Tesla has done “great things” for the world, but its CEO is an untruthful, self-important cult leader, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said.
“A lot of honesty disappears when you look at Elon Musk and Tesla,” Wozniak said on CNBC last week. “They have robbed my family — myself and my wife — of so much money, I couldn’t tell you, with things they said that we really believed would be real.”
Some Tesla shareholders argued in a lawsuit that one of Musk’s false statements — his 2018 tweet about having “funding secured” to take the company private — amounted to fraud. A jury ruled in Musk’s favor this month.
Wozniak said he bought a Tesla in 2016, when Musk claimed the company’s cars were months away from being able to drive themselves across the country. He said the car “makes mistakes all the time” and still can’t do what Musk was promising years ago.
“It’s a horrible, frightening experience,” he said.
Wozniak, who bought a Lucid Air in 2022, praised Tesla for accelerating the auto industry’s shift toward electric vehicles.
He said Musk is similar to Apple’s other co-founder, Steve Jobs, in his ability to make people do and believe whatever he says. But Jobs, who died in 2011, wasn’t dishonest the way Musk is, Wozniak said.
“They’re actually very similar,” he said, “and I don’t like to say that because Steve Jobs is such a good friend.”
