Elon Musk Takes To Twitter To Defend Tesla
The CEO of Tesla gets the fire tweets ready
The latest burn victim in Elon’s Twitter replies? Fortune’s coverage of Tesla’s stock after a deadly autopiloted car crash.
Finance journalist Carol Loomis reported that Tesla privately informed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the accident, and that the agency sat on news about the crash for eight weeks, during which time Tesla sold more than $2 billion of Tesla stock in a public offering.
When Fortune contacted Tesla for comment and tried to call him on “the non-disclosure of a material fact,” Musk replied via email that the crash “is not material to the value of Tesla” and cited the death toll of the auto industry as a whole. “[…]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,” Musk wrote.
And then Fortune editor Alan Murray learned that you can’t subtweet Elon Musk so easily:
“If you care about auto deaths as material to stock prices, why no articles about 1M+/year deaths from other auto companies?” Musk shot back in a reply.
As the Tesla autopilot crash story develops, one death very well might change the course of the self-driving car’s future.
Whether or not it was need-to-know info for car buyers is up for debate. But one thing is certain: Elon’s always down to beef on Twitter.