🔗 TSLAQ
TSLAQ is a loose, international collective of largely anonymous short-sellers, skeptics, and researchers who openly criticize Tesla, Inc. and its CEO, Elon Musk. The group primarily organizes on Twitter, often using the $TSLAQ cashtag, and Reddit to coordinate efforts and share news, opinions, and analysis about the company and its stock. Edward Niedermeyer, in his book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors (2019), establishes the doxxing of Lawrence Fossi, a Seeking Alpha writer and Tesla short seller who uses the pseudonym Montana Skeptic, in July 2018 as the catalyst for the formation of TSLAQ. The group was the subject of a Real Vision video which included interviews with prominent members @TESLACharts and @Paul91701736.
TSLAQ highlights what they claim to be a variety of dangerous, deceptive, unlawful and fraudulent business practices by Tesla. Regular criticisms include knowingly selling Model S cars with a design flaw that could cause fires, reselling defective "lemon" cars, performing stealth recalls and requiring customers to sign non-disclosure agreements for "goodwill" repairs, issuing over-the-air updates to cover-up a fire risk in their batteries, publishing misleading safety statistics, delivering cars with lower-performance hardware than promised, taking months to issue customers refunds, and selling a Full Self-Driving package with the promise 1 million "robotaxis" by the end of 2020 despite the technology not yet being available. TSLAQ has also criticized Tesla and Musk for their attempts to intimidate and silence whistleblowers who have spoken out against the company. In addition, the group has highlighted Tesla's history of environmental violations, disregard for workers' safety, and Musk's excessive compensation package. As financial media producer Demetri Kofinas put it, TSLAQ believes Musk "to be a carnival barker running the biggest fraud in corporate America."
On occasion, TSLAQ has exchanged online verbal hostilities with Tesla fans and Elon Musk, who once tweeted with a prominent member and also tweeted personal information of another. While explicitly an online group, off-line activities performed by subgroups include aerial reconnaissance and on-the-ground observations of parking lots used by Tesla for storage.