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Tesla Facing Criminal Probe

posted by martyb on Wednesday September 19 2018, @03:09AM   
from the Probe-able-cause? dept.

takyon writes:

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.

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Original Submission

• Re:Nothing to see here (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 21 2018, @05:17AM

  by khallow (3766) on Friday September 21 2018, @05:17AM (#737978) Journal

  You can't attribute anything to SpaceX's existence that can't be attributed to a million other factors.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  Parent