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Tesla Is Facing U.S. Criminal Probe Over Elon Musk Statements
Tesla Inc. is under investigation by the Justice Department over public statements made by the company and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, according to two people familiar with the matter. The criminal probe is running alongside a previously reported civil inquiry by securities regulators.
Federal prosecutors opened a fraud investigation after Musk tweeted last month that he was contemplating taking Tesla private and had "funding secured" for the deal, said the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss a confidential criminal probe. The tweet initially sent the company's shares higher.
[...] The criminal inquiry is in its early stages, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Justice Department probes, like the civil inquiries undertaken by the SEC, can take months. They sometimes end with prosecutors deciding against bringing any charges.
Also at MarketWatch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @07:56PM (4 children)
You're just here to write a novel about Musk, bashing him and his ventures. You claim he never makes a profit, except SpaceX has been for years. Tesla would have been had they not been re-investing (you obstinately ignore Amazon which has spent a long time in a similar state).
He's not perfect, nor are the companies he represents... but they've together accomplished far more than most companies ever do. They've all driven their respective industries to improve. You also forget that SpaceX SAVES NASA billions. Heck, if I have to list out everything you're blatantly ignoring to prove your own belief it'd be massive, but you're also ignoring that it's been proven by more than 4 tear-downs by 4 different entities, that they make a sizable profit on each Model 3. They also sold the most cars in the luxury market, but you're ignoring that too.
Nevermind, I'm wasting my time. You made up your mind a long time ago and will not re-evaluate because it's now who you are.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday September 19 2018, @09:07PM (3 children)
Sigh.
1) SpaceX's profit is opaque, and certainly not healthy at all. https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/11/11/will-spacex-earn-a-profit-in-2017.aspx [fool.com] but I don't claim it's a creditable source (however I cannot FIND a creditable source), and they have reported losses in recent years and there's no actual proof they ever made a profit. Certainly not enough to shout, or to avoid having to have investors dump hundreds of millions on it constantly.
2) Amazon founded in 1994. Didn't profit until 2001 (7 years, ahead of a specific plan to not profit for 5). SpaceX founded in 2002. Unknown if it actually makes a profit in those 16 years. Telsa founded in 2003. Yet to make a profit in 15 years. P.S. Just because "Amazon did it 8 years before" isn't a business plan. Any number of companies didn't profit for 7 years and then tanked.
3) SpaceX hasn't driven anyone to improve. NASA and other places just pay them to launch. And take the blame when things blow up. They are a liability sink. A very, very, very cheap one because they probably don't profit. The technology is not substantially different and the bits that are are dodgy (like trying to land the things upright, which resulted in a number of documented-but-not-well-reported accidents including the landing ships being obliterated in the process). Tesla cars are just electric cars. The battery are industry standard batteries made en-masse. The "AI" is... the same as everyone else's. Crap. If anything, like I say, they let SpaceX/Tesla take the hit with their billions in investment and "no need" to account for where the money goes and cherry-pick what works. So far... nobody's cherry-picked a damn thing.
4) Teardowns don't tell the story... Apple devices aren't worth shit in component costs, but they sell for a fortune. And Apple make a fortune. Tesla aren't making a profit. At best, they're getting 20% on the models they make (I can't find a single number much better than that). And they are sinking their money they do make into manufacturing that... well... every big car company already out-ranks by probably an order of magnitude. Tesla barely make enough cars to even figure on the charts, everywhere I look. They are small fry. And it's taking every penny they have to get close to production numbers that the big companies can roll out this year at the push of a button. Ford et al are each selling MILLIONS OF CARS PER QUARTER. Tesla don't even figure.
I made up my mind long ago that Musk is exactly what he appears - an eccentric billionaire with pie-in-the-sky dreams who sets up toy companies for things that sound cool. For which none of them make a profit worth shouting about, are all bouyed up by investment (mainly his) and which investment he doesn't understand the rules of (hence being investigated by the SEC). When he dies / runs out of money, those companies tank.
If I was a billionaire, I'd do the same, for my own entertainment. What I wouldn't do is claim it's anything other than that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 20 2018, @02:01AM (2 children)
Counterexamples: Russian and Chinese space programs, Blue Origin, ULA, Arianespace, etc. Anyone who launches rockets is now feeling the pressure to do better.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday September 20 2018, @07:35AM (1 child)
Though the make-up of spaceflights have changed, because SpaceX are launching things and didn't exist pre-2003, correlation is not causation.
For instance, Russian flights have gone from being the most numerous to almost nothing since 2000-ish. Literally bottomed out. They aren't competing and there are issues with how much they want to do stuff with the ISS.
China has ramped up, but is that because of SpaceX or because of Russia bowing out? You're attributing one drop and one boom country to SpaceX's existence with the same reasoning for both.
You can't attribute anything to SpaceX's existence that can't be attributed to a million other factors.
https://space.skyrocket.de/directories/chronology.htm [skyrocket.de]
Even in 2017 (the last full year of stats), SpaceX basically is doing a handful of Iridium's. In terms of actual payloads, nothing compared to the other countries.
Of course they are there are they are appearing on the stats and they are doing launches. But everyone else is just business-as-normal in comparison.
They are "just another competitor".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 21 2018, @05:17AM
While that is true, you would mostly wrong to do so. SpaceX does more than merely exist. It also offers the cheapest, reliable flights to space for a significant range of payloads. And while a million factors don't depend on relative cheapness, price remains one of the biggest deciding factors for who gets the customers. So we have a clear means of causation for how SpaceX affects everyone who launches rockets and needs to occasionally attract paying customers.
Even if we ignore that it's true, what's the problem? There's no contradiction here. Russia's and China's programs are different launch providers with different characteristics. There is no reason to expect them to react identically to factors in the industry.
Then you haven't been paying attention. SpaceX went from 8 launches in 2016 to 18 launches in 2017 (completely dominating the US commercial launch market BTW with 17 of 22 launches) and 15 launches so far this year in 2018. What's going on is that in a few short years, they took a large share of the launch market.
When one looks at the global industry [wikipedia.org], there were 83 successful orbital launches of any sort in 2017, including government programs. More than 20% of those launches came from SpaceX. 25 successful launches [wikipedia.org] came from China which suddenly decided to massively increase its launch tempo to 40 launches [gbtimes.com] this year (35 from the government launcher and several private launch attempts).
So not only is SpaceX doing a large number of launches now, it's doing enough that the current leader, China is greatly increasing the launch frequency of its own programs in order to stay ahead. This is just one example of how it's changing the industry.