Last week, the billionaire had tweeted that he was looking forward to meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi….reports Asian Lite News
Elon Musk, on Saturday, confirmed that he will not visit India this month amid crucial Tesla quarterly results and will possibly visit the country later this year to announce his investment plans.
In a post on X, the billionaire said that unfortunately, “very heavy Tesla obligations require that the visit to India be delayed.”
“But I do very much look forward to visiting later this year,” Musk added
Last week, the billionaire had tweeted that he was looking forward to meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The SpaceX CEO was also set to meet representatives of Indian space companies during his India visit.
Musk has a key conference call with analysts about Tesla’s latest quarter (Q1) results, after the company reduced 10 per cent of its workforce, or around 14,000 employees — globally.
The layoffs at Tesla “gutted some departments by 20 per cent and even hit high performers,” and the decision was apparently made “due to poor financial performance.”
Two high-profile Tesla executives — Rohan Patel, VP of Public Policy and Business Development and Drew Baglino, Tesla’s SVP of Powertrain and Energy — have also quit.
Tesla has just shelved plans to develop a low-cost EV for around $25,000.
Tesla can eventually produce 5 lakh electric vehicles annually that start from Rs 20 lakh in India…reports Asian Lite News
Elon Musk is coming to India for the first time to spend at least 48 hours in the country later this month. As all eyes are on what the billionaire would announce during his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and industry leaders, Tesla lovers have only one question: When will they finally be able to drive a ‘Make in India’, affordable EV?
A cheaper Model 3, which is the entry-level Tesla, can only be possible with local manufacturing of battery components and a strong EV supply system, for which Musk will surely have a substantial announcement to make during his maiden visit to the country.
Currently, Tesla prices are almost the same worldwide. The base variant of the Model 3 is priced at over $40,000 (nearly Rs 33.5 lakh).
According to senior analyst Soumen Mandal from market intelligence firm Counterpoint Research, the import duty will be eliminated by setting up local production by Tesla, thus paving the way for an affordable Tesla car.
Also, the cost reduction could be achieved if Tesla cars manufactured in the country come with fewer features compared to the ones available globally.
Mandal told IANS that certain hardware required for Full Self-Driving (FSD) mode could be eliminated and “Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) Level 2 could be included”.
Tesla can eventually produce 5 lakh electric vehicles annually that start from Rs 20 lakh in India.
To produce a Rs 20 lakh car, Tesla can also have a battery pack with a lower capacity than 50kW and the electric motors could be of lower power. The in-vehicle electronics could also be reduced with a smaller centre display.
In the new EV policy, the Indian government has cut the customs duty to 15 per cent (with certain riders) from the earlier 100 per cent on imported cars.
A minimum investment of Rs 4,150 crore (about $500 million) will be required to set up the manufacturing facilities for EVs in the country.
According to industry experts, Tesla can generate at least $3.6 billion in revenue in India by 2030.
Even as Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed his visit to India, netizens eagerly welcomed the billionaire to the country.
“Looking forward to meeting with Prime Minister @NarendraModi in India!” the SpaceX CEO shared on X (formerly Twitter). The post has, so far, garnered more than 38 million views on the platform.
Soon after the announcement, several users took to the platform to welcome the billionaire to the country.
“Welcome to India, Elon,” wrote several users, while one added “Namaste India”.
“Welcome to India, Elon Musk, hoping for a long-term partnership between your companies and India,” wrote another user.
“Yes! Excited to have you here finally. Hope to see Tesla India up and running soon and reservation holders getting their Tesla’s,” said another.
The tech billionaire is reportedly slated to meet PM Modi “in the week of April 22 in New Delhi”.
Musk is also likely to announce his investment plans and setting up of a potential $2-3 billion manufacturing plant in the country.
As per reports, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu are on top of Tesla’s agenda to start EV manufacturing and export the vehicles as well
According to Musk, the entry of Tesla in India, as the company scouts for factory land, will be a “natural progression”….reports Asian Lite News
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is reportedly planning to visit India later this month to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and announce his mega investment plans, as the country doubles down on its EV adoption strategy.
However, an official confirmation on Musk’s India visit from the tech billionaire or his electric car company was yet to come.
Musk is slated to meet PM Modi “in the week of April 22 in New Delhi”, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing sources.
The X owner, accompanied by other top Tesla executives, is also likely to make an announcement about his investment plans and setting up of a potential $2-3 billion manufacturing plant in the country, the report mentioned.
According to Musk, the entry of Tesla in India, as the company scouts for factory land, will be a “natural progression”.
“All vehicles will go electric and it is just a matter of time,” the Tesla CEO said.
India, like other nations which have adopted EVs, should also have more and more electric cars going forward, according to the X owner.
Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu are reportedly on top of Tesla’s agenda to start EV manufacturing and export the vehicles as well. During his visit to the US last year, PM Modi had invited the tech billionaire to explore opportunities in the country for investments in the e-mobility sector.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk on Thursday said that his X platform has activated the Community Notes feature — a user-based fact-checking programme — in India, as the country prepares for general elections.
Musk-owned social media platform also welcomed new contributors in India for its community notes feature.
“Community Notes now active in India,” wrote the Tesla and SpaceX CEO.
The company said that its first contributors in the country “are joining today, and we’ll be expanding over time”.
“As always, we’ll monitor quality to ensure that notes are found helpful by people from different points of view,” said the X platform.
Community Notes now has contributors in 69 countries around the world.
“We’re adding more regularly,” said the Musk-run platform.
In December 2022, the company first enabled the ability for people to look at ‘Community Notes’ related to posts globally.
“Community Notes aim to create a better informed world by empowering people on X to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading posts,” according to the company.
Contributors can leave notes on any post and if enough contributors from different points of view rate that note as helpful, the note will be publicly shown on a post.
“A post with a Community Note will not be labelled, removed, or addressed by X unless it is found to be violating the X Rules,” said the company.
The Government of India has approved a new electric vehicle (EV) policy that is designed to attract investments in the EV space by global manufacturers like the Musk-run electric car company.
Tesla lovers in the country are anxiously waiting for the first response from Elon Musk after the government approved a new electric vehicle (EV) policy that is designed to attract investments in the EV space by global manufacturers like the Musk-run electric car company.
It was in 2015 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto, California and met the billionaire who gave the Prime Minister a tour of the company’s electric car plant.
In later years, the billionaire sought customs duty to be lowered so that he could bring Tesla vehicles to the country.
Presently, customs duty on cars imported as completely built units (CBUs) varies from 60-100 per cent, depending on their cost.
In the new policy, the government has reduced the customs duty to 15 per cent, with certain riders.
“The customs duty of 15 per cent (as applicable to completely knocked down or CKD units) would be applicable on the vehicle of minimum value of $35,000 and above for a total period of five years subject to the manufacturer setting up manufacturing facilities in India within a 3-year period,” according to the government.
This now paves the way for Musk to enter the Indian market.
Last year, PM Modi met Musk in the US and appreciated his efforts at making technology accessible and affordable in various sectors.
The Prime Minister invited Musk to explore opportunities in India for investments in electric mobility and the rapidly expanding commercial space sector.
After hearing PM Modi’s ‘Make in India’ pitch, the Tesla CEO announced that his electric vehicle and battery company will come to the country “as soon as it is humanly possible”.
“He (PM Modi) really cares about India because he’s pushing us to make significant investments in India, which is something that we intend to do and we’re just trying to figure out the right timing,” said the billionaire.
In the new EV scheme, the government mentioned that a minimum investment of Rs 4,150 crore (about $500 million) will be needed to set up manufacturing facilities and production started within three years and reach 25 per cent DVA (domestic value addition) by three years and 50 per cent DVA within 5 years at the maximum.
India’s EV market has the potential to achieve over 40 per cent penetration with $100 billion revenue by 2030.
Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX this week successfully launched the third test flight of its 400-foot-tall Starship rocket, along with the Heavy booster.
Elon Musk on Saturday said that the huge starship Starship rocket, that aims to help land astronauts on the Moon in 2026, will be on Mars within five years.
Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX this week successfully launched the third test flight of its 400-foot-tall Starship rocket, along with the Heavy booster.
“Starship will be on Mars within 5 years,” the billionaire posted on X. The Tesla CEO also posted some images of the Starship rocket, saying “wild that this is a real picture”.
“Pretty much anything that you can do on the ground should be done on the ground. But for warming up Mars, reflectors made on Phobos & Deimos (Mars’ two moons) could be a good way to go,” he further said.
Starship is the world’s most powerful rocket and will be used to send humans to the Moon and then eventually to Mars.
Starship consists of a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 50 metres upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship.
Musk eventually plans to shift at least one million people to Mars. “We are mapping out a game plan to get a million people to Mars,” Musk wrote in a recent post on X.
“Civilisation only passes the single-planet Great Filter when Mars can survive even if Earth supply ships stop coming,” he added. “One day, a trip to Mars will be like a flight across the country”. He also aims to build a base on the Moon.
“Humanity should have a moon base, cities on Mars and be out there among the stars,” the X owner said.
Musk’s lawsuit details complaints such as contract breach, fiduciary duty violation, and unfair business practices….reports Asian Lite News
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging they breached their original contractual agreements around AI.
The lawsuit, filed in a court in San Francisco in the US, revolves around OpenAI’s latest natural language model titled GPT-4.
The X owner alleged that OpenAI and Microsoft (which has poured billions of dollars into Sam Altman-run company) have “improperly licensed GPT-4” despite agreeing that artificial general intelligence (AGI) capabilities “would remain non-profit and dedicated to humanity”.
“Musk has long recognised that AGI poses a grave threat to humanity — perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today,” read the lawsuit.
Musk’s lawsuit details complaints such as contract breach, fiduciary duty violation, and unfair business practices.
Musk was an original board member of OpenAI until 2018.
According to the lawsuit, OpenAI’s initial research was performed in the “open, providing free and public access to designs, models, and code”.
When OpenAI researchers discovered that an algorithm called “Transformers,” initially invented by Google, could perform many natural language tasks without any explicit training, “entire communities sprung up to enhance and extend the models released by OpenAI”.
Altman became OpenAI CEO in 2019. On September 22, 2020, OpenAI entered into an agreement with Microsoft, exclusively licensing to Microsoft its Generative PreTrained Transformer (GPT)-3 language model.
“Most critically, the Microsoft license only applied to OpenAI’s pre-AGI technology. Microsoft obtained no rights to AGI. And it was up to OpenAI’s non-profit Board, not Microsoft, to determine when OpenAI attained AGI,” the lawsuit further read.
Musk said that this case is filed to compel OpenAI to “adhere to the Founding Agreement and return to its mission to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual defendants and the largest technology company in the world”.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX criticized Google Gemini as highly discriminatory…reports Asian Lite News
X owner Elon Musk on Wednesday continued his tirade against Google, saying its artificial intelligence (AI) model Gemini is super racist and even “sexist”.
The billionaire responded to a follower who said that Google Gemini replied to his prompt that “white people should absolutely acknowledge their white privilege”.
“Google Gemini is super racist and sexist,” said the Tesla and SpaceX CEO.
Another follower commented to Musk’s post that “Gemini holds Asians to similar standards as Whites when it comes to privilege”.
“This just shows more and more how Gemini is programmed with the exact same narratives that our higher education teaches,” an X user posted.
Musk recently accused Google of running “racist, anti-civilisational programming” with its AI models.
“Given that the Gemini AI will be at the heart of every Google product and YouTube, this is extremely alarming,” he had posted earlier this week.
One of his followers commented on his latest post on Google Gemini, saying “just remember who is programming it.
“There’s your problem and your answer. If the left can control the narrative, we will never have honesty again. Truth will be censored or not even added to the database. It will only be left talking points. That’s scary.”
Musk had claimed that a senior Google executive called him after screenshots of Gemini’s response to “misgender” Caitlyn Jenner to avoid a nuclear apocalypse went viral on social media.
The Minister of Communications and the representatives of the company reached agreements regarding the entry of Starlink into the Gaza Strip…reports Asian Lite News
Israel’s Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi gave the green light for Starlink, the satellite giant owned by Elon Musk, to operate in the country for the first time.
The Ministry of Communications said that this means the country’s local authorities, emergency departments, government bodies and more, will be able to “continue to consume advanced communication services with broadband, even in case of wired and cellular communication failures.”
In addition, the Minister of Communications and the representatives of the company reached agreements regarding the entry of Starlink into the Gaza Strip. Today the security officials approved the introduction of one such unit to a field hospital of the United Arab Emirates in Rafah. Starlink’s high-speed, low-latency connections will allow conference calls with other hospitals and real-time remote diagnoses.
The Starlink company, owned and operated by SpaceX, operates communication services that include broadband internet via satellites and independent of communication centers located on the ground. (ANI/TPS)
The SEC sued Musk in October to compel him to testify as part of an investigation into his $44bn purchase of what is now known as X….reports Asian Lite News
Elon Musk has been ordered to testify again as part of an investigation by US regulators into his 2022 purchase of the social media platform Twitter, later renamed X.
A California federal court ruling released on Saturday gave the Tesla and SpaceX chief a week to agree with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) on a date and place for the interview after Musk refused to attend a previous sit-down in September.
In the order, US magistrate judge Laurel Beeler said the parties had initially agreed to a date “but ultimately the respondent (Musk) did not appear and resists the subpoena on the grounds that the SEC’s investigation is baseless and harassing and seeks irrelevant information”.
The SEC sued Musk in October to compel him to testify as part of an investigation into his $44bn purchase of what is now known as X. The commission also seeks his testimony on whether he followed the law when filling out the required paperwork about Twitter stock purchases as well as whether his statements in relation to buying the platform were accurate.
According to the order, Musk’s attorneys had said he would not appear because regulators had leaked information to the media. Musk’s team also argued the investigation was frivolous, and it said document requests as well as demand for testimony again in the face of an investigation “arising from the accidental tardiness of a clerical filing” was troubling government action.
Beeler, in forcing an interview, rejected that argument and said regulators had authority to issue the subpoena for relevant information. If the SEC and Musk cannot agree on a date and time for the interview, Beeler said she would hear from both sides and decide for them.
The action dates back to a notorious 2018 tweet in which Musk said “funding secured” when he was attempting to take Tesla private.
Regulators claimed that was a breach of a securities laws that prohibit publicly traded companies from announcing plans to buy or sell securities if executives don’t intend to complete, don’t have the means to complete, or are trying to manipulate the stock price.
In a settlement, Musk agreed that a Tesla lawyer would vet his tweets about the electric vehicle maker. But regulators sued him again a year later for allegedly breaching the agreement. Musk then petitioned the US supreme court to review the agreement, saying it violates his right to free speech.
In 2022, regulators asked Musk for information about the delayed disclosure of his Twitter stake, which he reported a week late. He testified twice that year, the SEC said. A third interview, Musk claims, amounts to government “harassment”.
The dispute is not Musk’s only run-in with the government. In November, he lost a bid to stop the federal trade commission (FTC) from continuing to oversee X’s handling of private user data.
Musk had called the agency’s action “a shameful case of weaponization of a government agency for political purposes and suppression of the truth!”
India has been a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for eight terms (16 years)….reports Asian Lite News
Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk insisted on the revision of United Nations bodies and called India, as not a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council is ‘absurd’.
The American entrepreneur highlighted the problem in the revision of the UN bodies on Sunday and said that the countries with excess power don’t want to give it up, adding that the Africa collectively should have a permanent membership in the United Nations.
Taking to X, Musk said, “At some point, there needs to be a revision of the UN bodies. Problem is that those with excess power don’t want to give it up. India not having a permanent seat on the Security Council, despite being the most populous country on Earth, is absurd. Africa collectively should also have a permanent seat imo.”
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had also made an impassioned plea for the UN to reflect today’s world.
“How can we accept that Africa still lacks a single Permanent Member in the Security Council? Institutions must reflect today’s world, not that of 80 years ago. September’s Summit of the Future will be an opportunity to consider global governance reforms & re-build trust” Guterres had said in a post on January 21.
India has been a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for eight terms (16 years).
The country is a member of the G4, a group of nations that back each other to seek permanent membership of the UNSC. The countries advocate for reform in the UNSC.
Earlier, emphasising on growing global support for India’s permanent membership at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that sometimes things are not given generously and one has to seize it.
“With each passing year, the feeling in the world is that India should be there, and I can feel that support…The world does not give things easily and generously; sometimes you have to take them,” the EAM said on a question regarding a permanent seat for India at the UNSC.
In September 2023, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar expressed concern that the United Nations’ reluctance to reform its structure would render the organization “anachronistic,” prompting people to seek solutions elsewhere. He made an analogy by likening the situation to passengers on a bus, drawing an “injudicious” reference to the permanent members of the UN Security Council.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had noted, “When the UN was established, the world at that time was completely different from today. At that time there were 51 founding members in the UN. Today the number of countries included in the UN is around 200. Despite this, the permanent members in UNSC are still the same.” (ANI)
