The ENRON scandal - part 2

I did write a post about TESLA citing a report which says the company might use accounting fakes when reporting to investors and was wondering whether we will see an ENRON like event for TESLA.

Those kind of articles need to be considered with some skepticism, which is healthy imo.

First of all, I dont know who the guy publishing that is, but I did look around a bit.

Aaron Greenspan, the author of the analysis on TESLA, has a history of similar allegations regarding Facebook and Mark Zuckergberg you can find here. The guy had a dispute with Facebook creator regarding the creation of the social portal by Aaron himself during his university years when he and Mark were colleagues.

In January this year, Aaron published a 75-page report, in which he states that fake accounts made up more than half of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users. He has also testified the same, in front of the UK Parliamentary Committee. He minced no words when he said Mark Zuckerberg is a liar, fraudster and unfit to be the CEO of Facebook.

See here for some information on the subject:

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, said “Aaron and I studied together at Harvard and I’ve always admired his entrepreneurial spirit and love of building things. I appreciate his hard work and innovation that led to building houseSYSTEM, including the Universal Face Book feature. At school, I was even a member of houseSYSTEM. We are pleased that we’ve been able to amicably resolve our differences.”

They are friends now (with money we sort out all sort of things 😁).

Given those statements, for sure the TESLA report I did point in my previous post must be considered carefully.

What's in it btw? All sorts of things:

• A bit of TESLA history
• A chapter on Elon the boss (who the guy is, what's his entrepreneur profile, risk, etc.?)
• Other companies Elon owns and how they have been created or aquired (SolarCity, SpaceX but also a bunch of LLCs created in fiscal interesting places, etc.)
• TESLA earning reports (2018 & 2019)
• Misleading statements Elon made at various moments in media (or social media)
• TESLA cars defects
• The culture at TESLA
• Regulatory
• Subsidies

But there is a chapter on Accounting Fraud. I will try understand and make a blog post after going in detail over it. Of course some other chapters are intersting and I might touch one or two but I wont stop too much on those.

The report can be found here btw.