A Not So Merry FUDmas — #Pravduh About #Tesla Report 16

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Intro

This past week, the stock market kept panicking, everyone was looking at what is going on in the White House, and the most positive major thing that happened was Elon Musk unveiling the first Boring Company tunnel. At the same time, there was a lot of negative news regarding Tesla: 10 stories related to the stock market, 10 about a few people departing Tesla, 6 about the spontaneous combustion of a Tesla Model S (whose battery was apparently shot — like, with a gun), and the rest on various other topics.

Two complete FUD pieces built on nonsense, one claiming that Elon misappropriated SpaceX resources for The Boring Company and another about company’s tunnel costing $40 million instead of $10 million were labeled as negative. All other articles related to The BoringCompany were labeled as neutral, in part because they are only loosely related to Tesla. These are the ways Tesla relates to the Boring Company:

• Tesla is building the loop skates that will be used in the tunnel.
• The Boring Company is using Tesla battery technologies to build a better boring machine.
• Tesla vehicles are continuously used in the tunnel.

Remember that each week we are sharing the raw data (headlines and scores) for Pravduh About Tesla. You can scan through the stories yourself if you want to double check our findings or just see the headlines. And you can check out our own Tesla stories for more context and comparison. For details on our methodology and broader context about this weekly analysis, see our previous Pravduh About Tesla report.

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#Pravduh About #Tesla
Report #16 (December 15–21)

 

The next matter on our itinerary is tracking the authors who covered this news. While the whole list is too long to put here since there are many authors who have written just one piece about Tesla, here are the 40 who published more than 7 articles about Tesla since we started tracking on September 1st, ranked from least positive to most positive:

Note: At major media outlets, there are often headline writers who control this part of articles, but we find tracking the authors is also interesting and potentially useful for considering what kind of stories the authors tend to write.

What Changed With Tesla Last Week?

Adding onto the summary in the intro, here’s a summary of Tesla news and potential news ordered by day. You can consider for yourself what were objectively the important updates in the “Tesla story” last week.

• Tesla Gigafactory 3 construction clearly began (17 Dec)
• Elon Musk unveils Boring Company test tunnel (18 Dec)
• Tesla implements 5-minute contract (19 Dec)
• Elon Musk considering buying GM plant in Ohio (20 Dec)
• Tesla updates phone app with new features (21 Dec)

Some Sneaky Headlines Last Week

• What’s Tesla Investors’ Biggest 2019 Wish? A Low-Key Elon Musk (Bloomberg)
• Why 2018 Was Tesla’s Year of Turnover (Bloomberg)
• Tesla Investors Aren’t Daunted by Elon Musk’s Antics (Bloomberg)
• If you could handle the insanity, Tesla was the best auto stock to invest in for 2018 (Business Insider)
• Tesla Survived Manufacturing Hell–Now Comes The Hard Part (Forbes)
• Tesla driver who settled when his car caught fire forgot to mention someone shot the battery with a gun (BGR)

The more these #Pravduh About #Tesla reports get shared online through social media, the more people will take notice. If there is an ongoing heavily negative slant about Tesla in certain outlets — even as Tesla has so much positive news to share — people should be aware of this and approach each new story with that in mind.

Again, here is the data from this past week in case you want to have a closer look at the raw data.

For details on our methodology and broader context about this weekly analysis, see this Pravduh About Tesla report.