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To say Tesla Motors is desperate for capital would be a little harsh, but Elon Musk's company sure needs all the liquidities it can find to sustain its planned expansion for the next few years. Which is why halfway through May, Tesla sold $2-billion worth of its stocks in a public offering at a price of $215 per stock.
Nothing surprising about that, especially since it's not the first time the Palo Alto company did this. Besides, it was just about to finish its impressive Gigafactory project and start planning for the needed production boost to meet the overwhelming demand for the future Model 3 electric sedan. Cash is always welcome, but it's even more so under these circumstances.
However, we've only just recently found out about another important event linked to Tesla that happened in May: Joshua Brown, a Model S owner, died in a crash while using his car's Autopilot feature. He was the first man to lose his life this way, but ever since Autopilot became operational, everybody agreed it was just a matter of time before it happened.
Of course, Tesla took all the necessary legal precautions so anything that happens to the drivers of its vehicles will be entirely their fault, but the Autopilot is a very important part of Musk's marketing plan for its current and future models. He's currently caught up in a process of playing down the importance of this incident while also being careful not to seem insensible to the loss of a human life.
You can imagine his nerves are pretty tense, so when a journalist decided to publish a story that questions his decision to keep the incident a secret until after the public offering, he reacted aggressively. Carol J. Loomis of Fortune was the one who signed the piece, but before publishing it, he sought to obtain a reaction from Tesla as well.
But after a short e-mail exchange with a PR executive, Elon Musk intervened in the dialogue. After stating that the Autopilot incident “is not material to the value of Tesla," this is what the CEO had to add: “Indeed, if anyone bothered to do the math (obviously, you did not) they would realize that of the over 1M auto deaths per year worldwide, approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla autopilot was universally available. Please, take 5 mins and do the bloody math before you write an article that misleads the public.”
While the math is correct, that doesn't change the fact that Tesla has shown plenty of duplicity in its attitude toward the Autopilot system: the tone in the official communication is very different from the one in Elon Musk's tweets. Sure, those are one man's ramblings and should be ignored or taken as such, but this is Elon Musk we're talking about, so of course people will believe what he says. Like it or not, he's a very important figure now, so he needs to be very careful with every punctuation mark in his tweets. Because, sadly, it can make the difference between life or death.
However, we've only just recently found out about another important event linked to Tesla that happened in May: Joshua Brown, a Model S owner, died in a crash while using his car's Autopilot feature. He was the first man to lose his life this way, but ever since Autopilot became operational, everybody agreed it was just a matter of time before it happened.
Of course, Tesla took all the necessary legal precautions so anything that happens to the drivers of its vehicles will be entirely their fault, but the Autopilot is a very important part of Musk's marketing plan for its current and future models. He's currently caught up in a process of playing down the importance of this incident while also being careful not to seem insensible to the loss of a human life.
You can imagine his nerves are pretty tense, so when a journalist decided to publish a story that questions his decision to keep the incident a secret until after the public offering, he reacted aggressively. Carol J. Loomis of Fortune was the one who signed the piece, but before publishing it, he sought to obtain a reaction from Tesla as well.
But after a short e-mail exchange with a PR executive, Elon Musk intervened in the dialogue. After stating that the Autopilot incident “is not material to the value of Tesla," this is what the CEO had to add: “Indeed, if anyone bothered to do the math (obviously, you did not) they would realize that of the over 1M auto deaths per year worldwide, approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla autopilot was universally available. Please, take 5 mins and do the bloody math before you write an article that misleads the public.”
While the math is correct, that doesn't change the fact that Tesla has shown plenty of duplicity in its attitude toward the Autopilot system: the tone in the official communication is very different from the one in Elon Musk's tweets. Sure, those are one man's ramblings and should be ignored or taken as such, but this is Elon Musk we're talking about, so of course people will believe what he says. Like it or not, he's a very important figure now, so he needs to be very careful with every punctuation mark in his tweets. Because, sadly, it can make the difference between life or death.
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