Name: Elon Musk Is Not Happy With Fortune's Reporting
Uploaded: 2016-07-07
Duration: 4 min 46 s
Description: Here's how he responded to our recent Tesla coverage

Elon Musk tweeted out that Fortune produced a BS, and that's a direct court article .>> Yeah >> About Tesla, what is going on here ?>> So what happened is on May 10th, a guy using Tesla Autopilot is driving down the road, and he crashes. May 7th. May 7th, sorry. Any crashes and Tesla immediately tells the federal authorities, but they don't tell shareholders. And then they sell two billion dollars worth of stock and that is not disclosed. So, fortunes, Carol Loomis, wrote an article For the website saying that they should have told this to shareholders because this is a material event that will impact the stock price. And Ulan Musk did not agree. Right Ulan Musk said that was a B S article and then Steven Geddel you write a misleading article quote unquote [ LAUGH ] according to Tesla. And now, a misfortunate article he used Yeah misfortunate. [ LAUGH ] So first of all I should say we stand by our reporting here at Fortune Yes. Right. Tesla seems to be suggesting that we are questioning the reliability of their autopilot. Is that what you're story is about? No, we just say that there's a potential for a claim here, and that seems Like a material event. They've sold themselves based on this breakthrough technology. And they said it's gonna boost sales. And here we have a major news event. Lots of papers around the country, major papers have decided this is a material event. Wall Street Journal has a big front page story about it today. Yes, they decided this is a material event, right? A big news event. So what we're saying is that's something that shareholders should know about. Right, and again, Tesla knew about it when they sold about $ 2 billion of stock on the [ UNKNOWN ] and that wasn't in their disclosure. But your story's about the fact that in the [ UNKNOWN ] filing, they did disclose that this could be a material event. So His retort to us, is why the article was BS, was because this was not a material event, and that's why they didn't have to disclose it. But earlier, [ LAUGH ] in their own filings, their own company filings, right? I dunno if it's the lawyers, the accounts Or whoever. They said that if there was fatal accident related to autopilot, even one fatal accident, even a single fatal accident, that would be a material event. And here after the fact, after it happens, that's before it happens right? If this might happen. But now here it happens, Musk says it's not material, we didn't have to disclose it. Again, Elon Musk is not here and we'd welcome him on to Tell his side of the story, but from what I'm reading in his tweets and Tesla's response, they're saying it's not material because the day after the federal authorities announced that there had been this fatal crash with someone on autopilot, that the stock didn't go down. Right? It went down in the morning and it came back at the end of the day. Is that how we should be defining a material event, whether the stock closes up or down on a given day, Ann? No, no. [ LAUGH ] I don't think so. I mean and you did see the markets react. I think you can't tell the markets what they should think, you just have to give investors the information then have them do with it what they will. But- That's what disclosure's all about right? We're gonna give you this information. You do with it what you will. I think if there wasn't an offering, I think they should disclose it no matter what, but if there wasn't an offering then maybe it's a 50 50. But the fact that there was an offering, the fact that there are new shareholders potentially coming into this A company. They should have gotten this information. Even if Musk thought, this isn't really an autopilot failure, this is something else. It's potentially an information that they should know about and I said that's why. The material shouldn't be about what the stock prices move. It should be whether this is going to hurt earnings and hurt sales. And I think this is going to cause some people to pause before they run into buying a Tesla, running to the dealership, spending 80, 000 bucks on an auto- pilot feature. Right, to be clear, we're not saying the auto- pilot failed. We're saying Tesla should have disclosed that there was a death With someone who was driving on auto pilot. That's all it was reported. No, and the other thing going on, so we have this offering, but we also have in this time period from when the accident happened, Tesla knew about it and didn't tell shareholders If we have this merger deal. Right? Where their potentially buying Solar city. So, there is a question we don't know yet. There is the question did they tell Solar City's board. They should have told them as well. Right. Interesting. So, it strikes me that there is a separate related story here that Elon Musk was very publicly, you know, going after Alan Murray our boss the editor of Fortune on Twitter calling this a bs article, saying it was misleading. that we just did it for the advertising revenue. This is again a new world where CEOs are out there. On social networks, talking directly to journalists and their shareholders as well. I think the article certainly would not have done as well as it did, had Elon Musk not been tweeting about it. But just to be clear, the headline of this story- And he has a history of going after journalists too. He does. Yes, yes, he really doesn't have the thickest skin. But so did Steve Jobs too, right? That's what people are saying, that he's just like Steve Jobs. Yeah. Is it the same thing? Well, I believe that there's an instance of them downloading. They took the record. Someone tested a Tesla and said that it didn't do very well and they took the person's driving record. I'm not sure if Steve Jobs ever went to that- that degree that level. Yeah. Okay. [ SOUND ]

Here's how he responded to our recent Tesla coverage