So I got some push-back for my criticism of Timothy B. Lee's Ars Technica article about Tesla, so let me list a fuller analysis of the various levels of false, dishonest and misleading factoids his Tesla articles are often riddled with.
Firstly, I value Ars Technica for most of their excellent non-Tesla content - it's the reason I even mentioned them here.
Regarding Timothy B. Lee's articles about Tesla, here's a quick list of distortions just from his last article:
The "funding secured" tweet wasn't untrue - Elon had verbal commitment from the head of the Saudi PIF, and as
@neroden pointed it out back then:
The Saudis also bought 4.9% of Tesla shortly before the $420 tweet for an estimated ~3 billion dollars - which, combined with Elon's decades of track record of successfully securing investment rounds is additional 3,000,000,000 valid reasons for "funding secured".
Timothy B. Lee is presenting this at minimum hotly contested topic with a curt and false "it was untrue" summary, which is disingenuous and creates a pattern of distortion that goes through his other Tesla articles as well.
He continues with:
'and it's illegal to publish inaccurate information that has the potential to move markets.'
This is a false statement too, it's not illegal. Here Timothy B. Lee is knowingly or unknowingly misleading about the legal standard, which is way more relaxed than that, even under SEC enforcement. There's a requirement of "gross negligence" and intent to deceive - which can be read from the SEC's initial filing.
Companies are posting "inaccurate" information all the time: predictions about the future are, according to the known laws of physics, inaccurate by definition.
Then he continues:
'Last month, Musk tweeted out a prediction that Tesla would produce "around 500k" cars in 2019. Hours later, Musk followed up with another tweet clarifying that Tesla was aiming to achieve an annualized production rate of 500,000 cars (10,000 per week) but was projecting 400,000 cars produced during the 2019 calendar year.'
This too is a false claim, Tesla was projecting to
deliver up to 400,000 cars, but this was carefully made conditional on a worst-case recession event in the Q4 conference call.
The actual
production guidance was more optimistic, 350k-500k for Model 3's alone:
Firstly, deliveries != production, there can be several tens of thousands of units difference in a global supply chain, especially if the China Gigafactory is ramping up at the same time with a lot of produced but not yet deliverable cars.
Secondly and more importantly there's also the guided 100k Model S+X production which goes on top of the Model 3 guidance -
so the true guided range is 2019 production of around 450k-600k cars.
So Timothy B. Lee is (again) presenting the factual record in a highly misleading fashion and is adding literally false snippets of characterization.
Timothy B. Lee doesn't stop there:
'But the SEC argues that allowing Musk to unilaterally decide which tweets are material before submitting them for review "renders [the] pre-approval requirement meaningless."
Indeed, the SEC noted, Musk tweeted about a number of other seemingly material topics without seeking pre-approval.'
Note how the "Indeed" from Timothy B. Lee lends support to a one-sided (and ultimately false) narrative from the SEC. He doesn't mention what Elon's filing made abundantly clear, that Elon didn't seek review of tweets because early on he decided to apply self-censorship and not tweet ANY material information whatsoever.
So basically by omitting Elon's decision of self-censorship to not tweet any material information, the SEC (and Timothy B. Lee) creates the false impression that Elon was careless or reckless in just tweeting material information and didn't
want to seek approval.
This pattern of manipulative misstatements might be genuine errors, but if we take a look at past articles about Tesla, Timothy B. Lee is erring almost exclusively
against Tesla, which suggests it is a pattern, not just the noise of journalistic carelessness.
For example note Tim's reporting about Elon's previous filing:
Here too his article is misleading about the true guidance range:
These figures aren't quite the same, as the SEC pointed out in its original filing. There's a difference between producing 500,000 vehicles in 2019 and reaching an annualized production rate of 500,000 vehicles (in other words, 10,000 vehicles per week) by the end of 2019. Moreover, Tesla's earlier disclosures actually said that Tesla would achieve that rate "between Q4 of 2019 and Q2 of 2020."
But Musk's lawyers argue that Musk was speaking loosely. They say that Musk's statements were close enough to Tesla's earlier disclosures that Musk could have reasonably believed that he wasn't providing the markets with new information.
No, that's not true at all, Elon's lawyers are arguing that Elon's "about 500k" figure was
within previously disclosed production ranges:
"Musk's statement that Tesla would make 'around 500k' 'cars' in 2019 was within previously disclosed ranges,"
Note the subtle slant accusing Elon of speaking "loosely", and the actual false statement of "close enough" numbers, which characterization appears nowhere and is not intended in their filing - it's a creation of Timothy B. Lee and falsely presented as if it's Tesla's legal argument.
Anyway, there's countless such examples in most of Timothy B. Lee's Tesla reporting ... just wanted to point out the subtle and damaging disinformation Timothy B. Lee is spreading under the disguise of factual reporting. I noticed that pattern months ago.
Also note that I find most of Timothy B. Lee's
other articles just fine, which makes me suspect it's probably not some kind of political or professional bias but maybe a personal dislike of Elon?