Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Articles re Tesla—Fact or Fiction?

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
This is hilarious because it seems you are looking at things with your agenda just like my Tesla hating friends who say Musk only hates the media because they expose his dependency on gov't subsidies.

"The media sucks...when they're attacking the guy I like. When they're attacking the guy I don't like, they're being honest."

LOL. There's a reason I rarely read anything you post. I think I'll continue that habit.

Your bias causes you to miss the point, typically. When we know the facts about Elon and Tesla we can see the deception in the media when they are innacurate. When we know the facts about "other" matters and they match up with what the media is reporting we know they are accurate.
 
When members of the media are dishonest that's how they should be labeled. There is literally no other word which would be more accurate.
Do you mean "some" members of the media are dishonest ? Or did you mean ALL members of the media are dishonest ?

This is exactly what I'm talking about … you have to be careful.

Just say "media that is dishonest" or "journalists who are dishonest".

OT : When Trump says media is the enemy of the people, his base cheers. But they never think it includes Fox News ! I wonder why ...
 
  • Like
Reactions: neroden
Your bias causes you to miss the point, typically. When we know the facts about Elon and Tesla we can see the deception in the media when they are innacurate. When we know the facts about "other" matters and they match up with what the media is reporting we know they are accurate.

Apparently, it is YOUR bias that has blinded you because I HATE Donald Trump and LOVE Tesla/EM. I not only own TSLA stock, I own a Tesla Model S. Do you? What bias are you referring to?

I was just blessed to be born with the ability to be objective - a trait I rarely see in people. And absolutely never in your posts.

PS. Everyone believes what they "know" to be fact. Your facts aren't necessarily right because you believe they are. I know that's difficult for you to believe or accept (or even consider). You are no different than the idiots I argue with in the comments section of Fox News articles. They are convinced that what they believe and "know" is 100%, total facts. Like you, they know everything they will ever know because they already believe they know everything.
 
This is hilarious because it seems you are looking at things with your agenda just like my Tesla hating friends who say Musk only hates the media because they expose his dependency on gov't subsidies.

"The media sucks...when they're attacking the guy I like. When they're attacking the guy I don't like, they're being honest."

LOL. There's a reason I rarely read anything you post. I think I'll continue that habit.
You don't have to read my posts. Just correlate when there is an outburst on Twitter by Trump and recently published negative report on his administration in high profile media. Funny how Trump picked up a phrase made famous by Stalin.

BTW, this is what Trump himself said about why he attacks media.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/trump-fake-news-leslie-stahl

"There were no cameras, there was nothing going on," Stahl said, when she began to ask Trump about his attacks on reporters. "And I said, 'You know, that is getting tired. Why are you doing this? You're doing it over and over and it's boring, and it's time to end that. You won the nomination.'"


"And he said, 'You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all, and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.' He said that."
 
  • Like
Reactions: neroden
Joe Nocera's survey article in Bloomberg at year's end is pretty hard. In concert with the article's title: Trump, Musk, Ghosn and other tragedies: 2018 in Review, he pillories Mr Musk because...why? Seems to be because he's no longer Board Chmn. Nocera was incapable of finding any accomplishments to weigh against that.
 
When members of the media are dishonest that's how they should be labeled. There is literally no other word which would be more accurate.
Yes. But EVNow is correct in saying that the statement "dishonest media" could be interpreted as saying that all media is dishonest.
Unless you wish it interpreted that way you need to remove the ambiguity. E.g. the dishonest part of the media.
 
Apparently, it is YOUR bias that has blinded you because I HATE Donald Trump and LOVE Tesla/EM. I not only own TSLA stock, I own a Tesla Model S. Do you? What bias are you referring to?
I didn't mention Trump, but typically you jumped to a conclusion, in your oh so "objective" manner, and went off on a rant, as usual.
I always look at the facts and am quite capable of changing my opinion in the face of new information.
 
  • Like
Reactions: AndreN
A lot of it is because EM went after journalists - that equated him to Trump. EM went so far as to say he will start a "Pravda" website to fact check journalists.

OT :

BTW, anyone following the '16 Dem primary knows how badly biased the MSM is. They always wrote bad things about Bernie. The '20 primary hasn't even started, but they are already going after Bernie with FUD articles - and trashing a real investigative journalist David Sirota for pointing to the pro-oil voting record of Beto (duh, he is from TX and married to a billionaire heiress) .

View attachment 365203

I do like talking about this, but, because it's normally taboo and with people paying less attention, please ignore any extra bite in anything I write... glad to be able to discuss it with folks like you here at TMC EVnow.

Can't believe how much I can disagree with your first paragraph and how much I can agree with the second paragraph all at once.

Much of the media tried to discredit Elon by trying to convince the public his criticism was equivalent to Trump's. Guess what... if Bernie criticizes the media, they'll probably write about "his Trump-like ego issues." What's more I saw at least one article (NYT IIRC) asserting that Musk was talking about making himself the arbiter of 'good/bad' journalism like an old school dictator, when his actual idea was crowd sourced public rating.
 
  • Like
Reactions: neroden
Not advocating to bend the knee.

But, we need to understand why journalists have soured against EM. Using the language Trump uses is not helpful if he wants to point inaccuracies. He should ask Tesla comms team to do a point by point rebuttal of wrong articles instead of waging a general war against all journalists, good and bad.

Remember, it helps Trump but hurts Tesla.

If the errors were oversights, that approach could work.

After watching Tesla/Elon media coverage (and Bernies as well for that matter) I'm extremely confident that in the overwhelming majority of cases these are not errors... but willful trolling, attempts to deeply erode publics sentiment and confidence in Elon, Tesla, and their products.

Advising the Tesla comms team to do a point by point rebuttal of wrong articles would be like telling a kid being bullied and beat up at school to tell those hitting him, "fellas, when you punch me it hurts and I feel insecure about being here at school... you know, bad stuff... so, stuff you guys should stop doing."
 
  • Like
Reactions: neroden
Remember, behind the journalists are the editors. They call the shots, and they determine what gets in or not in, in the corporate media. So apply the question to editors. I wonder if it is simply that they made a decision a while ago that all things Elon/Tesla should be considered entertainment not hard news, kinda how for a while HuffPost put pre-election Trump campaign news into their entertainment section rather than politics/national news. I would love to know, and am hoping one day to find out, for instance, if Broder, now on the NYT Editorial Board, is the guiding hand behind some of the more atrocious articles that have come out since last summer, including the anti-Tesla op-eds.

After nearly 7 years watching all of this escalate, I'm about 99.95% confident it is not simply "entertainment" "click-bait" distortion.

Given the amount of money at stake in Tesla's almost certain disruption, given the amount of ridiculously twisted coverage we see from the shabby to the once thought of as respectable

-like 60 Minutes editing Elon's meaning by snipping video, or,

-the NYT actually setting up some quotes from Mark Spiegel by writing that unlike some rabid people on twitter, Spiegel is a staid, seasoned and measured investor (pretty much as if the NYT had done Trump's work for him and written that Trump's greatest strength was his temperament)).

Given awareness of all of that, I think one would have to be a conspiracy theorist to claim that Tesla's media coverage was simply generic, click-bait influenced contemporary media coverage, and not impacted by game-playing to try to please massive concentrated wealth.
 
Editors is the key. Lora and Dana often have positive articles, but seem to have to post boilerplate, erratic Elon bs. Probably doesn't help that they get beat up for some of the BS in their otherwise positive articles.

Take a look through their twitter feeds through the whole Tesla bankruptcy "reefer madness" of last spring. Unless the editor's have the reigns of their twitter feed, they are not simply having their work twisted by editors.
 
My thoughts are that the only way to combat the FUD is for Tesla to succeed. In 2018 almost every article I read on CNN/NYT/Bloomberg always prefaced Tesla with "money losing Tesla..." Bloomberg even had a animated graphic with Musk throwing money into the fire. In Q3 2018 Tesla took that away from them with their gangbuster quarter.

Another example in practice: The Gigafactory was a risky move that critics argued could bankrupt Tesla, but has been transformed into a brilliant business decision that is key to Tesla margins and ability to scale EV production.

I also agree with others that mentioned the state of online media having reduced the game to who gets the most clicks and ad views. Case in point, one of my favorite blogs arstechnica.com This is a tech blog, yet there's been no reporting on any of the cool tech this year when it comes to Tesla, from V9 software upgrades to Model 3 reviews. Almost every article is a FUD headline and is designed to drive clicks ad views and interactions (like comments). Their main auto reviewer has lamented several times that the reason they have not done a Model 3 review is that Tesla has not offered them a review car even though they have asked many times. (Seems obvious to me as to why)

I think the motivation for these sites is mostly financial as the controversy boosts the bottom line. It reminds me of the time when the platform wars waged over Apple vs Wintel (Microsoft & Intel). But there's another aspect that I think plays a part and that's that Tesla's priced the Model 3 at a price point higher than most of these tech writers can afford which at least subconsciously makes it a car for the elite, which brings out the hate.


Tesla had it's 2019 avg EPS numbers TRIPLED by the 20 plus analyts covering it in a matter of 2-4 months. I'm skeptical as to whether any company with a market cap of Tesla's scale ($40 billion at the low point of that period) has seen that happen before. If it has happened, I'm willing to bet that feat of avg forward year EPS being tripled had a torrent of positive coverage... because that is a sensational scale of upward revision for any company, and an ubersensational scale for an already quite large company.

I am not aware of ANY mainstream media coverage of that event. I don't buy even a little bit the notion that the quality of Tesla's media coverage is simply a product of media sensationalism for clicks.
 
That is not the only meaning of dishonest media. It could be construed as a generic attack. You have to be careful when using the exact same language as fascists do.

Listen to Kara's Recode interview again.

Kara's relevant comments in the recode interview were painful to listen to.

She knee-jerkingly acted as if journalists were by default to be believed rather than anyone questioning any of the statements they've blared through their massive loudspeakers. That is "Trumpian" itself. She then implored Elon to reflect on his behavior after having exhibited not a scintilla of self-reflection about the ridiculously glaring, many years long, intellectually dishonest coverage of Tesla by so many in her knee-jerk defended profession.
 
  • Like
Reactions: landis and JRP3
last bit on all of this for today



  • Donald Trump
  • The majority of corporate media
  • Elon Musk

two out of three of the above are flooding the public conversation with a massive amount of bullshit on basically a daily basis.
 
  • Like
Reactions: JRP3
Advising the Tesla comms team to do a point by point rebuttal of wrong articles would be like telling a kid being bullied and beat up at school to tell those hitting him, "fellas, when you punch me it hurts and I feel insecure about being here at school... you know, bad stuff... so, stuff you guys should stop doing."

I agree with everything else you've written on this topic other than the above. When Elon/Tesla have released statements the media has picked it up and spread the message. Unlike a weak kid Elon/Tesla have power, I think they should use it more.
 
...
-the NYT actually setting up some quotes from Mark Spiegel by writing that unlike some rabid people on twitter, Spiegel is a staid, seasoned and measured investor (pretty much as if the NYT had done Trump's work for him and written that Trump's greatest strength was his temperament)).....
Did that indeed happen? Can you reference it?
 
Did that indeed happen? Can you reference it?

exactly as published including these two paragraphs coming in sequence, the second of the two being the first mention of Spiegel (link below),

“There’s no doubt Tesla and Mr. Musk, the company’s high-profile chief executive, have plenty of detractors, especially on Twitter, where some critics trumpet vitriol and unsubstantiated information about the company and its business. But many of those who believe that Tesla is destined for a major restructuring — or even collapse — are buttoned-up investors. They base their view not on antipathy for Tesla or Mr. Musk, but on cold financial calculations, including its heavy debt load and voracious cash burn.

“This isn’t only about Musk,” said Mark B. Spiegel, a managing partner at Stanphyl Capital, which has a large position shorting Tesla. “It’s about a terrible capital structure, because of the debt, and a stock price that is out of whack with the demand for the product and the competition that’s coming in.””

Betting Against Tesla: Short-Sellers Make Their Case


don’t forget, in the years since th me NYT’s Public Editor had to investigate and find “problems with precision and judgement” in John Broder’s NYT story of being stranded with a Model S out of juice,

1. The public editor position was eliminated at the NYT

2. Broder was promoted to the NYT editorial board.
 
exactly as published including these two paragraphs coming in sequence, the second of the two being the first mention of Spiegel (link below),

“There’s no doubt Tesla and Mr. Musk, the company’s high-profile chief executive, have plenty of detractors, especially on Twitter, where some critics trumpet vitriol and unsubstantiated information about the company and its business. But many of those who believe that Tesla is destined for a major restructuring — or even collapse — are buttoned-up investors. They base their view not on antipathy for Tesla or Mr. Musk, but on cold financial calculations, including its heavy debt load and voracious cash burn.

“This isn’t only about Musk,” said Mark B. Spiegel, a managing partner at Stanphyl Capital, which has a large position shorting Tesla. “It’s about a terrible capital structure, because of the debt, and a stock price that is out of whack with the demand for the product and the competition that’s coming in.””

Betting Against Tesla: Short-Sellers Make Their Case


don’t forget, in the years since th me NYT’s Public Editor had to investigate and find “problems with precision and judgement” in John Broder’s NYT story of being stranded with a Model S out of juice,

1. The public editor position was eliminated at the NYT

2. Broder was promoted to the NYT editorial board.

In addition, just the idea that a guy who manages a few million dollars out of his apartment (a recent article showed him working on his laptop in the bathroom), and loses money at it, should been given press time and interviews as if he’s some kind of authority just bewilders me. Really?
 
  • Like
Reactions: neroden
Much of the media tried to discredit Elon by trying to convince the public his criticism was equivalent to Trump's. Guess what... if Bernie criticizes the media, they'll probably write about "his Trump-like ego issues." What's more I saw at least one article (NYT IIRC) asserting that Musk was talking about making himself the arbiter of 'good/bad' journalism like an old school dictator, when his actual idea was crowd sourced public rating.

Basically, many journalists think they are sacred cows that shouldn't be criticized and if you do it, you are automatically rabid Trump supporter.

This attitude... is not helpful.