() – At any Tesla event you should expect a fair amount of smoke and mirrors. After all, this is the company run by Elon Musk, its self-proclaimed “king of technology,” who has made overpromising and failure to deliver a career motto.
But Thursday’s unveiling of the “Cybercab” robotaxi was, even by Muskian bragging standards, a gigantic optical illusion. The kind of show that should remind everyone that the richest person in the world is someone who promotes and seems to enjoy disinformation and hyperbole on a grand scale, whether he’s addressing investors, his millions of followers on politician who he considers most likely to agree with his increasingly right-wing and conspiracy-laden worldview.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
In case you missed it: Robotaxis, Tesla’s fully autonomous vehicles it hopes to put into service next year, were the main event. But the company’s humanoid Optimus robots stole some of the limelight as they danced and mingled with the crowd, serving drinks and miming
All of this would have been impressive if it weren’t for some small details. For example, the fact that the robots were not truly autonomous and were controlled remotely by humans, as Bloomberg reported. At one point, an assistant even got a robot waiter to admit that he was being assisted by a human.
“This was not disclosed, and many thought they were operating autonomously,” Gordon Johnson, a longtime Tesla critic and bearish investor, said in a note. “In our opinion, this is very misleading.”
The event – appropriately held on a Hollywood stage – was short on details about how Tesla plans to improve its “Full Self Driving” system, or how it plans to actually put its self-driving cars on the road.
Although Tesla fans in the crowd seemed happy enough, investors were looking for more than just shiny objects.
“Overall, we were disappointed with the content and details of the presentation,” wrote Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas. “There was no demonstration or update on the latest advancements in FSD technology, no mention of any go-to-market strategy on a ride-sharing service or supporting economic data for investors to dig deeper into.”
Tesla shares sank almost 9% this Friday.
Of course, Wall Street’s disappointment is nothing to lose sleep over. And Tesla’s spell may have only been temporarily broken, as shares began to rise on Monday. Investors continue to value Tesla more than any other automaker on the planet, mainly because they remain convinced that it can deliver on all of its big promises.
Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, was famous for his “reality distortion field,” often selling less-than-stellar products out of sheer charisma. But Musk’s reality distortion field is something else entirely, and it’s not limited to overly optimistic timelines or wild projections about Tesla’s delivery schedule. While Musk may face criticism from shareholders or market regulators for bending the truth or failing to deliver on his promises, he is free to promote conspiracy theories and far-right arguments with impunity on his personal social media megaphone. , x.
That’s where Musk and others promote racist conspiracies and false rumors about federal hurricane aid to their more than 200 million followers, even as authorities ask for help to stop the misinformation (which former President Donald Trump is also spreading).
These are not, by any means, harmless speculations on the internet.
Over the weekend, federal emergency workers were forced to halt operations in hurricane-hit North Carolina after National Guard troops reported that an “armed militia” was “hunting for FEMA.” , according to the Washington Post, which cited an email sent to federal agencies
A former FEMA administrator, Craig Fugate, told that while individual FEMA staff had received threats in the past, it was nothing like what the agency has experienced in recent days.
“This is unprecedented,” he said.
It’s not hard to understand why, then, companies advertising on administration of the old Twitter.
Although X’s policies say that content that glorifies violence will be banned and that hate symbols such as swastikas will be labeled, a recent NBC News analysis found that .
Unilever, the company that owns Dove, Hellmann’s and a couple dozen other consumer brands, was one of four companies X named in a lawsuit in August, alleging they organized an “illegal boycott” when they pulled their ads from the platform. .
In a twist, however, X dropped Unilever from the lawsuit this Friday. In a statement, Unilever said X had “committed to meeting our accountability standards to ensure the safety and performance of our brands on the platform.” He declined to comment beyond that statement.
X said in a post that the deal with Unilever was “the first part of the ecosystem-wide solution and we look forward to further resolution across the industry.”
That’s the same industry, it’s worth noting, that Musk last year publicly told to f**k off.
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