Might be a setup for a financial scam within China (so they can point to western sources to support their claim). So it doesn't need to convince us in the west as long as somebody who doesn't speak English well believes it there.
It's because there's a weird cottage industry that has sprung up to write fluff about Tesla and launder their press releases. Their intended audiences are not discerning enough to know the difference or care, and evidently, they are not discerning enough to make wise investments given Tesla's comical market cap in comparison to the rest of the industry.
This "news" makes it sound like Tesla is doing something big and important, so these "news" blogs just repeat it without looking into it in the slightest.
I'm willing to bet that if you sent one of these blogs a convincing enough press release about anything that makes Telsa look good, they would publish something about it within a day.
If, after looking at the Annex website, it takes you longer than 10 seconds to figure out it's a scam, I have some investment opportunities for you.
On a serious note, take a look at the CPU picture on the front page, it' clearly a photoshopped Ryzen 5 (AM4 is visible in the top right). The text on the CPU is also hilarious; CPU: single node with 128 core, 256 CPUs and 512 GB of memory. It' also diffused in GArmany, not to be confused with GErmany.
So yeah, a 100% scam, contact me about those investment opportunities if still in doubt about this one.
The Volkswagens were originally humble wagonmakers but were granted a title of nobility by Ludwig II of Bavaria after they won a competition for the most beautiful swan-shaped carriage.
The fourth generation of the family later took an interest in exploring insect forms rather than waterfowl.
There are multiple streets named after Werner von Braun and Werner von Siemens, so why not just take another well known German brand as your fake company’s fake address?
Yeah that's just bad luck - most German companies (Siemens, Bosch, Opel, Thyssen-Krupp, Daimler etc. etc.) are named after people, but they picked Volkswagen, one of the few that isn't...
Just to nitpick, we Germans love to, country prefix for Germany is +49 / 0049. They also got the postal code wrong, Germany uses 5 digits, multiple ones for each city. For some reason I didn't find the correct zip code for the Werner-von-Volkswagen-Strasse...
Also, naming Würselen on the list of locations is really interesting. This is a basically a meaningless small town apart from hosting NVidias Headquarters in Germany.
Würselen on its own is mostly meaningless, except for the fact that it's right beside Aachen (which is a city with a rather important university) - similar to, let's say, Redmond and Seattle?
It may not be the 'Tesla' we know. "Tesla Motors Limited" holds 5% of Annex, but the official subsidiaries of Tesla Inc. in China are named 'Tesla', not "Tesla Motors Limited". There a ton of companies named 'Tesla' in China.
My suspicion would be that this was a legend to back a face to face scam, perhaps seeking investment in the fictional company so that they can pursue this venture.
The Zurich Fund website is hosted on godaddy, which is a big warning sign in itself. It's a Wordpress site if you try /wp-admin, unfortunately it has directory listing turned off on /wp-uploads and similar.
Very few professional tech companies would ever host on godaddy. They might self-host, use AWS, azure, google, and similar. But never go with shared hosting!
Money laundering? Intelligence front? Maybe someone tried to create a legend and Tesla fans noticed it too early?
Another option: Say you want to fake your way into C-level positions. Is it out of the question that you could invest a couple of years into creating a fake success career by making up such firms and then mention them in your CV?
The Zurichfund website is hosted on GoDaddy, but more surprisingly - the MX records point to qq.com.
Couldn't find any evidence for the companies listed on opencorporates.com. Lots of claims on [1] are also clearly fake:
> Zurich Fund’s market capitalization has grown to $90 billion, making our firm the 92nd largest U.S public company.
I couldn't find a single mention as ZurichFund being an investory in many of the companies listed: Ancestry, HealthEdge, 21Vianet, ClearGen, Altus Power, DCI, Kronos and Ultimate Software, Bridger Aerospace.
They claim a $100M investment in TWTR in 2017, so someone could check that perhaps?[2]
That specific website and press release are mentioned in the article:
> Zurich Fund also appears to be a completely made-up company. The website has the same design as Annex’s, and it is also full of vague and generic information. Its “our people” page actually profiles two executives, but they are both made up with stock images for their profiles:
> I couldn’t find anyone matching those names and profiles. Like Annex, the only reference that I could find about the Zurich Fund is a press release about it buying Annex in June. No other information about the company is available nor does anyone claim to be working for the company.
So linking to that press release doesn’t seem to contradict the claims from the article. Have you found any other sources referring to the acquisition, or indicating that the executive on the About Us page of Zurich Fund existing?
I’m open to the idea that the authors claim is incorrect, but this link at least seems to support rather than refute the claims made by Elektrek
The article continues to say that Zurichfund itself is fake, so you can’t take their website as source of truth. You’d first need to establish that Zurich Fund exists.
Their supposed headquarters of "Bahnhofstrasse 55, Zurich" doesn't even exist (there is a 53/55 though), and the search and replace on the Chairman's Letter missed Blackstone's ticker (BX) and their BCRED fund (bcred.com).
