Elon Musk

Back in October, we reported that Tesla invited investors to a special event at the Gigafactory on January 4th. This week, Tesla sent out the official invites and confirmed that CEO Elon Musk will be there for a talk with management, including CTO JB Straubel. Our understanding is the focus will be on touring the factory, which recently doubled in size, and not on access to management.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk was on Twitter this morning responding to a few questions – primarily about the new Easter Eggs the company included in its latest updates, but I thought maybe we could get a proper ‘Elon Tweetstorm’ on Christmas eve so I asked him about an update on Tesla’s plans to install solar arrays at Supercharger stations? He had this to say:

There are some installed already, but full rollout really needs Supercharger V3 and Powerpack V2, plus SolarCity. Pieces now in place.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 24, 2016

Tesla indeed operates a few Supercharger stations with solar arrays – like the Hawthorne Supercharger pictured above – but they only represent a small fraction of Tesla’s 760+ stations. But more importantly, It’s the first time we’ve heard about a third generation of Tesla’s Supercharger and that’s not all, Musk also hinted at a power output greater than 350 kW – up from the current ~150 kW.
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In this week’s top stories: Tesla’s 2017 Supercharger network expansion plans, Autopilot & launch mode limits, Musk’s tunnel digging company, the latest solar and EV news, and much more.

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Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk has floated the idea in the past of digging tunnels under highways to reduce traffic – an idea he had while sitting in Los Angeles traffic. Now he is apparently serious about doing it and he even has a name and tagline for the venture: “The Boring Company – Boring, it’s what we do.”
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Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was among 15 tech executives taking part in President-elect Donald Trump’s meeting with Silicon Valley’s top brass. His presence stood out when you consider that Trump opened the meeting by saying:

“I won’t tell you the hundreds of calls we had asking to come to this meeting. Peter [Thiel] was sort of saying “no, that company is too small,” and these are monster companies…”

Musk’s companies are dwarfed by the sizes of the other companies at the table, which makes his presence more interesting – especially in light of his nomination to Trump’s Strategic and Policy Team.
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US President-elect Donald Trump has invited Silicon Valley’s top brass to the Trump Tower in New York today for a special tech summit which is taking place right now – jobs and regulations are expected to be on the agenda. The meeting will be crowded with over a dozen tech executives, but apparently two of them will get a separate private meeting with the next President of the US: Tesla & SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

The news comes just as it was announced by Trump’s transition team that Musk will be on the President’s Strategic and Policy Team, a group of high-profile businessmen that “will be called upon to meet with the President frequently to share their specific experience and knowledge as the President implements his economic agenda.”
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US President-elect and environmental foil Donald Trump set up a Strategic and Policy Team on December 2nd made up of business leaders and chaired by Stephen Schwarzman Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder of Blackstone Financial Services. Most of the people on the original board were folks from traditional American “Blue Chip” companies including Mary Barra, Chairman and CEO of General Motors.

Today, Along with Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, untraditional transportation leaders were added to the list: Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Travis Kalanick, CEO and Co-Founder of Uber were announced via press release.
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It was revealed last week that President-elect Donald Trump will be meeting with important tech-industry executives, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, among others, at Trump Tower on December 14.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wasn’t listed among the attendees when the meeting came to light last week, but Musk recently said that he would be “happy” to meet the new President-elect in an interview with the New York Time and now he is reportedly going to be present at the meeting.
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In a post to his Dealbook column in the New York Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin says, “Want to Bring Back Jobs, Mr. President-Elect? Call Elon Musk.” That’s something that seems beyond obvious to anyone paying attention: after all, Musk started the United States’ first viable automobile company in a century, is opening up the biggest battery plants and solar plants the world has ever seen, and is working on manned flights to Mars…
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In this week’s top stories: A top Trump propagandist launches a campaign against Elon Musk and Tesla, a new report claims Model 3 might not arrive until the very end of 2018, GM launches the Chevy Bolt EV leasing program, and Tesla officially closes its acquisition of SolarCity.

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In light of the recent smear campaign launched against Tesla and Elon Musk by a conservative group backed by a Trump propagandist, it’s worth taking a look at which companies involved in the same industries as Musk and Tesla are receiving the most public subsidies. After all, it’s the main aspect on which these smear campaigns are based.

The group ‘Citizens for the Republic’ targeted Musk and Tesla for taking subsidies from the government, which they referred to as “defrauding American taxpayers”. But according to their manifesto, they are against all subsidies, which is something a lot of people can get behind, but it raises the question of why are they targeting Musk and Tesla?

If you want to campaign against subsidies, it would make sense to target all subsidies or at least the corporations that are getting away with the lion’s share of them and contrary to what has long been reported, Tesla is actually receiving only a small fraction of what the Big Three automakers and oil companies are receiving.
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A right-wing propaganda group led by one of Donald Trump’s top propagandists recently launched a campaign called ‘Stop Elon From Failing Again’. According to their manifesto, the initiative aims to stop Elon Musk from “defrauding” American taxpayers through his companies, Tesla and SpaceX.

The effort is backed by conservative public relations specialists and Trump insiders that are funded by fossil fuel interests. Unsurprisingly, it is full of misinformation about Tesla, electric vehicles, and solar energy.
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When Elon Musk promised to back Tesla’s resale value guarantee program with his own fortune or to pay back SolarCity’s debt himself if needs be, some criticized that if it came to it, it would be difficult for him to do so since his fortune is mostly tied to those companies.

There was always his stake in SpaceX, his rocket company, but the value of it and his precise stake in the company was unknown… until today.
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While Tesla’s Vice President of Vehicle Programs, Jerome Guillen, is working on the automaker’s all-electric heavy truck program, Tesla Semi, CEO Elon Musk made rare comments about the vehicle and more especially, its autonomous driving capacity.
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Tesla’s lawsuit against an oil executive trying to impersonate CEO Elon Musk to get material information about the company and now a subsequent countersuit are starting to uncover what appears to be a plot by the oil industry against Tesla.
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Back in September, we reported on a lawsuit Tesla filed against an oil service company, Quest Integrity, and its CFO, Todd Katz, over an email made to look like it was from Tesla CEO Elon Musk that Katz allegedly sent Tesla CFO Jason Wheeler in an attempt to obtain secret information about Tesla.

Katz, who apparently resigned from his position at Quest Integrity a week after the lawsuit was filed, is now responding to the accusation. He is not denying having sent the email, but he defends himself by saying that the impersonation wasn’t “credible” enough for anyone to believe the email was from Musk and therefore, it shouldn’t merit a lawsuit.
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Even though Tesla just released a new report with the clear goal to pitch the SolarCity acquisition to its shareholders, CEO Elon Musk is now saying that he would be surprised if the merger wouldn’t pass at this point.

He even referenced the early votes which he described as “overwhelmingly in favor” of the merger.
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Bob Lutz, General Motors’ former vice chairman, can’t stop and won’t stop attacking Tesla in the media. CNBC had him on this morning ahead of Tesla releasing its financial results this afternoon and they let him straight up lie about the company’s financial situation without correcting him.

As usual, he also went after Tesla CEO Elon Musk, which now makes happier times, like the moment pictured above at the ‘Revenge of the Electric Car‘ premiere, seem like a bygone era.
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In this week’s top stories: Tesla/SolarCity announce upcoming events, Elon Musk challenges Big Coal, Google deploys its self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans, and much more.

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Now that Tesla is venturing further into the energy industry by ramping up its energy storage division, ‘Tesla Energy’, and with solar through its proposed merger with SolarCity, the company is not just causing serious concern to established automakers and big oil, but also traditional energy companies like coal mining corporations.

This morning it became clear that Tesla is not welcomed by those companies either when Robert Murray, a climate-change denier and CEO of Murray Energy Corporation, one of the biggest coal mining firms in the US, called Tesla a “fraud” for receiving subsidies without turning a profit.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter this afternoon to announce an unexpected product launch event on October 17th, just a week away. He further noted that the expected Tesla/SolarCity announcement, which he previously hoped to hold at the end of the month, would indeed be on October 28th…
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