Cosmic Log
Another tweet, another catfight: Billionaire CEO Elon Musk has once again accused super-billionaire Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos of being a copycat.
This time, Musk took aim at Amazon’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Zoox, a venture focusing on self-driving cars that could compete with Tesla, the car company that Musk heads.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s dispute with county authorities over the reopening of the company’s California car factory was injected into President Donald Trump’s Twitterstream today.
President Donald Trump is said to be closely watching the impeachment proceedings on Capitol Hill, but he’s also watching what billionaire techie Elon Musk is doing at SpaceX and Tesla — and he likes what he sees.
Amid clouds of smoke and “Blade Runner” hype, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled a hard-edged, all-electric pickup truck that will cost as little as $39,900 and is due to hit the market by as early as 2021.
And then, with hundreds of fans cheering him on, Musk brought out one more thing during his laser-show presentation at Tesla’s design center in Los Angeles: an all-electric, all-terrain vehicle that rolled right into the Cybertruck’s bed for recharging from an onboard outlet.
There’s no sign that the ATV is for sale … yet … but Tesla is already taking refundable $100 deposits for the Cybertruck.
Tesla has increased the size of its stock and bond offering to $2.7 billion, and CEO Elon Musk has raised the amount of stock he’d be buying, sparking an additional rise in the controversial electric-car company’s share price.
The company’s revised plan calls for offering almost $850 million in stock and up to $1.84 billion in convertible notes, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Tesla said Musk plans to buy $25 million worth of Tesla shares, which is more than twice what he committed to in previous filings.
Tesla shares closed at $255.03 at the end of the trading day on May 3, representing a 4.5 percent rise for the day. That figure is still well below the 52-week high of $387.46, however.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to keep his Twitter habit in check — and feels comfortable enough with the arrangement to refer to it in a teasing tweet.
The April 26 settlement was a serious matter: Musk could have faced sanctions for contempt of court if he failed to patch up the rift with the SEC over whether he was following the terms of an earlier settlement.
Tesla today reported wider-than-expected financial losses in the first quarter — due to what the company said were delivery challenges, a seasonal dip in demand and the unanticipated effects of pricing decisions.
Despite the downturn from what had been a profitable couple of quarters, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was bullish on several fronts, including rollouts for the company’s Semi truck and Model Y crossover SUV, plus the opening of Tesla’s Gigafactory in Shanghai, China.
Musk is even planning to offer car insurance policies starting next month, with pricing determined by the data that’s received from the company’s cars.
“We have direct knowledge of the risk profile of customers and the car,” he explained during today’s teleconference with financial analysts. “If they want to buy Tesla insurance, they have to agree to not drive the car in a crazy way. Or they can, but then the insurance rate is higher.”
Tesla’s billionaire CEO, Elon Musk, laid out a vision for a huge fleet of self-driving electric vehicles that owners could share with friends or other riders, with Tesla getting a cut of the proceeds.
The Robotaxi concept relies on the ability to make Tesla cars fully autonomous, to the point that the steering wheels can be removed.
“By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware, feature complete, at a reliability level that we would consider that no one needs to pay attention,” Musk told investors at Tesla’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.
Musk acknowledged that the timetable could be in flux, due to regulatory concerns as well as his tendency to get overly optimistic about timetables.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk finished spelling out an all-electric acronym by lifting the veil on the Model Y, a crossover SUV that’s due to hit the market in the fall of 2020.
“We are bringing ‘sexy’ back, quite literally,” he told hundreds of Tesla fans who gathered for the Hollywood-style unveiling at Tesla’s design studio in Hawthorne, Calif.
Musk didn’t quite literally lift a veil to reveal the new model. Instead, he built up the suspense by giving an “extended history lesson” about Tesla’s decade-long history of vehicle production, starting with the Tesla Roadster and moving on to the Model S, Model X, Model 3, the Semi truck and the remade Roadster.
Along the way, Musk explained the ins and outs of his naming convention, including the fact that he couldn’t use the name “Model E” because Ford had it trademarked.
“Ford killed SEX,” Musk joked.
As he described the vehicles, each model was driven into the spotlight. Finally it was the Model Y’s turn. Cheers and whoops went up from the crowd as a shiny blue car pulled into its place alongside the Model S, 3, X. Y completed the acronym.
Tesla is finally following through on its pledge to sell its Model 3 electric cars at the standard price of $35,000, but says it’s shutting down on-the-spot showroom sales to remain “financially sustainable” at the lower price point. Going forward, worldwide sales will shift to online only, the company says.
Many of Tesla’s stores will be shut down over the next few months, the company said on its website. A small number of stores in high-traffic locations will remain open as galleries, showcases and information centers, but would-be buyers will have to go online to close the deal.