Tesla sues ex-employee for hacking and theft. But he says he's a whistleblower
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
I'm willing to listen, but he's got miles to go before his claims are more than hot air.
The interesting thing about this story is that both Tesla and Tripp should have irrefutable evidence to back up their version of the story, and it just remains to be seen who releases it.
If it’s true, someone got that data and should be building the story. If it isn’t, Tesla can prove pretty easily that the data is truly trade secrets and his whistleblower story is no longer makes sense.
I think it's more likely that a lot of Tesla's side is spin to cover safety problems. But I still have no idea what the real story is either way.
It's something we do as a culture: pump people up to celebrity status and then ritually sacrifice them (or their character at least). We do it to our celebrities and sometimes political figures too. It's our version of the old wicker man ceremony. Maybe it guarantees a bountiful harvest.
Neither the hero worship of Musk nor the vilification is true. He's not superhuman. He can be an asshole and he overpromises and makes mistakes. But he's also someone with a record of taking on soul crushingly difficult problems and delivering major advances, and while he might be a hard driver he does not trip my sociopath alarm.
In short he is an ambitious human who tries to lead immensely hard projects and sometimes succeeds.
Seriously. Mass producing an ambitious new kind of car and reusable rockets. Those are literally two of the hardest things I can think of to attempt. Any degree of success in either is miraculous. He's succeeded to some extent leading Tesla and to a (IMHO) greater extent with SpaceX. That is pretty incredible.
I get the sense that Tesla is really in trouble. Personally I'd be happy to see Elon sell it and double down on space. I think that's his true love anyway. Electric cars have enough momentum now they will tip with or without him.