The Elon Musk Thread

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The Elon Musk Thread

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Whether you love him or loathe him, he's one of the most influential people in the world of tech.

So here's a dedicated thread for Elon Musk.

Topics covered:

– SpaceX
– Tesla
– Neuralink
– The Boring Company
– OpenAI
– Starlink
– Hyperloop
– Tesla Energy
– And more!


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Re: The Elon Musk Thread

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On Elon Musk's 50th Birthday, A Major Throwback From Mom Maye Musk

June 28, 2021 11:07 am IST

Elon Musk's mother brought in his 50th birthday with a major throwback picture. Maye Musk took to social media this morning to wish her eldest son a happy birthday with an old picture and a sweet message. The throwback photograph shows the Tesla and SpaceX CEO as a baby, swaddled in a blanket and being cradled by his mother.

"Happy birthday @elonmusk," wrote Ms Musk, a Canadian author and model, on Twitter while sharing the picture. "Thank you for this wonderful day 50 years ago. You have brought me great joy. Lots of love," she added. Ms Musk also noted that the hashtag #HappyBirthdayElonMusk had begun trending on social media.

Maye Musk often treats fans and followers to throwback pictures of her family. Only last week, she had shared a picture of Elon and his brother Kimbal Musk as teenagers.

https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/on-elon-mu ... sk-2473973


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Re: The Elon Musk Thread

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Elon Musk’s Tesla Bot is a Joke
by James Vincent
August 20, 2021

https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/20/2263 ... usk-ai-day

Introduction:
(The Verge) After a dense presentation about the undeniably impressive work Tesla is doing with AI, the company’s self-anointed Technoking, Elon Musk, capped the evening by bringing out a dancer in a spandex suit. Behold, said Musk: my Tesla Bot.

The dancer in the suit, he said, was the model for a new humanoid robot Tesla will produce in the near future. After the dubstep and applause had faded, the vaguest of briefing slides promised that the Tesla Bot will stand five feet, eight inches (1.7m), weigh 125 pounds (56kg), have “human-level hands,” and eliminate “dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks.”

Musk said that building a human-replacement robot — something no company in the world is close to achieving — was a logical step forward from Tesla’s work developing self-driving cars. “Our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels,” he said. “It kind of makes sense to put that on to a humanoid form. We’re also quite good at sensors and batteries and actuators so we think we’ll probably have a prototype some time next year that basically looks like this.”

Even by Musk’s standards, it was a bizarre and brilliant bit of tomfoolery: a multipurpose sideshow that trolled Tesla skeptics, fed the fans, ginned up the share price, and created some eye-catching headlines. The latter being particularly important in a week when most Tesla news has focused on a federal investigation into a tendency of the company’s Autopilot software to crash into parked emergency vehicles. Forget about all that, says Musk, just look at the person in the spandex suit! Next year, it’ll be a real robot, I promise.

Do you believe him? Should you believe him? I won’t answer that for you, but I want to restate the facts...
Some funny observations in the rest of the article such as…
Over the years, these ambitions (for the Hyperloop) have shrunk until the project morphed into The Loop: a small tunnel that you can drive a car through, if you want. (Otherwise known as: a tunnel.)
...he doesn’t even need a simulacrum of a robot to sell the dream. All he needs is a dancer in a spandex suit. Now that’s innovation.
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Re: The Elon Musk Thread

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Tesla's Battery-Manufacturing "Megafactory" Breaks Ground in California
by Aria Alamalhodaei
September 23, 2021

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/23/tesla ... alifornia/

Introduction:
(TechCrunch) Tesla broke ground on its “Megafactory,” a new production facility in California, so christened because it will produce the company’s large-scale battery system Megapack.

News of the previously unannounced factory was confirmed by the Lathrop Mayor Sonny Dhaliwal, in a Facebook post that was deleted and re-posted. “We are proud to be the home of the Megafactory, Tesla’s most recent expansion here,” he said. “The future of green energy will be produced right here in our community.”

The factory, in the small northern California city of Lathrop, is near Tesla’s automotive plant in Fremont. Lathrop is also home to Tesla’s 870,000-square-foot distribution center.

Megapacks, as well as Tesla’s other energy storage products, were being manufactured at the electric automaker’s so-called “Gigafactory” in Sparks, Nevada. This is the first facility dedicated to the Megapack, though it’s unclear if production of Tesla’s other storage products – which include Powerwall and Powerpacks – will shift to the new factory.

The new factory is a positive signal for the automaker’s growing Energy division. As opposed to the Powerwall, which is a home consumer battery product, the Megapack is meant for utility-scale energy storage. Utilities building solar and wind farms are increasingly pairing these with large batteries to store excess energy to discharge to the grid later. Just last week, the Arizona electric utility Salt River Project brought online a 100 megawatt-hour Megapack project.
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Re: The Elon Musk Thread

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Elon Musk holds Twitter vote over $21bn Tesla share sale

35 minutes ago

Tesla billionaire Elon Musk has launched a Twitter poll of his 62.6 million followers asking if he should sell 10% of his shares.

The vote, which closes later on Sunday, could see him dispose of $21bn (£16bn) of stock in the electric carmaker.

He promised to abide by the result of the poll, a response to a "billionaires tax" proposed by US Democrats.

The plan could see Mr Musk, who is one of the world's richest men, face a huge tax bill.

By late morning on Sunday, with about 8 hours to go before the poll closes, 57% of the 2.8 million respondents had voted "yes".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59182278


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Re: The Elon Musk Thread

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Well, he did it. (At least in part).

Elon Musk Sells Around $5 Billion of Tesla Stock
by Lora Kolodny and Christine Wang
November 10, 2021

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/10/elon-mu ... stock.html

Introduction:
(CNBC) Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold nearly $5 billion in Tesla stock, according to financial filings out Wednesday evening. He still holds more than 166 million shares.

His trust sold more than 3.5 million shares worth over $3.88 billion in a flurry of trades carried out Tuesday and Wednesday. Those transactions were not marked as 10b5, meaning they were not scheduled sales.

Earlier Wednesday evening, filings showed Musk is selling a separate block of Tesla shares via a plan that he set in motion on Sept. 14 this year. Those sales amount to more than 930,000 shares worth over $1.1 billion.

Musk sold these shares in part to satisfy tax obligations related to an exercise of stock options.
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Re: The Elon Musk Thread

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Early Data Shows Musk's Las Vegas Loop Not Yet Up To Speed
by Mark Harris
November 12, 2021

https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/12/early ... r-service/

Introduction:
(TechCrunch) When Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill unveiled The Boring Company’s plan for a subterranean shuttle that would whisk visitors to different parts of the city’s vast Convention Center campus, he predicted it would take just under two minutes to travel between its farthest stations.

“If the system doesn’t work, we will get all of our money back,” Hill said, in June 2019, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal.

That two-minute promise was repeated to the media as recently as April, according to an email between a Boring Company (TBC) representative and the LVCVA. That email was part of a 5,051-page drop of documents obtained by Plainsite under public records legislation.

So far, it seems the two-minute target is still out of reach.

Detailed trip reports from the same records request show that in its first six weeks of operation, the LVCC Loop’s Tesla taxis took an average of nearly four minutes to span the system.
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Re: The Elon Musk Thread

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Re: The Elon Musk Thread

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^^^Maybe I am just a cynic, but I have to wonder how much of this is just profit taking on the part of Musk. That is to say, he knows that the Tesla stock is overvalued. Still, how to cash in on that fact without telegraphing that opinion to other stock holders?

Well, just coach it in terms of "paying my fair share of taxes" on his wealth. I believe that a previous article I posted on this also discusses other accounting reasons why it might make sense for Musk to sell a significant share of his stock, even if that does mean paying out a healthy tax bite.
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