Elon Musk Running Wild | “He’s awesome! Inspiring / motivating / etc.”

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday said Tesla Inc Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk had violated a fraud settlement by making new inaccurate statements on Twitter, pursuing a contempt order against the electric car chief and sending shares of the company down 5 percent in extended trade.

By Shanks D Zoro Go To PostI love when I see this thread get a bump.

How can this guy continue to be so stupid.

By Shanks D Zoro Go To PostI love when I see this thread get a bump.

How can this guy continue to be so stupid.

By Pennywise Go To PostHe's already that rich that he doesn't care.

The SEC isn't the only one concerned that Elon Musk may have crossed the line (again) with his tweets. A group of institutional investors has sued to stop Musk's "unchecked use of Twitter" to make "repeated misstatements" they believe hurt Tesla and, of course, its shareholders. Musk allegedly violated his duties to investors when he tweeted that Tesla would make "around 500k" cars in 2019, and backers want permanent safeguards to be sure this doesn't happen again.

The SEC has already asked a judge to find Musk in contempt of his settlement after he didn't appear to have cleared the "500k" tweet with the attorney responsible for vetting his tweets.

The world, that is, except Elon Musk. Although he wasn’t asked about the Business Insider story the following day at the company’s annual meeting, he stewed for weeks, dispatching a team of investigators to try to figure out who’d shared the information with the press.
The leaker, they determined, was one Martin Tripp, a slight man of 40 who’d spent his career in a series of low-level manufacturing jobs before finding his way to the assembly line at the Gigafactory. Tripp later claimed to be an idealist trying to get Tesla to tighten its operations; Musk saw him as a dangerous foe who engaged in “extensive and damaging sabotage,” as he wrote in a staff memo. He implied that Tripp had shared the data not only with the press but also with “unknown third parties.”

Could larger forces be at work? Musk wondered out loud. Could Tripp be coordinating with one of Tesla’s many enemies—oil companies, rival automakers, or Wall Street short sellers? “There are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die,” he warned.

Many chief executive officers would try to ignore somebody like Tripp. Instead, as accounts from police, former employees, and documents produced by Tesla’s own internal investigation reveal, Musk set out to destroy him.
Tesla’s PR department spread rumors that Tripp was possibly homicidal and had been part of a grand conspiracy. On Twitter, Musk suggested the Business Insider reporter, Linette Lopez, was on the payroll of short sellers and claimed Tripp had admitted to taking bribes from her in exchange for “valuable Tesla IP.” Lopez denied the allegation.

Musk’s treatment of Tripp threatens to complicate this legal and regulatory mess. The security manager at the Gigafactory, an ex-military guy with a high-and-tight haircut named Sean Gouthro, has filed a whistleblower report with the SEC. Gouthro says Tesla’s security operation behaved unethically in its zeal to nail the leaker. Investigators, he claims, hacked into Tripp’s phone, had him followed, and misled police about the surveillance. Gouthro says that Tripp didn’t sabotage Tesla or hack anything and that Musk knew this and sought to damage his reputation by spreading misinformation.

By reilo Go To PostRich person wants to build underground tunnel to drive on to avoid sharing road with the poors.

By reilo Go To PostTheir stock is essentially where it was 5 years ago…

In the past, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has blamed crashes involving Autopilot on driver overconfidence. “When there is a serious accident it is almost always, in fact maybe always, the case that it is an experienced user, and the issue is more one of complacency,” Musk said last year.

The latest crash comes at a time when Musk is touting Tesla’s plans to deploy a fleet of autonomous taxis in 2020. “A year from now, we’ll have over a million cars with full self-driving, software, everything,” he said at a recent “Autonomy Day” event for investors.

Those plans will be futile if federal regulators decide to crack down on Autopilot. Consumer advocates are calling on the government to open up an investigation into the advanced driver assist system. “Either Autopilot can’t see the broad side of an 18-wheeler, or it can’t react safely to it,” David Friedman, vice president of advocacy for Consumer Reports, said in a statement. “This system can’t dependably navigate common road situations on its own and fails to keep the driver engaged exactly when needed most.”

Car safety experts note that adaptive cruise control systems like Autopilot rely mostly on radar to avoid hitting other vehicles on the road. Radar is good at detecting moving objects but not stationary objects. It also has difficulty detecting objects like a vehicle crossing the road not moving in the car’s direction of travel.

Radar outputs of detected objects are sometimes ignored by the vehicle’s software to deal with the generation of “false positives,” said Raj Rajkumar, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Without these, the radar would “see” an overpass and report that as an obstacle, causing the vehicle to slam on the brakes.

On the computer vision side of the equation, the algorithms using the camera output need to be trained to detect trucks that are perpendicular to the direction of the vehicle, he added. In most road situations, there are vehicles to the front, back, and to the side, but a perpendicular vehicle is much less common.

“Essentially, the same incident repeats after three years,” Rajkumar said. “This seems to indicate that these two problems have still not been addressed.” Machine learning and artificial intelligence have inherent limitations. If sensors “see” what they have never or seldom seen before, they do not know how to handle those situations. “Tesla is not handling the well-known limitations of AI,” he added.

By DY_nasty Go To PostI've been following a few of those cases for reasons too.

People are also really dumb.

By reilo Go To PostIt's definitely both in this scenario. The fact that regulators allowed Tesla to brand this as AUTOPILOT is wholesale dumb as that monicker is flat out false-advertising, and the overconfidence of drivers using this is ridiculous, e.g. people fucking sleeping while it's engaged.

BUT, for Tesla not to have resolved this issue within the last 3 years and seemingly just saying "driver fault" is quite something.

The latest crash comes at a time when Musk is touting Tesla’s plans to deploy a fleet of autonomous taxis in 2020. “A year from now, we’ll have over a million cars with full self-driving, software, everything,” he said at a recent “Autonomy Day” event for investors.

(Bloomberg) – As the challenges for Tesla Inc. continue to mount, the shares of the company are plunging sharply, falling below $200 for the first time since December 2016 on Monday.

The stock has been struggling this year, down nearly 41% to date, but the recent deepening trade rift between U.S. and China, cost-cutting moves, fallout from a fatal crash involving Autopilot and cautious commentary from Wall Street analysts have sent the shares into a free fall.

In a note Sunday, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said the electric-car maker faced a “Kilimanjaro-like uphill climb” to hit profitability goals in the second half of the year, while Needham analyst Rajvindra Gill said the latest report from the National Transportation Safety Board on a fatal Tesla crash “could cast doubt on Tesla’s self-driving capabilities, which have been highly touted by Mr. Musk.”

Tesla shares dropped as much as 7.3% to $195.56 in New York on Monday, touching the lowest level since Dec. 13, 2016.

Musk unveiled a new computer and custom chips for the company’s self-driving system at a Tesla TSLA, -2.49% autonomous-driving event last month, where he continued his bashing of lidar, a key component of most self-driving cars. “Lidar is a fool’s errand, and anyone relying on lidar is doomed,” Musk said, likening the sensor technology to an “expensive appendix.”

Musk has been called irresponsible by critics for his bashing of lidar, including by Consumer Reports. Lidar manufacturers are more unhappy. Louay Eldada, a co-founder and chief executive of Quanergy Systems Inc., a startup now valued at about $2 billion, is growing fed up with what he sees as Musk’s cowboy mentality.

A few days after Musk’s issuance of brash autonomous-car predictions and his dismissal of lidar technology, Eldada got on the phone with MarketWatch for a brief phone interview during a business trip to China. “Elon did not mince his words; I will not mince mine: An autonomous vehicle with only radar and video is irresponsible with people’s lives,” Eldada said.

Marta Hall, president and chief business development officer at Velodyne, wrote in an email. “Bravo! However, I would not trust its ‘Autonomy’ claim, because the company has claimed its Autopilot feature is, ‘Almost Autonomous.’ ”

Hall said that Tesla’s Autopilot is “NOT ALMOST AUTONOMOUS [emphasis her own] and it gives autonomy a bad rap.”

She said the Tesla Autopilot feature has grave limitations. “Without lidar, the system is missing crucial 3-D vision, with 3-D data points for collision avoidance and advanced autonomous navigation. Musk brought us innovation, but not quality when it comes to safety,” she said.

“Level 5, next year, only in geofenced areas, that is feasible. Today we are supporting vehicles in geofenced areas,” Eldada said, referring to the system used to keep self-driving cars within a specific area that the technology understands well enough to traverse safely.

“But to say I am going to sell Level 5, and deploy in say, Mumbai, in full chaos, no way. No chance. It would an exceptionally irresponsible decision if he decided to move forward with that. The technology exists, and it is being used in geofenced areas. I see one of those cars and I am going to pull over. It goes against the state of the art in this space.”

Musk added that "any fool can find out who the artist was in seconds" and that the act of crediting artists is "destroying the medium" of Twitter.