55half-hour,snappingphotoswithhisphone
asittraveledalongtheEastBay’sindustrialspine.Thecar
wentthrougha tollplaza,ontotheBayBridge,andultimately
toTreasureIsland.OnApril 18 hepostedthephotoson
Twitter,alongwithsomebearishanalysis.HothiknewTesla
hadinvitedinvestorstoitsheadquartersthefollowingweek
foranAutopilotpresentation.Thesightingofa democarjust
daysbeforetheevent,Hothiargued,provedthatAutopilot—
“slaughterpilot,” in TSLAQ parlance—wasn’t fully baked. The
investor day, he predicted, would be “saturated with false
promises, misleading suggestions, and lures to credulity.”
Two days later, Hothi learned, to his surprise, that his real
name was all over Twitter—and on a restraining order, to boot.
No one served him in person, but the day after he published
his tweets, Tesla lawyers had gone to a court in Alameda
County and told a judge that Hothi had “stalked, harassed,
and endangered” the employees in the Model 3. Tesla claimed
that Hothi had been “swerving dangerously close” to the vehi-
cle and that its employees had feared for their safety. The
company also alleged that Hothi had hit a Tesla security guard
with his car at the Fremont factory two months earlier and
that he’d placed a portable camera mounted on a utility pole
outside the factory in 2018.
Hothi was bewildered by the allegations and taken aback
that he’d become the story. He and his family received racist
messagesanddeaththreats.SomeoneemailedtheUniversityofMichiganatAnnArbor,whereHothiis a doctoralcandidate
inAsianlanguagesandcultures,toaccusehimofhaving“dis-
turbingandviolenttendencies.”Voicemails left at the depart-
ment offices urged his
expulsion. Disturbed
as he was by the invec-
tive, Hothi also felt pro-
foundly validated: He’d
gotten inside Musk’s
head. “I realized that
I had won,” he says.
Naturally, he went
straight back to Twitter.
“This is my promise,”
hetweeted on April 20.
“Tesla is a zero. @Elon
Musk will go to prison.”Undernormal circumstances,
TSLAQwouldbejustanother
wayforobsessivestofindeach
otheronline,like#paleodiet or
#juggalo. But these obsessives
have proved they can shape per-
ception and move the stockHOTHI IN ANNARBOR@JIMNEYCREDIT: $TSLA
(SOON $TSLAQ) BOARD
OF DIRECTORS WIELDS ZERO
INFLUENCE OVER THIS
PETULANT, BEYOND
REPROACH CHARLATAN WITH
A RELIGIOUS FOLLOWING
OF MINDLESS MINIONS.THE ENTIRE BOARD OF
DIRECTORS SHOULD BE FINED
BY @SEC_ENFORCEMENT.
NO PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY
AFTER SO MANY CRAZY
TWEETS. (AUG 7 2018)@SKABOOSHKA: LET’S TALK ABOUT $TSLA’S SHAREHOLDER MEETING. ELON ANSWERED ELEVEN QUESTIONS
FROM TWITTER. OF THOSE ELEVEN, FOUR WERE FROM TWITTER USERS THAT HAVE TWO OR LESS
FOLLOWERS. TWO OF THOSE USERS HAVE ZERO FOLLOWERS. ONE OF
THEM HAS ZERO FOLLOWERS AND IS FOLLOWED BY ZERO (JUN 6 2018)PUNCHING GENIUS, YCLEPT ELON. (DEC 18 2019)
PHOTOGRAPH BY ALI LAPETINA FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK; STYLIST: AJA COON