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Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s love-hate relationship with ‘the media’

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Negative media coverage is a fact of life for any company, large or small. However, as it does in so many areas, Tesla approaches this problem quite differently than most firms do. Conventional wisdom has long been that companies shouldn’t respond to attacks in the media, but Elon Musk never got that memo. He responds quickly, bluntly and often colorfully.

Lately, the anti-Tesla stories have been spewing forth like fastballs from a pitching machine – so quickly that you might think poor Elon has time to do little else than bat them away.

When a media outlet offers constructive criticism, Tesla often responds in a constructive way. When Consumer Reports announced that it wouldn’t recommend Model 3 because of the new EV’s poor performance in a braking test, Elon Musk immediately promised to look into the matter. Within a week Tesla had improved Model 3’s braking via an over-the-air software update, and CR awarded the coveted Recommended rating.

On the other hand, the Iron Man has never been shy about calling BS when he feels Tesla has been portrayed unfairly. To take just one example, Business Insider has been a frequent purveyor of anti-Tesla pieces, including one that claimed Model 3 production was producing an “insane amount” of scrap at Gigafactory 1, and another that accused the company of cutting corners by skipping a “critical” braking test.

In the first case, inside information was provided to Business Insider by a Tesla employee, Martin Tripp, who is now being sued by Tesla for sabotaging the company’s manufacturing software and stealing trade secrets (Tripp claims he is not a saboteur, but a whistleblower).

Above: Track testing the Model 3 at Tesla’s Fremont factory (Source: @TeslaClubBE)

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Both of these hit pieces were written by Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, whom Elon Musk has accused of acting “as an inside trading source for one of Tesla’s biggest short-sellers” (apparently a reference to super-Tesla bear Jim Chanos) and “bribing” Mr. Tripp. The Twitter exchanges between Musk and Lopez have now degenerated into an undignified flame war.

So, cui bono from the flinging of all this mud and FUD? Obviously, media outlets, of both the respectable and gutter varieties, profit from the huge appetite for Tesla news of any kind. However, it would be hard to deny that, despite the best efforts of its critics, Tesla benefits from the endless controversies in the form of “free publicity that just raises the company’s profile and drives demand for its cars,” as Brooke Crothers writes in a recent Forbes article.

Tesla has been turning media lemons into publicity lemonade since the beginning. A 2008 snarky review of the Roadster and a 2012 turd-in-the-punchbowl article in the New York Times both evolved into media coups for Tesla (in the first case, the publicity was far from free – Tesla laid out a huge sum in legal costs). Both stories are told in detail in a certain book about Tesla.

In fact, Mr Crothers thinks the frequent media clashes have become “pretty predictable and pretty boring.” The Musk vs media trope has now evolved into what you might call “meta-coverage” – that is, media coverage about media coverage, for example, recent articles in the Times and CNBC.

Above: CNBC’s “Fast Money” crew discuss Elon Musk taking on the media (Youtube: CNBC Television)

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Journalists who engage in sketchy reporting don’t damage Tesla’s brand, says Crothers. “In the end, it serves Musk’s cause to expose the media as hacks out to get him.”

When the custom-forged monoblock aluminum wheels hit the road, what matters is not the scare stories about fires, Autopilot crashes, cobalt, production problems, red ink, union-busting (we could go on, but you get the idea), but rather the quality of Tesla’s vehicles, and here even the company’s most ardent critics have little to say. The evil media, from mainstream car mags to amateur offerings on YouTube, overflows with rave reviews. The real winners in this battle would seem to be car buyers.

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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com by Charles Morris

EVANNEX carries aftermarket accessories, parts, and gear for Tesla owners. Its blog is updated daily with Tesla news.

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Elon Musk

X changed how everyone gets paid, and this lawsuit shows why

X sued a Bitcoin account network over fake payouts as its creator pay model shifts

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Elon Musk’s X has taken a Bitcoin-focused engagement ring to court, and the case doubles as a receipt for how differently the platform pays creators today. The company filed suit in the High Court of England and Wales against Vivek Kumar Sen and Zamyang Sherpa, alleging the pair ran six accounts, including @Vivek4real_, @Bitcoin_Teddy and @TrendingBitcoin, as one coordinated operation to fake the kind of engagement that used to translate directly into money.

According to the filing, first reported by Gizmodo, the accounts posted near identical “BREAKING” crypto headlines seconds apart, in one case 11 seconds, then had three more handles like, reply to and repost the material to manufacture what X called “a false appearance of genuine, human communication and interaction.” X says the scheme pulled in at least £207,384, about $278,000, and pegs its own investigation and remediation costs at another £75,000. The accounts were suspended August 18. X general counsel James Burnham announced the case on X last weekend, writing that the company “will act forcefully to protect our platform and the earnings of genuine creators.” Musk’s own reaction, posted shortly after, was three words: “Don’t mess with 𝕏.”

The timing lines up with a a recent update to how X pays its creators. The program these accounts allegedly gamed, Creator Revenue Sharing, launched in mid 2023 and paid out based on how much a post got engaged with. Originality was never part of the formula, which is exactly how the platform ended up flooded with recycled clips, copy pasted “BREAKING” posts and replies engineered purely to farm reactions from paying subscribers.

X tried patching the model more than once, including an April cut to aggregator payouts and a March regional weighting change that Musk personally paused hours after it was announced. X retired Creator Revenue Sharing for good on September 7 and opened its replacement, Original Content Rewards, the next day.

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The new math is stricter. Payouts now come only from qualified impressions, meaning unique Home Timeline views from Premium subscribers where at least half the post is visible, and replies no longer count toward eligibility at all. Copied posts, reuploaded media and reposts without meaningful changes are explicitly excluded. Allegra Jacchia, senior product manager for Creators at SpaceXAI, which now runs X’s product and AI work following xAI’s acquisition of the platform, put it bluntly, saying the goal is to reward creators who bring original ideas and perspective, “not those who have become best at gaming the system.”

Read that way, the lawsuit isn’t really about six crypto accounts. It’s X putting a dollar figure on what the old incentive structure cost, then suing to collect it right as the new one goes live. For live updates on how the case and the new rewards program shake out, follow @Teslarati on X.

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Why automakers keep turning down Elon Musk’s Tesla Full Self-Driving offer

Elon Musk confirms no automaker has ever accepted Tesla’s offer to license Full Self-Driving software.

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Elon Musk gave a brief answer on X Monday that confirmed that Tesla’s standing offer to license Full Self-Driving to other automakers still has zero takers. Sawyer Merritt wrote that “Tesla has for years openly invited other automakers to license FSD. None of them have accepted,” responding to a prediction from Boom Supersonic founder Blake Scholl that Tesla would eventually open FSD the way it opened its Supercharger network to rival brands. Musk’s reply to Merritt was one word: “Exactly.”

It is not the first time Musk has made this point. He said something similar in November, when he called legacy automakers reluctance to adopt FSD “crazy,” and Tesla has floated the offer publicly since at least 2021. Scholl’s prediction touches on something real. Once NACS became the de facto charging standard, adoption from Ford, GM, Rivian and others followed within about a year. FSD licensing was supposed to work the same way once Tesla built enough of a lead that switching made sense for everyone.

The case for licensing now is stronger than it was two years ago. Waymo and Zoox are logging hundreds of thousands of unsupervised autonomous miles, along with Tesla’s own Robotaxi fleet. Every automaker still selling driver assist systems that lag FSD has given the robotaxi conversation to Tesla, Waymo and Zoox by default. Licensing FSD would let a GM or a Ford compete on the same field without spending a decade and billions of dollars building a stack from scratch, the same argument Tesla made when it opened the Supercharger network to bring more EVs onto its chargers.

But FSD is not a connector standard. As one reply to Musk’s post pointed out, licensing FSD is not a software license the way NACS was a plug spec. It requires adopting Tesla’s eight camera layout and its onboard compute architecture, meaning a licensee’s cars would effectively become Tesla hardware wearing someone else’s badge. That is the visible obstacle. The less visible one is data. A licensed FSD stack would report back the same telemetry Tesla collects from its own fleet, giving Tesla a continuous read on how a competitor’s cars are actually driven, where they struggle, and how often drivers intervene. For an automaker trying to build its own autonomy program, or simply trying to keep its build quality and safety record private, handing Tesla that visibility could be a bigger cost than the hardware bill. It is the reason the Supercharger comparison only goes so far. Opening a charging plug cost Tesla very little. Opening FSD would cost a rival something it cannot get back.

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Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production

Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.

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Concept rendering of Tesla Optimus in mass production

Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.

Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.

Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.

New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point

Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.

Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.

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