Elon Musk expands his misinformation empire

Analysis by Allison Morrow, CNN

New York (CNN) – At any Tesla event, you should expect a fair amount of smoke and mirrors. After all, this is the company run by Elon Musk: his self-anointed Technoking, who has made his career theme over-the-top and under-delivered.

But Thursday’s unveiling of the “Cybercab” robotaxi was, even by Musk’s standards of swagger, a giant optical illusion. The kind of show that should remind everyone that the richest person in the world is someone who promotes and seems to enjoy disinformation and hyperbole on a massive scale, whether he’s talking to investors, his millions of followers on X or whichever politician he thinks is most likely to do so. in accordance with his increasingly right-wing and conspiracy-laden worldview.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

ICYMI: Robotaxis, Tesla’s fully driverless vehicles it hopes to put into service next year, were the main event. But the company’s Optimus humanoid robots stole some of the spotlight as they danced and mingled with the crowd, pouring drinks and playing charades.

All of this would have been impressive if not for a few liiiitttle things Like, the fact that the robots weren’t really autonomous and were being operated remotely by humans, which was first reported by Bloomberg. At one point, an attendant even got a waiter bot to admit it was being attended by a human.

“This was not disclosed, and many thought they were operating autonomously,” Gordon Johnson, a longtime Tesla short seller and critic, said in a note Monday. “In our view, it is a lot misleading”.

The event, most appropriately held on a Hollywood stage, was light on how Tesla plans to improve its “fully self-driving” system, or how it plans to get its driverless cars on the road.

While the Tesla superfans in the crowd seemed happy enough, investors were looking for more than shiny objects.

“We are generally disappointed with the substance and detail of the presentation,” wrote Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas. “There was no demonstration or updates of the latest developments in FSD technology, no mention of a strategy to go to market in a ride-sharing service or to support financial contributions for investors to investigate.”

Tesla shares sank nearly 9% on Friday.

Of course, Wall Street’s disappointment is nothing to lose sleep over. And Tesla’s spell may have been broken only temporarily, as shares started to gradually rise on Monday. Investors still value Tesla more than any other automaker on Earth, mainly because they’re still convinced it can deliver on all the big promises.

Spreading misinformation about hurricane relief

Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, was famous for his “reality distortion pitch” that often sold less-than-stellar products on sheer charisma. But Musk’s field of reality distortion is something else, hardly limited to overly optimistic timetables or sky-high projections for Tesla’s delivery schedule. While Musk might face some pushback from shareholders or market regulators for stretching the truth or not keeping his promises, he is free to promote conspiracy theories and far-right talking points with impunity on his own megaphone social media staff, X.

That’s where Musk and others are pushing racist conspiracies and false rumors about federal hurricane relief to their more than 200 million followers, even as officials plead for help to stop the misinformation (which former President Donald Trump is also spreading) .

This is far from a harmless reflection on the Internet.

Over the weekend, federal emergency workers were forced to halt their crash in North Carolina after National Guard troops reported an “armed militia” was “hunting FEMA,” according to the Washington Post, which cited an email to federal agencies.

A former FEMA administrator, Craig Fugate, told CNN that while individual FEMA personnel have received threats in the past, it’s nothing like what the agency has experienced in recent days.

“This is unprecedented,” he said.

Unilever is back

It’s not hard to see why, then, companies that advertise on X might be uncomfortable having, say, ads for Dove body wash alongside posts from Musk or any number of pro-Nazi direct accounts that thrive under the its management of the first. Twitter.

Although X’s policies say that content glorifying violence will be banned and that it would apply tags to hate symbols, such as swastikas, a recent analysis by NBC News found that X “does not appear to be enforcing these policies of coherent way”.

Unilever, the company that owns Dove, Hellmann’s and a couple of dozen other consumer brands, was one of four X companies named in a lawsuit in August, alleging that they conducted an “unlawful boycott ” when they pulled their ads from the platform.

In a twist, however, X dropped Unilever from the suit on Friday. In a statement, Unilever said X had “committed to our standards of accountability to ensure the safety and performance of our brands on the platform.” He declined to comment beyond that statement.

X said in a post that the deal with Unilever was “the first part of the ecosystem-wide solution and we look forward to further resolution across the industry.”

This is the same industry, it’s worth noting, that Musk last year publicly told them to make themselves.

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