Elon Musk Is Mad About Reporting On Robots Injuring His Workers, And He Has A Point

Elon Musk is big mad at a report that kind of sort of implied that one of his favorite robots attacked one of his employees at Tesla’s Austin, Texas factory two years ago. The report never actually said it was one of his shiny (fuckable?) Optimus friends, but it didn’t exactly highlight that it was a terrifying robotic arm meant for picking up scrap metal.

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Musk is pissed thanks to the “social media sharing image” (a little news lady speak for you there) on the exclusive story from the Daily Mail, which broke the news of the attack. The image includes a split of Cowboy Elon and a small legion of his Optimus robots. The entire post, indeed, still includes images of Optimus robots while never once mentioning them in the story.

Misleading? Yep. It’s why we here at Jalopnik stayed away from the story, as the Mail isn’t known for being the most reliable source. While it may seem like Musk is missing the forest of attack robots for the blameless robots trees, the event itself sounds terrifying, but all too common on America’s factory floors:

A Tesla engineer was attacked by a robot during a brutal and bloody malfunction at the company’s Giga Texas factory near Austin.

Two witnesses watched in horror as their fellow employee was attacked by the machine designed to grab and move freshly cast aluminum car parts.

The robot had pinned the man, who was then programming software for two disabled Tesla robots nearby, before sinking its metal claws into the worker’s back and arm, leaving a ‘trail of blood’ along the factory surface.

[…]

The two eyewitnesses to the event — which occurred in the section of the Texas factory floor where vehicle chassis are first assembled — told reporters for The Information a more harrowing story, however.

As the bleeding Tesla engineer attempted to wrestle free from the assembly robot’s grasp, another worker hit an emergency ‘stop’ button to end the attack.

Once free, the engineer fell ‘a couple of feet down a chute designed to collect scrap aluminum, leaving a trail of blood behind him,’ according to The Information, a subscription-based tech news site.

OSHA has found that Tesla has a habit underreporting injuries, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility at all that Tesla is now, but the Mail report goes on to say Tesla has a much higher rate of injury than other auto plants (something we’ve covered as well.) If Tesla is cheating the system, why wouldn’t it go all the way? The Mail also speaks to a lawyer representing injured contractors and employees, who says injury figures are much higher than what is being reported and reported to OHSA about the violations, but her statements are still light on facts and actual findings. All of this, plus the multiple images of Optimus robots that fill the body of the story, makes me think the Daily Mail has done what it always does—create a technically correct, but sloppy and misleading story, for the clicks.

This whole thing put me in the uncomfortable and unfamiliar position of lightly defending Elon Musk. Ugh. His way of doing business is still bad and, most of all, dangerous for workers, but there’s plenty to dislike about Musk without bringing his (so far) innocent sex robots into it.