Musk and his Tesla company are reportedly being sued by shareholders. The shareholders alleged that they committed securities fraud because they concealed a material risk:Self-driving vehicles such as the company's robotaxi are dangerous.
The class-action lawsuit, filed late Monday, comes just days after Tesla first publicly tested its self-driving taxis at its headquarters in Austin, Texas, in June.
The testing revealed a number of issues with the vehicles, including speeding, braking hard, running over curbs, driving into the wrong lane and dropping passengers off in the middle of multi-lane roads.
Tesla’s stock price fell 6.1% in the two trading days after the test began, wiping out approximately $68 billion in market value.
Shareholders accuse Musk and Tesla of repeatedly exaggerating the effectiveness and prospects of their self-driving technology, thereby artificially inflating Tesla's financial expectations and stock price.
Musk responded to the case on X on Tuesday, lambasting the shareholders' lawyers."The truth is, these lawsuits are never investor driven, it's always scumbag class action attorneys committing fraud to get a piece of the verdict. They are the scum of the earth. The worst people I have ever met."
It is understood that Tesla's Robotaxi unmanned taxi service, which has been launched now, adopts a "dynamic pricing" model, that is, the price of the trip will change according to the length of the trip, with lower charges for short-distance trips and higher charges for long-distance trips.
A trip from one end of the current Tesla Robotaxi geofence to the other costs about $13.70 and covers a distance of about 11 miles.
