Is Tesla the next ‘Enron’?
Facebook cofounder accuses Tesla of being the next ‘Enron’
Business Insider • April 27, 2024 // Yahoo Finance
Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz has been a critic of Elon Musk and Tesla for years, but his latest jabs at the billionaire CEO and his EV giant were a bit more pointed than usual.
“I know I sound crazy to most people who don’t follow $TSLA closely but at this point it really needs to be said. This is Enron now, folks,” he wrote in a Thread on Friday. “It may keep going, but people are going to jail at the end.”
Dustin Moskovitz, the Facebook cofounder who later went on to start Asana, claimed in a Threads post on Wednesday that the EV maker has misled consumers “on a massive scale,” accusing Tesla of lying about its Full-Self Driving software and the vehicle’s ranges.
Spokespeople for Tesla and Asana did not respond to a request for comment.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk did not directly address Moskovitz’s allegations but instead, on Friday, hurled insults and a slur at the Facebook cofounder on X.
Musk then followed up with another post: “I’d like to apologize to Dustin Moskovitz for calling him a ‘retard’. That was wrong. What I meant to say is that he is a pompous idiot whose his head is so far up his own ass that he is legally blind. I wish him the best and hope that someday we can be friends.”
Moskovitz had not yet addressed Musk’s posts on Friday.
On Wednesday, the Facebook cofounder acknowledged the gravity of his comments in his social media post.
“I know I sound crazy to most people who don’t follow $TSLA closely but at this point it really needs to be said,” he wrote. “This is Enron now, folks.”
To recap the two-decade-old scandal, Enron, the energy giant, filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after it was caught using creative accounting (conspired with the now defunct Arthur Andersen) to hide billions of dollars in debt and lying about its sources of revenue and overstating its revenues by 95% but it took years for regulators to discover the scandal.
The company’s chief executives were found guilty of fraud and conspiracy in 2006.
While Musk and Tesla have not been accused of overstating revenues, Asana’s Moskovitz alleges they are outright lying about their full self-driving technology (FSD).
“The data is presented in fraudulent ways, and it doesn’t say what they claim it says even when they make it up,” Moskovitz wrote. “Tesla has committed consumer fraud on a massive scale, from lying about FSD, ranges, and (recently, unconfirmed!) even inflating odometers…also securities fraud.”
Tesla has faced lawsuits and probes from federal regulators regarding its FSD technology or Autopilot and its vehicle range, but there are no legal challenges related to the automaker misleading people about mileage usage with Tesla’s driver-assistance feature.
Most lawsuits have come from drivers who alleged that Tesla is misleading customers about FSD’s capabilities. So far, the company has either settled or has been found not liable.
On Friday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it was investigating whether Tesla sufficiently addressed issues with the company’s Autopilot software after its December recall of 2 million vehicles.
Tesla is also facing a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Bloomberg reported last year that federal regulators are investigating how Tesla’s driver-assistance software was marketed and if Musk had any involvement in the promotion of the technology.
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