Apple cofounder Wozniak hits out at ‘dishonest’ Elon Musk for misleading Tesla buyers: ‘He robbed my family of so much money’ With one lowered into hot water.
Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple, the world’s most valuable company, slammed the Tesla CEO for allegedly stealing from his customers, including himself.
Speaking to CNBC: SquawkBox on Thursday, Wozniak said he was intentionally misled about how well the Tesla could drive, arguing that his own car was far inferior to Musk’s claims. “It makes mistakes all the time,” he told the daily news Programme. “It’s a horrible, horrible experience.”
Wozniak expressed disappointment over the Tesla CEO’s performance, saying it contrasted sharply with his approach to business based on candor and a refusal to embellish the truth. “A lot of the sincerity disappears when you look at Elon Musk and Tesla,” he continued.
Wozniak specifically complained about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the latest self-driving technology since 2016, when Tesla first offered full self-driving (FSD) in beta as an unapproved commercial product. Did. It turns out that the Apple co-founder bought a promotional Tesla video, which is now reportedly staged at Musk’s request, according to recent testimony by the head of the program.
Wozniak said, “They’ve robbed my family – me and my wife – of so much money that I couldn’t tell you.”
With minimal progress, Musk has given up on all talk of his Robotaxi dream. Musk’s bold claims go back years, but they reached a different level during Tesla’s Autonomy Day in April 2019. , so that their owners can “sleep” in the vehicle while it is transporting them around.
Tesla customers can earn passive income from their car, potentially around $30,000 a year, by joining a dedicated Tesla network of Robotaxi and instructing the vehicle to automatically rent. It would happen at the push of a button, he claimed: “The fleet wakes up with an over-the-air update – that’s all it takes.”
Nearly four years later, Musk has made some fundamental progress with the fourth-quarter roll-out of its feature-complete FSD to all customers who paid for the $15,000 option. But the software remains in beta, meaning the vehicle must be under constant supervision by a licensed driver behind the wheel, and is limited to only the United States and Canada.
To Wozniak’s sorrow, none of the Tesla CEO’s original claims have come true. “Elon Musk said it would drive itself across the country by the end of 2016,” Wozniak said, adding that Musk was tired of constantly moving the goalpost from one year to the next, failing every time.
In recent months, Musk has toned down his rhetoric. He now only aims to make supervised FSDs safer than the average human, and has completely abandoned all talk of achieving the most advanced stage of full autonomy known as “Level 5”.
When Musk was asked last April how he could be so far off in his prediction — when rivals have been more calm in theirs — the entrepreneur simply said that it might shock people to realize that it’s time – Can be wrong at times.
Even though Musk hasn’t delivered on Robotaxi plans, a key element of his master plan Part Deux, he will unveil Part 3 at Tesla’s investor day on March 1.