Elon Musk’s firm says 80% of the satellites it launched last week are expected to burn up instead of reaching orbit
SpaceX will lose up to 40 of the 49 Starlink satellites it launched last week as the result of a geomagnetic storm, the company has announced.
Elon Musk’s firm launched the satellites into low-Earth orbit on 3 February from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but 80% of them are now expected to burn up instead of reaching their intended orbit.
Continue reading...In DM exchange Tesla boss offers $5,000 for takedown but 19-year-old replies: ‘Any chance to up that to $50K?’
A row has broken out between the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, and a 19-year-old student and aviation enthusiast from Florida.
Jack Sweeney created the Twitter bot @ElonJet, which tracks Musk’s Gulfstream private jet and posts real-time updates of its location.
Continue reading...Africa’s unprecedented population growth will impact geopolitics, global trade, migration and almost every aspect of life. It’s time for a reimagining of the continent
In 2022 the world’s population will pass 8 billion. It has increased by a third in just two decades. By 2050, there will be about 9.5 billion of us on the planet, according to respected demographers. This makes recent comments by Elon Musk baffling. According to him, “the low birthrate and the rapidly declining birthrate” is “one of the biggest risks to civilisation”.
Fertility rates in Europe, North America and east Asia are generally below 2.1 births per woman, the level at which populations remain stable at constant mortality rates. The trajectory in some countries is particularly arresting. The birthrate in Italy is the lowest it has ever been in the country’s history. South Korea’s fertility rate has been stuck below one birth per woman for decades despite an estimated $120bn (£90bn) being spent on initiatives aimed at raising it. Japan started the century with 128 million citizens but is on course to have only 106 million by 2050. China’s population will peak at 1.45 billion in 2030, but if it proves unable to raise its fertility rate, the world’s most populous country could end the century with fewer than 600 million inhabitants. This is the “big risk” alluded to by Musk. The trouble is, his statement seems to imply that “civilisation” does not include Africa.
Continue reading...Elon Musk and Tesla must consider human rights in the Chinese region or risk being complicit, says Human Rights Watch
Tesla has opened a new showroom in the capital of Xinjiang, a region at the heart of years-long campaign by Chinese authorities of repression and assimilation against the Uyghur people.
Tesla announced the opening in Urumqi with a Weibo post on 31 December saying: “On the last day of 2021, we meet in Xinjiang. In 2022 let us together launch Xinjiang on its electric journey!”
Continue reading...China said its space station deployed prevention collision avoidance control measures in July and October and called on the US to ‘bear responsibility’
Beijing has called on the UN to remind the US to abide by the treaty regulating outer space after space satellites launched by tech tycoon Elon Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX almost collided with its space station twice in the past year.
China said its space station deployed prevention collision avoidance control measures in July and October to avoid colliding with Starlink satellites in a recent report submitted by Beijing to the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space earlier this month.
Continue reading...Publication cites Tesla boss’s influence ‘for good or ill’, but accolade is criticised over his views on tax, unions and Covid
Time magazine’s decision to make Tesla billionaire Elon Musk its person of the year for 2021 has been criticised because of his attitude to tax, opposition to unions and playing down the dangers of Covid.
Musk, who is also the founder and chief executive of space exploration company SpaceX, recently passed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the world’s wealthiest person as the rising price of Tesla shares pushed his net worth to around $300bn (£227bn).
Continue reading...Chief executive posts ‘Blow the whistle on Tesla!’ amid lawsuits brought against carmaker
Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has appeared to joke about whistleblowers on Twitter in the wake of high-profile lawsuits against the electric carmaker brought by current and former staff.
The billionaire urged his 65 million Twitter followers to “Blow the whistle on Tesla!” and included a link to a branded “Cyberwhistle” for sale in the company’s online shop.
Continue reading...Dozen of motorists report error as company’s CEO, Elon Musk, apologises on Twitter
Hundreds of Tesla drivers were locked out of their cars at the start of the weekend after the manufacturer’s mobile app suffered an outage – and dozens voiced their complaints on social media.
Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, said on Friday that the company’s mobile application was coming back online after the app server outage. Musk was responding to a Tesla owner’s tweet, who said that he was experiencing a “500 server error” to connect his Model 3 through the iOS app in Seoul, South Korea.
Continue reading...World’s wealthiest person says proposed billionaires tax led to poll, the result of which sent price falling
Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and world’s richest person, asked his 62.8 million Twitter followers over the weekend whether he should sell $21bn (£15.5bn) worth of shares in the electric car company in order to pay tax. Tweeting he would “abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes”, 58% of those who responded said “yes”, he should sell the shares, sending Tesla’s share price down 5% in pre-market trading on Monday.
Why did he do it?
Musk, who is sitting on a paper fortune of more than $338bn in Tesla and Space-X shares, proposed selling 10% of his Tesla shares in order to generate enough money to pay a proposed “billionaires tax” on “unrealised capital gains”.
After Elon Musk asked his Twitter followers to vote on whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock, the architect of the proposed billionaires tax that prompted the move dismissed the tweet as a stunt.
“Whether or not the world’s wealthiest man pays any taxes at all shouldn’t depend on the results of a Twitter poll,” said Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and chair of the Senate finance committee. “It’s time for the billionaires income tax.”
Continue reading...Elon Musk on Saturday asked his 62.5 million followers on Twitter if he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock.
“Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock,” Musk wrote in a tweet referring to a “billionaires’ tax” proposed by Democrats in the US Senate.
Continue reading...Communication error may cause a false forward-collision warning or unexpected activation of the emergency brakes
Tesla Inc is recalling nearly 12,000 US vehicles sold since 2017 because a communication error may cause a false forward-collision warning or unexpected activation of the emergency brakes, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on Tuesday.
The California automaker said the recall of 11,704 Model S, X, 3 and Y vehicles was prompted after a software update on 23 October to vehicles in its limited early access version 10.3 Full-Self Driving (FSD) (Beta) population.
Continue reading...Milestone comes after firm’s Model 3 became first battery-powered electric car to top Europe’s monthly sales chart
Tesla’s market value has broken through the $1tn mark for the first time after the US electric car pioneer received an order for 100,000 of its vehicles from the rental company Hertz.
The carmaker’s stock market value has soared during 2020 and 2021 as investors bet on accelerating sales of electric cars in the run-up to government bans on petrol and diesel cars to meet climate targets.
Continue reading...Critics see the ‘awful business’ of private space tourism as having little technological or exploration value
As Star Trek’s iconic Captain James T Kirk, he voyaged the universe for the good of humanity. The nonagenarian actor William Shatner’s brief, real-life thrill ride off the planet today, however, is much less about advancing the species as promoting the fortunes of Blue Origin, the private space company owned by the Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos that’s taking him there.
Booking arguably the most famous fictional space traveler in history to front only the second crewed flight of Bezos’s New Shepard rocket system has secured a vast slew of positive publicity that not even the huge wealth of the world’s richest man could otherwise have purchased.
Continue reading...CEO confirms move in shareholder meeting after clashes with California officials over pandemic restrictions
Elon Musk has announced that Tesla will move its headquarters from California to Texas, following through on a threat he had hinted at for several months.
The company has been building a new plant in Austin and the CEO confirmed the move in a shareholder meeting on Thursday. He gave no timeline, however, and said the electric car maker will keep expanding its manufacturing capacity in the Golden State.
Continue reading...SpaceX founder, who in April won a contract from Nasa, took a jab at Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin for suing when it lost out on deal
Elon Musk intensified the feud over lawsuits and rocket sizes with space rival Jeff Bezos this week, kicking off the latest round in the billionaire battle over humanity’s return to the moon.
The SpaceX founder, who in April won a contract from Nasa to build the next-generation spacecraft to take astronauts to the moon’s surface for the first time since 1972, took a jab at Bezos for suing the US government when his company lost out on the deal.
Continue reading...The wealth of the Tesla boss and would-be space coloniser has overtaken that of his Amazon rival. How does he plan to celebrate? By being as puerile as possible
Name: Elon Musk v Jeff Bezos.
Age: About two.
Continue reading...Four-person crew asked for the public’s help in reaching fundraising target of $200m for the children’s charity St Jude
Elon Musk surprised his first all-private crew of space tourists with a welcome home gift after their trailblazing trip to orbit ended on Saturday night: a $50m donation to the children’s charity St Jude.
Related: ‘The point is ambition’: are we ready to follow Netflix into space?
Continue reading...Launch marks biggest advancement so far in space tourism as Elon Musk’s company conducts first chartered passenger flight
SpaceX has launched the world’s first crew of “amateur astronauts” on a private flight to circle Earth for three days.
Wednesday night’s successful launch marked the most ambitious leap yet in space tourism. It’s the first chartered passenger flight for Elon Musk’s space company and the first time a rocket streaked toward orbit with a crew that contained no professional astronauts.
Continue reading...Billionaire Tesla chief gives no indication of any progress in actually building such a machine
Elon Musk said he would probably launch a humanoid robot prototype next year dubbed the “Tesla Bot”, which is designed to do “boring, repetitious and dangerous” work.
The billionaire chief executive of the electric carmaker Tesla said the robot, which would be about 5ft 8in (1.7m) tall and weigh 125 pounds (56kg), would be able to handle tasks such as attaching bolts to cars with a spanner or picking up groceries at stores.
Continue reading...