Tag: Elon Musk

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Elon Musk hails Hyperloop and touts tunnel

Hyperloop test track
A pod rolls down an enclosed test track next to SpaceX’s headquarters. (SpaceX Photo)

Three student teams got through the engineering gauntlet and sent their Hyperloop pods through a mile-long tube to test a new mode of transportation today.

The pod races were the climax of this weekend’s first-ever Hyperloop competition – hosted by SpaceX at its headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., and backed by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who came up with the Hyperloop concept in 2013.

Twenty-seven teams, including a squad from the University of Washington, brought their fast-moving, high-tech machines to Hawthorne for testing.

But there was only enough time for three of the teams – coming from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Germany’s Technical University of Munich – to pass all of today’s required preliminaries and make a tube run under full race conditions.

“We completed all tests and were ready to go, as were a few other teams,” David Coven, one of the leaders of the UW Hyperloop team, told GeekWire in an email. “There just wasn’t enough time to race each of the teams.”

The German team, known as WARR Hyperloop, clocked the fastest time of the three, traveling through the vacuum tube at a maximum speed of 94 kilometers per hour (58 mph). Delft won the overall prize, based on the points given for design and safety as well as for speed.

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Elon Musk talks about Trump, taxes and tunnels

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the SolarCity merger will lead to increased synergies. (Tesla via YouTube)
Elon Musk has repeatedly spoken out about the need for a carbon tax. (Tesla via YouTube)

Billionaire brainiac Elon Musk already has a lot on his hands with Tesla, SpaceX and the quest to make humanity a multiplanet species, but now he’s delving other deep subjects, ranging from politics to his top-secret tunnel plan.

First, let’s check in on the politics: Before the election, Musk said he thought Donald Trump was probably “not the right guy” to become president. But after the election, he joined the president’s Strategic and Policy Forum – which met with Trump at the White House this week.

This week, Musk tweeted his support for Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO whom Trump picked to become secretary of state. Today, Musk explained his thinking via Twitter in an exchange of direct messages with Gizmodo.

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SpaceX finances revealed on eve of launch

SpaceX Falcon 9 readied
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is readied to launch 10 Iridium Next satellites into orbit at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. (Iridium Photo via Twitter)

As SpaceX prepares for its first Falcon 9 rocket launch in five months, a new report about the company’s finances is pointing to the importance of getting back to routine operations – and the importance of SpaceX’s satellite operation in the Seattle area.

Today’s report in The Wall Street Journal is based on a look at the privately held company’s internal financial documents. Those documents indicate that the company lost $260 million on revenues of nearly $1 billion in 2015.

The main factor behind that loss was the schedule disruption caused by the breakup of a Falcon 9 shortly after liftoff in June of that year.

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Elon Musk says he’s serious about tunnels

Bertha boring machine
The Bertha tunneling machine’s passage has been anything but boring. (WSDOT Photo via Flickr)

Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, insists he’s really going to build a tunnel-boring machine to do something about road traffic. But should he?

Never say never when it comes to Musk doing something about the things that bug him. He founded SpaceX, a company that’s revolutionizing the rocket business, when he couldn’t find a cheap ride for a mission to Mars.

Three years ago, he came up with the Hyperloop concept for near-supersonic land travel out of frustration with California’s costly plan for a rapid-transit system that’s not that rapid.

Now it’s tunnels.

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Tesla-SolarCity merger takes effect

Elon Musk
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the SolarCity merger will lead to increased synergies. (Tesla via YouTube)

The $2 billion Tesla-SolarCity merger went into effect today, just four days after Tesla Motors’ shareholders gave their approval.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tesla said SolarCity is now its wholly owned subsidiary. The all-stock deal converted each SolarCity share into 0.11 Tesla shares, and SolarCity is no longer listed in the NASDAQ market quotes.

For what it’s worth, the final trading price for SolarCity shares was $20.34 as of Nov. 18. At the end of today’s trading, Tesla shares were down 50 cents for the day at $184.52.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the merger would create synergies between Tesla’s lines of business, which market electric cars and electricity storage systems, and SolarCity’s line of electricity-generating solar panels.

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Shareholders OK Tesla-SolarCity merger

Image: Elon Musk
Elon Musk unveils Tesla’s Powerwall 2 battery and SolarCity’s roof panels in Los Angeles in October. (Tesla via YouTube)

Tesla’s shareholders overwhelmingly approved a merger with SolarCity today, opening the way for consummating the marriage of the electric-car company and the solar-panel venture within days.

The vote was more than 85 percent in favor, excluding the shares held by billionaire Elon Musk and other executives affiliated with the companies, Tesla said in a statement. Musk is the CEO of Tesla as well as the chairman of SolarCity.

Musk and other executives talked up the deal in advance of the vote, saying that it would take advantage of the synergies offered by each company. In addition to manufacturing electric-powered vehicles, Tesla is ramping up production of its Powerwall storage batteries. Meanwhile, SolarCity has become America’s top solar-panel installation company.

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Elon Musk holds forth on the election and more

Image: Elon Musk
Elon Musk is the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. (Credit: AGU file)

Today Elon Musk laid out his views on electricity-generating solar roofs, the Tesla-SolarCity merger, SpaceX’s return to flight and artificial intelligence during an extraordinary 30-minute telephone interview on CNBC.

His timeliest comments may relate to next week’s presidential election: Musk gave a lukewarm endorsement to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

“I would say it’s not going to make much of a difference one way or the other, honestly,” he said. “I think Hillary’s economic policies and her environmental policies particularly are the right ones, you know? Yeah. Also, I don’t think this is the finest moment of our democracy in general. But so it goes.”

So what about GOP candidate Donald Trump? “I feel a bit stronger that probably he’s not the right guy,” Musk said. “He just doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States.”

Musk – who’s the billionaire CEO of the SpaceX rocket venture and the Tesla electric-car concern as well as chairman of SolarCity, a producer of solar panels – touched on a wide range of topics, with occasional commentary from one of Tesla’s biggest investors, billionaire Ron Baron.

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Elon Musk geeks out over his Mars plan on Reddit

Mars rocket
An artist’s conception shows SpaceX’s Interplanetary Transport System lifting off with a refueling tanker sitting beside it. (Credit: SpaceX)

In the weeks ahead, SpaceX plans to pressure-test a prototype carbon fiber tank on an oceangoing barge, to gauge how well the technology will stand up to the oomph that’d be required for trips to Mars.

The test is one of the near-term steps that SpaceX founder Elon Musk laid out today during an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit’s SpaceX discussion forum, focusing on his long-term plan to transport a million settlers to Mars.

Musk signed on to the AMA session to follow up into some of the geeky questions raised by last month’s big reveal about SpaceX’s Interplanetary Transport System. Which, by the way, Musk is not happy with as a name.

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Elon Musk sets a course for full auto autonomy

Field of view for Tesla sensors
A graphic shows an overhead view of a Tesla vehicle with the field of view for sensors installed on the car. (Credit: Tesla Motors)

Billionaire Elon Musk doubled down on Tesla Motors’ autonomous driving features today, saying that every vehicle produced from now on will offer the option of full self-driving capability. But that capability won’t be turned on immediately.

“The foundation is on board to bring full autonomy,” the Tesla CEO told reporters during a teleconference.

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Reality check on Elon Musk’s plan to go to Mars

View of Mars
An artist’s conception shows a traveler looking out at Mars through the window of SpaceX’s future passenger spaceship. (Credit: SpaceX)

GUADALAJARA, Mexico – In order to make the figures work for Elon Musk’s plan to put settlers on Mars, SpaceX will have to build boosters and interplanetary spaceships for less than the price of a Boeing 777x jet, on a shorter time frame.

What’s more, Musk is aiming to ramp up to building 1,000 of those spaceships. That’s three times the number of 777x orders to date.

The comparisons between Boeing’s next airplane and SpaceX’s ultimate spaceship suggest Musk is overly optimistic about what it’ll take to get a million settlers to Mars by the end of the century.

So what else is new?

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