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Elon Musk bares his soul as Tesla stays on track

Elon Musk
Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks to shareholders. (Tesla via YouTube)

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.

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Elon Musk berates (and plans to rate) media

Elon Musk
Elon Musk muses at SpaceX’s Mission Control. (SpaceX Photo)

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 TeslaSpaceXthe Boring Company, the Neuralink brain-computer interface company, flamethrowers, tequila, candy and his campaign to fend off an AI apocalypse.

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Elon Musk and Tesla shares take a weird turn

Elon Musk and Tesla
Tesla CEO Elon Musk presides over the handover of Model 3 cars in August 2017. (Tesla via YouTube)

Tesla’s share price took a weird turn today after the company reported its first-quarter financial results and billionaire CEO Elon Musk dissed analysts’ concerns about the Tesla Model 3 mass-market electric car.

The raw numbers reflected Tesla’s efforts to ramp up production over the quarter: Net loss widened to a record $784.6 million for the quarter, but revenue rose to $3.41 billion, outdoing analysts’ estimates.

The key questions have to do with the Model 3, which Musk is counting on to bring the company to profitability by the latter half of this year.

“It’s high time we became profitable,” he said during today’s teleconference for analysts. “The reality is, you’re not a real company until you are.”

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Elon Musk turns Tesla’s woes into April Fools’ joke

Elon Musk "bankwupt"
Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted out a picture of himself seemingly “passed out against a Tesla Model 3, surrounded by ‘Teslaquilla’ bottles, the tracks of dried tears still visible on his cheeks.” (Elon Musk via Twitter)

Between Model S recalls and Model 3 production snags, Tesla has been having a hard time lately — but not as hard as CEO Elon Musk made them out to be today in a hilarious series of April Fools’ tweets.

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Elon Musk deletes SpaceX and Tesla from Facebook

SpaceX on Facebook
This is an archived Portuguese-language version of SpaceX’s Facebook page, which has been deleted. (SpaceX / Facebook via Archive.org)

Facebook suffered another blow today: Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, had those two companies’ official pages removed from the embattled social network.

Musk’s action came after it was pointed out to him on Twitter that SpaceX actually had an official Facebook page. “I didn’t realize there was one,” he tweeted.

The context for Musk’s wild and woolly tweetstorm is the controversy over Facebook’s handling of personal data from users. A series of reports found that the information was mishandled, and ended up being used inappropriately to micro-target voters in the 2016 presidential election.

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Elon Musk Q&A: First Mars ship is being built

Kimbal and Elon Musk
Billionaire Elon Musk (in the black hat) and his brother, Kimbal Musk (in the white hat), join in a rendition of “My Little Buttercup” at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. (SXSW via YouTube)

SpaceX is building its first Mars transport vehicle, also known as the BFR, and “making good progress” toward short-hop test flights on Earth by the middle of next year, CEO Elon Musk said today.

“We’re actually building that ship right now,” Musk said at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, during a Q&A with “Westworld” co-creator Jonathan Nolan, a longtime friend.

Today’s conversation ranged over all things Musk — from SpaceX and Tesla, to The Boring Company, Neuralink and the billionaire’s concerns about artificial superintelligence.

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Tesla’s Semi trucks ship Tesla’s battery packs

Tesla Semi trucks
Tesla Semi heavy-duty trucks carry battery packs fromNevada. (Elon Musk via Instagram)

“Eat Your Own Dog Food” is an aphorism referring to the Microsoft tradition of using its own software products, but it applies equally well to the first production cargo trip of Tesla’s all-electric truck — which carried battery packs from Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada to its car assembly plant in Fremont, Calif.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk spotlighted the start of the 260-mile journey on Instagram.

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Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster gets set for liftoff

Tesla Roadster
Elon Musk’s red Tesla Roadster is nestled within the payload shroud for a Falcon Heavy rocket. (Elon Musk via Instagram)

After a flurry of speculation, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is showing off his midnight cherry-red Tesla Roadster sports car as it’s being prepared for its ride atop a Falcon Heavy rocket.

Liftoff from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is currently set for next month, and if all goes as planned, the car will be put into a long, looping trajectory bridging the orbits of Earth and Mars.

“A Red Car for the Red Planet,” Musk wrote in the Instagram post that accompanied pictures of the car.

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Launching a sports car to Mars? Questions abound

Falcon Heavy
An artist’s conception shows the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. (SpaceX via YouTube)

Billionaire CEO Elon Musk tweeted out the idea of putting a cherry-red Tesla Roadster on SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket and sending it toward Mars, sparking lots of questions in the process.

The first question has to be: Is he serious?

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Australia powers up Tesla’s monster battery

Tesla batteries
Tesla’s battery bank is linked to wind turbines in South Australia. (Jay Weatherill via Twitter)

South Australia’s state government turned on the switch for the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery today, marking a signal achievement for rapid deployment of renewable energy resources.

Technically speaking, the 100-megawatt battery bank built by Tesla isn’t the highest-capacity power storage system: Molten-salt batteries, for example, can store more energy for distribution over a longer time. Alphabet’s X team, the “moonshot factory” associated with Google, is currently seeking commercial partners for a megawatt-scale, molten-salt battery project called Malta.

Even in the lithium-ion category, there are bigger power storage systems in the works: A battery bank that’s being built for Southern California Edison can be expanded to store 300 megawatts of power.

But that battery isn’t due for completion until 2021 or so. What’s most notable about the Tesla facility connected to Neoen’s Hornsdale Wind Farm is that it was installed under the terms of a “100 Days or It’s Free” deal with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Today’s switching-on ceremony took place just 63 days after the grid-connection agreement was signed in September, although Tesla got a head start on the project before the signing.

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