In today’s installment of “is Elon Musk actually a crazy person,” he has announced on Twitter that the payload of the first SpaceX falcon heavy rocket will be his personal “midnight cherry” Tesla Roadster.
In tribute to David Bowie, the plan is for the car to be playing “Space Oddity” on its speakers during the launch.
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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Last year, we reported that Tesla’s Chief Information Officer Jay Vijayan quietly left in January 2016 and his position stayed mostly vacant until now.
Gary Clark, who was IT CTO and Engineering CIO at Juniper until recently, joined Tesla over the last month to take over the automaker’s IT department.
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SpaceX held a Hyperloop Pod Competition this weekend at their facility in Hawthorne, CA, and earlier today Elon gave the crowd a short speech talking about transportation innovation, efficiency, and his new “boring” company focused on building tunnels to alleviate traffic, showing that his recent focus on tunnels is probably related to how he sees hyperloop developing as underground, rather than overground, transport.
SpaceX is holding the last phase of its first ‘Hyperloop Pod Competition’ this weekend at its headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Surprisingly and despite some startups making significant progress, this mostly-student competition could represent the most advanced hyperloop technology demonstration since Elon Musk first published the idea back in 2013.
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Tesla has hidden some pretty cool Easter Eggs in its software before – from changing your Model S into a James Bond amphibian car to a Mario Kart animation on Autopilot – but the latest Easter Egg on the update Tesla started pushing today is from another planet…. literally.
CEO Elon Musk added an Easter Egg to jokingly ship your car to Mars on SpaceX’s Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) – something Musk revealed in September as part of his plans to colonize Mars.
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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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About 2 dozen teams of students and engineers are creating hyperloop pods to compete and try to achieve the greatest speed and control on the 1-mile track for the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Design Competition. As we reported earlier this month, the track is quickly taking shape in front of SpaceX’s HQ in Hawthorne, so we thought it would be a good idea to take a look at some of the pods that will compete on it.
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A little over a month ago, we reported on tubes for SpaceX’s Hyperloop test track starting to show up at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne. Now they already have the entire 1-mile track up along the road ahead of the pod competition.
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Today is without a doubt a bad day for SpaceX. In preparation for its static fire test, one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded in Cape Canaveral, Florida, earlier this morning :
SpaceX Falcon 9 reportedly exploded at Cape Canaveral. pic via reddit pic.twitter.com/f5x8Sxmza5
— Fred Lambert (@FredericLambert) September 1, 2016
The company confirmed the loss of the Falcon 9 rocket and its $200 million payload, the Amos-6 telecom satellite. But at Electrek we don’t really report on spaceflight (even though it’s awesome), we report on electric transport, and there’s actually SpaceX news related to electric transport today. And it’s good news.
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Yesterday, Elon Musk surprised a lot of people when he announced that Tesla (TSLA) has made an offer to acquire SolarCity (SCTY). The entrepreneur is the largest individual shareholder of both companies – he owns about 21% of Tesla and 22% of SolarCity.
Some Tesla shareholders are already calling the deal a “bailout” of SolarCity, especially after Musk bought another $10 million worth of shares last year – before the stock fell 60% in 2016. The deal would allow him to convert his shares of SolarCity to Tesla shares at a favorable rate, but we now learn that the move might not be reactionary and actually long in the making.
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Following reports of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) probing Tesla over a possible problem with the Model S’ suspension and the automaker’s goodwill agreement, it came to light that several false and/or misleading complaints were filed with NHTSA.
A spokesperson for NHTSA confirmed that the agency has not found any safety issue with Tesla’s suspensions and that the company has clarified the language in its goodwill agreement. It considers the issue resolved, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared on Twitter that something suspicious is going on with the suspension complaints:
Would seem to indicate that one or more people sought to create the false impression of a safety issue where none existed. Q is why?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 10, 2016
It can be difficult to understand why would someone falsify complaints to an official agency, which can be harmful to both the company and time-wasting for the regulators. The most obvious explanation is always money, and Tesla brought it up in a blog post following last week’s events.
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You might remember Porter Harris from our piece on SpaceX’s battery development ‘Tesla is not Elon Musk’s only company developing high-tech battery packs‘ – and also when covering Faraday Future (FF) since Harris joined the company as ‘Chief Battery Architect’ in November 2014 – and then one more time when he suddenly left the company just before it came out of stealth mode.
Electrek has now learned that he co-founded a new startup to compete with FF and Tesla with new battery pack designs for electric vehicles, and even to compete with ‘Tesla Energy’ in stationary energy storage products.
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We have often highlighted the importance of the Model 3 reservation process, especially for people in the US because of the federal tax credit, but it’s now also the case for most people worldwide since Tesla received hundreds of thousands of reservations. At this point, it looks like Tesla will have a backlog of over 1 year of production by the time the Model 3 hits the market.
Tesla plans to deliver vehicles in batches based on regions starting with the west coast, closer to the Fremont factory, then expanding east and to other countries. A significant number of the first Model 3 vehicles that will be delivered in California will go to Tesla employees, who have been given priority in the reservation process.
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The list of people having priority on the Tesla Model 3 reservation queue keeps growing. After Tesla employees, Electrek learned from sources that SpaceX employees can now also reserve Tesla’s upcoming third generation vehicle set to be unveiled on March 31st. Like for most Tesla employees, it appears most SpaceX employees reserving the vehicle are doing so sight unseen.
Beside showing more synergy between Elon Musk’s two companies, it also adds up to now 3 groups of people having priority on the Tesla Model 3 reservation queue: Tesla employees, Tesla owners and SpaceX employees.
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SolarCity’s Solar Bond Program is looking more and more like SpaceX’s private investment platform. After market close yesterday, SolarCity revealed in a SEC filling that it expects Elon Musk’s rocket company to buy $90 million of the $105 million in new Solar Bonds issued.
Last year, SpaceX already purchased solar bonds from SolarCity on two separate occasions: another $90 million followed by $75 million. SpaceX’s involvement in SolarCity’s Solar Bond Program is set to total around $255 million, which should help finance a lot of solar installations.
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After SpaceX announced the Hyperloop Pod Competition last year, hundreds of teams submitted design packages, 124 teams passed the screening round and moved forward to the ‘Design Weekend’, where a panel of judges consisting of Tesla and SpaceX engineers selected 23 winners.
The winning teams shared ~$250,000 in cash to help them build their pod prototypes for the final phase of the competition which will take the form of a race on SpaceX’s upcoming test track, but most teams are also courting sponsors since the cost of a pod prototype is estimated to be well into the 5 figures.
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A company is only as good as its employees and a new PayScale survey gives us an interesting look into the employee demographic of some of the top tech employers. Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX particularly standout in the survey for ranking at the bottom for their bellow average salaries and at the top for most stressful environments, but also and maybe more importantly, at the top for being the two most meaningful places to work out of the 18 tech firms listed in the survey.
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Elon Musk shines in MIT Technology Review’s recently published top 10 list of technology breakthroughs of 2016. According to the MIT, the list “identifies innovations from the past year that solve difficult problems or create powerful new ways of using technology”.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is directly involved in 3 of the 10 projects identified by the MIT.
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Elon Musk, CEO of both electric automaker Tesla and rocket manufacturer SpaceX, splits his time between his two companies, which he also co-founded and financed with most of his early fortune from Paypal. Now Electrek has learned through sources that Musk will not be the only executive dividing his time between Tesla and SpaceX since the CEO hired Apple’s alloy expert Charles Kuehmann to lead materials engineering at both companies.
Kuehmann is now Vice-President of Materials Engineering at Tesla and SpaceX, where he is responsible for delivering materials innovations, something he is very familiar with after over two decades spent in materials science.
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SpaceX and Texas A&M University hosted the ‘Design Weekend’ phase of the ‘Hyperloop Pod Competition’ this weekend and a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) came in first place for having the best design by a student team, while the rLoop team from Reddit won the best design by a non-student team.
The picture above is rLoop’s trophy and yes, it is signed by Elon Musk.
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From time to time, Reddit comes together and does something awesome. Whether it be gifting supplies to teachers or sending thousands of letters to a terminally ill man. Although quite different from the previous examples, the rLoop project is undoubtedly Reddit at its best.
Since SpaceX announced the Hyperloop Pod Competition last year, over 100 teams from universities and other organisations have created and submitted their design to compete for a chance to build and race their pod on SpaceX’s upcoming test track. rLoop is one of those teams.
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This weekend, Texas A&M University will be hosting SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition’s “Design Weekend”. Over 1,000 students and engineers forming 124 teams are competing for a chance to build their own Hyperloop pod prototypes and race them at SpaceX’s upcoming test track.
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