The former chief financial officer at oil pipeline company Quest Integrity Group Mr. Todd Katz apparently asked the Court to dismiss the charges that were brought up against him for alleged attempt to impersonate Elon Musk. He suggests that he didn’t do any damage to the company and that “nobody who received this preposterous and grammatically deficient e-mail ever believed that it really came from Elon Musk”, as said by Katz in his court filing, according to Bloomberg.
This unwelcome event draws roots from an email from August 3rd, 2016 to Tesla CFO Jason Wheeler which was sent from account [email protected]. The exact message contained following: “why you so cautious w Q3/4 gm guidance on call? also what are your thoughts on disclosing M3 res#? Pros/cons from ir pov? what is your best guess as to where we actually come in on q3/4 deliverables. honest guess? no bs. thx 4 hard work prepping 4 today”. Thankfully Wheeler was smart enough to see that something is not right and did not bother to respond.
To be really honest, when you look at the message you can straight away see that there is no chance in hell that Mr. Musk could ever write this, furthermore, there is no way that he would have been using a Yahoo account when corresponding with a fellow high-ranking executive at his company. When you analyze the problematic email even further than you see that there are a lot of questions to which Musk should already know answers or at least have the data available, meaning it would be pretty stupid to send an email and ask for the info.
Tesla, in their lawsuit, has asked for reimbursement for the costs of the investigation and the legal fees from the litigation, which is reasonable. On the other hand, Katz is insisting that, allegedly, electric automaker’s inquiry included hacking his Twitter account in an effort to discover his real identity.
This is surely a minor distraction to the company, but a distraction nevertheless, especially when they are riding a huge wave of big announcements throughout the entire October. Some of those announcements are related to the necessary equipment for fully autonomous driving which all vehicles will soon posses while the software that activates this will arrive later. Tesla Motors also disclosed their second-best quarterly profit ever when the company made $22 million in Q3 2016 and they showcased the solar roof panels ahead of a possible merger with SolarCity.
