SpaceX is moving forward with its Hyperloop prototype test track for its “pod competition”. The company released the revised specifications of the test track (embed below) in which the competing teams will race their pods. The track will be 1-mile long , have a 6-ft diameter and be capable of creating a 99.8% vacuum environment.
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Between established automakers accelerating their electric vehicle programs and the newcomers in the EV industry – like Apple, Faraday Future or Atieva – engineers with battery experience are not short on employment opportunities. Earlier this year, Apple poached several battery tech experts from A123 Systems and we also reported that about 1 in 8 of Faraday Future’s ~400 employees is formerly from Tesla Motors.
From an executive’s standpoint, retaining talent in a specific field can be challenging on its own, but for Elon Musk, CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, it can be even more complex when both companies he’s managing require talent in the same field…
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Tesla sent out an email this weekend to Model S owners on the waiting list for a retrofit of their Performance Dual Motor Model S to enable the ‘Ludicrous’ mode. In the email, Tesla explained that due to parts and process improvements, the company is now able to offer the upgrade at a reduced price of $5,000 instead of the previously announced $7,500.
The Ludicrous upgrade consists of two improvements to the electronics of the Model S’ battery pack. The first improvement is the replacement of a standard fuse to an “advanced smart fuse” which enables the monitoring of current to the millisecond, and makes it possible to cut the power with “extreme precision”.
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The so-called “poaching war” for top automotive engineering talent between Tesla and Apple gathered quite a few headlines in the past months, especially after Tesla CEO Elon Musk called the Cupertino company the “Tesla Graveyard” for hiring people he claimed were “fired” by the company. But after looking closer into the recent hires between the two companies, it looks like Tesla has little to fear from Apple’s recruiting effort, at least if we compare it to Faraday Future’s.
Faraday Future took a small step out of ‘stealth mode’ earlier this summer to announce that it is looking for a location for a manufacturing facility to build an electric vehicle. In the months since, the 1-year old startup ramped up its hiring effort and now has over 400 employees with an impressive percentage coming from Tesla.
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Tesla Motors, SpaceX and SolarCity – three companies influenced by Elon Musk – are currently on a massive hiring spree around the US. They already have a combined headcount of over 32,000 employees and the total is set to increase significantly in the coming months. We learned that Musk’s companies are holding joined private recruiting events, the latest of which held last weekend at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
Recruiters from each company select students recommended through university programs and invite them to the relatively secretive events to interview with SolarCity, SpaceX or Tesla.
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Hyperloop Technologies Inc. recently inaugurated its Innovation Campus in Los Angeles and at the same time, celebrated the hiring of its new CEO, Cisco veteran Rob Lloyd. At the event, the company hosted hundreds of affluent investors, artists, engineers and politicians, including LA Mayor Eric Garcetti. The mayor voiced his support for the company’s project to make a reality of the new mode of transportation first detailed in a white paper by Elon Musk and teams of engineers at Tesla Motors and SpaceX.
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Media organisations will be disappointed to learn that Tesla CEO Elon Musk plans on cutting back on media appearances. In the past week, Musk mentioned on two occasions, on the Marketplace report and at the New Establishment Summit, that he wishes to reduce time spent on “press stuff” from “2 or 3 percent” of his time to only 1%.
We did the math. 1% of 24 hours is roughly 15 minutes a day or 100 minutes a week – assuming Musk includes sleep in his time.
The CEO says that he already spends most of his time on engineering and design, but he plans to use the time freed up by making less media appearances to focus even more on the products.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk was at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit earlier this week for a talk with Sam Altman, the President of Y Combinator. New York Times and CNBC contributor Andrew Ross Sorkin moderated the conversion on topics from sustainable energy to artificial intelligence.
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Earlier this summer, rocket manufacturer SpaceX announced the Hyperloop Pod Competition; a two-phase competition to first evaluate pod designs and then test scaled down prototypes on a 1-mile Hyperloop track. We now learn through Fortune that hundreds of teams have signed up to participate in the competition including 130 universities.
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In a blog post and appearance on CBS This Morning, Rob Lloyd was announced as the first official CEO of Hyperloop Technologies; the company trying to make a reality of the high-speed transportation system envisioned by Elon Musk.
Rob Lloyd is a 20 year veteran of networking equipment giant Cisco, where until recently he was President. Lloyd is replacing interim CEO and co-founder Brogan Bambrogan (yes it’s his real name), who will now focus on the technology that will power the Hyperloop.
Elon Musk, who published a white paper on the project in 2013, recently said to CNN that making the Hyperloop is “actually easier than people would think”. He then described the concept as “an air hockey table with a pod in it”. Musk is oversimplifying the concept, but he is not lying either. The goal is to create a low-pressure environment, in this case a tube, in which it will be easier to move things really fast. In other word, it’s recreating the operating environment of an airplane at high altitude, but on the ground.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk went on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show last night for a quick interview about his ongoing projects. Musk didn’t reveal any new information about Tesla or SpaceX, but he did talk about how we could terraform Mars – hint: it involves dropping nuclear weapons on the poles – and he also talked a little about Tesla’s robot charging station. Unfortunately we didn’t learn much new about the cars but we did get to see what the Tesla CEO drives [hint: It is the same vehicle as Colbert] and his security detail after the show.
Video of the show and the after show both below:
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The Hyperloop is a new mode of transport consisting of a reduced-pressure tube in which pods powered by solar energy can travel at extremely high-speed due to the low pressure. Two years ago the Hyperloop was only a white paper published by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, but now two independent companies are working hard to make the project happen.
One of these companies is Hyperloop Technologies, which posted pictures showing decent progress on the new mode of transport…
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SolarCity announced today the closing of a new fund to finance $400 million in solar projects. The company, which recently acquired Mexico-based solar installer ILIOSS, has been perfecting the art of raising money for solar installations and now says it has raised enough funds to finance more than $9 billion in solar projects.
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Last week, Elon Musk, CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, announced new options and trims for Tesla’s award winning electric sedan, the Model S. One of the new option is a battery pack electronics upgrade, the Ludicrous Speed Upgrade, which enables faster acceleration for the existing Model S P85D and the new P90D. On this new driving mode, the Model S can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 2.8 second, making the 5,000 lb 4-door sedan faster than a McLaren F1.
Earlier this year, we wrote about SpaceX transferring some technology and welding equipment to Tesla. Now it seems like the new “Ludicrous” upgrade might have been made possible due to knowledge acquired through rocket engine manufacturing at SpaceX.
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Solar panels on the roof of SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, CA.
SolarCity revealed in a recent SEC filling that the company expects SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, to buy $75 million in “SolarBonds”. Earlier this year, SpaceX already purchased $90 million in solar-backed bonds from SolarCity, just 2 months after the aerospace company landed a $1 billion equity deal with Google and Fidelity. If this second purchase goes through, SpaceX will be holding $165 million in SolarCity debt backed by solar assets.
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The track will support half-scale Hyperloop pods desinged by independent engineering teams and student teams to compete in the “SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition”. The Hyperloop is a concept of high-speed ground transport developed by Elon Musk and his teams of engineers at Tesla Motors and SpaceX. The competition will have two phases. For the first phase, the teams will submit designs for their own pod concepts, which will be judged by engineers from Tesla and Spacex on January 9th 2016 during an event SpaceX is calling the “Design Weekend”.
The LA Times published an article over the weekend titled “Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by government subsidies”. The publication compiled data from government programs and estimated that Tesla Motors, SolarCity and SpaceX, three companies Musk is involved in, have benefited from “$4.9 billion in government support”. Saturday, I wrote an opinion piece about how I thought the article is grossly one-sided. Since then, the LA Times released a breakdown of the $4.9 billion figure.
Here is the complete breakdown with my comments on each government incentive and information that wasn’t included or simply glanced over in the LA Times article:
The Times published an article over the weekend titled “Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by government subsidies”. The article is well-researched and mostly accurate, but it conveys a clear disdain for the fact that Musk’s companies are taking advantage of the government subsidies available to them.
The publication compiled data from government programs and came to the conclusion that Tesla Motors, SolarCity and SpaceX, three companies Musk is involved in, have benefited from an “estimated $4.9 billion in government support”. I will not dispute the actual amount, but I’d like to bring up a few points which weren’t discussed in the article and that are highly relevant to the subject.
SpaceX transferred friction stir welding techniques and equipment to Tesla Motors according to Ashlee Vance, a Bloomberg journalist who recently published a book about Elon Musk. Musk, CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, often speaks of the difficulties of running two companies, but he also acknowledged some advantages of being active in two different industries. SpaceX aims at dramatically reducing the cost of rockets and if there’s an industry who mastered the art of making complex vehicles cheap, it’s certainly the automotive industry.
[tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/503077090803986432]
Surely there had to be a better way? Personally, I’ve never wanted for much of this but I’ve also never had cars that had these features in the past either. Full ad pasted below:
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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fIq2MOUppk]
Overall, not much new in this collection of videos and story by CBS’s 60 Minutes. If you follow this blog you’ve likely have heard all of this before….except maybe this bit.
Kind of a no-brainer IMO. Fortune doesn’t mention it but Musk has taken to social media and direct communication with the public unlike any CEO and certainly any Car/Aerospace CEO of our time. His honest and often overly transparent views have managed to turn media controversy into positives for the company.
Also throw in the fact that he’s CEO of two game-changing companies and the Chairman and largest stakeholder of another: Solar City….and if he wasn’t so busy, he’d be building a ultra high-speed hyperloop train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Also he doesn’t seem to be too terribly pretentious..and there you go.
FORTUNE NAMES ELON MUSK THE 2013 FORTUNE BUSINESSPERSON OF THE YEAR
FORTUNE’s 2013 List of the Top 50 People in Business Includes: The “Activist Investor” at #2; “Pony” Ma Huateng at #3; Angela Ahrendts at #4; Jeff Bewkes and Reed Hastings tie for #5
Musk Tells FORTUNE Contributor and TED Curator Chris Anderson About the Early Years at Tesla and SpaceX: “I thought the likeliest outcome was failure”
(New York, November 21, 2013) – Today, FORTUNE reveals its annual choice for Businessperson of the Year and names Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX and Chairman of SolarCity, the 2013 FORTUNE Businessperson of the Year. Chris Anderson, TED Curator, writes the cover story on Musk, comparing him to Steve Jobs. FORTUNE also reveals its list of the Top 50 People in Business for 2013, which includes Pony Ma, Angela Ahrendts, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Warren Buffett, Marissa Mayer, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. FORTUNE Editors write: “Fortune’s annual list is filled with executives who defied expectations (buying a newspaper, leaving luxury for Apple), executed big turnarounds, and delivered stellar results for their shareholders.”
Adam Lashinsky writes the blurb:
Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity
–Cultural impact
–No. 1 revenue gainer
–No. 2 stock price gainerIt is no Secret that Elon Musk is a triple threat: The co-founder of PayPal has gone on to disrupt aeronautics with Space Exploration Technologies, known as SpaceX; shake up the auto business with Tesla Motors; and retool the energy sector with SolarCity. (He is CEO of the first two companies and chairman and largest shareholder of the third.) But 2013 was an especially notable year for Musk, as investors and consumers wholeheartedly embraced his ideas and vision. After a rocky start a decade ago, Tesla has emerged to become the world’s most prominent maker of all-electric cars. Revenue at Tesla is up more than 12-fold for the first three quarters of the year, and the company is on track to top $2 billion in sales in 2013. The stock is up more than fourfold year to date, and that’s after giving back some gains when recent vehicle sales missed some analysts’ estimates. (A series of troubling car battery fires has not helped.) And just as SpaceX has helped reignite interest in space exploration, Musk’s plans for a “hyperloop” between San Francisco and Los Angeles got Americans buzzing about ultra-high-speed transit when Musk released his design plans in August. Musk’s creations have already made him tremendously wealthy — Bloomberg Wealth says he is worth $7.7 billion — but it is his audacity and tenacity that make him Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year.
Not terribly surprising considering the year and the press. Congrats!
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