I signed up for Tesla emails in late 2006 , (i made a score and wanted to actually buy one ), here are some excerpt from their newsletters back then

"
Hi again,

It's been a busy couple of months for Tesla Motors. First we completed a short but successful spring tour of Detroit, New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago in our red Engineering Prototype. It was a great opportunity to meet many of our East Coast and Midwest customers – some for the first time – as well as meet with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and, of course, many Tesla Motors enthusiasts. Tesla Roadster in Washington, D.C.

We arrived back at our headquarters in San Carlos, Calif., in time to announce that our Series D financing round had closed with $45 million in investments, led by Technology Partners and Tesla Motors Chairman Elon Musk. The money will be used to build the company-owned sales and service infrastructure, mass produce the Tesla Roadster, and continue development of WhiteStar, our planned four door sports sedan.

Following on the heels of Series D was the public unveiling of the Tesla Energy Group, a new division of Tesla Motors that will focus on developing and selling lithium ion battery packs to other car makers. Tesla Energy Group also announced its first customer, Think Global, a Norway-based EV manufacturer, that will use a custom-developed Tesla battery pack in its Think City cars. Tesla Motors CEO Martin Eberhard detailed the history behind the Tesla Energy Group and some interesting tidbits about the development of our battery packs in a recent blog. It's definitely recommended reading."


"
Major Milestone Achieved! P1 Delivered to Chairman Elon Musk

Last month we told you that the very first production Tesla Roadster would arrive soon. On Friday, February 1, Chairman Elon Musk took delivery of the (his) first production Tesla Roadster. The jet black first production car, called “P1” internally, is significant because it demonstrates that the Roadster has met all regulatory requirements for importation and sale as a fully certified production car. Series production of 2008 Tesla Roadsters begins March 17.

Coinciding with the delivery of P1, employees and select media gathered in the shop at the Tesla Headquarters in San Carlos, California. The excitement was palpable as we took part in the first delivery of a production EV in many years. After the battery was installed [note: the battery is installed in San Carlos before delivery to the customer], Elon led a convoy of 5 Roadsters, piloted by early members of the Roadster engineering team, down University Avenue in Palo Alto. Zak Edson, manager of member services, describes the day in a blog about delivery of P1 that you can find here.

How does Elon like his new daily driver? He wrote a blog about his first few weeks with the car here."

feb08
"Funding Round Closed

As of February 19, we closed a $40M bridge financing that will be used for continued production of the Tesla Roadster, establishment of company-owned sales and service infrastructure, and development of the sedan. The round was co-led by Valor Equity Partners and Chairman Elon Musk."


"Production Update

Tesla Motors Chairman and CEO Ze’ev Drori opens this edition of the newsletter with good news. The production logjam has been broken. Nine production Roadsters have arrived in California and nearly 30 more are well into their completion. Tesla Motors will continue to deliver an average of four Roadsters per week until September – when the new gearbox and upgraded Powertrain 1.5 will enable the production ramp up to 100 Roadsters per month."

2/09

"Tesla to be Profitable by Mid Year

Although extraordinarily difficult to close, the $40M financing round completed in December was twice the amount Tesla needed to reach profitability. Moving forward two months later, we remain on track with our cost reductions and production ramp, so it appears highly likely that Tesla will meet the goal promised to those investors of becoming profitable by mid year.

The main reason for this confidence is that Tesla is already in the fortunate position of being sold out until early November, something few automakers can claim, and will soon be sold out of all 2009 production. While we have had some cancellations due to buyers experiencing personal financial difficulties, new orders continue to flow in every week from the United States and Europe. We have now produced over 200 Roadsters for customers and there are more than 1,000 customers still awaiting delivery.

Due to our order backlog, it seems that owning a Roadster can be a good investment. Last September, as the financial and real estate markets began crashing, a Roadster was sold at the Sonoma Paradiso in California wine country for $160,000, well above the current list price of $109,000. Many Roadster owners who have taken delivery of their cars have already decided to purchase a second Roadster or Roadster Sport because they like the first one so much.

The continued strong demand is driven by the fact that the Tesla Roadster has no direct competitors in the marketplace. It is faster than almost any sports car on the market (our Roadster beat a Porsche GT3 on the Top Gear test track) and yet uses less energy and has a smaller carbon footprint than a Toyota Prius, even if you assume the worst possible case where all electricity comes from coal.

I expect sales demand to strengthen further as this awareness grows. After all, what’s the point of driving another exotic sports car when it is slower than a Tesla and damages the environment? Already, the Tesla Roadster is the car of choice among the technology, business and Hollywood A lists – this year’s Academy Awards will be a lineup of Teslas – and we have never had to give a discount to anyone.

Many customers also appreciate the fact that profit from their purchase goes towards helping Tesla develop more affordable, mass market electric cars. The same cannot be said for those who buy gas-guzzling sports cars from other automakers.

And owners aren’t the only ones impressed with the Roadster. Road & Track was the first auto enthusiast magazine to perform third-party, instrumented testing on the Roadster; they were “pleased to see its extravagant claims confirmed.” The Washington Post’s Warren Brown gushed, “Wheeeeeee! If this is the future of the automobile, I want it.” Dan Neil of the Los Angeles Times had perhaps the most colorful description we’ve ever seen to describe the Roadster’s scorching acceleration: “God has grabbed me by the jockstrap and fired me off his thumb, rubber band-style. Wow.” And we’ve also had a torrent of positive reviews in Europe, where deliveries begin this summer – including a Le Monde story with our favorite headline: “Le chic électrique.”
"

and plenty of emails like that..

I consider myself an investing novice but I definitely follow tesla a lot because I think they have questionable accounting and it interest me.

Anyways, general question, if a ceo fraudulently misrepresents a material fact, blah blah, they are liable for possible securities fraud. I don't want to debate whether Elon has done this.


My question is, what if they are in cahoots with a media outlet to distribute materially misleading information? Could the media outlet get in any trouble?

Legit question that I have no idea about.

I assume that this would be considered a conspiracy to commit securities fraud and as such they would be in huge trouble.

I don't think it's absurd to draw inferences from it. It tells us something; it's a good data point. But saying that Uber SDCs kill a pedestrian every three million miles is absurd. And as others point out, since you seem to be of the opinion that (maybe you said 100% of the time—I won't bother to verify) a human kills the pedestrian in this situation also, this data point shouldn't be dispositive that Uber SDCs are worse than humans.

In your black box analogy (which you would admit is too extreme to map well onto this issue), of course I would say the new box is probably worse than the old one, but I definitely wouldn't say the new box produces a failed outcome every time, since we've only seen it do so once.

Only if there were an active conspiracy between the journalist and the company executive. Which would be totally useless, look at how Theranos got tons of good press (without a conspiracy) just from manipulating credulous journalists. So you could get journalists in the bag pretty easy just through PR and making it easy for them to get a story. But that doesn't stop real journalists from reporting on your fraudulent company (again, like the WSJ did to Theranos).

Musk has an uncanny ability of repeating the same fluff for 10 years and there's still plenty of people who believe him. The press releases from 10 years ago are almost exactly the same as their press releases today.

Maybe it's Musk's accent that throws people off?

Words, how do they work? I'm amused at the little gotcha attempt though.
Most pedestrians are killed after dark. What you think is a relevant point is utterly irrelevant. In fact, more people are killed midnight - 4am than midday - 4pm, despite there being at least 50x the cars and pedestrians on the road in the latter time frame, not to mention kids.

The point stands. The starting position here is that Uber is very likely more lethal to pedestrians than the average driver, given this one data point. You need a lot of special pleading just to get it to even money.
I think you express yourself well, and your reasoning is ok, if a little Karl Pilkington. It's your priors and focus that are all ****ed up due to lack of having the real world teach you that your mental models are worthless despite their detail. Hilariously, you don't realize this. There's nothing funnier than good reasoning studiously applied to horrible priors with irrelevant focus. I thank you for that.

He's obviously a liar and a fraud. I think even his fans in this thread would admit that now.

It's the cult of the hero imo, it's as old as time. That and aggressive PR. Basically,

Vance's biography, where he's presented as living the basement nerd power dream +
rockets +

+
constant new shiny distractions +
extremely aggressive PR +
green energy/saving the planet (the home of frauds and cons and breathless fanboys) +
mass government subsidies and ultra cheap (historically low) debt cost +
one of the longest bull runs in history, especially in tech +
the notion idiots have that the stock price rising is the market validating their thesis (observe this thread)

explains how it was able to happen.

As a con it's not even that clever. Enron did a far more impressive con. As did Madoff. And Valeant. They were similarly the darlings of all of Wall Street with soaring stock prices for years before it all came crashing down.

I think you're probably right about the accent.

The first paragraph has nothing to do with what I was saying. Or it actually supports my point. The circumstances matter a lot. As such, it is irrelevant what the number is given that a lot of miles are driven in traffic, for example.

I am not even disagreeing with the second paragraph.

The differentiation between hit and kill is quite funny given you wrote the above.

Spurious,
What the **** are you talking about? We assume Uber is driving similar miles to everyone else at similar times (some light, some dark). Per mile is just fine. In fact, Uber is never drunk or texting or bleary eyed, so it's already at a big advantage over humans to not hit pedestrians.

Per mile comparisons are just fine. Your special pleading is stupid. There's no good reason for it, and it's actually counterproductive because you're cherry picking exceptions to stuff that kind of evens out and probably evens out in Uber's favor all considered. Come to think of it, you do that a lot. If you can find a path to argue what you want to be true via some special pleading exception, you assume that's good enough. You need more real world experience bro, that heuristic is so broken it's not funny.
It's not funny at all. Here's what I said:
There is nothing inconsistent in anything I have said. Perhaps English isn't your first language so you miss implied context and read things absolutely literally. Perhaps you're stupid. I don't know. Either way, you doubling down on saying dumb things is a waste of everyone's time.

I didn't miss anything, you are back-tracking massively now. There is no implication what so ever.

I am not cherry-picking and it's extra ordinarily stupid to think that Uber drives under the same conditions as the normal population. Your entire argument is completely backwards. You claim that hit and kill don't mean the same thing while saying that 80% of people would hit at full speed and the other 20% would hit the pedestrian. I don't get why you are now trying to argue that hit and kill mean two complete different things. Certainly not with regards to the outcome.

You are incapable of following even simple conversations and logic. There is zero backtracking, every I have said is consistent.

I think you have a problem with parsing language. Or maybe you rush to judgment on contrary viewpoints too quickly. Either way, it's ****ing weird. This:
Is 100% compatible with this:
The above sentence in the context of the discussion means you that you couldn't count on your average human to brake in time [although some would] but you'd expect an autonomous car to do so given the much faster reactions possible. "Wouldn't expect" in this context means "you wouldn't fault them for not doing so", not "no one would manage it". The above sentence is contrasting the reasonable expectations we could have for each party, not making a statement that no one would react in time.

There's nothing inconsistent and no backtracking. You're just stupid. Or maybe English is a foreign language, in which case you should shut the **** up or at least assume good faith if you understand context and nuance so poorly you're constantly tripping over yourself.

For your own sake, go take an LSAT and see how you do on the reading comprehension section, you might find it educational. Nextworldchamp tried to present a gotcha on the probability argument, which would have been correct if I had said 100% would have died with a human driver. Only I never said that. So his gotcha failed. Go back and read until it dawns on you. It's all there on the last page.

This is again a stupid discussion.

No argument here. You and NxtWorldChamp shouldn't have started it in some dopey misquoting gotcha attempt that backfired, perhaps?

my post regarding your use of bayes theorem still stands regardless of your strawmanning other people's post interchanging hit/kill.

classic TS

Let's go back to your "scenario" and change 1 thing. Instead of 1 in 500 million failure rate, let's use what you actually think human's are capable of in this situation which you have stated to be ~100% chance a human driver hits this pedestrian.

Now I am really looking forward to your answer.

This i-pace waymo deal sounds pretty bullish for tesla


Said no one

This is classic Google. They try to provide the software for everyone and take themselves out of the manufacturing/hardware aspect. As if this is an unexpected move.

I think this will find support somewhere between $270-$280 but the relative strength is truly a technical nightmare for longs. This is supposed to be the time your shareholders should be most excited with your game changing product hitting the market & yet you continue to lose alpha holding on here over the past year.

For anyone in the know it's not newsworthy for tesla, but for bulls I mean what is the bull case now?

I'm more interested in the bear case of those news. I am not saying it's positive for TSLA. But come on, I don't think it changes all that much.

Remember Tesla Autopilot's concrete barrier affinity we talked about (or rather, Tesla users constantly talked about on the forums, and I quoted) a few months ago? It might have just come to fruition in a bad way. Tesla tanking right now on this:

Bear case is bulls realize they are about to be bag holders

Short-term the stock needs to go down, I agree. It's overvalued, especially given the results in the past 12 months. Doesn't change my long-term view on the company.

There is no long term for tesla

Just sold my Jan 2019 puts I got when it was at 350+. Will probably buy again if it goes back up.