Musk discussed the wonky side of vehicle production and the prospects for building cars in the same price range as, say, a Toyota Prius (which is the top trade-in for the more expensive Model 3).
“Getting to, like, a $25,000 car — that’s something we could do,” Musk told Brownlee. “If we work really hard, I think maybe we could do that in three years, four years.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk presided over the company’s SolarCity merger in 2016. (Tesla via YouTube)
When Tesla CEO Elon Musk chokes up, Tesla’s stock price gets depressed as well.
The link between public perceptions of the tech billionaire’s mental state and the financial state of his publicly traded company was evident today, in the wake of a New York Times interview that quoted Musk as acknowledging he was fraying.
“This past year has been the most difficult and painful year of my career,” Musk told the Times. “It was excruciating.”
A cutaway graphic shows how the western terminus of the Dugout Loop might look, with electric-powered “skates” lined up to be lowered into the transit tunnel. (Boring Company Graphic)
Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s tunneling venture, the Boring Company, is getting the go-ahead sign on a project to build a transit tunnel connecting Dodger Stadium with one of Los Angeles’ Metro Red Line subway stations.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk introduces the Semi truck and an updated Roadster at an unveiling event in 2017. (Tesla via YouTube)
When Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he had “funding secured” for a plan to take the company private, he was referring to the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund — whose executives had been pressing him for almost two years to take such a step.
That’s according to an update that Musk posted to Tesla’s website today. The update sheds more light on Aug. 7’s cryptic and seemingly sudden tweets revealing that he was considering a plan to buy up shares from whoever wanted to sell, at a premium price of $420 a share.
It didn’t help that some interpreted $420 as a veiled reference to 4-20, which is a magic number for marijuana users. At $420 a share, Tesla’s valuation would be in the range of $72 billion.
When NASDAQ trading was stopped, Tesla’s shares were at $366.94, a 7.3 percent gain. When trading resumed, prices reached beyond $380 but ended the trading day just below that mark, adding up to a rise of nearly 11 percent over the previous day’s close. The gap between $380 and $420 reflects market uncertainty over whether the deal will go through as described.
Tesla’s electric vehicles take up spots in a parking lot at the company’s factory in Fremont, Calif., during late June. (Tesla via Twitter)
Tesla reported a larger loss per share than expected in the second quarter, but there was more revenue and less of a cash burn than expected — all of which resulted in an after-hours surge in share prices that at one point amounted to more than 10 percent.
There were less quantifiable factors as well, in the form of apologies from Tesla CEO Elon Musk for his behavior three months earlier.
Musk had dressed down Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst for the Sanford C. Bernstein investment management firm, during the previous quarter’s conference call for asking what the billionaire techie called “boring, bonehead questions.” He also had complained about a “dry” question from RBC Capital Markets’ Joseph Spak.
During today’s call, Musk apologized to both analysts.
SpaceX/Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Washington Hyperloop team member Mitchell Frimodt check out the UW team’s racing pod at the Hyperloop competition. (Washington Hyperloop via Twitter)
“Very impressive,” Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, told the WARR team after today’s record-breaking run.
Dutch-based Delft Hyperloop was the runner-up in the finals with a top speed of 88 mph, and Switzerland’s EPFLoop team was No. 3 with 53 mph.
Although Washington Hyperloop didn’t make it to the three-team finals, the UW team’s leaders said they had an “amazing competition experience” over the past week.
“We finished in the final four, and #1 in the U.S.,” they said in a text message exchange with GeekWire. “After a week of insanely hard work, we powered through the testing stages and managed to get some open-air runs in the tube.”
Water samples from 2015 show a range of contamination in tap water from Flint, Mich. (FlintWaterStudy.org Photo)
Elon Musk didn’t even wait to get back from his Asia trip to start a new philanthropic campaign, this time to do something about the contaminated water supply in Flint, Mich.
The genesis of Musk’s involvement with the years-old Flint controversy echoes how he came to build a mini-submarine for the soccer-playing boys trapped in a Thai cave. It all started with a seemingly flip suggestion from comedy writer Cullen Crawford — plus an assist from Don A. Bailey, a Flint native who runs a blockchain consulting firm called Lab Mouse Security.
An underwater rescue pod fashioned from a SpaceX Falcon 9 liquid-oxygen transfer tube undergoes testing in a California swimming pool. (Elon Musk via Twitter)
The mini-submarine created by SpaceX engineers may not play a role in the crisis it was designed for — the Thai cave rescue drama that’s now speeding to a resolution — but it could be a lifesaver for future space missions.
“With some mods, this could also work as an escape pod in space,” SpaceX’s billionaire CEO, Elon Musk, said today in a series of tweets sharing the team’s progress.
Last week, Musk’s Twitter followers asked him what he could do to help the team in Thailand that’s working to extract 12 young soccer players and their coach from a flooded cave.
After considering a “bouncy castle” air tube that the kids might be able to wriggle through to safety, Musk and his team settled on the idea of building a kid-sized submarine, equipped with external air tanks. A foot-wide liquid oxygen transfer tube, originally built for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, would serve as the hull.
The contraption went through dive-pool tests at Palisades Charter High School in Los Angeles and was sent on a 17-hour flight to Thailand.
Meanwhile, the rescue team at the Tham Luang cave complex decided that the situation was too dire to wait any longer. Over the weekend, a team of expert divers began escorting the kids out of the cave. At times, the boys had to be hooked up with full-face oxygen masks as they swam through water filling the narrow, pitch-black cave channels.
The crisis could be resolved without having to resort to SpaceX’s mini-sub, and without further fatalities, which everyone agrees would be good news.
But in today’s tweets, Musk made clear that he wouldn’t consider the effort wasted even if it doesn’t come into play in the flooded Thai cave. The concept could come in handy for future underwater rescues on Earth, or rescues in the vacuum of space.
In any case, it’s instructive to see how the crowdsourced engineering exercise unfolded over the course of just a couple of days. That’s why we’re passing along this long string of tweets documenting the creation and testing of the mini-sub.
Rescuers work on their equipment inside a Thai cave complex where a dozen boys and their soccer coach are trapped. (National News Bureau of Thailand)
Billionaire techie Elon Musk is sending a team of engineers from SpaceX and the Boring Company to help with the increasingly desperate effort to rescue a dozen boys and their soccer coach from a waterlogged cave in Thailand.
The soccer team became trapped in the Tham Luang cave complex nearly two weeks ago when floods from a sudden downpour hemmed them in. Divers were able to reach the boys on July 2, perched on a rock slab above the water level. But on July 5, one of the volunteer rescuers died during an hours-long dive to deliver oxygen to the group.
One of Musk’s fans tweeted out a plea this week for Musk to pitch in. Musk agreed to put on his thinking cap, and eventually to do more than think about it. James Yenbamroong, the founder of Thailand’s mu Space satellite startup, facilitated contacts with the Thai government.
