Elon Musk expands his empire of misinformation

Analysis by Allison Morrow, CNN

New York (CNN) — At any Tesla event, you have to go in expecting a good amount of smoke and mirrors. This is the company run by Elon Musk, after all — its self-anointed Technoking who’s made overpromising and underdelivering a theme of his career.

But Thursday’s “Cybercab” robotaxi unveiling was, even by Musk-ian standards for bluster, one giant optical illusion. The kind of spectacle that should remind everyone that the world’s richest person is someone who promotes and appears to relish misinformation and hyperbole on a mass scale, whether he’s speaking to investors, his millions of followers on X or whichever politician he feels is most likely to agree with his increasingly right-wing and conspiracy-laden worldview.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

ICYMI: The robotaxis, Tesla’s fully driverless vehicles that it hopes to put into service next year, were the main event. But the company’s humanoid Optimus robots stole some of the spotlight as they danced and mingled with the crowd, pouring drinks and playing charades.

That all would have been impressive if not for a few liiiittttle things. Like, the fact that the robots were not actually autonomous and were being operated remotely by humans, which was first reported by Bloomberg. At one point, an attendee even got a bartending bot to admit that it was being assisted by a human.

“This was not disclosed, and many thought they were operating autonomously,” Gordon Johnson, a longtime Tesla critic and short-seller, said in a note Monday.  “In our view, this is very deceptive.”

The event — rather appropriately held on a Hollywood stage — was light on details about how Tesla plans to improve its “Full Self Driving” system, or how it plans to actually get its driverless cars on the road.

While the Tesla superfans in the crowd seemed happy enough, investors were looking for more than shiny objects.

“We were overall disappointed with the substance and detail of the presentation,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote. “There was no demonstration of or updates to the latest advancements of FSD technology, no mention of any go-to-market strategy in a ridesharing service or supporting economic inputs for investors to dig into.”

Tesla shares sank nearly 9% on Friday.

Of course, Wall Street’s disappointment isn’t anything to lose sleep over. And the Tesla spell may have been only temporarily broken, as shares began inching higher Monday. Investors still value Tesla more than any other carmaker on Earth primarily because they’re still convinced he can deliver on all the grand promises.

Spreading hurricane relief misinformation

Steve Jobs, the late Apple co-founder, was famous for his “reality distortion field” that often sold less-than-stellar products on sheer charisma. But Musk’s reality distortion field is something else entirely — hardly limited to overly optimistic timetables or pie-in-the-sky projections for Tesla’s delivery schedule. Whereas Musk might actually face some pushback from shareholders or market regulators for stretching the truth or failing to deliver on his promises, he’s free to promote conspiracy theories and far-right talking points with impunity on his own personal social media megaphone, X.

That’s where Musk and others promote racist conspiracies and false rumors about federal hurricane relief to his more than 200 million followers, even as officials are pleading for help to stop the misinformation (which former President Donald Trump is also spreading).

That is far from harmless musing on the internet.

Over the weekend, federal emergency workers were forced to halt their in hurricane-hit North Carolina after National Guard troops reported that an “armed militia” was “hunting FEMA,” according to the Washington Post, which cited an email to federal agencies.

A former FEMA administrator, Craig Fugate, told CNN that while individual FEMA personnel have received threats in the past, it’s nothing like what the agency has experienced in recent days.

“This is unprecedented,” he said.

Unilever’s back

It’s not hard to see why, then, companies that advertise on X might be uncomfortable having, say, Dove body wash ads running alongside posts from Musk or any number of straight-up pro-Nazi accounts that are thriving under his stewardship of the former Twitter.

Although X’s policies say that content glorifying violence will be banned, and that it would apply labels to symbols of hate, like swastikas, a recent NBC News analysis found that X “does not appear to be enforcing those policies consistently.”

Unilever, the company that owns Dove, Hellmann’s and a couple dozen other consumer brands, was one of four companies X named in a lawsuit in August, claiming they staged an “illegal boycott” when they pulled their ads from the platform.

In a twist, though, X dropped Unilever from the lawsuit on Friday. In a statement, Unilever said X had “committed to meeting our responsibility standards to ensure the safety and performance of our brands on the platform.” It declined to comment beyond that statement.

X said in a post that the agreement with Unilever was “the first part of the ecosystem-wide solution and we look forward to more resolution across the industry.”

That’s the same industry, it’s worth noting, that Musk last year publicly told to go f—— themselves.

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