Latest news with #algorithm
Fast Company
4 days ago
- Politics
- Fast Company
AI is supercharging war. Could it also help broker peace?
Can we measure what is in our hearts and minds, and could it help us end wars any sooner? These are the questions that consume entrepreneur Shawn Guttman, a Canadian émigré who recently gave up his yearslong teaching position in Israel to accelerate a path to peace—using an algorithm. Living some 75 miles north of Tel Aviv, Guttman is no stranger to the uncertainties of conflict. Over the past few months, miscalculated drone strikes and imprecise missile targets—some intended for larger cities—have occasionally landed dangerously close to his town, sending him to bomb shelters more than once. 'When something big happens, we can point to it and say, 'Right, that happened because five years ago we did A, B, and C, and look at its effect,'' he says over Google Meet from his office, following a recent trip to the shelter. Behind him, souvenirs from the 1979 Egypt-Israel and 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaties are visible. 'I'm tired of that perspective.' The startup he cofounded, Didi, is taking a different approach. Its aim is to analyze data across news outlets, political discourse, and social media to identify opportune moments to broker peace. Inspired by political scientist I. William Zartman's 'ripeness' theory, the algorithm—called the Ripeness Index —is designed to tell negotiators, organizers, diplomats, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) exactly when conditions are 'ripe' to initiate peace negotiations, build coalitions, or launch grassroots campaigns. During ongoing U.S.-led negotiations over the war in Gaza, both Israel and Hamas have entrenched themselves in opposing bargaining positions. Meanwhile, Israel's traditional allies, including the U.S., have expressed growing frustration over the war and the dire humanitarian conditions in the enclave, where the threat of famine looms. In Israel, Didi's data is already informing grassroots organizations as they strategize which media outlets to target and how to time public actions, such as protests, in coordination with coalition partners. Guttman and his collaborators hope that eventually negotiators will use the model's insights to help broker lasting peace. Guttman's project is part of a rising wave of so-called PeaceTech—a movement using technology to make negotiations more inclusive and data-driven. This includes AI from Hala Systems, which uses satellite imagery and data fusion to monitor ceasefires in Yemen and Ukraine. Another AI startup, Remesh, has been active across the Middle East, helping organizations of all sizes canvas key stakeholders. Its algorithm clusters similar opinions, giving policymakers and mediators a clearer view of public sentiment and division. A range of NGOs and academic researchers have also developed digital tools for peacebuilding. The nonprofit Computational Democracy Project created an open-source platform that enables citizens to crowdsource outcomes to public debates. Meanwhile, the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies built a peace agreement simulator, complete with a chart to track how well each stakeholder's needs are met. Guttman knows it's an uphill battle. In addition to the ethical and privacy concerns of using AI to interpret public sentiment, PeaceTech also faces financial hurdles. These companies must find ways to sustain themselves amid shrinking public funding and a transatlantic surge in defense spending, which has pulled resources away from peacebuilding initiatives. Still, Guttman and his investors remain undeterred. One way to view the opportunity for PeaceTech is by looking at the economic toll of war. In its Global Peace Index 2024, the Institute for Economics and Peace's Vision of Humanity platform estimated that economic disruption due to violence and the fear of violence cost the world $19.1 trillion in 2023, or about 13 percent of global GDP. Guttman sees plenty of commercial potential in times of peace as well. 'Can we make billions of dollars,' Guttman asks, ' and save the world—and create peace?' The Ripeness Index Every evening, Didi's bots scrape the websites of 60 Israeli and 30 Palestinian media outlets, digesting keywords into its Ripeness Index model. The index, a colorful radar chart resembling a digital version of the vintage puzzle game Simon, aims to distill the complex dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian social unrest into simple categories. These categories indicate when the time may be right to push for peace through grassroots messaging and diplomatic activity. If the center of the index is red, it signals that conditions are not yet ripe for negotiations. In such cases, messaging efforts should focus on shifting the surrounding red sections of the model to yellow. Yellow indicates that both sides are beginning to recognize that the costs of continuing the conflict outweigh the benefits. In early May, Guttman and his cofounder, Keren Winter-Dinur, a doctoral student in conflict resolution, worked with a team of developers to put the system through its biggest test to date. The occasion was the annual People's Peace Summit in Jerusalem. This year's summit was organized by the It's Time coalition —a network of dozens of grassroots organizations seeking solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and brought together 15,000 attendees from peace-focused groups on both sides of the border. Many of the summit's events are 'talking about, 'Hey, Israelis, learn about and understand what Palestinians are going through,'' Guttman says. 'See the other.' The 'ripeness' theory of negotiation, first introduced by Zartman in 1989, proposes that conflicts become ripe for resolution when two conditions are met. The first is the experience of a 'mutually hurting stalemate,' where both sides are suffering and see no viable, unilateral path to a satisfactory outcome. The second is that both parties perceive a 'way out' of the conflict. At this moment of 'ripeness,' the door to negotiation opens. More recently, as big datasets around conflict resolution have become more easily available, researchers have tried to quantitatively validate Zartman's theory on past diplomatic negotiations. Still, quantitative studies around ripeness theory remain limited. When they launched Didi in 2022, Guttman and Winter-Dinur began by testing their Ripeness Index model on a different conflict: the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the years leading up to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. After scraping a decade's worth of speeches from the U.K. Parliament, the team found that support for negotiated peace increased on both sides just before key political partnerships formed, while support for continuing armed struggle diminished. Then October 7th happened. Guttman and Winter-Dinur knew they needed to pivot to Israel's war. They began localizing their training database in Hebrew and Arabic and started scraping regional news. Their dataset now extends back to September 26, 2023. 'I said, 'Let's jump into the deep waters and see how we do,'' Guttman recalls. As it scans the news media, the bot tracks specific terms associated with each section of the Ripeness Index, such as confident in winning or willingness to compromise. At the bottom of the dashboard, graphs plot the frequency of flagged keywords in Israeli and Arabic news outlets over time, aligned with the model's criteria. For the It's Time coalition, the model also tracks mentions of affiliated organizations, such as the pro-peace group Women Wage Peace and a recent Israeli-Palestinian memorial gathering. Guttman believes grassroots organizations should be using this data every day to spread pro-peace messaging to the public, alongside documentation of wartime atrocities, and to challenge the belief that military victory is necessary. 'We should be moving as fast as the news cycle moves,' he says. One promising signal came in January, at the start of a two-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, when Guttman and his team observed a surge in Israeli sentiment toward compromise. 'According to the theory, that moment of ripeness was what gave the Israeli political echelon the legitimacy and the support to say, 'Okay, we're going to have a ceasefire, we're going to give humanitarian aid, we're going to exchange Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages,'' Guttman says. But that sentiment declined soon after and dropped sharply in March. That same month, citing stalled ceasefire negotiations, Israel resumed its ground war in Gaza. Guttman interprets the public shift as a response to the perceived failure of political efforts to secure the return of Israeli hostages. Then, in the week leading up to the People's Peace Summit in early May, the model determined that both Israeli and Palestinian publics saw a potential 'way out' of the war. Still, the moment was not yet ripe for negotiations. On the left side of the index, the 'confident in winning' and 'impossibility of winning' sections had yet to shift into the green zone. Alongside the insights Didi gathers from the news media, the It's Time coalition also has been collecting data from social media platforms, including Facebook and X. Social media sentiment analysis is on Didi's road map as well, but Guttman and Winter-Dinur caution against using it as a source of ground truth. Guttman and his team are still learning the limitations of their own data, too. Manual validation is important because the AI still misclassifies news articles. And Guttman admits that the model's capabilities in Arabic are not yet as good as they are in Hebrew, a problem future datasets will address, he says. What could go wrong? The company's mix of AI and big data will also need to win over skeptics in the world of diplomacy. One concern is that relying on historical data to make predictions and inform decision-making could lead to a repetition of past mistakes. 'Most of the time, any kind of prediction work, machine-enabled or human-enabled, is going wrong,' says Martin Wählisch, associate professor of transformative technologies, innovation, and global affairs at the University of Birmingham. The representativeness of data is a major challenge for PeaceTech, says Wählisch, who founded his own startup in the space, Office for Dreams, which combines digital tools with creative strategies to facilitate decision-making. 'The currency is the data inflow,' he says. Last month, Wählisch joined an interdisciplinary group of technologists, researchers, and peacebuilders at the Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development to define a vision for AI use in large-scale deliberation processes. One system, built at Google's DeepMind, uses large language models to assist with the mediation process itself. In experiments with more than 5,000 participants in the U.K., researchers found the system, named after the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas, outperformed untrained human mediators, with 56% of participants preferring AI-generated statements over human ones. The tool also increased group agreement by about 8 percentage points and incorporated minority views. However, the researchers noted, 'AI-assisted deliberation is not without its risks. . . . Steps must be taken to ensure users are representative of the target population and are prepared to contribute in good faith.' Still, many of these efforts are swimming upstream at a moment when defense startups are seeing increased focus and funding amid surging military budgets. According to Bloomberg, private investors have already spent around $790 million on defense this year. Compare that figure to the investing trend in the past two decades, when private equity spending on defense reached $1 billion in only five of those years. Private investment in PeaceTech is still nascent. Peacebuilding startups have traditionally been supported by government grants and donors, but these are harder to find now. The U.S. Agency for International Development's Development Innovation Ventures, for instance, typically funded startups like Didi, until it was shuttered by the Trump administration. Didi's angel investor, B Ventures Group, exclusively funds tech firms with peacebuilding applications. Other PeaceTech investors include Peaceinvest, which focuses on local, pro-peace projects, and Kluz Ventures, which runs the annual Kluz Prize for PeaceTech. Two years ago, Didi won a Kluz Prize, which came with a $20,000 cash award recognizing the company's achievements in machine learning. 'Peacebuilding has traditionally been seen as the domain of nonprofits and governments, not a space for venture capital,' Brian Abrams, founder and managing partner of B Ventures Group, wrote in a March essay. 'At the same time, this type of opportunity has been associated with impact investing and lower returns, a trade-off many venture investors are unwilling to make. But PeaceTech challenges those assumptions, offering a model that prioritizes both profit and purpose.' Pursuing profits means presenting PeaceTech as useful outside of conflict zones too, the way defense firms typically diversify their business with the sale of dual-use technologies. Palantir, for instance—known for the AI-powered data tools it sells to military and immigration authorities—also works for Fortune 500 companies and develops tools for humanitarian purposes. After its software was used to facilitate Ukrainian refugee assistance, the company was awarded a special distinction by the Kluz Prize for PeaceTech in 2023, the same year Didi won its award. 'We need to expand the current dual-use framing of technology—civilian and military—to a triple-use paradigm that includes peace as a third pillar,' Artur Kluz, founder and CEO of Kluz Ventures, and Stefaan Verhulst, a research professor at New York University, wrote in a recent Fast Company op-ed. 'This would mean structuring investments in a way that not only supports battlefield advantage and economic competitiveness, but also actively contributes to conflict prevention, mediation, and resolution.' Abrams sees many commercial opportunities in Didi's tool: Imagine a private equity firm using the Ripeness Index to time its mergers and acquisitions perfectly, or a public relations firm tuning its crisis management messaging just right. Recent estimates gauge the market size for public opinion and election polling at $8.93 billion in 2025. In any scenario, developers and entrepreneurs must be mindful about the use of personal data, says Abrams. 'PeaceTech begins, I think, with Hippocratic guardrails. First, do no harm. Make sure the technology is contributing toward peace and not in any way being used for anything counterproductive,' he says. That concern is heightened by the use of AI for political influence. Governments throughout history have sought to monitor and police public sentiment during times of war and peace. More recently, governments have used artificial intelligence to identify people for deportation and arrest, sometimes wrongfully. The expanding use of AI and data analysis tools to police social media accounts, and the increasing use of large language models (with their tendency to fabricate), exacerbates these risks. Algorithms already purport to track what millions of people are thinking, but there are few ways of knowing if those are correct. 'The true test of AI in diplomacy will not be whether it can pass the Turing test, but whether it can contribute to a more cooperative, stable, and just international order,' writes Erman Akilli, professor of international relations at Ankara's Hacı Bayram Veli University, in a blog post for the SETA Foundation for Political Economic and Social Research. He urges policymakers to regulate the use of AI in diplomacy to prevent the tech from being exploited for 'strategic manipulation or coercion.' Promising trends Two days before the People's Peace Summit, Guttman noticed anomalies in the trends he had been seeing in the previous few weeks. 'Willingness to compromise' had been on the uptick, but the double-whammy of Israel's Memorial Day and Independence Day events had a notable impact on public sentiment. 'Everything leading up to Memorial Day and Independence Day, the way that people were talking was very much pro-military: remembering soldiers who died, remembering these tragic stories of heroism and so on,' Guttman says. The 'confident in winning' line started to rise, reflecting a perception that a military solution to war is still possible. Meanwhile, the 'hurt' measure in the Ripeness Index has remained green, as it has been for most of the war, reflecting the public sentiment that the price of war is too high. Despite that high price, Guttman says, many Israelis appear to believe that 'there's nothing to do but pay it and keep fighting because the military can win.' 'A very big victory would be increasing the sentiment in Israeli society that we can't win the war militarily,' he says. As the U.S. attempts to broker a new cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas—and as Israel launches a new war against Iran—the Didi team has been tracking a sudden, upward spike in the 'Confident in Winning' indicator. More recently, Guttman and his team have offered a new recommendation to the It's Time Coalition and its partners as they push for peace: Link the high cost of war with the fact that military resources are limited and military options will eventually run out. 'In general, a missing element in Israeli discourse has been the connection between the feeling that the price of this war [in Gaza] is too high with the sentiment that we have exhausted our military options,' says Guttman. 'Making this connection could create a tipping point in Israeli discourse that pushes the Ripeness Index to yellow.'
Forbes
06-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How To Beat The LinkedIn Algorithm in 2025
LinkedIn is crushing organic reach: here's how to beat the algorithm You thought you knew where you were going with LinkedIn. You had your content calendar, your comments strategy and your DM messages lined up. You had a posting schedule nailed and were showing up on repeat. And then the algorithm changed. Suddenly, your posts didn't go as far. They only got a handful of likes. Only one comment. You wonder how you missed the mark. It's not just you. Other accounts on your feed faced the same hit. Data shows an 11–20% decline across all content types in 2024 versus 2023. In 2025, creators are reporting similar results. People that used to get 10,000 views on every post now struggle to see 3,000. 95% of users report declining reach, engagement, or follower growth. The LinkedIn algorithm changes all the time, and strategy shakeups are required to make the same effort go just as far. The platform made a calculated decision. Sponsored content and ads now fill almost 40% of the LinkedIn feed. Personal content from individual creators accounts for around 28% of what users see, while company page content gets deprioritized completely. Rethink your approach in five simple steps, to get your reach and engagement back under the new rules of LinkedIn. The algorithm seems to favour authentic, personal content that demonstrates real knowledge. Niche topics that showcase authority in your field work better than generic business advice. Your expertise becomes your competitive advantage when everyone else struggles with visibility. Pick three areas where you're genuinely expert. Share specific frameworks you've developed. Break down methods that only come from years of experience. When you demonstrate deep knowledge, the positive engagement means the algorithm recognizes its quality. Your posts get shown to people seeking that exact expertise. Stop trying to appeal to everyone. The narrower your focus, the stronger your signal becomes. A post about "leadership tips" gets lost. A post about "how to give feedback to high performers without crushing their motivation" finds its audience. Visual content paired with relatable business stories performs better than anything else right now. Photos from your workspace, your team meetings, your client calls. The grittier and more genuine, the better the response. Keep it real. Take a photo during your next strategy session. Share the whiteboard full of ideas. Show the messy middle of building something important. You should be in the photo too. Add a story about what you learned in that moment. Bring your followers on the journey with you. No stock photos. No polished graphics. Not the marketing version of success. Candid photos paired with genuine stories about your entrepreneurial challenges connect with other founders facing similar ones. Now and always, everything depends on your opening lines. The first two sentences determine whether anyone reads the rest of your post. With reach down across the board, you can't afford weak openings that let people scroll past. Start with a specific result or surprising insight. Follow with context that makes them need to know more. "I fired my best salesperson last month. Here's why it was the smartest decision I've made all year." The combination should create an information gap they have to click 'read more' to fill. Test your hooks ruthlessly. Write ten different options before picking one. Read them aloud. The strongest hook makes you lean forward, wanting the rest of the story. That physical reaction tells you everything about whether it will work on your audience. Despite lower overall reach, posts with genuine engagement go further than ever. Comments longer than ten words can increase your visibility when they stand out from the AI-generated mess. Real conversations in your comment section signal quality content to the algorithm. Reply to every comment with substance. Ask follow-up questions that continue the discussion. Tag relevant people into conversations where their expertise adds value. The depth of engagement matters more than the quantity. Add private jokes. Create an insider group when you hang around to engage in the comments. Engage strategically before and after you post. Spend fifteen minutes commenting thoughtfully on posts from accounts serving your target audience. The algorithm tracks your activity and rewards engaged users with better distribution. Your comments become discovery opportunities for new followers. Daily outreach becomes essential when organic reach drops. Send 10-20 connection requests each day to people who match your ideal customer profile. Write personal messages. Make typos. Prove it's you and not an AI. Reference something specific from their profile or recent posts. Explain briefly why you'd like to connect. Skip the sales pitch and focus on building genuine professional relationships. Each new connection expands your potential reach for future posts. The algorithm shows your content first to people most likely to engage. Growing your network with engaged professionals multiplies your chances of breaking through. Quality connections convert better than random followers. Platform volatility separates serious creators from casual posters. Lock in a posting schedule and stick to it regardless of individual post performance. Daily posting, five times per week, or three times per week all work. Choose what you can maintain long-term. The algorithm will change again, and you'll be ready. Most people reduce their posting when reach drops. This creates opportunity for consistent creators. Your consistency becomes your competitive advantage when others give up. Track engagement patterns rather than vanity metrics. Notice which topics spark discussions. Double down on content types that generate genuine responses from your target audience. The data tells you exactly what resonates, even when everything seems up in the air. The LinkedIn algorithm will keep changing. The platform priorities will shift again. But your expertise, your network, and your consistency create sustainable growth regardless of algorithmic volatility. Your cheese moved, so keep chasing it. Focus on authentic authority over viral content. Share insights that only come from your experience. Build relationships that last beyond any single post. Engage genuinely with people you want in your professional network. Have fun with the process. Build long-term relationships with long term people. Establish authority that compounds over years. Don't chase short-term metrics that fluctuate with every algorithm update. Your content deserves to be seen. Adapt and persist to make that happen. Access my best ChatGPT prompts for building your personal brand in 2025.
Entrepreneur
30-05-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
Frank McCourt Jr. Interview: Why I Want to Buy TikTok
Frank McCourt Jr. says buying TikTok would help him bring the U.S. one step closer to a new Internet. Here's what he envisions. TikTok's algorithm has been infamously called "addictive," with research finding that it is "highly engaging and emotionally rewarding in nature," which has led to compulsive (and lucrative) user numbers. It's also why the algorithm is a main point in the ongoing saga of the app potentially being banned in the U.S. if it isn't sold soon. But billionaire Frank McCourt Jr., 71, tells Entrepreneur in a new interview that he and his business partners are "completely ready to buy TikTok" — and they "don't need or want the algorithm." The former L.A. Dodgers owner and investor, who's worth $2.4 billion, said that China has "made it very clear" they're not selling it. "So we're in a good position if there is a transaction," McCourt said. Related: Emma Grede Dropped Out of School at 16. Now the Skims Boss Runs a $4 Billion Empire — Here's How. After last year's law passed requiring TikTok to separate from its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, or face a permanent ban in the U.S., the potential to own TikTok has attracted a slew of interest from notable people and companies. (After multiple extensions, the new deadline is June 19.) McCourt announced his $20 billion offer for TikTok in May 2024, calling it The People's Bid for TikTok. He made the bid through Project Liberty, the $500 million initiative he founded in 2021 that focuses on creating a better Internet by giving users control over how they share their data. Over time, other public figures joined his bid, the most notable being Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary in January and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian in March. But so far, there haven't been any updates. "We're on standby," McCourt said. Other bidders for TikTok include AI startup Perplexity, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, mobile advertising company AppLovin, and Amazon. McCourt said O'Leary called him after talking to all the potential bidders and determining that The People's Bid was ahead of the rest. Ohanian connected with McCourt through a mutual friend, and also ended up publicly backing the bid's mission. Frank McCourt Jr. Why Frank McCourt's Bid for TikTok Is Different McCourt is working towards creating a new Internet, and TikTok is a stepping stone to get there. McCourt's bid is focused on the social media app's 170 million users. He wants to migrate those millions of people and their data over to an open-source platform that both preserves TikTok's user experience while also using an American-built tech stack. The basis of this platform is called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), which Project Liberty developed and first made public in 2021. DSNP stores individual data in a profile that a user can transport across a network of social apps. Users on the platform can take their connections and content, their personal data, from one DSNP app to another and dictate the terms of its use. "We're advocating for a new, better, advanced Internet where individuals own and control their identity and their data," McCourt said. "We're in charge, and our social information is ours to share with others as we see fit." Right now, the only social media app that uses DSNP is MeWe, which has more than 20 million users globally and began offering members the option to sign in with DSNP in September 2022. Now, McCourt wants to bring the protocol to TikTok's 170 million users as well. "We need to scale DSNP for it to be a true alternative, and that's what TikTok would do," McCourt said. McCourt outlined a future where social apps will be interoperable, and users will be able to tap into their network no matter which social app they are logged into. So, someone on MeWe could talk to someone on TikTok, or share a link with them without logging into an account just for that one specific app. Related: 3 Simple Steps to Start Making Money on TikTok McCourt compared the situation to how phone numbers are now interoperable. A person using AT&T can call someone on Verizon without worrying about whether their call will go through. "Imagine an Internet where that's the case, where you can be on one app and I could be on another, and we'll be able to share information," McCourt said. McCourt noted that gathering $20 billion for the bid was "quite easy" because "people saw the value" of the offer. And if The People's Bid doesn't end up being selected, McCourt isn't ruling out developing a competing social media app. "We may," he said. "At some point, we just need to move forward."
Wall Street Journal
30-05-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
The Billionaire Odd Couple Whose Hedge Fund Is Killing It
LONDON—London investment duo Paul Marshall and Ian Wace outran competitors during the recent market turmoil with an unconventional trading strategy: a top-secret algorithm that analyzes tips from rival hedge funds and investment banks. It's Wall Street meets fantasy football. Stock salespeople and others across Wall Street submit trading recommendations to the duo's hedge-fund firm, Marshall Wace. The firm analyzes the ideas and rewards firms of top contributors with millions of dollars of commissions each year.
Auto Blog
26-05-2025
- Automotive
- Auto Blog
Tesla Faces Lawsuit Over Odometer Tampering Claims
Tesla's warranty strategy isn't just aggressive—it's algorithmic warfare against its own customers. A California class-action lawsuit alleges the company uses predictive software to inflate odometer readings by up to 117%, voiding warranties prematurely and forcing owners into $10,000 repair bills. And if the Courts find it to be systematic? Global? Based on the lawsuit data, the total estimated annual financial benefit to Tesla is about $3.99 billion. The Algorithmic Mileage Scam Nyree Hinton's 2020 Model Y odometer logged 72 miles/day despite a 20-mile commute, burning through his 50,000-mile warranty in 18 months. Tesla's system calculates distance using energy consumption and driving patterns rather than physical rotation, a method patented in 2023. This is not random or a glitch but part of Tesla's revenue model. Every 1,000 algorithmically generated 'miles' saves Tesla $200 in warranty repairs per vehicle, while pushing owners into $3,500 extended coverage plans. Class Action Lawsuit Could Trigger Global Tesla Warranty Fallout Tesla's Q1 2025 revenue dropped 9% YoY to $19.3B, with operating margins collapsing to 2.1%. A Dieselgate-scale penalty ($33B+) would consume 89% of its $37B cash reserves. Unlike VW's emissions cheat, Tesla's alleged fraud targets individual contracts—a breach that could nullify 1.3 million California warranties and trigger global copycat suits. The Trust Equation Elon Musk dismissed the claims as 'idiotic,' but Tesla's only defense hinges on a technicality: odometers legally tolerate ±4% inaccuracies. Hinton's alleged 117% discrepancy would require driving 205 mph daily—farcical for a suburban commuter. The real damage is reputational at a time when the costs of EV ownership, and the high likelihood of 'unexpected costs,' are turning customers away. Can Tesla Survive a Scandal Bigger Than Dieselgate? VW never recovered its 2015 U.S. market share after Dieselgate. Tesla's crisis is worse—it isn't hiding pollution, but the mileage equivalent of rigged scales. When your car's odometer runs faster than your mortgage clock, what's left to trust?
