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...Boss’s Twitter rant against Uber Eats risks backfiring, as experts warn online outbursts can damage companies’ reputation
Chief executives are being warned to “think twice before they tweet” after the boss of takeaway company Just Eat Takeaway was told his Twitter spat with Uber threatened to undermine the firm’s reputation.
Jitse Groen this week became the latest in a growing list of chief executives to be rebuked by customers, investors and even regulators over ill-judged tweets.
Continue reading...A global shortfall of semiconductors has affected the Tesla supply chain as well as car manufacturers across the world
Tesla made a profit of more than $1bn in the last three months even as it struggled to keep up with demand for electric cars in the face of a global chip shortage.
The company announced Monday that it has made a profit of $1.14bn in its second quarter, 10 times what it made a year ago and its eighth quarter of back-to-back profits.
Continue reading...The neuroscientist, broadcaster and author on the evolution of the brain, the mystery of consciousnesss, and why the next generation will be much smarter than us
David Eagleman, 50, is an American neuroscientist, bestselling author and presenter of the BBC series The Brain, as well as co-founder and chief executive officer of Neosensory, which develops devices for sensory substitution. His area of speciality is brain plasticity, and that is the subject of his new book, Livewired, which examines how experience refashions the brain, and shows that it is a much more adaptable organ than previously thought.
For the past half-century or more the brain has been spoken of in terms of a computer. What are the biggest flaws with that particular model?
It’s a very seductive comparison. But in fact, what we’re looking at is three pounds of material in our skulls that is essentially a very alien kind of material to us. It doesn’t write down memories, the way we think of a computer doing it. And it is capable of figuring out its own culture and identity and making leaps into the unknown. I’m here in Silicon Valley. Everything we talk about is hardware and software. But what’s happening in the brain is what I call livewire, where you have 86bn neurons, each with 10,000 connections, and they are constantly reconfiguring every second of your life. Even by the time you get to the end of this paragraph, you’ll be a slightly different person than you were at the beginning.
Data leak published by ProPublica fuels calls to tighten up system which sees ultra-wealthy pay little or no tax
The revelation last week that the 25 richest US billionaires have paid very little tax even as their fortunes have soared has reignited demands for wealth taxes on both sides of the Atlantic.
An unprecedented leak of “a vast trove” of 15 years of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data to the investigative news site ProPublica has provided a staggering insight into the legal strategies the very rich deploy to avoid tax.
Continue reading...ProPublica investigation shows how little US super-rich, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, reportedly paid between 2014 and 2018
The 25 richest Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Elon Musk, paid a “true tax rate” of just 3.4% between 2014 and 2018, according to an investigation by ProPublica, despite their collective net worth rising by more than $400bn in the same period.
Related: Global economy set for fastest recovery for more than 80 years
Continue reading...As Amazon founder prepares to jet off in his Blue Origin vessel, can he compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX?
Every billionaire needs something to spend their fortunes on. For Howard Hughes, it was the Spruce Goose; for Roman Abramovich, it’s Chelsea FC. And for the current crop of tech moguls, it’s space.
Jeff Bezos has led the charge. He founded his company, Blue Origin, in 2000, after a conversation with his friend, the science fiction author Neal Stephenson. And in July, 21 years later, the investment will pay off: Bezos will blast himself, his brother, and a third fee-paying guest 100km up in the company’s New Shepard rocket, brushing the edge of space until he comes back down to earth three minutes later.
Continue reading...Investigators examining letter from group claiming to be behind fire at Grünheide ‘Gigafactory’ site
German police are investigating whether a fire that broke out overnight at the construction site of Tesla’s first European Gigafactory had a political motive, after far-left activists claimed responsibility.
The fire at the site in Grünheide in the eastern state of Brandenburg early on Wednesday morning damaged several power cables, said a spokesperson for the LKA state criminal investigation office.
Continue reading...Digital currency under pressure from payment crackdown and tweets from Elon Musk
The price of bitcoin fell by almost 30% on Wednesday, after a Chinese government crackdown on banks’ use of cryptocurrencies accelerated a long-predicted sell-off, in a day of chaotic trading.
The world’s largest digital currency tumbled to about $30,000 (£21,000) amid frenzied trading, a drop of more than 50% since it hit record highs of more than $64,000 in mid-April. However, by 10pm UK time, the bitcoin price had risen back to about $38,500, still down 11% on the day, according to Refinitiv data.
Continue reading...The driver of a Tesla car in a fatal crash that California highway authorities said may have been operating on autopilot posted social media videos of himself riding in the vehicle without his hands on the wheel or foot on the pedal.
The 5 May crash in Fontana, a city 50 miles east of Los Angeles, is also under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). It is the 29th case involving a Tesla the federal agency has investigated.
Continue reading...Digital currency, which is made with an energy-intensive process, falls 17% after the tweet
Tesla has suspended customers’ use of bitcoin to purchase its vehicles, Elon Musk said on Wednesday, citing concerns about the use of fossil fuel for bitcoin mining.
Related: Dogecoin’s record-breaking rise shoots ‘joke’ cryptocurrency to wider attention
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