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Comment by irthomasthomas | Hacker News Reader

On the subject of lying tech CEOs, will Musk ever pay for his sins?

"I feel very confident predicting 1 million autonomous robo-taxis for Tesla next year" - E. Musk 2019

Did he ever atone for this, or is he still kicking the can down the road?

Edit: I know, I know... It's not a crime until it is. Let a jury decide if Musk lied, or if he genuinely believed that his company was capable of producing 1 million robotaxis in a year. I would love to know what his staff where telling him that would lead him to this "very confident" prediction.

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Being wrong about a prediction, even being very wrong, is not the same as lying or defrauding.

By 2019 pretty much everyone knows that Musk is a person who makes extremely ambitious predictions, projections, timelines, etc, and tries to meet them. Almost anyone in that situation will have a low hit rate. There's no sin to pay for, this is how he chooses to work and structure his businesses. Investors tend to be very happy with the results. To them, making a large number of ambitious goals and meeting some of them is still very worthwhile.

If you want to invest in companies where they make no such predictions, and the CEOs are never wrong, you are welcome to buy GE and follow their CEO on twitter. He has never, ever made a wrong prediction: https://twitter.com/larryculpjr

But its aimed at Musk so no matter what it's an astute point! /s

What about making a prediction while being, as you're saying it, 95% sure its bullshit?

Is that not lying? When does it become lying, when you're 100% sure you're not saying the truth?

I think he makes these predictions based on the absolute best case scenario he can think of. It's hard to prove he had fraudulent intent unless you had communication from him that showed he knew what he was saying was impossible.

It becomes lying when it can be proved to be false. Stating that your company currently provides 200 blood analysis when it does not is very easy to disprove given insider documentation. Saying that by next year you'll be able to support the 1000 most common blood analysis is not lying, it's a somewhat of a promise but of course projects go behind schedule all the time.

There's a difference between saying I weigh less than 90kg and I will weigh less than 90kg by next year.

Because she took things that she knew to be not true and said the they were true in order to get money.

She didn't say we hope to work with the US Army or that we plan to. She said that units were in use by them.

She didn't say the devices are on the verge of being used to analyze blood samples. She said that they were indeed being used to analyze a high percentage of the samples.

Many, many other examples.

That's the plain definition of fraud.

When the speaker implies uncertainty it is difficult for the investor to claim fraud because uncertainty was expressed to them. That the speaker "knows" the 95% figure is BS is very difficult to prove and generally everyone treats it as BS/puffing anyways.

If you could easily show that the CEO saying hitting the next milestone is 95% in the bag but in fact it is impossible AND they said so to others in private then that would also be prosecutable fraud.

Seems very presumptuous to assume Musk knows that he won't hit his goals. Most people make goals to try to hit them. He probably was bent on achieving that, and hit a snag.

There's a whole thing at work here that basically goes to credibility and obvious intention.

I don't know anybody who hears Musk talk and thinks "that's a true statement." He's a circus barker. We might call him a bullshitter -- he's making a big noise, but nobody really thinks he means most of what he says.

Musk has spent years building this persona, and so people generally treat him with the level of credibility he has established he deserves.

I still think he's being dishonest at best, but the rational world's response to "gee I bet my life savings on his robot taxi prediction" would be ridicule.

Holmes presented herself at all times as deadly fucking serious, and got incensed and rage-angry when questioned. She's in a different category here, I think.

I don't think this would hold up in court, and I hope it wouldn't persuade a jury. One of the things that jumps out at me is that those two different perceptions, "circus barker" versus "deadly fucking serious", are highly subjective. Gender-biased, even. On of the things that women in STEM often complain about is our willingness to smile at a man being stern while shaking our heads at a woman acting that way. That's not to say I disagree with you in this instance; I actually see it the exact same way. Musk is a head-in-the-clouds showman type while Holmes was sober and stoic. I just wouldn't trust myself to make an actual ruling based on those perceptions, and I'd hope our legal system doesn't either.

The real difference between the two that I see is that Musk's borderline-fraudulent statements are intermingled with true statements about the actual companies he operates and the actual things they do. That's what buys you some slack to make outlandish statements: Accomplishing outlandish things. If Holmes had normalized electric cars or launched some reusable rockets, and had then staked (some of) the reputation of one of those companies on claims about a non-existent blood test, there may not have been a trial.

Well, normal human discourse isn't bound by the very specific rules of a courtroom.

I figured someone would suggest there's a gender issue at play in my distinction, and I think that's inevitable and unfortunate because I'd be making the same point if they were both men or both women.

Another factor I somehow managed to omit is that Musk's predictions are far enough off to be seen as aspirational, not statements of actual forecast. He said we'd have Tesla Johnnycabs by X date, but then no real movement on them happened, and self-driving proved harder than expected, and so far nothing has come of it. That's barker behavior. That's making noise to get headlines. I think it's still stupid and unserious and fundamentally not honest, but it's not fraud.

Holmes outright lied about what Theranos could do, and behaved (we now know) in ways that showed she KNEW she was lying and that the repercussions would be significant if Theranos was exposed, all while enriching herself from it. That's fraud.

A black swan event can justify changing a prediction. Musk couldn't know in 2019 that in 2020 and 2021 everybody would pass much more time at home, nobody would travel to the airport or to the workplace for months and therefore the number of taxi customers would run dry overnight. None of us would be able to predict that.

Stop and rethink your plan seems reasonable in this circumstances.

There is a difference between will have, and does have.

Elon Musk has been in trouble for his tweets in the past

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/why-elon-m...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/28/elon-musk...

"I feel very confident" - well you can't sue somebody for his feelings ...

Of all the things to call Musk out on (especially in comments on a case about misconduct in the field of medicine), making bad company sales forecasts is hardly it.

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