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Comment by hamasho | Hacker News Reader

So I skimmed several articles and the reasons why the Theranos CEO was sentenced to 11 years are

  1. The scale of the fraud was too big
  2. From emails it seemed she intentionally tricked investors
  3. The product, medical equipment, endangered patients.

I think this can be applied to Tesla too (though I'm not sure there is enough evidence of 2). Shouldn't someone in charge be sentenced to at least a few years?

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2 more, most important reasons she was sentenced:

1. She stopped making money for rich people.

2. She herself wasn’t rich enough.

Leon is too rich, and he keeps on making money for the right people.

Right, I've also heard your (1) above expressed as "she basically stole from the wrong set of people -- rich and powerful".

Kinda-sorta off-topic (but not really), it reminds me of Charlie Javice. She sold a database of college loan applicants to JP Morgan for $175 million -- it later turned out that she had fabricated most of that data.

I think the big difference is that criminal wire fraud depends on a "clear scheme to defraud with intent". Tesla/Musk can argue that they thought they would delivery - They've been making claims that FSD was coming for years and have been slowly making deliveries towards FSD, its just that its harder/taken longer than expected and without a smoking gun (email chains like in the Holmes case) it would be very hard to prove.

They may have committed false advertising or "failed to deliver on contract" but they are civil matters, which could still involve big payouts, but not prison time.

There's a corpus of work that could help there. Tesla was forced to add disclaimers like "Elon's statements are aspirational and do not necessarily represent engineering reality", as well as quotes from him on investor calls where he's described (in 2009, I believe) FSD as a "solved problem, we're just implementing", and five years later, "Our highest priority is solving the problem of FSD". But it seems possible that there comes a time when an ambitious prosecuting attorney or attorney general pushes for this and the discovery that comes with (though I have near zero confidence that even then, that discovery won't already be thoroughly crippled by document retention policies or outright fuckery by Elon).

I'd say repeatedly forecasting "full self driving next year" every year for a decade qualifies Tesla for #2.

3 was likely in practice a reason that prosecution was pushed for, but IIRC those claims were the only ones she won on.

Think about who she ripped off and the difference will be obvious.

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