Elon Musk

Even though Elon Musk described his new Boring Company as “a few engineers and interns”, it seems to be moving incredibly fast.

They took delivery of their first boring machine last month and Musk now unveils new pictures of the entry hole, staging area for the machine, and the start of his network of tunnels under Los Angeles.
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Elon Musk discusses future plans for Tesla and his other endeavors with curator Chris Anderson at a TED Conference in Vancouver, Canada, April 28, 2017. The transcript below is an attempt to capture the conversation as accurately as possible. 

Chris: Elon. Hey, welcome back to TED. It’s great to have you here.

Elon: Thanks for having me.

Chris: So, in the next half hour or so we’re going to spend some time exploring your vision for what an exciting future might look like, which I guess makes my first question a little ironic. Why are you boring?

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Update: Musk has since revealed his vision for The Boring Company in more details: Elon Musk unveils concept behind ‘The Boring Company’ featuring Tesla vehicles speeding through tunnels on mobile platforms

With the recent launch of Elon Musk’s latest company, Neuralink, we almost forgot that the CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX also recently launched yet another startup: the Boring Company.

The company aims to make important advancements in the cost and speed of digging tunnels in order to solve transportation problems in cities. The startup recently took delivery of its first giant boring machine.
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Elon Musk wanted Tesla to create a sense of urgency for other automakers to move faster on electric vehicles and accelerate the overall transition to sustainable transport. It helped for some, but others still don’t take Tesla or EVs seriously.

It’s certainly not the case for BMW anymore since the company is now saying that it was under “an electric assault” in reference to Tesla and other automakers working on electric vehicles. The German automaker seems now more inclined to move into the electric vehicle space.
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Tesla has been under attacked before from people and organizations linked to the fossil fuel industry. For example, when an oil executive tried to impersonate CEO Elon Musk to get material information from Tesla or when a group linked to the industry launched the ‘Stop Elon From Failing Again’ campaign. 

But for a change, we now learn of an activist environmentalist, or at least someone claiming to be, launching a somewhat similar anti-Tesla campaign. 
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Update: the article has been updated to reflect the fact that while Musk’s and the Rive brothers’ solar bonds were discharged like everyone else’s, they were transferred to regular bonds under the same terms.

SolarCity launched a Solar Bond Program in 2014. It was presented as an interesting way for people to invest in solar with minimum cost requirements and without having to install panels on their roof. Elon Musk himself, his cousins and SolarCity co-founders Lyndon and Peter Rive, and Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, ended up being the biggest buyers in the program.

Now we learn that Tesla is discharging most of its solar bonds ahead of the maturity date and paying back all the principal with interests for the life of the bonds – though not for Musk and his cousins.
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A billboard with an interesting message appeared near Tesla’s Fremont factory last week. Someone anonymously paid for the signage in an attempt to tell Tesla CEO Elon Musk to “Dump Trump”.
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Tesla’s earnings report for 2016 was released moments ago, with information regarding two, possibly three future gigafactory plants.  Tesla’s current “Gigafactory 1“, which will be the largest factory building in the world by footprint, isn’t even finished yet and Tesla is already looking to finalize the locations of future plants by the end of this year.

This is the first solid announcement of additional gigafactories which Tesla has made.  They’ve referenced the future need for “several” gigafactories before, and talked about choosing a location for Gigafactory 2, but this is the first time, in writing, that they have solidified an actual count of multiple additional gigafactories and a timeframe for these future gigafactories.

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As we reported yesterday, Tesla officially launched in the United Arab Emirates – starting with Dubai. Tesla held an event at the Armani Hotel in the Burj Khalifa tower for the occasion and CEO Elon Musk gave a quick presentation, which you can see in full below.
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There are a few important milestones associated with the advent of autonomous driving: the first self-driving car being commercially available, all new cars have self-driving capability, and all cars on the road have self-driving capability. There could be years or even decades between those milestones.

At the end of 2017, it will be the deadline for Elon Musk’s most recent prediction for the first one and since he predicted that Tesla will be the first to market, it’s also when the company plans to have its first fully self-driving software build available.

Today, Musk is making a prediction for the second milestone and consequently the last milestone.
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Tesla’s market capitalization keeps reaching new highs since the past few weeks and while most people are concerned about the company starting to be worth more than bigger automakers, like Nissan, it also has other interesting implications.

In the past, Elon Musk has associated his potential departure from his role as CEO with completing the milestones of his CEO stock option compensation plan – especially the production of the Model 3.
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As we reported earlier this month, Tesla’s official launch in the United Arab Emirates is coinciding with CEO Elon Musk attending the World Government Summit in Dubai.

We now learn the location of Tesla’s first store in UAE – pictured above – and that the company is already deploying charging infrastructure – both Superchargers and Destination chargers – in the region.
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As we reported yesterday, there’s a new effort to unionize Tesla’s workforce amid the production expansion for Model 3. In the report, we highlighted the fact that Tesla described the effort, which at first glance is simply a plea from a single Tesla employee, as a “professional union organizing effort”.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk went a step further last night when he claimed that the employee in question has been planted by the United Auto Workers (UAW) – a claim that the union is now denying.
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image via NYTimes

Yesterday, 97 companies, largely tech industry leaders such as Apple, Google and Intel, filed an amicus brief in the federal court case led by Minnesota and Washington states against the recent executive order banning certain refugees and immigrants from entry into the United States.  Tesla was a notable absence from the list of companies, but today news came that another ~30 companies are joining the amicus brief, including both of Elon Musk’s companies Tesla and SpaceX.

Tesla’s absence from the original list was notable due to Elon Musk’s position on the Presidential Advisory Forum and his recent comments on twitter regarding the immigration order, the Advisory Forum, and the US justice system.

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A few weeks after announcing his intention to launch a new company to build a boring machine and improve tunneling time, Elon Musk appears to have released the first picture of the machine. It could be the first product from what the CEO has been referring to as “The Boring Company”.
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Earlier today, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick dropped off of US President Donald Trump’s advisory council. The reasons cited were because of immigration reform but Kalanick was also targeted for his previous support for Trump, Uber continuing to serve JFK airport during the recent taxi strike and the subsequent #DeleteUber campaign which caused 200,000 people to flee the service and boosted its competitor Lyft to the top of the app charts.

On Thursday, Mr. Kalanick gave his answer, stepping down from Mr. Trump’s economic advisory council. “There are many ways we will continue to advocate for just change on immigration, but staying on the council was going to get in the way of that,” Mr. Kalanick wrote in an email to employees obtained by The New York Times.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also on that economic advisory council which has similarly hurt his reputation among some– I’d wager far fewer– and has also caused some Tesla Model 3 reservation holders to refund their deposits.

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US President Trump’s executive order to ban people from some specific primarily Muslim countries is having a significant backlash across the world.

The ban itself is directly affecting a lot of people, but in some cases, people’s reactions to the executive order are indirectly impacting companies. For example, Uber has been hit by an unsubscription campaign because of its CEO’s link to the Trump administration and the fact that its drivers didn’t comply to a call to halt pick-ups at John F Kennedy International Airport in protestation against the ban.

It looks like Tesla is also being the target of a similar – though apparently less significant – effort after comments made by CEO Elon Musk about Trump’s executive order.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk was already on President Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, but the White House announced today that he will also be joining the administration’s new manufacturing council, a private sector group that advises the U.S. secretary of commerce.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has long been a supporter of a revenue-neutral carbon tax to “price the unpriced externalities of carbon emissions”, as he phrases it.

Now that he has a rare access to the Trump administration after joining Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, he is reportedly pushing for a carbon tax with the new President.
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If you weren’t convinced that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was serious about launching a new company to start digging tunnels, maybe you will be now that he is putting a timeline on the project.

He announced early this morning that they have made “exciting progress” and that he expects to start digging “in a month or so.”
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Former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson narrowly managed to get the support of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in order to get confirmed as Secretary of State yesterday. While he was only one vote away from losing the important position, he also gained the surprising support of Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Tillerson’s opposition was concerned by his obvious close ties with the oil industry and Russia, but Musk seems more optimistic about the new Secretary of State.
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