“Why Should We Believe Anything?”: Gordon Johnson Harps On Tesla’s Broken Promises Ahead Of “AI Day”

Ahead of Tesla’s upcoming AI day, GLJ Research’s Gordon Johnson took to CNBC to defend a recent note questioning whether or not anyone should believe anything Elon Musk says at the event.

“The last 5 Tesla ‘days’ were ‘littered with lies’,” Squawk Box host Joe Kernen reads from Johnson’s note. When asked to back up his reasoning by Kernen, Johnson unloaded about Musk’s horrific track record of lying at these types of events. 

“My question is: why should we believe anything that’s going to be said at AI day 2 when all the prior days were defined by complete fabrications or something close,” Johnson opens by asking. He then runs down examples. 

“Battery day. No battery introduced. They said they were going to have a 500 mile Model S Plaid this year, that we know right before it was launched, they cancelled,” he says. “They talked a lot about the Semi which was introduced in 2017 and the Cybertruck, which they’ve recently delayed.”

“A lot of promises made, nothing kept,” Johnson argued. “Let’s talk about Autonomy Day number 1. Elon Musk said they were going to be at Level 5 Autonomy in 2020 and have a million robotaxis on the road in 2020.”

He continues: “We now know there’s not one robotaxi on the road and we now know from a FOIA request that at the same time he was saying that to investors, his lawyers were telling the California DMV they were only at Level 2.”

Then, he brought up Neuralink and the Solar Roof demo, stating: “Let’s go to Neuralink day, where they put a chip in a pig’s brain and gave a lot of sick people hope they were going to be fixed. MIT refutes that and referred to it as fear.”

“And best of all, solar roof day! They had a fake solar panel on the set of Desperate Housewives which they used to sell the Solar City acquisition to shareholders. In fact, it was so fake, there’s an ongoing lawsuit,” Johnson says. 

“We think given that history, Autonomy Day number 2 will be something similar,” Johnson concludes. You can watch the video here:

“We see that effectively there’s promises made that they either in our view know they can’t meet or will never meet,” says @GordonJohnson19 on @Tesla‘s production fallbacks ahead of their upcoming A.I. Day $TSLA. pic.twitter.com/bO9yKgEpMi

— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) August 19, 2021