“This is Enron now, folks.”
Heads Will Roll
Amidst a chaotic month for Tesla — even by its continuously plunging standards — Facebook cofounder and multi-billionaire Dustin Moskovitz has made some pretty dire predictions for the automaker, accusing it of committing “consumer fraud on a massive scale.”
“This is Enron now, folks,” Moskovitz wrote on Threads, referring to the corporation that went bankrupt in 2001 after it was exposed for one of the biggest accounting frauds in history. “It may keep going, but people are going to jail at the end.”
His concerns stem from a graph Tesla shared to mark a key milestone: one billion miles driven using Full Self-Driving, the company’s highly fraught advanced driver assist system. He then compares it with a new graph released during Tesla’s latest earnings call — an event that came with its own eyebrow raising moments.
The point of the side-by-side is this: according to Moskovitz, the automaker is wrongly recognizing its deferred revenue — revenue for a product that hasn’t been delivered, like an annual subscription fee — as earned revenue through the wider release of its Autopark feature last month. This is a sketchy move, Moskovitz claims, because an earlier version of Autopark was already released with FSD years ago, resulting in inflated numbers.
“The data is presented in fraudulent ways, and it doesn’t say what they claim it says even when they make it up,” he wrote.
Better Days
Moskovitz, who is now CEO and co-founder of the software company Asana, has a history of criticizing Tesla and its owner Elon Musk. And to be sure, his claims this time around are extremely bold.
But with all the controversies surrounding the safety of FSD and Autopilot, including scrutiny from the federal government, plus Tesla’s continued failure to actually achieve fully autonomous driving, it’s undeniable that the EV leader is treading on thin ice.
Internally, there’s plenty of strife at the automaker. In the past few weeks, three of Tesla’s top executives resigned, one of whom departed in the middle of that eventful earnings call.
And cooked books or not, some of the automaker’s metrics are looking utterly dismal. Its profits fell by a whopping 55 percent, and it sold less cars this quarter than it did in the same period last year.
It certainly hasn’t helped that Musk has vacillated on whether Tesla would finally put out an affordable, $25,000 EV — something the company’s backers have been desperate for. He ultimately, although not convincingly, landed on “yes” during the earnings call (Musk also once again teased Tesla’s foray into robotaxis, which saw its stock recover from a near one-year low.)
All of this is a questionable look for the automaker. But if we’re going claim that there’s some Enron level of catastrophic scandal unfolding over there, we’re going to need to see more than a few botched graphs. Not that we’d put lying past Musk, of course.
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