Some senior Tesla executives were alarmed last year when Elon Musk denied a Reuters report that the company had killed a planned all-new $25,000 EV that investors had expected to drive explosive vehicle sales growth, according to people familiar with the matter.
“Reuters is lying,” Musk had posted on X, minutes after the story published on April 5, 2024, halting a 6% decline in Tesla’s stock. Tesla shares recovered some of the loss after Musk’s post, but the stock was down 3.6% at market close.
The executives knew that Musk had, in fact, canceled the low-cost vehicle, which many investors called the Model 2, and pivoted Tesla to focus on self-driving robotaxis, the people said. The company had told employees the project was over weeks earlier, Reuters reported, citing three sources and company documents.
How is this even legal?
And this is not the first time Elmo has been engaged in market manipulation via premeditated misinformation campaigns.
If you’re rich enough, everything is legal.
Calling something illegal has no meaning when nobody enforces consequences.
If it’s true, it’s not.
But you’d have to prove it.
Also lots of wiggle room on canceled vs delayed a long time.
I am no lawyer, but I think it possible to relatively easily prove whether the project is current or not. I mean “prove” in the real sense, i.e. any individual of sound mind would agree that it was actually cancelled and the attempts to bring in delays and so on are are malicious actions to avoid legal responsibility.
This is not a complex issue, either the project was cancelled or it wasn’t.
If they still plan to build a cheaper consumer vehicle using the newer unboxed method and they simply back burnered it a few years in favor of the shared line models then it’s not canceled. Canceled (edit or killed) is very specific. There will be no 25k vehicle using the new method they had planned.
Edit: you would need to prove it’s actually canceled and that would be difficult. There’s a lot of other less definitive language Reuters could have used that would have made what Elon responded with definitely a lie.
Edit: just an example, the 2026 launch of the 25k vehicle was canceled/ killed. That is true. Refuting that is a lie. The 25k vehicle was canceled, is unclear, although this report further substantites it.
As I am not a lawyer and I don’t support “wiggle” room judicial approaches when it comes to oligarchs (especially ones that have been caught lying in similar cases before - e.g. “funding acquired [with Saudi sovereign fund”).
What may happen in a few years is IMO irrelevant. We are discussing things as they stand now. It’s either cancelled or not with respect to short/medium term introduction.
As the old saying goes, in the long term, we are all dead.
The roadster was announced in 2017, it’s been roughly 8 years since it was announced. They are still working on it, Lars has even said he has something like a weekly meeting about it.
Is that cancelled? No. Is it acceptable for the people who made deposits? Not really.
The 25k model is using their new “unboxed” method, which the Cybercab is also using. They clearly decided to go with the Cybercab first and that’s not up for debate, but they are still designing how the unboxed method even works. As they work on the Cybercab and hone the design of unboxed, if they are continually considering how that may impact the 25k vehicle they had originally planned to make in 2026, is that cancelled?
It’s not as black and white as you want it to be.
Edit:
What Reuters said was very definitive.
April 5 (Reuters) - Tesla has canceled the long-promised inexpensive car that investors have been counting on to drive its growth into a mass-market automaker, according to three sources familiar with the matter and company messages seen by Reuters.
I think this is all bullshit for market manipulation. “Lars” can say he has three dicks, that doesn’t make it so.
Musk is a known and confirmed liar (“deal secured”), it is reasonable to assume he has a level of commitment to dishonesty, especially considering he lives in the US, where criminality and dishonesty are broadly encouraged both at an institutional level and among wider society.
You bring all this cybercab and unboxed stuff, what makes you think you are more qualified to evaluate these points than Reuters?
Are you claiming you have insider info or are you just repeating various Tesla PR copytext?
You can think all you want, and you might be right, but to prove a fraud case, you’re going to need proof.
Not my gut tells me, not anonymous sources say, or billionaires suck so it must be true. Proof. Proof is hard.
For all we know what Reuters saw was an email saying we’re canceling the 2026 launch of the 25k model to focus on the shared line models, we’ll come back to it in a few years after we learn more from the robotaxi development process.
We’ll never know because they are withholding the email they saw.
Reuters wanting clicks writes a headline truthful enough to not get them in legal trouble or have to write a retraction. This kind of stuff in the MSM is par for the course. They aren’t super trustworthy either.
Edit: also if Reuters is confident in their report and has the proof, why not sue Musk for Libel? Maybe it’s not as definitive as they wrote?
So long as he didn’t lie to his investors. Because that’s what matters.
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