Tesla Employee Fired for Posting Video Showing Failure of Self-Driving Beta

It’s never a good idea to publicly embarrass your employer…especially when your employer is Tesla and you’re fiddling with their Full Self-Driving Beta software.

And if said software fails, and you hit a traffic cone, you probably shouldn’t post the ensuing collision on YouTube….at least if you value your job.

That exact comedy of errors transpired when former Tesla employee John Bernal was reviewing Tesla’s FSD beta software, hit a cone, made a huge deal about it (pointing out the precise point of impact and damages), and then inexplicably posted it to his YouTube channel AI Addict.

Because he clearly wanted to test the job market.

While Tesla doesn’t explicitly forbid its employees from publicly posting about its products, it “relies on the common sense and good judgment of its employees to engage in responsible social media activity,” and John was conspicuously lacking in the last part.

Apparently, this wasn’t even the first time John had publicly exhibited FSD’s shortcomings – a post last year showed a bunch of near-misses with cyclists and pedestrians, after which Bernhal claimed, “A manager from my Autopilot team tried to dissuade me from posting any negative or critical content in the future that involved FSD Beta. They held a video conference with me but never put anything in writing.”

Again, the strict letter of the (company) law and common sense aren’t always the same thing. As if to drive that point home, Bernhal’s superiors told him after his firing that the YouTube channel was “a conflict of interest.”

You don’t say.