You know, when you think about an organized highly
motivated group of people coming together on
the internet, you usually picture a fandom. Right,
yeah, like people who just absolutely love a
band or a sports team or a massive movie franchise.
Exactly, it's an ecosystem built entirely on
adoration. You buy the merchandise, you paint
your face, you memorize all the obscure trivia.
You want the thing you're focusing on to succeed.
It's a community bound together by, well, by
shared enthusiasts. All right, the collective
energy is positive, even if it gets a little
obsessive. But what if we invert that entirely?
Oh, man. What if you take all that obsessive
late night energy, all the sprawling message
boards, the highly coordinated digital campaigns,
and you aim all of it at the total destruction
of a single company? Yeah. That is a completely
different vibe. It really is. Welcome to today's
Deep Dive. We are looking at a stack of sources
today, centering on a fascinating Wikipedia article
detailing an online collective known as TSLAQ.
It's quite a story. The mission for today's deep
dive is to explore what happens when you build
the ultimate corporate anti -fandom. We're unpacking
how an anonymous international group of internet
sleuths, skeptics, and short sellers organized
to wage a massive information war against Tesla
and its CEO. Elon Musk. Both digitally and physically,
which is wild. Yeah. OK, let's unpack this. This
is such a critical topic for you to understand,
because while this isn't just a story about internet
trolls exchanging memes on a message board, we
are talking about billions of dollars on the
line. It's a story about the raw power of networked
advocacy and the extreme lengths people go to
just to prove a dominant corporate narrative
wrong. And before we get into what this group
actually does out there in the real world, we
really need to understand exactly who they are,
and, you know, the specific start that forced
them to organize in the first place. Yeah, let's
start with the name. So TSLAQ. It's pronounced
Tesla Q. It's basically a mashup. You take Tesla's
stock ticker symbol, which is TSLA, and you add
the letter Q to the end of it. And why the Q?
Well, because on the NASDAQ exchange, adding
a Q to a ticker symbol specifically indicates
that a company has filed for bankruptcy. Which
is just, I mean, it... perfectly encapsulates
their entire thesis in a single keystroke. It
really does. They are this loose international
collective operating primarily on social media.
They use the cash tag TSLAQ on platforms like
Twitter, now known as X, and they coordinate
really heavily on Reddit. Right. They use those
platforms to share news, post their own independent
analysis, and just actively try to tear down
the company's PR narratives. But they weren't
always a formalized swarm, right? Like for a
long time, they were just scattered individuals.
screaming into the void of the internet. Exactly.
Until July of 2018. The sources point to a specific
catalyst for the birth of TSLAQ as a unified
group and revolves around a guy using the pseudonym
Montana Skeptic. Right. So Montana Skeptic was
the pen name of a man named Lawrence Fossey.
He was a highly visible writer for the financial
website Seeking Alpha and a really vocal short
seller of Tesla. Now, pseudonymous writing is
a huge part of the financial commentary world.
Yeah, because if you're publicly betting against
a massive corporation, you want to protect yourself,
you know, from corporate retaliation or harassment.
Exactly. Your anonymity is your shield. But in
July 2018, that shield was completely shattered.
Because Lawrence Fossey was doxxed. Yes. His
real identity was exposed to the public. And
you would think that would be the end of it.
Right? I mean, the nuclear threat of doxing is
supposed to scatter the critics. It's supposed
to make everyone else terrified to speak up.
But the exact opposite happened. Right. The exposure
of Montana skeptic acted as a massive rallying
cry. It was the spark that ignited the powder
keg. Instead of running away, these scattered
skeptics circled the wagons and formally became
TSLAQ. And we really cannot overstate the financial
stakes involved in this ecosystem. Like, by December
of 2020, Tesla wasn't just another stock with
some vocal skeptics. No, it was the most shorted
stock in the entire United States. Yeah. At its
peak, there was over $34 .5 billion in shorted
share value betting against the company. That
is just an astronomical amount of money. Right.
When you have $34 .5 billion betting against
you, that's not just market speculation anymore.
That is literally the GDP of a small country,
financially incentivized to find a crack in your
armor. It's staggering. I mean, I like to think
of TSLAQ as a neighborhood watch group for the
stock market, but... armed with telephoto lenses
and spreadsheets. That's a great analogy. But
I really have to push back on their core motivations
here. Like, are these people genuinely concerned
about corporate fraud and protecting the everyday
retail investor? Or are they just highly motivated
gamblers trying to protect their $34 .5 billion
bet? Exactly. Because if I have billions riding
on a company failing, I'm going to do everything
in my power to make sure they fail. Well, what's
fascinating here is that according to their own
self -reported goals, this was noted in a 2019
LA Times piece. Their main objective was to,
quote, change the mind of Tesla stock bulls and
the media. So they wanted to completely shift
the narrative. Right. They fundamentally believed
Tesla was a fraudulent company heading for a
crash. And they turn their financial speculation
into an active, crowdsourced information campaign.
They weren't just passively waiting for the stock
to drop. No, they were actively trying to expose
the structural cracks they believed were hidden
behind the corporate PR. So since these skeptics
have billions of dollars on the line, what exactly
is their unified theory of attack? Like, what
are they digging up to try and convince the market
that this culturally dominant company is destined
for bankruptcy? Because looking at the sources,
they aren't just throwing darts at a board. No,
they are relentlessly targeting the gap between
what the company presents to the public and what
is actually happening behind closed doors. And
a huge part of that is deep forensic accounting.
Exactly. At the macro level, TSLAQ members push
the theory of a demand cliff. OK, what is that?
This was their claim that the public appetite
for Tesla's cars was actually dropping off rapidly
and that the company was systematically distorting
its sales numbers to hide that terrifying reality
from investors. Wow. But to prove that, they
really had to get into the weeds of the balance
sheets. Oh, absolutely. They raised serious,
highly technical questions about irregularities
regarding accounts receivables, regulatory credits
and specifically. Warranty reserves and we should
actually unpack the mechanics of that because
it is brilliant if you're an investigative skeptic
go for it So warranty reserves are basically
the funds a company legally has to set aside
to fix Future broken products. It's a predicted
expense right if you as a company artificially
lower those reserves on paper You know saying
oh our cars won't break as much as we thought
then that money goes straight back onto the balance
sheet. And your quarterly profits suddenly look
a whole lot better in the short term. Exactly.
Even if you haven't sold a single extra car,
that is the kind of deep forensic accounting
TSLAQ was utilizing to argue the company was
a house of cards. And they applied that exact
same financial scrutiny to the company's historical
promises, too. Oh, like what? Well, in 2012,
Elon Musk publicly claimed that Tesla would never
need to ever raise another funding round. He
pitched the idea that the company was going to
be entirely self -sustaining. And TSLAQ members
kept the receipts on that. They loudly pointed
out that following that specific statement, Tesla
actually ran a total negative cash flow of over
eight. billion dollars. Eight billion. Yeah.
And they subsequently had to raise over 18 billion
dollars in additional debt and equity, utilizing
subsidies and other financial levers just to
stay afloat. So they were tracking the financials,
but they also went after corporate behavior.
They heavily highlighted a 2019 ruling by a California
judge stating that Tesla had violated labor laws.
Right. By unfairly disciplining employees who
were engaging in pro -union activity. Yeah. But
the holy grail for TSLEQ, the thing that really
galvanized them. was the 2016 acquisition of
SolarCity. That was a huge deal for them. They
alleged massive fraud and insider dealings surrounding
that acquisition. Now, we have to be completely
impartial here and look at the legal outcomes.
The courts entirely vindicated Tesla on the SolarCity
front. Tesla explicitly won that fraud case in
2022. The legal system sided with Tesla, yes.
But within that overarching SolarCity saga, there
was a specific undeniable victory for TSLAQ.
that proved their presentation versus reality
thesis. Oh, the fake roof tiles. This is incredible.
Tell the story. It's wild. So in October 2016,
Elon Musk stood on stage and revealed a sleek
new solar roof shingle. It looked amazing. It
was like a perfect product reveal. Right. But
TSLAQ members, specifically an account named
at Tesla Charts, started looking really intensely
at the presentation materials. And they speculated
that the tiles shown were completely fake. They
argued it was just a theatrical prop, not a working
product. And they were right. It was later disclosed
that the tiles on stage were indeed non -functional
fakes. And that is exactly the kind of victory
that fuels a crowdsourced intelligence group.
Oh, for sure. When they expose a literal stage
prop, it validates their deepest skepticism.
It proves to them that they can't trust what
they're shown. Yeah. And they took that exact
same skepticism and applied it to the factory
floor. specifically targeting the concept of
the alien dreadnought. Right, the alien dreadnought.
So Elon Musk had promised to build a fully automated
state -of -the -art factory for the mass production
of the Model 3. He described it as an unstoppable
alien dreadnought. Yeah, effectively a machine
that builds the machine. The narrative was that
human hands wouldn't even need to be on the factory
floor. It sounded like a science fiction utopia.
But TSLAQ didn't just take his word for it. No.
They actually flew drones over the Fremont, California
factory. And what did that drone footage reveal?
Tents. Literally people building cars by hand
inside giant temporary tent structures outside
the main facility. It fundamentally shattered
the automated utopia narrative. It did. But this
raises an important question, though. When you
have a massive decentralized group fundamentally
biased toward finding failure, you are inevitably
going to get noise along with the signal. Here's
where it gets really interesting. You know, if
you are a group actively flying drones, trolling
through SEC filings and proving the CEO wrong
about his factory, do you eventually start seeing
ghosts everywhere? Yeah, exactly. How do you
as an observer separate the highly valid critiques
like exposing the fake solar shingles or the
hand -built cars from the outlandish conspiracy
theories that the sources explicitly state were
also floating around the TSLAQ community? It
is the inherent danger of crowdsourced intelligence.
As Business Insider noted, the community exchanged
brilliant rigorous research, but they also signal
-boosted baseless conspiracies. Because they
want to find the flaws so badly. Right. The inherent
bias of a short seller means they view every
single corporate misstep, every delayed product,
not as a normal business mistake, but as definitive
evidence of a grand, fatal deception. So for
anyone watching this ecosystem play out, it requires
rigorous objective synthesis. You have to constantly
fact check both the polished corporate PR machine
and the dedicated highly biased anti -fandom.
Because eventually all that digital sleuthing
all the drone flights and the forensic accounting
it Couldn't stay contained to spreadsheets and
Reddit threads. No. When billions of dollars
are on the line, the digital wall breaks down.
The conflict inevitably spilled over into the
real world, culminating in some incredibly high
stakes legal battles. And the poster child for
this escalation is a TSLEQ member named Randy
Pothi. Yes. Operating under the online handle
Scubuska, Randy Pothi became central to the physical
manifestation of this conflict. What happened?
In April of 2019, Tesla filed a lawsuit and requested
a restraining order against him. And the allegations
they laid out were severe, detailing two specific
incidents of alleged physical endangerment. Right.
The first incident was in February 2019. Tesla
claimed who he was found sitting in his car in
the parking lot of the Fremont factory. Just
waiting there. Yeah. And when security ordered
him to leave, the company alleged he sped out
of the lot at high speed and nearly struck a
Tesla employee. And then two months later, in
April 2019, Tesla alleged a second incident.
This is the highway one. Exactly. Huthy spotted
a Tesla vehicle out on the public highway. This
car was fitted with numerous camera systems,
and there were personnel inside. Huthy believed
it was a test car demonstrating and filming Tesla's
autopilot capabilities. Right. So he proceeded
to film the vehicle himself while driving alongside
it, and Tesla's lawsuit alleged that he drove
erratically and dangerously while doing so. So
you have a situation where a massive corporation
is leveraging the legal system against an individual
citizen researcher eliting physical endangerment.
But I have to push back hard on who these actions
here, because trawling through warranty reserves
on a spreadsheet is one thing. Digging up court
filings is legal research, but chasing down a
test vehicle on a public highway, prowling around
employee parking lots. It gets sketchy. At what
point does the TSLAQ community justify crossing
that line from financial analyst to physical
stalker? It feels like the obsession completely
overrode basic safety. Well, that is the danger
of this decentralized framework. There's no HR
department. There's no code of conduct. But what
is truly remarkable is how the TSLAQ community
responded to the lawsuit. Right, they didn't
disavow him at all. No, they fully backed him.
They doubled down. Lawrence Fossey, the guy who's
doxing started the whole unified group, he spearheads
a GoFundMe campaign for Huthi's legal defense.
And they raise over $100 ,000. And we really
need to understand the mechanism of what that
means. Yeah. Usually a massive corporation uses
a lawsuit to financially bleed a loan critic
into submission. Right. That's the entire mechanism
of corporate deterrence. You bury them in legal
fees until they shut up. But Fossey's GoFundMe
completely neutralized Tesla's financial advantage.
They essentially crowd -sourced a legal shield
that allowed Huthy to fight back on equal footing
during the discovery phase of the trial. And
that equal footing completely changed the calculus
of the lawsuit. How so? Because during that discovery
phase, regarding the April Highway incident,
it was revealed that Tesla had internal cameras
recording inside the test car. Ah, okay. But
Tesla outright refused to produce that internal
footage for the court. They argued that releasing
the video risked the safety and privacy of the
employees involved. Ultimately, rather than produce
the evidence, Tesla chose to drop the lawsuit
and the request for the temporary restraining
order against Hokey entirely. Wow. And what about
the February parking lot incident where he allegedly
Almost hit an employee. Well, the local Fremont
police actually reviewed the surveillance camera
footage from the parking lot. And after watching
it, they declined to press any charges against
Houthi whatsoever. That is wild. But the story
doesn't end there. Having successfully crowdsourced
his defense, Houthi decides to go on the offensive.
Oh, yeah. In August of 2020, he sued Elon Musk
directly for defamation. Right. This defamation
suit stemmed from an email exchange Musk had
with a man named Aaron Greenspan. Greenspan is
the owner of a transparency site called Plainsight.
In that email, Musk explicitly accused Hathi
of having almost -kill Tesla employees. And Musk's
legal team tried to get the lawsuit thrown out
immediately by utilizing what are known as anti
-CellAPP laws. Let's break down how that works,
because it's a fascinating legal maneuver. Yeah,
please do. So SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit
Against Public Participation. Anti -SLAPP laws
were originally designed to protect regular people
and journalists from being bullied by powerful
entities with frivolous lawsuits aimed at chilling
free speech. But Musk tried to invert this. Exactly.
He used the anti -SLAPP law to argue that Houthi's
defamation suit was actually an attack on Musk's
own right to free speech. But the courts didn't
buy it. In January 2021, a judge completely rejected
Musk's anti -cell APP motion. And then Musk appealed,
right? He did. And in January 2022, the appeal
was denied again. The courts basically stated
that Houthi's defamation claim had enough merit
that it needed to go to a full trial. Wow. Ultimately,
they never made it to a courtroom. In April of
2023, the party settled the defamation suit,
with Houthi receiving $10 ,000. So what does
this all mean for you, the listener? We've gone
from anonymous people looking at balance sheets
on Twitter to exposing stage props to a guy allegedly
driving erratically on a highway, leading to
massive defamation lawsuits and a hundred thousand
dollar crowd source defense funds. If we connect
this to the bigger picture, this entire saga
perfectly illustrates the chaotic modern reality
of corporate accountability. The Internet has
completely democratized investigation. It allows
a decentralized group of anonymous individuals
to effectively challenge the narrative of a multibillion
dollar corporation. which historically was almost
impossible. Right, but that democratization is
inherently messy. Very messy. It lacks any kind
of oversight. It creates real -world consequences
where the line between an earnest financial researcher
and a dangerous provocateur completely blurs.
It really forces us to ask how society should
mediate these massive asymmetries of information
and power. It is an absolute wild ride. To quickly
recap our journey today, we watched an anonymous
collective forum out of the ashes of a doxed
financial blogger. We saw them meticulously decode
warranty reserves to challenge the company's
financial narrative. We watched them uncover
hand -built cars hiding in tents. instead of
automated alien dreadnoughts. We tracked them
as they correctly called out fake solar panels
on a presentation stage. And we watched the whole
thing physically escalate into high -speed highway
confrontations, crowdsourced legal shields, and
defamation settlements. It is the absolute peak
of the modern information age, a place where
absolute truth, billions of dollars, and obsessive
internet culture violently collide. It is. And
I want to leave you with a final thought to mull
over. Okay. If a decentralized, anonymous group
of Internet users can effectively run a global
surveillance financial and research operation
on a multi -billion dollar company grounding
drones, tracking legal filings, and crowdsourcing
legal defense funds to neutralize corporate power,
what happens when this exact same crowdsourced
scrutiny is pointed at our political institutions?
Oh, wow. or our local governments, or even private
individuals. The tools for uncovering the truth
are more powerful and accessible than ever before,
but are we truly prepared as a society for who
is wielding them? That is an incredible question,
because as we talked about at the very beginning,
a fandom is powerful when it's built on love.
But an anti -fandom built on proving a dominant
narrative wrong might just be the most relentless,
unstoppable force on the internet. Thank you
so much for taking this deep dive with us. Keep
questioning the narrative and we will catch you
next time.