[helsinkiandrew]

I think the big difference is that criminal wire fraud depends on a "clear scheme to defraud with intent". Tesla/Musk can argue that they thought they would delivery - They've been making claims that FSD was coming for years and have been slowly making deliveries towards FSD, its just that its harder/taken longer than expected and without a smoking gun (email chains like in the Holmes case) it would be very hard to prove.

They may have committed false advertising or "failed to deliver on contract" but they are civil matters, which could still involve big payouts, but not prison time.

[FireBeyond]

There's a corpus of work that could help there. Tesla was forced to add disclaimers like "Elon's statements are aspirational and do not necessarily represent engineering reality", as well as quotes from him on investor calls where he's described (in 2009, I believe) FSD as a "solved problem, we're just implementing", and five years later, "Our highest priority is solving the problem of FSD". But it seems possible that there comes a time when an ambitious prosecuting attorney or attorney general pushes for this and the discovery that comes with (though I have near zero confidence that even then, that discovery won't already be thoroughly crippled by document retention policies or outright fuckery by Elon).