They are likely referring to Elon’s 2018 promise that people that bought Teslas could make money while they slept because people could rent their Tesla from an app and the car would return to the users driveway by the morning.
Hire cars (backed by credit card) don't seem to fare sooo bad.
Although I'd hate to argue the toss over any scratches i certainly didn't make, it must have been the last renter.
Legal minefield?
Sure but he didn't say it would happen for certain by a certain day. If he did, even then, it wouldn't be fraud, it would just be a company not living up to what they promised. Which is nothing new, nor is it fraud.
Fraud would be someone intentionally deceiving you, which in this case would be nearly impossible to prove, hence not fraud.
But he did say that [0] and he does intentionally deceive customes.
One of the key reasons why it doesn't constitute as fraud is his abundant use of "I'm confident that ____" (and similar) he uses when stating these ludicrous things. It is deceptive and it is amoral but legally it is not fraud since those are opinions and not stated as facts.
I think Elon says things fully expecting them to become true.
Whenever I hear him say "I'm confident that X will happen by Y", I mentally add "provided that every single engineer at [one of his companies] puts in 20 hour days for 2 years and manages to solve a mountain of problems that have never been solved before."
Sometimes it works, which unfortunately encourages the behavior.
A company not living up to what it promised when it is telling you to buy the product on the basis of that promise meets the first condition of fraud. It absolutely can be fraud.
The only question is whether the company or company representative making the claim knew what they were saying was untrue.
Based on stuff Elon said in the same presentation as being true as of the day he made the presentation actually being false, I suspect he was indeed aware that he was just lying, but it’s hard to prove in a court of law, and Tesla is a huge company with an extraordinarily active legal department, so it’s unlikely a customer would take him to court.
On paper, it sounds great, but it seems to miss the context of humans. Humans are a garbage species. Within a week, that Tesla would be trashed.