Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a "utopian socialist." He lies about being a "free speech absolutist." He lies about which companies he founded:
businessinsider.com/tesla-cofo…
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pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edi…
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Ousted Tesla cofounder sounds off on Elon Musk, Tesla, EVs
While Elon Musk is sometimes referred to as the founder of Tesla, Martin Eberhard cofounded Tesla in 2003 with his friend Marc Tarpenning.Grace Kay (Insider)
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •He lies about being the "chief engineer" of those companies:
quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-ac…
He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:
eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-tod…
The fundamental laws of physics don't care about this bullshit, but people do.
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The Case for Fiber to the Home, Today: Why Fiber is a Superior Medium for 21st Century Broadband
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible - as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn't a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a *mule* named "Ole Bub":
newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-t…
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The One-Traffic-Light Town with Some of the Fastest Internet in the U.S.
Sue Halpern (The New Yorker)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Previous tech barons had "reality distortion fields," but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn't doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There's an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk's public lies:
elonmusk.today/
But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he's much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he's been promising "full self driving...next year."
pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/her…
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Yes, this is a thing Elon Musk really claimed.
TSLAQclacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 likes this.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •He's hasn't delivered, but he keeps *claiming* he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:
washingtonpost.com/technology/…
Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn't its cars, it's Tesla's business arrangement, the #TeslaFinancialComplex:
pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-…
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Pluralistic: 24 Nov 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Once you start unpacking Tesla's balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling #CarbonCredits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:
pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for…
But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla's got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to *1600x* its profitability:
pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoo…
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Pluralistic: 14 Apr 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •That valuation represents a bet on Tesla's ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla's batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don't *own* that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:
memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10…
That's just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for.
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Tesla’s demon-haunted cars in Irma’s path get a temporary battery-life boost – Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
memex.craphound.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •You don't own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla's shareholders:
theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243…
To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car's software without Tesla's permission. This is the root of all #autoenshittification:
pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/ren…
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Tesla remotely disables Autopilot on used Model S after it was sold
Nick Statt (The Verge)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •This is #technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek #rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:
pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-i…
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Pluralistic: 11 Jun 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.
Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there's no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device's software lets a company run *overt* scams on you.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.
But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, #Section1201 of the #DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legit purposes. That means your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how the surveillance works, the maker can be incredibly sloppy with the personal info they harvest:
cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-mode…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:
tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/t…
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Tesla allegedly remotely unlocks Model 3 owner's car, uses smart summon to help repo agent - Alt Car news
Paulo Acoba (Alt Car news)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember #Dieselgate? #Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn't have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users' privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:
pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/lux…
Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal.
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Pluralistic: 14 Nov 2022 Even if you’re paying for the product, you’re still the product – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and #NorihikoShirouzu for #Reuters reveals how Tesla created its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:
reuters.com/investigates/speci…
The root of the deception is simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can't attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.
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Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints
ReutersCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you'd immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out, you'd figure something was up pretty quick - say the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.
So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren't getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •But there's a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can't go anything *like* that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.
This creates a problem for *Tesla*: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there's nothing wrong with the car. It's performing exactly as designed.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren't broken.
This new unit - the "#DiversionTeam" - was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn't defrauding them.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs's "You're holding it wrong"):
wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-hol…
The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren't just lied to, they were also punished.
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Apple's Response to iPhone 4 Antenna Problem: You're Holding It Wrong
Dylan Tweney (WIRED)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car's range was no longer able to book a service appointment for *any* reason. If their car malfunctioned, they'd have to request a callback, which could take several days.
Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.
Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing *any* remote diagnostics on drivers' cars.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •A source told Reuters that "Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car" without any diagnostics being performed.
Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the *most* inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.
Other countries' regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than *half* of the claimed range.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively - think of #ThomasEdison, archnemesis of #NikolaTesla himself. The difference here isn't merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being - but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren't just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed - they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.
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Image:
Steve Jurvetson (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…
CC BY 2.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
eof/
File:Tesla Model S Indoors.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.orgAbe the Honest
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Thaiis Thei 𓁟
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Hugh Young
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Toot Uncommon
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Panopticola
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Ugh (“ugh”)
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Barry Goldman
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •even my old android phone which i only use for fotos and playin mp3s isn't owned by me. for a few weeks i needed to use it as a wifi hotspot thingie for my computer thus putting it online and boom, the owners rammed software down my throat that broke a lot of functions.
can't imagine owning a car that is internet enabled! YIKES
Tio
in reply to Cory Doctorow • •trade-free blog :)
I am baffled when I hear some people praising Musk, and say that he is changing the world for the better. It goes to show how "personalized" content works on those fb and the like ad-platforms, where people probably swim in their own bubble.
John Mierau
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Big Tech isn't capitalism, in case you missed the forest for the trees (courtesy Doctorow at @doctorow
"feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). (Anyone) must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.
Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there's no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you."
Fifi Lamoura
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
fluids_guru
in reply to Fifi Lamoura • • •Fifi Lamoura
in reply to fluids_guru • • •fluids_guru
in reply to Fifi Lamoura • • •@fifilamoura at the time, Lance wielded a huge amount of power. He bent the global cycling industry to his will and used his immense corporate backing to destroy the careers of whistleblowers and silence his critics with brutal intimidation.
Both Lance and Elon hid behind self-created ethical shields - “if you criticise me, you’re criticising cancer survivors” and “I’m saving us from global warming.”
Thomas Fricke (he/him)
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •@SheDrivesMobility
We have to look into the business models!
kierkegaank
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Voron
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Lizzie
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Oliver Schafeld
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •I found some quotes by Eberhardt positively reassuring.
…"Unlike so many Silicon Valley companies, the auto industry is not a winner-take-all industry," he said. "There's different kinds of cars for different market segments."
…"I think it's a mistake to think of a car as a software platform — you know, like an iPhone or something. It's not the same," he said.
…"I think the technology is way too immature to be laying on the road," he said, referring to Tesla's Full Self-Driving beta software.
fantazeur
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •then release the code and to me it seems like he shorted on twitter(buying it ) then bet on threads 5 minutes to help him build what ever he'll need for X
RodneyPetersonTalentAgency
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •GJ Groothedde 🇪🇺
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •John Shirley
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Maybe that is why he likes Trump around. A fellow serial liar.
They should write a book together, The Art of the Lie. But like all books "by" Trump it'll be done with ghost writers. So that's another lie worked into it.
Kac_Ander1
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Medea Vanamonde🏳️⚧️ ♀
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •He likes to CosPlay that he is in The Culture’s Special Circumstances division of Contact…but if that were the case he’d have been shaken down for his drug glands and wouldn’t have to suck down all that Ketamine in is Float Tank.
I’m getting a sense he’s about to cross the wrong person or Zaibatsu
skelric
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Perhaps he should be renamed as "X"?
(☑️ not applicable)
Horror Author Reed Alexander
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •PewPewMiau
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •Joe Beam
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •There’s this also
npr.org/2021/10/05/1043336212/…
Peter Principle
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Jordi (Sharpen Your Spikes!!!)
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •"Utopian socialist"
Lol. That's a funny way of spelling "oligarch".
firstprimate 🇵🇸
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •John Johnson
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Ramesh #NotGoingBack
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •A friend privately responded: "[Eberhard should] blame himself for not having covered [the points that led to defamation suit] in his agreements when Musk signed up initially. America is a land of opportunists."
1. This is pure victim-blaming — In my friend's view, even if Eberhard was a victim, it was the victim’s own fault, not the fraudster’s.
2. The last bit about opportunists is a #corrupt #distortion of opportunity.
#America — Land of #Opportunity ≠ Land of #Opportunists