Cosmic Log
Mark this down for later: Tech billionaire Elon Musk says the Boring Company could begin work on the express tunnel linking downtown Chicago and O’Hare International Airport in three to four months, and have it finished in three years. Musk, who’s famous for overly optimistic timelines, laid out that plan today as he stood alongside Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to announce the deal at a news conference in the unfinished Block 37 transit superstation.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Boring Company is getting the go-ahead to build a multibillion-dollar express transit system between downtown Chicago and O’Hare International Airport, city officials said.
Mayoral spokesman Grant Klinzman told GeekWire in a tweet tonight that the Boring Company won the bid. “Consider it confirmed,” he said.
In a follow-up statement, the Boring Company said its aim will be “to alleviate soul-destroying traffic by constructing safe, affordable, and environmentally friendly public transportation systems.”
Musk’s 18-month-old company beat out a bid from O’Hare Xpress LLC, a consortium that included the Mott MacDonald engineering firm and JLC Infrastructure, a venture backed by former basketball star Magic Johnson.
Just days after promising he’d make Tesla profitable within months, CEO Elon Musk announced today that 9 percent of the company’s workforce is being laid off as part of the effort to make it so.
Musk tweeted out his memo to employees, laying out the reasons for the layoffs.
He said the “difficult but necessary” decision was the result of a comprehensive organizational restructuring, targeting duplication as well as some job functions that, “while they made sense in the past, are difficult to justify today.”
“Given that Tesla has never made an annual profit in the almost 15 years since we have existed, profit is obviously not what motivates us,” he wrote. “What drives us is our mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable, clean energy, but we will never achieve that mission unless we eventually demonstrate that we can be sustainably profitable. That is a valid and fair criticism of Tesla’s history to date.”
Billionaire tech guru Elon Musk showed off pictures of the Boring Company’s first commercial flamethrowers being distributed to lines of buyers today — and joked that the device has been renamed “Not a Flamethrower” so as not to run afoul of customs or shipping regulations.
“First 1000 Boring Company Flamethrowers being picked up today!” Musk tweeted.
As shown in Musk’s tweeted pictures, hundreds lined up at the pickup site in Los Angeles to get their purchases and pose for pictures as flames licked out from the flamethrowers’ barrels.
Thousands more of the contraptions will be shipped out in the weeks ahead, Musk said. An initial offering of 20,000 flamethrowers, priced at $500 each, sold out within four days in January.
Tesla shareholders at today’s annual meeting swatted down challenges to billionaire CEO Elon Musk, who laid out an admittedly optimistic plan for the crucial months ahead.
“This is going to sound maybe a little cheesy, but at Tesla, we build our cars with love,” an emotional Musk told the crowd at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “We really care.”
He contrasted the dedication of the Tesla team with what he said was the typical mindset in the auto industry. “At a lot of other companies, they’re built by the marketing department and the finance department. There’s no soul, you know?” Musk said.
Musk acknowledged that the team has faced a lot of “incredible headwinds” in the course of manufacturing electric cars, battery storage systems and solar panels.
Billionaire Elon Musk hasn’t exactly had a smooth week in press relations, but today brought a string of feel-good tweets over a fake-news story on the ClickHole website.
The headline? “More Bad Press for Elon: The Car Elon Musk Launched Into Orbit Has Fallen Back Down to Earth and Crushed Malala Yousafzai.”
It’s been three months since SpaceX launched the first prototype satellites for its Starlink broadband internet network, and there’s been precious little information about what they’re up to. Until today.
Responding to a follower’s Twitter inquiry, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk assessed how the twin satellites, dubbed Tintin A and B, are doing:
Pretty good. TinTin A & B are both closing the link to ground w phased array at high bandwidth, low latency (25 ms). Good enough to play fast response video games.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 26, 2018
Elon Musk’s Tesla electric-car and power company has been getting some bad press lately, and today the tech billionaire pushed back with a tweetstorm criticizing “the holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies” and laying out a plan for a crowdsourced media credibility rating site.
The fast-moving discussion suggests Musk is adding yet another venture to his smorgasbord, in addition to Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company, the Neuralink brain-computer interface company, flamethrowers, tequila, candy and his campaign to fend off an AI apocalypse.
If billionaire Elon Musk’s tunnel vision comes to pass, travelers will be able to zip beneath Los Angeles through an underground Loop system at 150 mph for about $1 a ride.
That’s the promise of the Boring Company in a nutshell. During a Thursday night session that lasted nearly an hour, Musk and the Boring Company’s project leader, Steve Davis, laid out their case for building a network of tunnels 30 feet or more beneath Los Angeles, starting with a 2.7-mile “proof of concept” dig.
Musk’s aim is to get around the “soul-destroying traffic” that afflicts L.A. and other big cities, by building as many tunnels as needed to accommodate underground transit on fast-moving pods. Priority would be given to passengers and bicyclists, but cars could be lowered from the streets into subterranean superhighways as well.
Billionaire Elon Musk is talking up his tunnel-boring vision at a public forum in Los Angeles tonight, and hinting that the Boring Company’s Hyperloop system could eventually whisk travelers to sea-based spaceports.
But first, the Boring Company has to clear away logistical, legal and regulatory roadblocks — which is part of Musk’s agenda for his 7 p.m. PT presentation at Leo Baeck Temple in L.A. The Boring Company says the forum will be live-streamed via its website.