In Illinois today, a law firm announced they are filing a lawsuit against Tesla to hold the electric car maker accountable for a teen who died in an accident involving a car they say had a defective battery pack. Read the rest

I regret to inform you that Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk is back on his inappropriate for a CEO tweets again. Read the rest

YouTube personality Casey Neistat took a break from his paternity leave to open and test his new (not a) toy, the Boring Company's "Not a Flamethrower."

As you may know, the Boring Company is an Elon Musk entity. Its $500 propane torch (the "flamethrower") is, as Neistat describes it, Musk's "$10 million dollar joke."

He notes that it's simply a roofing torch encased in a plastic air gun shell topped with a bike water bottle holder (to hold the tank of propane), parts he says you can get on the internet separately for much less. Still, he thinks it's "hysterical" and gives it a whirl, melting the cover to his microphone.

Previously: The Boring Company's Not a Flamethrower is a joke compared to actual flamethrowers, Build your own Boring Company flamethrower! Read the rest

The value of Elon Musk's Tesla Motors dropped about $1.1 billion after the close today. When will he, and the adults around him, learn?

Welp. Friday at Tesla and at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission should be interesting. Have fun with that, Board of Directors and SEC officers. On Thursday afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that Elon Musk is at it again with the crazy tweets. Read the rest

That sure was an expensive 420 joke. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has agreed to pay $20 million and step down from his role as chairman of the board of the company he founded for three years, in a deal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The worst humiliation Elon Musk will have to face won't be the $20 million fine or the loss of his role as chairman. Elon Musk now has to have a boss. Read the rest

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against entrepreneur Elon Musk alleging securities fraud. The complaint hasn't yet been made publicly available, but likely centers on his harebrained tweeting about taking the company private with foreign money.

Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2018

Tesla shares are down 5.7%, reports Reuters. That's about $307, as of 4:20 p.m. Eastern time today.

AMAZING UPDATE:

Read the rest

Elon Musk's SpaceX revealed the name of the person who is set to become the first private space tourist to travel to the moon: Yusaku Maezawa. Read the rest

Angry that cave rescuer Vernon Unsworth made fun of his ridiculous rescue submarine, Elon Musk called him a "pedo" and, later, a "child rapist," then dared him to sue over the remarks. Unsworth has filed his lawsuit.

The defamation lawsuit will extend an episode that has made even Musk’s biggest supporters squirm, with several inside Tesla, Musk’s electric automaker, questioning why he remains so committed to doubling down on what they regard as a self-inflicted embarrassment.

Unsworth is seeking more than $75,000 to compensate for the “worldwide damage” he suffered following Musk’s attacks, uttered by Musk in July to his more than 22 million Twitter followers. Unsworth, through his attorney, said Musk’s claim was baseless and lacked evidence.

“Elon Musk falsely accused Vern Unsworth of being guilty of heinous crimes,” Unsworth’s attorney, L. Lin Wood, said in a statement. “Musk’s influence and wealth cannot convert his lies into truth or protect him from accountability for his wrongdoing in a court of law.”

A similar lawsuit was filed in London, where libel laws are more plaintiff-friendly. Unsworth is British, though, and Musk's remarks are completely bonkers, so it's not as if Unsworth is forum-shopping.

Even if Musk has some oppo-research dirt on Unsworth he's been sat on all this time, and there's no evidence at all that he has, what's the point? Musk's behavior has the air of pathology about it in general, and this only reminds everyone of the whole of it. Read the rest

I own a propane torch, so I know one when I see one. The Boring Company's Not a Flamethrower? It's definitely a propane torch... which, I suppose, means that Musk's marketing department is pretty much on the mark.

To drive the point of the Not a Flamethrower's not being a flamethrower home, the folks at DriveTanks.com subjected the Not a Flamethrower to the Pepsi challenge against a Vietnam-era M9 flamethrower and a XM34. Seeing how much more destructive these two weapons are compared to Musk's torch makes me glad that it's definitely not a flamethrower that the Boring Company was selling. Read the rest

“I suggest that you call people you know in Thailand, find out what’s actually going on and stop defending child rapists, you fucking asshole.” — Elon Musk, September 4, 2018, to Buzzfeed News. Read the rest

The first paragraphs in this Wall Street Journal story about the Tesla CEO's ego problems are absolutely b🔥o🔥n🔥k🔥e🔥r🔥s.

During a tour this spring at Tesla Inc.’s electric-car factory in Fremont, Calif., Elon Musk asked why the assembly line had stopped. Managers said automatic safety sensors halted the line whenever people got in the way.

Mr. Musk became angry, according to people familiar with what happened. His high-profile gamble on mass-producing electric cars had lagged behind since production began, and here was one more frustration. The billionaire entrepreneur began head-butting the front end of a car on the assembly line.

“I don’t see how this could hurt me,” he said of vehicles on the slow-speed line. “I want the cars to just keep moving.”

When a senior engineering manager involved with the system explained that it was a safety measure, Mr. Musk told him, “Get out!” Tesla said the manager was fired for other reasons.

Goaded by a tweet from writer Drew Olanoff, Tesla CEO Elon Musk again insinuated that the cave diver who mocked him during the Thailand cave rescue operation is a pedophile. Read the rest

Hoo boy. Read the rest

Tesla's Fremont, California factory is said to be running normally again, after a fire broke out Thursday around 5:20PM. No flamethrowers involved. Read the rest

An employee who was fired from Tesla's battery factory in Nevada has filed a whopper of a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In it, the former employee accuses Elon Musk's company of spying on employees' cellphones, and failing to act after discovering that a Mexican drug cartel may be dealing meth at the 'Gigafactory'. Read the rest

Elon Musk, an avowed utopian anarchist, is one of the top fifty donors to the Republican Protect the House PAC, having funneled $38,900 to support the group's mission of protecting Republican Congressional seats. Read the rest

Well, this should soften Elon Musk’s opinions about journalism: According to Engadget, Musk’s electric car-making baby, Tesla Motors, has had to return almost one quarter of the pre-order money it received from its American customers for the company’s delayed Tesla Model 3.

From Engadget:

Tesla raked in hundreds of thousands of pre-orders for its Model 3 after it unveiled the vehicle in 2016, but a report from analytics firm Second Measure shows that a good chunk of US pre-orders have since been refunded. As of April, the company's analysis shows that 23 percent of those who placed a pre-order in the US have had their $1,000 deposit refunded. A Tesla spokesperson told Recode that Second Measure's findings didn't match the automaker's own numbers, but declined to say by how much they were off. However, last August, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that 12 percent of reservations had been cancelled at the time – data that aligned with Second Measure's analysis.

Engadget’s Mallory Locklear reckons that the rampant production delays associated with the Model 3’s production are a viable culprit for the refund requests. That said, buying any new car, let alone a premium ride like the ones that Tesla offers, is an expensive undertaking. A person’s fortunes can turn pretty quickly within the space of a few months. Having the money to be able plunk down a grand to reserve the right to purchase a new car back then doesn’t translate into being flush enough to seal the deal now. Read the rest