As a general rule, celebrating the misfortunes of someone is unseemly. But when that person is billionaire Elon Musk, let’s do this. The past week has not been terrific for both Tesla and X, and it couldn’t happen to a worse dude.
Last Friday, a Florida jury slapped Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, with a $243 million verdict in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of a woman killed due partly to Tesla’s glitchy Autopilot self-driving software. The Tesla driver dropped his cell phone and reached down to grab it, letting Autopilot take over. The Tesla promptly blew through an intersection at over 60 miles per hour and crashed into an SUV, killing Naibel Benavides and severely injuring her boyfriend.
Of course, Tesla is being exceedingly dramatic about the verdict, saying that it “works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the entire industry’s efforts to develop and implement lifesaving technology.” Of course, that’s a weird statement to make when your “lifesaving technology” appears to have been involved in someone’s death.
Normally, the government plays a regulatory role here, investigating the safety of cars. However, once Trump took office and Musk burrowed in as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, most of those investigations were expected to just go away.
Though who knows what will happen now that Musk and Trump have fallen out. Last month, Trump said he wanted Musk’s businesses to “thrive.” However, Tesla’s launch of self-driving taxis in Austin, Texas, went so poorly that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is looking into the taxis’ myriad problems, including a penchant for reportedly veering into oncoming traffic. Seems bad!
Generally, Tesla has dodged these sorts of lawsuits or prevailed in court. But now there’s a template for future settlements to be more expensive. In other words, the company may have to up the amount it is willing to pay to settle or face a nine-figure jury verdict.
Unfortunately, while this hurts Tesla, the board still wants to shower Musk with money for … what exactly? He just got 96 million new shares, worth roughly $29 billion.
It’s not just Tesla having a dark day, though let’s all take a moment to engage in some pointing and laughing about how the jury verdict caused Tesla’s stock to fall. Meanwhile, over at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, things are not going great for Musk’s social media platform, X. The court ruled that while X cannot be held liable if it fails to remove child sex abuse material immediately, the company could face negligence claims going forward for not reporting such material to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and for not having an easy way for users to flag posts. Basically, once X is aware of that material on the platform, it has a legal duty to report it to NCMEC, not that Musk is really into following laws.
This has been a problem since Musk took over X in October 2022.
In 2023, the Stanford Internet Observatory reported that Twitter (as X was then known) failed to address 40 CSAM items over two months. For Musk, though, posting CSAM isn’t really a dealbreaker. He reinstated the account of right-wing conspiracy theorist Dominick McGee after McGee’s account had posted an image taken from one of the worst, most violent child abuse videos out there. But hey, McGee claims he did it to raise awareness! Musk tried to wave this away by saying only people on X’s safety team saw McGee’s post, but it actually got 3 million views and 8,000 reposts, according to The Washington Post.
Of course, McGee now gets to go to White House press briefings, and we can all thank Musk for that.
There should be consequences for turning X into a Nazi bar that aids the exploitation of children, and the 9th Circuit gave a roadmap on how to do that. There should also be consequences for Tesla’s apparent refusal to make its cars safer. That Florida jury verdict might get reduced on appeal, but it still puts Tesla on notice that going to trial may not be the greatest idea.
And anything that makes Musk’s life harder and more expensive, we’re here for it.