From the lead of a Times story today by Sorkin et al. (
Tesla Directors Do Damage Control After Elon Musk Tweets):
"In recent days, according to people familiar with the matter, some of his fellow board members delivered a stern message: Stop tweeting.
"Mr. Musk hasn’t heeded that advice. He has continued to post messages on Twitter, publicly plotting the company’s strategy and in some cases making assertions of
dubious accuracy."
You would think he's "erratically" tweeting away like Donald Trump (the subtext, if not the actual text, of so much Musk coverage is that he's as contemptibly unhinged as the toxic oaf in the White House). Am I missing something, because when I scroll through his tweets and replies, the only one "strategic" or remotely substantive about the go-private venture since last Tuesday was yesterday's "I'm excited to work with Silver Lake..." Frivolously, there were the "short shorts" quips on Aug 10. I see nothing else from him, on any subject, that isn't wholesome or innocuous.
This is the freaking New York Times. In the very same breath that they disparage him for continuing to fire off multiple tweets "of
dubious accuracy," the only certainty is how false their assertion is. But then it's all about "narrative gravity" (must-read essay on the subject here:
The Invisible Force That Warps What You Read in the News | Backchannel). The shadow persona of Musk as a Trumpian enfant terrible has so deeply taken hold in the media that any story that conforms to that narrative gets a free pass from editors, fact-checkers and the facile pundits who rehash the narrative on TV.
I've followed up with a "corrections" (
Corrections) email to The Times:
SUBJECT: Poor reporting: "Tesla Directors Do Damage Control After Elon Musk Tweets"
I believe there's a false assertion near the top of yesterday's story by Sorkin et al. about Tesla (Tesla Directors Do Damage Control After Elon Musk Tweets). This part:
"In recent days, according to people familiar with the matter, some of his fellow board members delivered a stern message: Stop tweeting.
"Mr. Musk hasn’t heeded that advice. He has continued to post messages on Twitter, publicly plotting the company’s strategy and in some cases making assertions of dubious accuracy."
As an investor who follows the Tesla drama closely, I was astonished by the implication that Musk has been tweeting up a Trumpian grand mal seizure of company business over the past few days. When I scrolled through his tweets and replies since Aug. 7, the day he ignited the firestorm with his "taking Tesla private" tweet and several replies to questions about the subject - all on the same day - the only subsequent tweet by Musk related to "plotting the company’s strategy" or "making assertions of dubious accuracy" was his reply on Aug. 14 in which he wrote: "I’m excited to work with Silver Lake and Goldman Sachs..."
I question the fairness of reporting some possibly inaccurate assertions by Musk (i.e. regarding the precise nature of his relationship with Silver Hills and Goldman) as being "of dubious accuracy." But more concretely, where are the relevant "tweets," plural, as reported in the Times story? Based on my review of Musk's tweet record, the sentence should read:
"Mr. Musk hasn’t heeded that advice. He has since posted one comment on Twitter in which he adds new assertions, some of dubious [unconfirmed] accuracy, about his proposal to take Tesla private."
I also take issue with the fact that the entire story is so negatively slanted that it veers into editorial territory instead of fair and accurate reporting. For example:
"Tesla has also been plagued by operational problems and it has struggled to meet Mr. Musk’s production targets for the Model 3 sedan, the company’s first mass-market offering and a vehicle he has said is crucial to company’s ability to become profitable."
This is all, arguably, true, but it disregards the fact that the months of struggling to meet production targets ended on July 1 when Tesla finally met its target of producing 5000 Model 3s in a week by the end of Q2 - a burst rate that has been largely sustained, judging by Musk's updates on Model 3 production (5000 per week has been repeated more than once) during the company's well-received Q2 conference call early this month and Bloomberg's Model 3 production tracker (
Terms of Service Violation). The latter suggests Tesla has produced 26,500 Model 3s (as of 11:30 am, Aug 15) so far this quarter, or roughly 4100 per week. For readers of your story, none of this progress ever happened - Tesla is still stuck in "production hell."
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