Facebook cofounder slams Elon Musk, calling Tesla and SpaceX 'scams he got away with'

• Dustin Moskovitz said Elon Musk's successful companies could be seen as "scams he got away with."
• The Facebook cofounder said Musk sucked up resources from others by overpromising with Tesla.

Apparently Mark Zuckerberg isn't the only Facebook founder that's wary of Elon Musk. Facebook cofounder and Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz took a jab at the billionaire on Thursday.

Moskovitz said people often argue Musk makes up for his antics through the value his companies Tesla and SpaceX bring to the world, but the Asana CEO said he's not sure the billionaire's success is legitimate.

"The point is I don't really see these companies as dispensating impact, or at least don't give nearly as much credit to him as others do," Moskovitz said on Threads. "If they were really built on outward lies, rather than just self-deceptions (rose-colored glasses), then we should really see them as scams he got away with."

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Moskovitz said that he believes Musk accelerated the development of EVs by one to two years at most and he thinks the Tesla CEO might actually have delayed it by "overpromising." Moskovitz said that Musk attracted customers, workers, and funding through his lofty promises for EV ranges, as well as autonomous driving and automated assembly plants.

Moskovitz pointed to a recent report from Reuters that claimed Tesla, through a direct order from Musk, had exaggerated the expected range for its EVs on the vehicle's dashboard. Moskovitz added that the higher ranges made Teslas "look heads and tails above the competitors and that was not true."

Neither Musk nor Tesla have responded to Reuters' report.

Reuters did not indicate how far off Tesla's advertised range estimates were from its actual range, but cited third-party tests that indicated meaningful differences in real-world testing. The electric-car maker dominates the US market in large part because legacy automakers like Ford and General Motors have only begun to scale production for their own EVs. Tesla also no longer has the longest advertised range on the US market for electric cars. The Lucid Air has a range of about 516 miles, while Tesla's longest range vehicle, the Model S, has an estimated range of about 405 miles per a full charge.

Moskovitz — who has never worked in the automotive industry but says he comes at the issue from a software perspective — said that Musk's "big promise" of fully autonomous cars has also contributed to the company's ability to suck up resources at the potential expense of competitors. The Facebook cofounder pointed out that Musk has been promising self-driving software for years, but the carmaker still only offers an admittedly buggy beta version of FSD that requires a licensed driver to operate the vehicle.

"I work in software, I get that delays happen. But these are *the* claims that positioned Tesla as massively ahead of the competition and created a belief that Elon can pull forward the future through sheer grit and ingenuity," Moskovitz wrote. "The *belief* in those claims and the accelerated timelines is what made Tesla look like a leader so quickly; then they turned that cache into actual resources with fundraising. Estimating correctly wouldn't have looked revolutionary."

Moskovitz argued that Musk has a tendency to overpromise and under-deliver, which sucked up resources from other companies like BYD, Toyota, Nikola, and Rivian. It's important to note that many of these automakers did not start making EVs until several years after Tesla began selling its first vehicle in 2008 after the company was founded in 2003. For example, Chinese automaker BYD didn't start building EVs till 2010, EV startup Nikola wasn't launched until 2014, and Rivian wasn't founded until 2009.

Moskovitz said he had similar thoughts regarding Musk's work at SpaceX, a company that is privately valued at about $150 billion, but said he'll "try to enumerate at some point in the future."

He did not respond to a request for additional comment from Insider ahead of publication.

Not everyone agreed with the Facebook cofounder's hot take — he received some pushback from users in response to his post.

"I am no Elon fanboy, but one could argue that without Tesla showing the way and pushing the industry (even with simply false and grandiose advertising), none of the existing car makers would have tried to update their existing cash cow line ups as they have now," one Thread user wrote.

Musk has also said that he does not want to discourage competition whether through Tesla's price wars or his updates to X, formerly known as Twitter.

"The goal of my companies is simply to be as useful as possible, never to kill the competition," Musk tweeted on Thursday in response to a meme about X. "Competing to serve the people is a good thing."

Spokespeople for Tesla, SpaceX, and Musk also did not respond to a request for comment ahead of publication.