[LanceJones]

I really used to enjoy Fred's writing on Electrek. But after the Roadster referral debacle, Fred's tune changed and has gotten more negative... so negative now that you cannot find any positive articles about Musk or Tesla (some articles you might classify as 'neutral'). If you look at comment counts, it's clear Fred is playing to the "I hate Musk" crowd now for clicks (comments and clicks have similar outcomes for Google Adsense). Electrek's other articles' comment counts pale in comparison. So the incentive is pretty obvious now. Too bad.

[Veserv]

I find it funny how stealing 500,000 $ from a fan is a "debacle". In most places that would be considered a felony instead of a justification to smear the victim and call them a whiner.

[LanceJones]

You think $500K was stolen? Hmm, doesn't sound hyperbolic at all...

[Veserv]

You are totally right. In accordance with the Tesla Referral Program contract a estimated ~250,000,000 $ in sales were referred to Tesla by major referrers earning those major referrers ~80 free Tesla Roadsters [1], announced as a 250,000 $ value and used a explicit contractual incentive to the program, in accordance with that legal contract. Having engaged in work on behalf of Tesla on the contractual guarantee of compensation and having earned that compensation in accordance with the contract, Tesla legally owes those fans ~20,000,000 $ in aggregate which it has so far rejected compensating for nearly 7 years.

I am not sure what term you use for having people work on your behalf according to the terms of a contract and then not paying the agreed upon compensation, but "theft" or "steal" would be the colloquial term. Only the intentionally biased would claim a trillion dollar company not paying fans for their work in accordance with their own contract is not "stealing" in common parlance.

I am sorry I was downplaying Tesla's bad behavior by just highlighting that individual fans were jilted out of hundreds of thousands of dollars of their work instead of pointing out how they screwed hundreds of their most loyal fans out of tens of millions of dollars of earned compensation. Anything other than praise for such a upstanding company is unwarranted and smearing their victims is the only unbiased move.

[1] https://electrek.co/2019/01/17/tesla-roadster-free-killed-re...

[fragmede]

Can you explain the $500k being stolen? All I could find was something about the roadster and some rebate program, but not actual cash being stolen.

[reitzensteinm]

Elektrek went from insufferably pro Tesla to insufferably anti Tesla. If you liked it before and not now, your quarrel is with the direction of the propaganda.

[breve]

Why do you want the articles to be "positive" or "negative"? Why do you not want them to simply be the fact of the matter?

If you want more good news about Tesla then perhaps Tesla should be better run. Perhaps Tesla should abandon their policy of constantly lying. Tesla's been lying continuously about full self-driving for a decade. Tesla lies about dumb things there's no need to lie about like how fast the Cybertruck is:

https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/tesla-cybertruck-beast-vs...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0AJmLvKjxw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J3H8--CQRE

Tesla never ran that quarter mile, a lie which the lead Cybertruck engineer pathetically tried to defend. When even your engineers can't achieve basic honesty then you've got a sick company culture:

https://x.com/wmorrill3/status/1746266437088645551

What "positive" spin do you want to see on these lies?