‘Scams…’: Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz on Elon Musk’s Tesla, SpaceX

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz recently referred to Elon Musk’s companies – SpaceX and Tesla – as ‘scams he got away with’. Taking to newly launched social media platform Threads, Moskovitz explained that although many consider the impact of Musk’s companies on the world to compensate for his antics, he expressed his doubts about the legitimacy of the Twitter owner’s success.

“The point is I don’t really see these companies as dispensating impact, or at least don’t give nearly as much credit to him as others do. If they were really built on outward lies, rather than just self-deceptions (rose-coloured glasses), then we should really see them as scams he got away with,” he wrote on Thursday.

Moskovitz added that he thinks the Tesla CEO boosted the development of electric vehicles (EVs) by around one to two years. However, he believes that Musk may have possibly delayed it with his ‘lofty promises’ which attracted customers, employees, and funding.

Taking the example of a Reuters report that alleged that Tesla, through a direct order from its boss, had exaggerated the expected range for its EVs on the vehicle’s dashboard, Moskovitz said that the higher ranges made the cars look falsely ‘heads and tails above the competition’.

“I work in software, I get that delays happen. But these are *the* claims that positioned Tesla as massively ahead of the competition and created a belief that Elon can pull forward the future through sheer grit and ingenuity. The *belief* in those claims and the accelerated timelines is what made Tesla look like a leader so quickly; then they turned that cache into actual resources with fundraising. Estimating correctly wouldn’t have looked revolutionary,” he said.

Expanding on Musk’s ‘inclination to overpromise and under-deliver’, Moskovitz said it had sucked up resources from competitor companies like BYD and Toyota.

Moskovitz pointed out that although Musk had been promising self-driving software for years, Tesla still only offers a ‘beta version of fully self driving’ vehicle that requires a licensed driver.

Musk, who has not reacted to Moskovitz’s comments, said on Thursday that he does not want to kill competition either through Tesla’s price wars or updates to X, earlier known as Twitter.