if these solar city folks win their case - guess who is going to get the money. Yes, TESLA! I've followed the case a bit. Not super impressive (aside from the plaintiffs attorneys vomiting in court! What was going on!).
Importantly, you are Elon, you own 22% of two companies - Tesla and SolarCity with highly overlapping missions. You want to integrate solar / energy / cars. I mean, what would YOU do. Go do a deal with some company in China the way others have tried? These folks saying it's such a bad idea / deal - what was their much better proposal? Elon already knew the Solarcity board and management etc etc. I really am curious what was the amazingly better option to get where Elon wanted to go. Easy to criticize, harder (much) to do.
The Battery-Solar-Car angle is such an obvious integration for Tesla. I guess on paper it is frustrating it was a family connection, but their alternative was for Tesla to start building their own Solar capability when they had a significant stake in one already.
SEC is a joke - chasing Elon is like a weird hobby for them... meanwhile things like 2008 happen and they shrug and go "Sorry, we missed that one"... What's their mission again?
So I can obviously see the self dealing side… but there is also an equally “it just made sense” side. Do billionaires need to self enrich with crazy side deals?
Elon already owned basically 22% of both companies. After they did the stock deal he owned 22% or whatever of the combined company. He already knew the folks / board / management of both companies.
Can you name the company he "should" have purchased?
Clearly options traders didn't, since all options above $420 went to zero.
> The short sellers around tesla have been pathetic. Note I don't own any tesla stock, but the short seller hype train is just ridiculous around tesla. How there has been no action there is mind boggling.
I disagree. I think the behavior of the stock holders have been pathetic. The short sellers demands for greater transparency and a company not entirely based on smoke and mirrors are easily met. The company itself has refused to meet those minimal standards.
> He's a crazy guy willing to take crazy risks - look at SpaceX -> they are operating COMPLETELY outside all norms.
So? This shouldn't be an excuse for fraudulent behavior. Everytime I bring up a specific problematic behavior of Elon Musk, someone wants to reframe the conversation around the totality of his behavior, rather than the single criticism. I don't know about rockets, but from what I hear, Elon has done a great deal for him. Good for him. That doesn't make any of his behaviors faking a buyout ok, his behavior in the SolarCity merger, or his behavior with the Boring Company.
If we want better businessmen, we have to hold the ones we have accountable. Continuing to refuse to do that for Elon is spawning generations of people like Trevor Milton who assume laws don't apply if you're charming enough.
> The conflicts with solar city were crazy - they were also public. I thought it was a terrible deal - but that was public too. If you think Elon is bad for tesla and you own stock vote him out by running your own board slate. But he has a vision for a fully integrated solar and powerwall type product no barriers. You get an app, the sun charges the battery. They had and have ideas around charging cars mixed into that. Not sure if it's a good idea - plenty of competitors coming for Tesla, but they may be able to deliver something here with their solar / energy AND car companies. And the trend is towards this type of integration - so he gets to take a crack at it.
He lied to shareholders about both SolarCity's financial state and faked a product in order to secure the merger. You can say, "these are public companies" all you want, but the public companies voted for the merger purely on Elon's word, which apparently isn't worth much.
> Importantly, you are Elon, you own 22% of two companies - Tesla and SolarCity with highly overlapping missions. You want to integrate solar / energy / cars. I mean, what would YOU do. Go do a deal with some company in China the way others have tried? These folks saying it's such a bad idea / deal - what was their much better proposal? Elon already knew the Solarcity board and management etc etc. I really am curious what was the amazingly better option to get where Elon wanted to go. Easy to criticize, harder (much) to do.
Not fake a product and lie about the financial status of my company. You know, the bare minimum.