UPDATED 22:39 EDT / MAY 17 2018

EMERGING TECH

Elon Musk lashes out at media as Tesla woes continue to mount

Tesla Inc. is in the news again for all the wrong reasons: a new crash under investigation, potential money issues and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk attacking the media.

At the top of the list is yet another crash involving a Tesla vehicle with autopilot engaged. The crash, involving a Model S that on May 11 ran into the back of a stopped firetruck in South Jordan, Utah, fortunately did not end in a fatality. But evidence has already emerged that the vehicle was on autopilot and that the driver of the vehicle did not have her hands on the wheel at the time of the crash.

As a result of seemingly yet another failure of Tesla’s autopilot feature, the U.S. National Transport and Safety Bureau has launched an investigation, adding to its ongoing probe into a fatal crash of a Model X in autopilot in March and its investigation into the death of two teenagers who died after batteries in a Model S caught fire following a crash earlier this month.

To complicate matters further, a report from the Wall Street Journal Monday claimed that company executives rejected a safety proposal by engineers that addressed its driver attention issue — the issue that has been attributed to multiple accidents — because of higher cost and a perceived lack of benefit. To make matters worse, those same engineers are said to have expressed direct concern, at an executive level, that there “weren’t enough safeguards to ensure drivers remained attentive” without the additional features.

Safety issues aside, Tesla may also be suffering liquidity problems. Goldman Sachs said Tesla may require as much as $10 billion in additional capital by 2020 to fund the company’s ongoing operations.

News that Tesla, which has never been profitable and reported a massive loss in November, is burning money and could run out of funds as soon as the end of this year are not new. But Goldman Sachs is positive on capital-raising opportunities.

“We believe this level of capital transactions may be funded through multiple avenues, including new bond issuance, convertible notes, and equity,” analyst David Tamberrino said in a note to clients reported by CNBC. “We see several options available to the company to refinance maturing debt and raise incremental funds, which should allow Tesla to fund its growth targets.”

To make matters worse, Musk (pictured) is now blaming the media for how the crashes have been reported.

On reports of the Utah crash, Musk wrote on Twitter that ‘it’s super messed up that a Tesla crash resulting in a broken ankle is front page news and the (approximately) 40,000 people who died in US auto accidents alone in past year get almost no coverage.”

He also made a reference to coverage of his hiring two interns. Musk wrote, before later deleting, that “Ford has had 3 CEOs in 4 years & no one even knows, but hey Tesla hired some interns!”

There are other examples as well, with media attention starting to shift toward how Musk lashes out at headlines he doesn’t like, such as “Elon Musk Gets Salty About Reports on Tesla Interns” and “What’s Eating Elon Musk?” His complaints have even resulted in some serious analysis, such as this article from Recode that explains, in depth, why Musk is wrong in comparing general car crash coverage to those of Tesla specifically.

Photo: NASA/Wikimedia Commons

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU