You are totally right. In accordance with the Tesla Referral Program contract a estimated ~250,000,000 $ in sales were referred to Tesla by major referrers earning those major referrers ~80 free Tesla Roadsters [1], announced as a 250,000 $ value and used a explicit contractual incentive to the program, in accordance with that legal contract. Having engaged in work on behalf of Tesla on the contractual guarantee of compensation and having earned that compensation in accordance with the contract, Tesla legally owes those fans ~20,000,000 $ in aggregate which it has so far rejected compensating for nearly 7 years.

I am not sure what term you use for having people work on your behalf according to the terms of a contract and then not paying the agreed upon compensation, but "theft" or "steal" would be the colloquial term. Only the intentionally biased would claim a trillion dollar company not paying fans for their work in accordance with their own contract is not "stealing" in common parlance.

I am sorry I was downplaying Tesla's bad behavior by just highlighting that individual fans were jilted out of hundreds of thousands of dollars of their work instead of pointing out how they screwed hundreds of their most loyal fans out of tens of millions of dollars of earned compensation. Anything other than praise for such a upstanding company is unwarranted and smearing their victims is the only unbiased move.

[1] https://electrek.co/2019/01/17/tesla-roadster-free-killed-re...