Seriously, you shouldn't believe Musk with regards to lawsuits.

If Musk knew anything about law, he wouldn't have been forced to buy Twitter last year. The world was revealed to how ignorant this guy is to the law.

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By the way, this is a civil case, not a criminal case. "Illegal" is almost a non-sequitur.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fraud

> In civil litigation, allegations of fraud might be based on a misrepresentation of fact that was either intentional or negligent. For a statement to be an intentional misrepresentation, the person who made it must either have known the statement was false or been reckless as to its truth. The speaker must have also intended that the person to whom the statement was made would rely on it. The hearer must then have reasonably relied on the promise and also been harmed because of that reliance.

All they have to do to successfully sue here is prove that the other side was "misleading", and that they "knew about being misleading" (intentional), or even the lower-standard of recklessness (they didn't know they were misleading, but they didn't do enough research to prove their own statements true before telling customers).

Welcome to Civil Law. The standards are much lower than criminal law. But its just money, so that makes sense.

“Unless you can get some actual developer to testify that he was explicitly ordered to build the algorithm to report a range which he knew was impossible to reach or something similar, this seems practically irrelevant.”

“Zero evidence for that.”

When confronted with evidence that the algorithm was specifically designed to show an unrealistic, misleading, and apparently impossible to meet range based on orders from the highest authority in Tesla:

“Certainly not [evidence] for anything illegal.”