Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaxn | Hacker News Reader

Unless Tesla is interested in adding social networking / messaging features to the car interface.

It’s not hard to envision a potential business case

It doesn’t work that way. Period.

Musk’s job as CEO is to work in the best interests of the company. Using the company's resources to buy/build a completely unrelated entity for his personal gain is most definitely not ok.

If he wanted to do what you’re saying (enrich Tesla with those features), Tesla should be buying Twitter. The scenario you're presenting, by the way, is exactly how Facebook/Meta acquired Instagram. However Facebook acquired Instagram, not Zuckerberg personally.

Who is going to stop him? No one. Nothing matters anymore.

Apparently it's completely legal, though (IANAL). It's just like being a contractor on the side.

Elon Musk didn't commit a criminal offense here, no. No one is claiming he has.

But he almost certainly acted against the interests of the company he was hired to shepard and committed a civil offense against the shareholders.

For sure the tesla stock is going to plunge because a few guys took time off to come assess twitter...

Unless the Tesla engineers also can learn a thing or two from the internals of Twitter and bring back to benefit Tesla. Or they are planning to do things that will benefit both parties in the long run

I think the fact that he’s taking Twitter private allows him to do what he wants. It won’t be publicly traded soon.

But Tesla is public, that’s the interest here.

I don't see your "Period" here. Perhaps it is in best interest of both Tesla and Twitter to cooperate on some topics, but not to the degree of acquisition of one by another.

Remember that SpaceX and Tesla do have a common VP for material engineering, Charles Kuehmann? It makes sense for them to share knowledge on materials.

In the same way, there may be a cause for sharing software engineering resources/know-how between Tesla and Twitter without actually merging the entire companies into one behemoth.

That’s not “unless” - it’s a translate post hoc rationalization. It’s a stretch that they’d be working on that feature - considering the distracted driving problem it’s something of a liability - but even if they were, that might mean that you send a couple of people from that specific team to talk APIs or something. Pulling random engineers over to review things outside of their specialty doesn’t make any sense.

Not to be used while driving. Tesla has a bunch of built in apps not to be used while driving. Ex: TikTok and Netflix.

Yes, and people use them while driving because the vehicle doesn’t prevent it. You can get away with that kind of legal attempt to dodge responsibility but at some point public awareness catches up with you, similar to how telling people to drive safely wasn’t enough to avoid generations of safety technology becoming legally required.

That's not true, the car does prevent it.

Maybe it’s easy to disable? The guys I see commuting to work with action movies on those giant dashboard TVs are all driving Teslas.

Great, next my car will be Tweeting all the real time telemetry (I405 North, by exit 18, lane #1, 81mph, throttle at 61%, 4 hands-off-steering-wheel events detected in the last hour, and 2 eye tracking sync failures due to checking out the sports car in lane #2".

Musk, being Musk, will find this amusing and start auto-tweeting "Kill" videos of Tesla's racing with other cars on the freeway."104 Z06 kills on the West Coast Today!".

I405 North, by exit 18, lane #1, 81mph, throttle at 61% - by the end of the year this car will be able to take drive using self driving

Self tweeting coming soon - self driving by the end of next year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com