April 2019 was when Elon Musk told Tesla buyers the normal rules of car ownership no longer applied to them. Do you remember? Did you buy a Tesla?
Speaking on Lex Fridman’s podcast, he said buying a Tesla was an investment in the future:
I believe you are buying an appreciating asset – not a depreciating asset
His claim was pumping the Full Self-Driving computer and a promised robotaxi network. He put a number on it that July, tweeting about any Tesla with the FSD package that his dream of autonomy (already years past when he promised it would arrive):
should be worth $100k to $200k
He was still repeating the pitch on the Q3 2023 earnings call, saying each car with autonomy hardware “may be worth five times what it is today.”
Five times! The con artist.
His cars built under his promise have now aged five years, and iSeeCars’ analysis of over 950,000 used sales from March 2025 to February 2026 puts the Model Y at 57.8% depreciation, the Model X at 61.2% (roughly $61,000 lost per car) and the Model S at 62.0% — three of the fifteen worst-holding vehicles in the entire market, worse than the Range Rover and the BMW 7 Series.
A CEO who repeatedly told customers and investors that a mass-produced car would gain value, then took the actions that guaranteed it would not, delivered the opposite of what he sold.
He was born with a silver spoon into a Nazi family, fled the rise of democracy in 1988 to illegally immigrate and launder his family apartheid money through American lack of tech regulation (PayPal), and now stands as one of the worst humans in history. His legacy, given global authoritarian platforms funded with ill-gained Tesla money, is predicted worse than Stalin: over 10 million dead.
Paul Verhoeven wrote in the Guardian in 2018 that he built his 1997 film Starship Troopers from Leni Riefenstahl’s footage so the Federation would read as Nazi propaganda, and that he put one character in an SS uniform to make the point unmistakable.
Audiences missed it, he said. He was wrong. Americans got it, backwards.
On Sunday Trump posted a “next generation” Space Force uniform whose own caption credits “the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform,” and the official White House Rapid Response account reposted it.
Source: Orlando Sentinel
It is the Neil Patrick Harris intelligence officer coat of the Nazi SS, relabeled for “the Guardians of the space domain.”
Verhoeven filmed the villains as satire because he expected a lecture on fascism would be ignored. Americans watched his SS officer and ended up with a White House that costumed its soldiers to match, throwing Hitler salutes and licking Putin’s boots.
Source: Mitchell and Webb sketch in which Nazi officers realize they are the bad guys.
OpenAI’s summer of claims is turning into a fall with a citation problem.
The company called their Hugging Face breach unprecedented, called their Black Hat account of it a watershed, wrote that ten mathematics problems had seen no progress for a decade, let a “secret technique” story about Astra run for a day, and launched Astra claiming the first model to cross its own cyber threshold. And yet every single one of these is not new, because there is an easily proven prior record. In two cases the prior record is proven by OpenAI’s own documentation of it.
Precedented
OpenAI models in July under evaluation had their safety filters removed and were put in a sandbox with internet access disabled. The models exploited a zero-day in the package registry proxy, moved laterally until they reached a node with internet, and then broke into Hugging Face production to cheat the answers to the test. OpenAI’s description of this was “unprecedented.” I wrote the five whys the next day, explaining what really happened. The chain began with a file that was trusted without a reason to be trusted. Cliff Stoll published the genre in 1989. I gave the BSidesLV talk 23 years later, in 2012, on data as the attack vector for AI. The failure had at least fourteen years of public knowledge before OpenAI’s engineers said it was new in their own evaluation harness.
Watershed
OpenAI in August pumped their story at Black Hat. The presentation treated a sandbox design failure as fixed by rebuilding the compromised service in the same wrong way, and so the agents rebuilt their coordination channel within days. Incident response frameworks require root cause removal. OpenAI presented their inability to perform basic security operations, and basic incident response, as a wakeup in the field. The follow-up was no better.
A decade behind
OpenAI published on 1 August ten mathematics results attributed to an internal Astra model. The release claimed these are problems that “have been open and seen no progress on the main result for at least a decade.”
It’s not a claim that is hard to check. Stephen Miller of Yeshiva University found the sphere-packing proof resting on an argument from his own 2016 paper. Francesco Fournier-Facio of Cambridge found the non-sofic group construction assembled from Gábor Kun’s 2016 paper and the 2019 Kun-Thom paper.
OpenAI’s paper actually cites all three. Cohn-Miller 2016 appears once, for a preliminary reduction step, and Miller says the argument the proof hinges on came from that same paper and was presented as the model’s own. Kun and Kun-Thom are cited in the summary of the non-sofic result. It’s just that their PR describing the paper erased the prior work entirely. Scientific American ran a scathing indictment of OpenAI five days later. Miller called the pattern systematic and put it under research misconduct.
OpenAI edited their page to say instead each result “resolves or makes substantial progress on a long-standing open problem,” under the original date, with no note about being caught.
The same release carries a section on responsibility to the mathematical community. It argues that attribution should reflect how a result was produced, and that claiming human authorship for an AI-generated proof would misrepresent the work.
Sheesh.
Credit between the system and OpenAI’s own staff is settled in that paragraph. Credit to the 2016 and 2019 authors was handled by the sentence above it. An OpenAI spokesperson told Scientific American the company meets the standards expected of human mathematicians. A human mathematician who submits a proof on a 2016 argument credited only for a preliminary step, and describes the field as stalled for ten years, is facing misconduct charges.
Open secret
Four weeks later The Information reported a “secret technique” inside Astra. I traced it the same day: recurrent depth, Graves 2016, Dehghani 2018, Giannou 2023, Geiping 2025 with released weights, and Nanbeige shipping it under Apache-2.0 in July with forty thousand downloads a month. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind had cited the Geiping paper by name in their July 2025 chain-of-thought monitorability statement as a risk to document. In that case OpenAI’s own chief scientist publicly rejected the novelty claim being made.
Opposite of first
On 3 September OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra as the first model to meet the critical cybersecurity threshold of its own preparedness framework. Easy to say, of course, when the threshold is OpenAI’s to say about OpenAI. But everyone knows Anthropic gated Mythos for cyber capability in April. The launch post reports two zero-day vulnerabilities found during evaluation. The July incident report had already described the models chaining zero-days to leave the sandbox.
So vain, so lame
Five claims in ten weeks. Five flops.
One came from reporters working from an anonymous source, and the vendor’s own scientist loudly disowned it. Four came from OpenAI.
The July incident was a repeat of fourteen years of published defense literature. The August paper was 2016 and 2019 mathematics that the paper itself cites. The September architecture was 2016 machine learning that OpenAI itself cited back in 2025.
The company’s PR calls everything new, even when the company’s own documents record earlier work.
OpenAI states the mathematics manuscripts were prepared by humans working with the model. Miller’s 2016 preprint with Henry Cohn, arXiv 1603.04759, is dated March 2016 and sits in the paper’s own bibliography. Kun 2016 and Kun-Thom 2019 are on arXiv. Graves 2016 is on arXiv. Stoll’s book has been in print since 1989. All of it was available to the models, let alone the people who wrote “unprecedented” in July, “at least a decade” in August, and “first” in September.
The mathematics release said the work was roughly $2,000 in tokens. The architecture report framed the same model needing roughly $600 billion in annual capital expenditure. That’s a lot of money wasted, especially when you realize the prior work it plagiarized cost nothing to read.
Tesla told a Florida court it could find no Test Incident Reports from its underbody impact testing. Its own test protocols require a report, photos and video for every run. Well, that doesn’t make any sense, does it? Could Tesla be lying in court, again? Then its own witness, Adam White, testified the reports can be located by clicking hyperlinks in the company’s system.
Circuit Judge Michael A. Robinson called the claim “not credible”, probably because court hates calling people liars, and wrote that it “appears to have been a willful and/or intentional misrepresentation.” Liar, liar, why can’t we just call Tesla the liar it has been and continues to prove itself?
That was the first sanction in Alcala v. Tesla Florida. The second was issued August 19. Trial is set for November 30.
Underbody Underengineering
Nicholas Garcia, 20, drove a 2021 Model 3 through the intersection of Alhambra Circle and Coral Way in Coral Gables with Jazmin Alcala, 19, in the passenger seat. The underbody struck a crest in the road. The battery pack ignited. The car veered onto the median, glanced off one tree and struck a second with its passenger side. Both occupants died in the fire. The date was September 13, 2021.
Garcia had owned the car for about six days. Four days before the crash he had taken it to Tesla service for steering and suspension complaints. Six weeks after the crash, Tesla filed recall 21V-835 with NHTSA, covering 2,791 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles whose front suspension lateral link fasteners could loosen and separate from the subframe.
The NTSB preliminary report recovered five seconds of data from the event recorder. Maximum recorded speed was 90 mph on a 30 mph street, accelerator applied to beat a yellow light, service brake off. Tesla’s defense rests on that data. The family’s case rests on how the underbody and battery pack respond to road contact.
Tesla’s own tests address that question, and Tesla has spent three years fighting to prevent transparency into it.
Willful Disregard for Safety
The family filed in October 2021. Here’s the discovery record:
September 20, 2023. The court ordered Tesla to produce an engineer responsible for stability control. Tesla produced Daniel Wood, who testified that the engineer “personally responsible for the stability control” would be better placed to answer. Tesla designated no one else. Judge Robinson found this “a direct violation” of the order.
November 6, 2023. The court compelled testing documents for real-world driving situations, including speed bumps and uneven surfaces. Tesla’s counsel told the court everything responsive had already been produced. Over the following year Tesla produced no additional testing documents. The withheld material included the Sine Wave Test, which Judge Robinson found “substantially similar to the crest in the roadway that was involved in the subject incident.”
March 7, 2025. Five days before a scheduled deposition, Tesla produced 8,100 pages of test reports. The documents state on their face that the tests simulate conditions in which the battery pack and underbody make direct contact with the ground, bumps, curbs and other objects, to reproduce severe unintentional customer usage constituting an accident.
June 12, 2025. Tesla’s counsel wrote that Tesla “did not locate any TIRs.” The court found the opposite, that Tesla “was in fact in possession of thousands of pages of TIRs.”
Just call them liars, seriously. Nothing they say can be trusted. It’s like the courts don’t yet have the power to shut the whole thing down? How long did Enron stay in business?
July 2025. Four days before the sanctions hearing, Tesla produced 123,000 pages with metadata and file names stripped. Judge Robinson found this was done intentionally and that the acts “were intended to make the review and use of these materials more difficult, time consuming and expensive for the Plaintiffs.”
Imagine a company that knows it’s killing its own customers, and then tries to pull as much time and money as possible away from anyone who complains.
Source: My presentation at MindTheSec 2021
October 24, 2025. Judge Robinson granted the first motion for sanctions. He found Tesla “acted willfully or with contumacious and deliberate disregard” for two court orders, awarded the plaintiffs fees and costs including expert time spent reviewing the July production, and warned that continued violations could result in Tesla’s pleadings being struck.
So many warnings, so much time.
The Tracker
A separate dispute concerns Tesla’s internal incident tracker. Tesla claims the file was assembled at the direction of counsel and is privileged. The plaintiffs argue the TREAD Act requires Tesla to report similar incidents to federal regulators, which places the tracker outside privilege. A special magistrate ruled that Tesla’s witness must answer who has access to the tracker and what it contains. Judge Robinson affirmed over Tesla’s objections, with the contents themselves protected pending appeal. Tesla has said it will seek review from the Fourth District Court of Appeal.
Fraud: Second Sanction
The family filed a third motion for sanctions in May 2026. The motion and Tesla’s response each exceed 300 pages. Both are redacted in full as confidential. You would think Tesla is building some kind of military secret, like AI-based drones, given how they treat their products as super secret squirrel stuff. It reminds me of the kids in “Teenage Wasteland” who jumped the “no trespass” signs at the Wallkill landfill and exposed a mafia toxic dumping operation in upstate New York, with Ford Motor Company among the dumpers.
Middletown High School student reporting from the Wallkill landfill, early 1990s. Trespassing produced the evidence that officials, the local paper and the dumpers spent years denying. Source: Teenage Wasteland, Netflix, 2026
Retired Circuit Judge Charles M. Greene, sitting as special magistrate, heard the motion August 14 for three and a half hours, most of it closed to the public. Todd Falzone of Kelley Uustal told the court Tesla had violated three orders, paid monetary sanctions and continued to withhold. The production to date covers component testing. Vehicle-level testing under roadway conditions has yet to be produced. Franklin Sato, for the Garcia estate, called Tesla’s conduct “tantamount to fraud.”
Val Leppert of King & Spalding answered for Tesla. Eleven thousand documents produced, 9,000 of them testing records. Engineers made available for deposition. One hundred fifty hours spent building a mapping tool linking documents. Their production failures were “copying errors, misunderstandings and false starts.”
“We have not been perfect. There has not been any intentional withholding.”
The company that builds a car on the claims that it can automate better than humans, that it can define safety as a baseline, flails and falls down on basic document delivery tasks and begs for forgiveness. Yeah, nobody should trust that company with anything related to life or death decisions privately let alone on public roads.
Judge Robinson’s October order found the withholding willful and intentional and described a misrepresentation to the court.
Judge Greene issued his recommendation five days after the hearing. Tesla’s pleadings stand. He recommended an adverse jury instruction at trial, a further award of attorney fees, and compliance with the outstanding discovery. According to the family’s counsel, the instruction tells the jury Tesla knew its own testing had shown failures similar to the one at Coral Way.
That sounds right to me. Tesla has known since 2013 that AI was a wildly unstable theory, a pipe dream, and by 2016 knew Musk was lying about it to the press, even as two fatalities proved the system too dangerous for production. In March 2018 Uber killed a pedestrian in America and suspended all road testing the same day. In April 2018 Tesla killed a pedestrian in Japan, and two months later raised the price of Full Self-Driving from $3,000 to $5,000 while expanding the program. Most Americans haven’t heard about it because Tesla litigated to keep it all in Japanese. The constant rise in crashes and rise in fatalities came after they knew it would.
Tesla’s own reports to NHTSA under the Standing General Order. January through June crashes, 2022 to 2026: 180, 261, 269, 476, 826. A 4.6x rise over five years. The increase from 2025 to 2026 alone (350) is nearly double the 2022 total for the same six months. May 2026 set the single-month record at 207. Source: Electrek
Going Back to Grimshaw
The Ford Pinto verdict rested on discovery. Ford’s rear-impact crash tests showed the fuel tank rupturing at moderate speeds. Ford produced the tests and a jury saw them. In Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co., 119 Cal.App.3d 757 (1981), the Court of Appeal upheld punitive damages on the basis that the tests established what management knew.
Note the door handle design defect.
Tesla’s approach in Alcala differs at the production step. Four years of orders, a production timed to a deposition, a second production timed to a hearing with filenames removed, a letter denying the existence of reports its own witness said were one click away, and a sealed 300-page attempt to call all of that purely accidental. It’s like they don’t believe in the laws of physics or the laws of America, operating above the laws and unaccountable while those who trust them are burned up or silenced.
Teslas notoriously “veer” uncontrollably and crash. Design defects (e.g. Pinto doors) trap occupants and burn them to death as horrified witnesses and emergency responders watch helplessly. Source: VoCoFM, Korea, 2024
In the Benavides Autopilot case, plaintiffs alleged withheld data and misdirected police; the jury returned $243 million and Judge Beth Bloom upheld the verdict in February 2026. The Alcala family alleges the same discovery pattern with respect to the battery and underbody.
An adverse inference instruction tells the jury that a party withheld evidence and permits the jury to infer the evidence would have been unfavorable to that party. Let’s see what happens when Tesla goes to trial at the end of November.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
