Facebook Cofounder Calls Tesla ‘Enron Now’, Musk Lashes Out With Slur

A prominent Tesla critic believes the automaker may have used doctored graphs to mislead investors

Facebook co-founder and Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz compared Tesla to Enron, an American energy company that became the poster child for corporate misdeeds in the 2000s, igniting a firestorm of offensive tweets from the EV maker’s CEO, Elon Musk. The billionaire’s complaints revolved around recent information the automaker presented to its investors.

On Threads, Moskovitz accused Tesla AI of manipulating graphs to show exponential growth in miles driven by its driver assistance technology, and that the automaker’s deception was “presumably done explicitly to support the robotaxi announcement.” Moskovitz further claimed that “Tesla has committed consumer fraud on a massive scale.”

Read: Tesla Posts Largest Revenue Dip Since 2012, Yet Shares Surge On ‘Affordable Model’ News

Moskovitz pointed to charts released by Tesla that he believes are misleading, and use “very surgical graph-foo” (the practice of designing charts to confuse readers) to maintain the illusion of advancement in its autonomous driving division. The automaker’s driver assistance technology is frequently listed as one of the major reasons for its high valuation.

Although Moskovitz predicted that Tesla’s actions would end up with people in jail, it is not clear that any crime has been committed, and none of the automaker’s executives have been charged with a crime.

Post by @moskov

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Over on X (formerly Twitter), Tesla CEO Elon Musk used a slur to refer Moskovitz in response to the criticism. Although X’s owner offered an apology for the use of the word, he doubled down on insulting his business rival, calling the Asana CEO “a pompous idiot whose his [sic] head is so far up his own ass that he is legally blind.”

Moskovitz has long been critical of Tesla’s divisive CEO, and called on the billionaire to resign from his leadership positions after Musk promoted an anti-semitic post on X.

Tesla is facing probes from both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over the efficacy of a recall to its driver assistance software, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, over the way the software was marketed.

I’d like to apologize to Dustin Moskowitz 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.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 26, 2024