Theranos survived for years after people first began raising the alarm... if you'd somehow figured out a way to make a large bet against it, there's a decent change the market would have remained irrational longer than you could have remained solvent unless you were very lucky with your timing.
That seems like an awfully low bar to imprisoning people. Shouldn't executives at every company which designs or manufactures vehicles go to jail by your standard? If not, why?
Because there's a fundamental difference between "manufactures a car with well-understood features in a mature regulatory space" and "prematurely deploys untested and unprecedented functionality without oversight." If a legacy manufacturer rushed out a product that ignored regulation, for example, they should be similarly subject to prosecution.
There's lots of oversight in the automotive space; everything from the dashboard indicators to the crash standards are tightly regulated. Perhaps the regulators should be 'better', but it seems to me that Tesla is quite compliant (as it does 'recalls' and all the like). Which regulations is Tesla maliciously failing to comply with?
There are no requirements in FMVSS that meaningfully apply to FSD, unless you want to consider AEB part of FSD (which it isn't). Tesla voluntarily follows ISO 26262 for the parts they consider safety critical (i.e. not FSD), but that's just a generic software process standard. ISO 21448 is both uncommon in industry and voluntary. Tesla does not follow SAE J3016 terminology internally. Tesla does not follow UL4600. Tesla flouts both the CA DMV and the NHTSA reporting requirements. Etc.
Can you point out where there's meaningful oversight that Tesla cooperates with without complaining or missing data?
I have heard of at least one case where someone thought that cruise control could operate as an un-supervised 'autopilot' and nearly died; I believe their (almost new) RV went off some sort of cliff.
There's a difference between someone not understanding the functionality of their car, and the CEO openly deceiving the public about the functionality of their car.
If this RV manufacturer's CEO said that the cruise control was FSD, yes then one can understand the user's confusion.
Do you mean to say it’s confusing to say “of course silly, the feature is called “Full Self Driving”, but the vehicle does not fully drive itself, your are in control!”
I mean, the point is, someone betting against Theranos in this way, if it were a public company, would almost certainly have lost money (unless their timing was _perfect_). Enron would be a better example (as it was public); a lot of people, even before Enron's downfall, were fairly sure that Enron was dodgy, but trading on that belief would have been extremely dangerous, because it might take _years_ to come unstuck, and shorts (or puts) ain't free.
Oh yeah, you can't, they're in jail.