Market Watch -- It was an intriguing story. Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly offered a multimillion-dollar bonus to tech wunderkind George Hotz if he came up with an autopilot system to “discontinue” Mobileye NV’s technology in Tesla vehicles, Bloomberg reported.

His alleged challenge to Hotz was cited by short seller Andrew Left when he announced Mobileye as the “short of 2016” on Wednesday, causing shares of Mobileye to tank.

Musk on Thursday came to Mobileye’s defense and refuted some of the claims made in the Bloomberg report, though he didn’t comment on his communication with Hotz specifically.

“The article by Ashlee Vance did not correctly represent Tesla or Mobileye,” he said in post on the Tesla’s home page.

“We think it is extremely unlikely that a single person or even a small company that lacks extensive engineering validation capability will be able to produce an autonomous driving system that can be deployed to production vehicles,” Musk wrote.

He pointed out that getting a system to work accurately 99% of the time is easy, but getting it close to 100% is the key.

Read the rest of the story here: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/teslas-elon-musk-comes-to-mobileyes-defense-2015-12-17