Gore, you see, is a prominent backer of Fisker's Fisker Automotive, which just last week got a $529 million government loan to build a hybrid sports car. Gore also is a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, another Fisker investor. The Department of Energy said the former vice president's involvement did not sway its decision, but his involvement with the company can't hurt the firm's credibility with investors in this down economy. Musk's electric car company Tesla, meanwhile, is backed by rival Valley firm Draper Fisher Jervetson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and is a media and celebrity darling. It got $465 million in government loans back in June.

Fisker once had an $800,000 contract with Tesla to design the Model S, the car central to the company's plan for profitability, and Tesla accused him in a lawsuit of stealing company secrets. Tesla also claimed Fisker did shoddy work, sabotaging their design and setting the company back three to six months, a delay that came during one of the company's darkest periods. Fisker won an arbitration ruling saying he did nothing wrong, but there's no reason to think that settled the grudge.

The government is now subsidizing both sides as they go head to head in the market for affordable electric-powered cars. Sure, one makes a plug-in hybrid and the other a pure electric, but the market for pricey, super-environmentally-friendly sedans is relatively small at this early stage. Not the best time to help the companies potentially undercut one another's profit margins. It would have been better to let Fisker get money from a government closer to where he'll be manufacturing the car, over in Finland.

After all, "I'm buying a Fisker!" probably doesn't sound nearly so dirty over in the European market.

Presumably, Martin Eberhard's acquiescence comes at a price. The ousted electric-car-company founder sued Musk (pictured) for libel, slander and breach of contract barely three months ago following months of building tensions. After Tesla won hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid and started putting its affairs in order, Eberhard dropped his suit, and now the two sides have confirmed a deal, according to the blog Legal Pad.

Among many other allegations, Eberhard's suit had disputed Musk's right to call himself a founder, since he wasn't around for the actual birth of the company, while Musk claimed he could call himself that because he did so much to help the company in its early years, a dubious definition he also used to call himself a "co-founder" of PayPal. Eberhard has surrendered, and not just in a grudging manner: In an official statement, according to Legal Pad, he writes, "As co-founder of the company, Elon's contributions to Tesla have been extraordinary." Yes, Musk has made extraordinary contributions, not just managerially, but linguistically, as well.

(Musk pic: JD Lasica)

Musk and his private rocket company, SpaceX, are "urging the White House to come up with... financial support" for their Falcon 9 heavy rocket, the Wall Street Journal reports. SpaceX would then charge the government to send astronauts and space-station parts into orbit. Luckily for Musk, the president appears to have a soft spot for profligate futurists. In addition to funneling $465 million to help Tesla manufacture an electric sedan, the Obama administration is also considering hiring private companies — like SpaceX — to launch and supply a forthcoming space station, the Journal says.

The bailout could hardly come at a better time; despite private infusions totaling at least $120 million, and millions in fees from government customers for its first few launches, SpaceX has become famous for its failed launches. The company notoriously sent the ashes of Star Trek actor James "Scotty" Doohan into the South Pacific rather than toward the stars, giving the startup a perfect 0-for-3 record. In the intervening year, the company has successfully launched exactly one satellite, and been bailed out by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Thiel, a libertarian, no doubt relishes the thought of displacing NASA bureaucrats. But he'll have trouble explaining to his pro-oil-drilling, anti-immigrant political buddies why he's helping a Democratic administration grow the federal debt through a massive pork-barrel subsidy to an environmental entrepreneur, from South Africa.

Come to think of it, the administration in question might have trouble explaining that, too.

(Pic: Musk, lower left, observing a rocket launch, via SpaceX)

Eberhard has suddenly dropped his suit, the San Jose Business Journal reports. It seems safe to assume some sort of settlement was reached; the $465 million in federal funds Tesla received from the Department of Energy after Eberhard filed could have freed up other cash for a payout, or convinced Eberhard that Tesla had the resources to mount a protracted fight. Or maybe Tesla was simply scared: it just lost a preliminary motion to throw out the case.

Tesla's money also helped it secure land in the Stanford Research Park, not far from Facebook's new headquarters, replacing a San Jose parcel it had planned to acquire but lost in January thanks to its lack of capital.

Now the company can turn its attention to the real challenge: Fighting off Nissan, which just rolled out its "Leaf" electric car, which it plans to introduce in 2012. Nissan, which will lease the battery pack separately, has said its car will compete with gas-powered vehicles costing $25,000-$30,000. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, meanwhile, has staked his company's future on the Model S, which is a full-sized sedan to the compact Leaf but starting around $50,000. In addition to an apparent price gap, Tesla must also wrestle with the recent departure of its science director, in charge of the critical battery system. And it must site and build a factory to manufacture the S itself.

Like most startups, Tesla has been through its share of booms and busts. Right now it's on a roll; the question is whether it can build up enough momentum for the inevitable crash back to reality.

[lawsuit news via Business Insider]

One of the real founders of Tesla, ousted CEO Martin Eberhard, argues that Musk didn't actually start the company. Reasonable! But no barrier to Musk: He has argued he should be called co-founder of PayPal for contributing to PayPal's "viral growth mechanism" and "business model." What really happened: Musk talked his way into a merger with payments company Confinity several months after Confinity launched a product called "PayPal."

Musk's arguments about Tesla are much the same; he just told the Associated Press "we had to basically rebuild the company," and thus he has claim on the title "co-founder." Of course, if cleaning up someone else's mess makes one a co-founder, every taxpayer in America can rightfully say he helped start Tesla, along with GM, Goldman Sachs and other corporation bailed out by the government. Be sure to thank Musk when you update your resumé.

At least, that's the way Musk is telling it:

Given that Daimler prides itself on integrity and conducted exhaustive due diligence, they would not have insisted that I remain CEO as a condition of the deal if Eberhard's attacks had merit.

Daimler's "cash infusion" (Musk's word) should be crucial to Musk's electric car company; just before the money came in we reported Tesla was running on fumes after nearly running out of cash last fall. So Musk will be awfully hard to oust if the Daimler deal really does lock him as CEO, if only because Tesla needs all the liquidity it can get.

Musk is said to have kept cash tight at PayPal to advance his control of the company; the Daimler clause accomplishes a similar goal at Tesla, albeit by different means. It would appear Musk is in the driver's seat, at least until another sugar daddy comes along.

So it's nice that Musk has such lofty goals. Frankly, it's always been his forte. He leaves the "how to get there" to other, more little people. Like with an idea to build 100,000 cars per year by buying an idled assembly plant from a U.S. automaker. He'll leave the whole "design a mid-size sedan for it to build" to other people. Musk's an "idea man," ya know. And for an "idea man" the reality of building 100,000 mid-size sedans is kind of like trying to build a "kabillion" mid-size sedans — they're both impossible numbers when you don't even have a working design.

He also thinks gas should cost $10 a gallon. Hmm, we wonder why. Keep in mind it's not that we disagree with Musk, we just happen to believe it's also probably the price-point in which a $100,000 Tesla roadster becomes a good investment versus a sports car with similar performance. [CNet, Twitter]

After all, so much about Tesla is not what it appears. But a lawsuit just filed by Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, who says he was unjustly pushed out of the company, shows top company executives could be as jumpily obsessive about getting their hands on a company roadster as anyone else. That's a vote of confidence on the trendiness of the end product, if nothing else.

Even after he was shoved aside as CEO and left the company, Eberhard desperately wanted a promised Tesla Roadster. He was thwarted no fewer than three time according to Wired's Chuck Squatriglia, who took a deep dive into the lawsuit documents:

Eberhard claims he was to receive the first Roadster to roll off the assembly line, but [Chairman Elon] Musk allegedly insisted it was his. The suit says Eberhard agreed to take the second car - which he says would be worth far less as a collectible - and got the deal in writing, only to see Musk allegedly sell the car to a friend in February, 2008.

At about that time, Tesla allegedly told Eberhard his car was on its way but would have to undergo "endurance testing." Several months later, according to the suit, Eberhard learned an unnamed Tesla employee "had driven Eberhard's Roadster into the back of a truck, almost completely totaling the vehicle." The damage was so bad, the suit states, that the car "required the replacement of no fewer than 75 different parts."

(The crash had been previously reported.)

There's apparently two kinds of Tesla employees — current employees and former employees suing Tesla. Frankly, we're not surprised Eberhard's suing Musk and Tesla. We're more surprised that it took this long to happen especially given Musk's propensity for diarrhea-of-the-mouth types of comments. For the moment, the only thing we have to go off of is the PDF file from the California Superior Court — which you can see here.

In response, we're told Tesla plans to counter-sue Eberhard. That went over real well with Henrik Fisker — let's see how well it works here. All we know is we're just proud Eberhard quotes former-Valleywag Owen Thomas in his court filing. Gotta love the V-wag love! (Hat tip to Owen!)

Photo Credit: Yodel Anecdotal @ Flickr

I still remember the day I called you up and tried to recruit you to Valleywag — only to learn that that sneaky rapscallion Nick Denton had beaten me to the punch by one whole day in offering you the night shift at Gawker. It all worked out in the end — and perhaps better than I could have imagined back in 2007. But the main lesson I take away from that is that you can get Denton to do pretty much whatever you want if you're patient enough.

Denton, who has a weakness for idle truisms, likes to say that gossip is a young man's game. But you're old enough to remember the first dotcom bubble, and how it popped. That's going to be key in the next few years. We may escape a depression, but Silicon Valley is facing a reckoning nonetheless. Too much venture capital chased too few idea for far too long — and a buoyant economy can no longer hide the startup factory's mistakes.

The biggest mistake you can make is getting too close to your Valley sources and fall for their groupthink in order to ingratiate yourself. (You know how I've scolded you for gullibly buying the hype that Twitter is an amazing source of real-time news. Okay, perhaps it was — for five seconds, before the blowhards, spammers, and self-promoters found it.) At least your schooling will help you remain an outsider: As a Berkeley grad, you'll have an instinctive dislike for the Valley's Stanford in-crowd.

At the same time, don't forget that your years living, studying, and working in the Bay Area give you a better understanding of your beat than anyone can have from 3,000 miles away. Gabriel and Nick, though well-intentioned, have the Manhattan media habit of confusing proximity with relevance. Gawker is much more than New York now — and Valleywag's unique place therein must be firmly grounded in northern California's shaky soil.

Remember: Love is far more powerful than hate. Keep a clear-eyed passion for the Valley. Most tech reporters here secretly loathe their subjects, but try to disguise it with a supine gladhandery as they beg for scoops about new startup website features. They hate themselves and the people they write about. Sad, right? By loving the Valley, you can write about it more honestly than any of them. Just prepare to have your heart broken again, and again, and again. To truly love something, you must love it with all its failings.

For example, the Valley's Alice-in-Wonderland economics — why is Twitter worth more than most startups precisely because it has no revenues to speak of? But the thing you must love most about Silicon Valley — the part of the story the local press corps always skips over in favor of buzzwords, punditry, and lazy analysis — is its people.

The Valley's story is not one of chips and code. It is not a tale of technology. It is the always-running tragicomedy of the people who make technology.

Here are a few characters to watch. I hope it helps — but I can't wait to see who you add to the list.

Marissa Mayer Valleywag's first story remains its best. The public face of Google, Mayer also runs search, the only business that matters there. The cupcake frosting of her girly image — one she assiduously advances at every opportunity — may humanize the otherwise robotic computer scientist. But it is a distraction. The real question to ask about Mayer: Does her spreadsheet-ridden management style scale to new problems beyond search? Are her strengths now turning into limitations?

Mark Zuckerberg Ignore the nerd façade. Facebook's 25-year-old CEO is headstrong and ruthless. Here's the grand irony of Zuckerberg's revolutionary venture: He claims to be all about openness and sharing. But his imperious, my-way-or-the-highway management style has created a fractious culture of dishonesty, delusion, and disillusionment at the social network. His underlings either learn to say things they don't believe, or they move on. This is why Sheryl Sandberg is exactly the wrong COO for Zuckerberg. The veteran of the Clinton Administration has forgotten her Google training and reverted to Washington-player form, where staying on message is all that counts. Facebook's best hope is that Zuckerberg learns from his mistakes — but first he has to recognize them as mistakes.

Carol Bartz Yahoo's CEO swears like a sailor. At last, a boss who has found the right language to describe Yahoo's plight! Bartz brings a refreshing frankness to Yahoo. But the already demoralized troops she inherited will need to start seeing results. Otherwise, Valleywag will continue to be a steady recipient of leaks from Sunnyvale.

Elon Musk The CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX is living the geek high life, playing with fast cars, rocket ships, and other people's money. It's wonderful that Musk has realized even a small part of his childhood fantasies. But he risks destroying his dreams by refusing to reconcile them with reality. Factcheck everything Musk says. For example, was he actually running either Zip2 or PayPal, the previous dotcom successes he likes to cite in his bio, when they were sold?

Owen Van Natta Everyone is going to give MySpace's new CEO a pass, because the so-called "social portal" is so clearly troubled. If the former Facebook executive succeeds in a turnaround, it will be viewed as an astonishing achievement; if he fails, people will say no one could save MySpace. That's not fair. Hold his feet to the fire, and judge this disturbingly tan rock-star boss like anyone else on the list.

Peter Thiel Thiel, the PayPal cofounder, likes to brag about how he recruits only the best brains from the best schools to work at Clarium Capital, his hedge fund. Oh, really? Take a look at their résumés on LinkedIn. Like so many of this outspokenly harebrained libertarian's theses, the claim sounds good on paper but doesn't stand up to inspection. Valleywag, alone in Silicon Valley, can take a keen look at Thiel's rhetoric without being dazzled by his inflated wealth.

Tim Armstrong Like Van Natta at MySpace, Armstrong, a Google golden boy now charged with running AOL, will be enjoying a honeymoon. Don't worry: There are plenty of disgruntled AOLers who will gladly help you break up the lovefest.

Jimmy Wales Remind me: What does Wikipedia's founder actually do to earn his keep, besides give speeches? In all this time, I was never able to figure that out. Maybe you can!

Eric Schmidt When did Google's CEO turn into such a raging egomaniac? When the blogosphere was the only corner of the Internet that criticized him, he dismissed it as a "cesspool." But now everyone from Hollywood to the New York Times to the Federal Trade Commission is looking askance at his online empire's practices. "Don't be evil" has turned into "don't get caught." He will, though. Be ready when he does.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin Google's wonder twins have achieved geek nirvana, creating a cloistered campus with free food, lava lamps, and exercise balls to spare. They have a fleet of jets to transport them to rocket launches or rendezvous with Richard Branson and Bono. They've even managed to get married and reproduce. Just one question: Are they still sane? Were they ever?

There are many people who will help you — many of the same people who helped me so much, I hope. They include:

• Nick Denton, for putting up with three years of playing hard to get — and then putting up with much more besides.
• Brian Lam, Choire Sicha, Noah Robischon and Lockhart Steele, for tag-teaming me into taking the job.
• Gabriel Snyder, for expertly steering Valleywag into Gawker's welcoming arms.
• All the Valleywaggers: Paul Boutin, Nick Douglas, Megan McCarthy, Tim Faulkner, Mary Jane Irwin, Jordan Golson, Nicholas Carlson, Jackson West, Melissa Gira Grant, and Tim Woolery. You guys, we've been through so much together!
• Richard Blakeley: We made sweet Photoshop magic together.
• Everyone at Gawker Media: How much do I love you? Far more than just five milligrams.
• Sarah Lacy, Kara Swisher, and Peter Kafka: My peers and fellow purveyors of Valley gossip, you constantly inspired me.
• Countless sources, tipsters, and fellow scribes: Please understand that I esteem you none the less for not naming you here. In fact, your continued anonymity is the best sign of my abiding affection.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Good luck, Ryan. I'll be reading eagerly.

Don't screw it up.

Yours,

Owen
The Valleywag

(Photos by Brian Solis and Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

It's not that Musk's dreams — introducing a mass-market electric car, colonizing space — are ignoble. Far from it. It's just that he lacks the means and the mindset to realize them.

Every dreamer must turn huckster at some point, lest his fantasies remain just that. But Musk is taking the practice to an extreme.

He is touring the United States, showing off a barely driveable show-car version of his Model S electric sedan, hoping to drum up deposits — sorry, "reservation fees" — on which his cash-strapped company will live until, in theory, it lands $350 million in government loans to build the car — maybe in 2011 but more likely in 2012, years after Musk first predicted his company would sell a mass-market sedan. If it happens at all. Musk has been treating the loans as a sure thing for months, but the company's application has yet to be approved.

If he cannot stop human motorists from polluting the planet, he will try to help them escape it through his other company, Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. But SpaceX, too, seems to be running aground. The latest launch of his Falcon 1 rocket was cancelled, and the vehicle is rotting in the moist salt air of Omelek Island in Kwajalein while his technicians scramble to fix a vibration problem.

Aside from Falcon 1, Musk has no tested vehicles. The Falcon 9, the rocketship which Musk hopes will replace the Space Shuttle in carrying crew to the International Space Station, has not yet had its maiden flgiht. According to an archived SpaceX launch schedule, that was supposed to happen last year. An updated schedule shows that SpaceX's paying clients from Malaysia to Sweden have had their launches delayed, in some cases by years.

Musk's personal life is another source of unmanaged distraction. He is in the midst of a divorce from his wife, Justine Musk; the couple has five children. He is engaged to a British actress, the recently blonde Talulah Riley, whom he is supposed to marry this year. (That launch's schedule, too, has seemed to shift.)

Musk's underlings report a fickle, reality-resistant boss, flitting from idea to idea but never quite landing. And yet we're supposed to believe that Musk will get us to Mars by 2020 on the dot?

There's the real danger: Not that Musk's dreams are wrong, but that his personal failings mean it's more than likely he'll never realize them. Then the danger is that Musk's frothingly dizzy fanboys and orgasmically giggling fangirls will turn not just against Musk but against the dreams of electric cars and spaceflight. That's why, if you hope to zip around this rock without polluting it, or escape its gravity altogether, Elon Musk should not be your hero. The dream is not the dreamer.

(Photo via SpaceX)

Mostly Letterman wanted to know why Detroit's big car companies didn't come up with mass-market electric cars, and whether Tesla's Roadster really would save the planet. (He made a good point about carbon emissions from coal-fired electrical plants.)

But Letterman, when he let Musk get a word in edgewise, let him off easy. He didn't quiz Musk, for example, on whether the Model S show car Musk drove on set was the real thing. According to Dan Neil at the Los Angeles Times, it's not. The slapped-together prototype, a rebuilt Mercedes with a Tesla-designed powertrain, is "just barely ambulatory — more like a glorified golf cart than a harbinger of tomorrow tech," Neil wrote. And Tesla executives confessed to Neil that the car was far from being finished in its design, let alone production.

Here's another thing Letterman should have asked about: How is Musk going to build the Model S? Even if Tesla gets the $350 million in government loans it's hoping for — far from a sure thing — it will fall hundreds of millions of dollars short of the real cost of bringing the Model S to market. An insider tells us Tesla is about to close a new round of financing from a so-called "strategic" investor — that is, some industry powerhouse, rather than a traditional financier. Tesla almost ran out of money last fall, and has run on fumes since then, despite raising a $40 million round of convertible debt from existing investors.

Any new money will mean handing a large stake to the new investor. Daimler, which already has a deal to buy parts from Tesla for its own electric car, is a strong possibility. But will they leave a hothead like Musk, with his habit of stretching the truth, in charge? That's what Letterman should have asked — not if electric cars will come to market, but if Musk will be the man to do it.

More from the segment:

He certainly has the motivation: revenge — and the success which is its best form.

Van Natta joined Facebook when the startup was an also-ran site, limited to college kids and run by college dropouts, and steered it through a period of hypergrowth. He was a key negotiator behind an advertising deal with Microsoft which provided Facebook with a solid financial footing as its user numbers blew up. His payback? Founder Mark Zuckerberg demoted him gracelessly in August 2007, and left in February 2008 — the first of many high-profile departures by executives who had fallings-out with Zuckerberg.

He then spent months hanging out and vacationing before joining a Palo Alto music startup he'd invested in, Project Playlist, as its CEO. Playlist's music widget for social networks had been banned by both Facebook and MySpace as it feuded with the major labels, and while he didn't manage to get it reinstated on either site, Van Natta did strike a deal with EMI.

Deals are what Van Natta built his reputation on. He spent seven years at Amazon.com, ultimately becoming its vice president of worldwide business development. Before that, his LinkedIn profile offers few details. There's a six-year gap between his 1992 graduation from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a BA in English and American literature and his 1998 arrival at Amazon.

Here's what we've reconstructed of his background: CNET editor Charlie Cooper recalls him being a sales intern at Computer Shopper in the early '90s. By 1996, he was working at Softbank Expos, a conference organizer. He then joined Zip2, a now-forgotten dotcom started by Elon Musk, now the CEO of Tesla Motors, and became its senior director of network advertising. In 1998, he joined PlanetAll, a nascent social network, as its VP of sales, shortly before it was acquired by Amazon.com.

What this alleged Internet studmuffin's resume tells us is that he's a smart opportunist. Is that what MySpace needs? It has certainly missed enough opportunities along the way. The other skill Van Natta's noted for is the ability, rare among slick suit-wearing dealmakers, to be tolerated by engineers. MySpace has never been a technology-driven company, and that flaw finally caught up with it over the past couple of years.

If Van Natta plays to his past reputation and just cuts some flashy deals, he'll solidify his reputation as a dilettante dealmaker, and doom his career. If he woos the right talent to MySpace and turns the place around, he'll prove he deserves to be a CEO — and rub his success in the face of a certain snotnosed punk in Palo Alto.

Van Natta, who has long aspired to run a consumer Internet startup, is an obvious choice. Having fallen out of favor with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's fickle 24-year-old CEO, he is spending his exile running a music startup, called Project Playlist, out of an office building shared with Facebook. While Van Natta has managed to extricate Playlist from some of its legal troubles with the music labels, it hardly seems like a gig that encompasses his ambitions. Having worked for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as well as Zuckerberg, Van Natta seems capable of dealing with a testy owner-CEO like Rupert Murdoch.

Calacanis, meanwhile, has no qualifications for the job. He tanked his first media company, then sold his second one, Weblogs Inc., for $25 million to AOL, where he accomplished nothing of note after the acquisition. He's since raised far too much money for Mahalo, a Web 2.0 rehash of Yahoo's 1995-era Web directory. Silicon Alley Insider thinks he should be MySpace's new CEO because he worships Jon Miller, the former AOL CEO who played mentor to him before Miller was fired and Calacanis quit. Ever the clever fameball, Calacanis is playing coy and saying "No comment" as loudly as possible.

Miller now runs News Corp.'s Internet operations, so he's the one to pick DeWolfe's successor. We have a suggestion: Hire both! Van Natta can do the hard work of fixing MySpace. While he's affable enough, he hardly seems to crave attention.

Tom Anderson, DeWolfe's sleazy sidekick at MySpace, is every MySpace user's first friend when they sign up. He needs a replacement, too. Why not replace him with Calacanis, the ultimate Web fameball, who seems to measure his self-worth by his number of Twitter followers? He doesn't need any other responsibilities. And as MySpace's Chief Ego Officer, he can still claim to be CEO.

Lacy conducted an interview with Musk that appeared last Friday. But instead of probing Tesla's uncertain future, she invited Musk to talk about the past. The column that sparked his outrage, published last November, asked whether taxpayers should subsidize a company which makes $109,000 electric sports cars for the wealthy. Musk claimed that the Times had retracted the story. In fact, the newspaper had corrected a minor bit about Tesla's application — still not granted yet — for $350 million in government loans. Randall Stross, a San Jose State University professor and Times contributor, initially wrote that the loans would go to the production of Tesla's expensive Roadster, as opposed to funding its vaporous plans for a $57,400 sedan, the Model S.

The New York Observer has the he-said, she-said between Times Sunday Business editor Tim O'Brien and Lacy, a former BusinessWeek reporter who freelances for TechCrunch, Yahoo, and other publications. Here's O'Brien:

I think Sarah Lacy was too busy giggling to do Journalism 101 and call Randy or me for comment to make sure what Elon was saying was accurate. Because it was not only inaccurate, it was flat-out wrong. We wrote a clarification of the headline. We didn't retract the story at all; we stood firmly by the story, and I still stand by Randy's column. You can't help but watch that interview and marvel at the squishy familiarity between Lacy and Musk. And I wonder whether or not some journalistic blinders had popped off.... It was so ridiculous that it was entertaining. It was so misguided and inaccurate and I was stunned at the poor quality of the journalism.

Lacy's response:

I think it's embarrassing that The Times would try to throw me under the bus because they did shoddy reporting that they wound up correcting. If they want to throw me under the bus to make up for their own column that they massively rewrote, you know, go for it.

Actually, that was an error, too. As the Observer notes, the Times removed one sentence from the story and rewrote another.

In her defense, Lacy implied that the Times was sexist for criticizing her. But then she goes on to defend herself on the grounds that she's a girl:

I think everyone has their own style in journalism. Look, I'm a girl from the South! Sometimes I laugh. Someone can pejoratively call it giggling. But if you look at the body of my work, I ask lots of hard questions, and break a lot of hard news.

Another error. If you look at the body of Lacy's work, you'll see a pattern of oblique references to unspecified insider knowledge trotted out after someone else breaks a story. Lacy knows far more than she reports, she always implies — and yet this knowledge never seems to make its way out to the public in a way that benefits the reader.

Lacy is right that the Times is making a lame critique of her journalism. Here's what the Times should have said.

First of all, it ought never have corrected the story. Because the truth of the matter is that if Tesla persuades the government to give it loans, it will in fact spend at least some of that money on ongoing production of the Roadster. It plans to open several expensive new showrooms in the U.S. and Europe. Until late 2011 at the earliest, those showrooms will have nothing but the Roadster to sell. If the Roadster is profitable now, it is barely so. Tesla's overhead will almost certainly have to be funded through the loan proceeds.

A tipster, who's given us inside info on Tesla before, has sketched the back-of-the-envelope numbers for what it will cost to get the Model S sedan into production and thinks, even with the loans, Tesla's more than $500 million short of what it needs. The Model S "prototype" Musk showed off last month was a "show car": a one-off model of what a car will look like, but far from a finished design that can be sent into production. The tipster thinks the earliest Tesla can go from concept to delivery is 2013 — not 2011, as Musk promises, which means another two years of peddling high-end sports cars for the wealthy, as some "douchebag" dared to point out.

Here's the tip:

The untrained observer and the Government may be persuaded by typical industry show car building tricks, but insiders and auto experts know that the Model S that was revealed was a reworked Mercedes CLS. To top it off the components and parts on the vehicle are not even those ever considered in the design.

The fact is Tesla had an agreement with an OEM [original equipment manufacturer] to use their off the shelf parts in the model S. Unfortunately that agreement expires in 2010, a good three years before Tesla can get the Model S engineered (assuming they get federal money). No other OEM has been willing to give Tesla the rights to buy parts or component CAD to design to, hence Tesla would need some additional $300M to develop all of the necessary hardware (suspension, air bags and sensors, modules etc.)

Cost:

D&R the Model S $250M
Build the Factory $300M
Components to put in the car $300M
Retail outlets $50M

Asking Musk about that would have made for a fascinating interview, though Musk probably would have lobbed his insults at Lacy rather than Stross. When we asked Musk about whether he was going to personally guarantee the deposits his company's collecting on those Model S sedans, this is what he said:

I'm not going to answer your questions until you start caring more about creating a truthful picture of Tesla. I know you think you are doing good by offsetting what you see as positive spin with negative spin, but that doesn't count as being honest.

That's the moral universe of Elon Musk: Only positive spin counts as "truthful." Lacy seems very comfortable in that world.

Musk, the boss of and lead investor in the electric-car startup, was previously the cofounder of PayPal, a payments startup bought by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. So one would assume he's rolling in it. And cash for silence is the usual barter when the newly wealthy part ways with their first wives. But Justine Musk isn't taking that route. After reading a profile of Elon's current love interest, 23-year-old British actress Talulah Riley, who is 13 years her junior, she piped up:

When you are living part of your life in the public eye anyway — when you blog, when your divorce has been kicked out there for public consumption — when does this whole idea of "taking the high road" segue into this idea of being silent, silenced, even as someone appropriates your words to spin out a certain version of events?

Justine now disputes the notion, previously advanced by Elon, that the two were racing to the courthouse to file divorce papers. She says that she and her husband had completed all of three sessions of marital counseling when Elon gave her an "ultimatum":

"Either we fix [the marriage] today, or I will divorce you tomorrow."

The next morning, Justine found that her credit card had been cut off and thereby learned that he had gone ahead and filed for divorce. This is not the picture she painted last year of an amicable, mutual split.

The unraveling of the Musks' marriage appears to have happened in the space of a few short weeks in July. Elon met Talulah Riley, the star of St. Trinian's, in London on July 3. On July 18, Justine wrote about being "in the midst of some major drama." A week later, Riley escorted Elon to the opening of Tesla's auto showroom in Menlo Park. And soon afterwards, he proposed to her, Riley told the Daily Mail. A couple of weeks later, Justine wrote a biting blog entry about older men who date younger women:

I was thinking about the time a male friend, who is my age (mid thirties), and I had a bit of a spat in the driveway outside his lush hillside home. When I refused to buy into his argument and turned to go inside the house, I heard him say scornfully, "Yeah, that's it, go hang with the twenty year olds."

I thought: Dude, I'm not the one who's dating them.

Not that there aren't some mature early twentysomethings out there capable of dating anybody — just that his comment revealed more about men like him than any group of women. To wit: women that young are like children, and quality interaction happens between myself and fellow successful male peers. And yet that pool of "children" is where these same men go again and again to fish out the new girlfriend. Thus: my girlfriend is a child, but that's okay, because quality interaction happens elsewhere.

The next month, Justine went public with news of her divorce. She subsequently wrote:

We had a good run. We married young, took it as far as we could and now it is over. That's about all I can say for now, other than that it was a very sad and very necessary decision.

So why is she breaking her silence now? It could be her frustration with seeing her own words used to portray Elon as an honorable man who found a new love as his old one foundered. But it could also be that she has literally nothing to lose.

Acquaintances have been saying for some time that Elon is essentially broke, save for his illiquid stakes in Tesla Motors and SpaceX, his rocket-ship startup. We hear that he had to liquidate investments at a loss so he could participate in Tesla's most recent round of funding, and that he's couch-surfing with friends on his frequent trips from Los Angeles, where he lives, to Silicon Valley, where Tesla is based.

One hopes Riley and Musk really did bond over a mutual love of astrophysics.

(Photo of Musk and Riley via Daily Mail)

Musk, responding to a question posed by Lyle Dennis at GM-Volt on his feelings about the range-extender concept behind the Chevy Volt and why he's not considered it it any Tesla products, says:

We looked closely at a range extender architecture for Model S. It ends up costing about the same in vehicle unit cost, a lot more in R&D and a lot more in servicing. Also, although performance is ok when both battery and engine are active at the same time, it turns really bad when the battery runs out and an undersized engine is carrying all the dead weight of the pack. Essentially, a REV is neither fish nor fowl and ends up being worse (in our opinion) than either a gasoline or pure electric vehicle.

That'd be perfect, make it clear you looked at the idea for the Tesla Model S Sedan and dismissed it after a simple cost-vs-return analysis, then pivot into a positive statement about your product. Musk, who's not yet figured out the best way to go after the competition is by talking flowers, sunshine and honey publicly, saving the knife-and-dagger treatment for his PR team during after-party drinks with the press later on, should have just left it there. He didn't.

An important consideration that people without a technical background don't understand is that you can either have a high power or a high energy cell chemistry, but not both. Since the battery pack in a plug in hybrid like the Volt has to generate the same *power* as a much larger battery pack in a pure electric vehicle, it has to use a low energy cell chemistry.

So, is he saying GM's Volt engineering team lack a technical background or is he saying potential customers lack a technical background? Unknown. Either way, he probably should have left it with just the "REV doesn't make sense" comment. Lesson learned? [GM-Volt]

In her haste to get the scoop, AllThingsD blogger Kara Swisher posted a version of Zuckerberg's memo which had a repeated paragraph. She's since eliminated the repeat, but we captured it:

Catch the differences? One says "will report," the other says "will be reporting." One uses treasurer Cipora Herman's last name, the other omits it. One says "we are fortunate," while the other uses the contracted form "we're." And one says Peter Currie will be "an advisor," while the other says only "advisor."

That's not the only oddity about the email. "Several versions I got of this memo had different punctuation in various places," Swisher notes in an update.

Why bother sending employees individual copies of a mass email with subtle changes throughout? There's only one reason to bother: Using the changes as tell-tale clues to identify whose copy got forwarded. That's what Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk did recently in an attempt to find leakers. Each of those changes can, in theory, serve as an identifier; assemble a series of unique identifiers, and it's possible to trace a particular version of an email to a particular employee.

If Zuckerberg is really wasting time on games like this, it means that he has completely failed as a leader. It's a humbling admission that he no longer enjoys his employees' trust and confidence. And it's an insult, too — that he thinks his employees aren't smart enough to figure out what he's doing. Of course they are. It's just one more reason for him to resign immediately, before he does more damage to the company he started.