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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has accused a Tesla employee of "quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations," according to an email obtained by CNBC. In the all-hands email to Tesla staff, Musk wrote that the employee had made "direct code changes" to the company's production systems, as well as exporting "large amounts" of Tesla's data to unknown third parties.
According to Musk's email, the unnamed employee claimed he had become disgruntled after failing to receive a promotion. However, the Tesla CEO also suggested the alleged saboteur could have been working with short sellers, oil and gas companies—whom he described as "sometimes not super nice"—or "the multitude of big gas/diesel car company competitors." Of this last group, Musk reminded his employees that, since the traditional OEMs have been known to cheat emissions tests, "maybe they're willing to cheat in other ways."
[...] Tesla has faced plenty of criticism about its ongoing troubles in ramping up Model 3 production. But that may have been unwarranted if those problems were due to sabotage. We reached out to Tesla regarding CNBC's story, but the company declined to comment at this time.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 19 2018, @11:33PM (1 child)
It can't last forever. They have to roll out some cars. If they can't hit production targets, it doesn't matter if the issue is hubris or saboteurs.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 20 2018, @06:12AM
That is true over the long run, but Elon has many more cards to play. He's a strategic thinker, and quite driven. No matter what else you might think about the guy, you have to grant him that because he's trying to change the world in material ways across several dimensions with several companies. He's a rare cat.
So I reckon he can get through this with grit and the lash. If not, he can always work out a deal with somebody who's not a competitor but who has really deep pockets, somebody like Apple or Google. That's a prospect that has to keep his competitors in Detroit and elsewhere up at night. I bet he could even finagle a loan out of Trump to get him over the production hump; after all, he's one of the very few CEOs that is actually expanding manufacturing in the US, not trying to offshore it in a hot hurry. (I suspect he'd go for Apple/Google first, though.)
Washington DC delenda est.