Tag: Elon Musk

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-Top News USA

Biden treats Americans ‘like fools’: Musk

Replying to Biden’s Twitter post on the future electric vehicles in America, Musk wrote the name of “Tesla” in all caps. In another tweet, he said, “Biden is a damp Socks puppet in human form.”…reports Asian Lite News

American billionaire Elon Musk slammed US President Joe Biden after the latter left out the name of Tesla in a post that talked about the future of electric vehicles in America.

Tesla CEO, Musk, apparently was miffed after the US President excluded the name of the electric vehicle manufacturer in a Twitter post where he said, “Companies like GM and Ford are building more electric vehicles here at home than ever before.”

Replying to Biden’s Twitter post on the future electric vehicles in America, Musk wrote the name of “Tesla” in all caps. In another tweet, he said, “Biden is a damp Socks puppet in human form.”

Musk also said that “Biden is treating the American public like fools”.

He made these remarks after the US President met with executives from rival car companies General Motors and Ford Motor earlier this week. The swipe comes after Biden invited CEOso of General Motors and Ford to the White House along with other business leaders to discuss his administration’s Build Back Better legislation.

Interestingly, Biden invited executives from these companies last year when signed an executive order with the goal of making all vehicles sold in the US electric by 2030.

However, Musk, who is critical of the Biden administration, was omitted from the list.

Back in September, Tesla CEO had said that Biden administration of being “a little biased” and “seems to be” controlled by unions, Fox News reported. (ANI)

ALSO READ: Biden to address crime in New York visit

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-Top News Business India News

Telangana invites Elon Musk to ‘set shop’ in state

KT Rama Rao and Elon Musk

This was after Elon Musk informed that Tesla is facing a “lot of challenges” for its car launch in India, reports Asian Lite News

Days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke about challenges when asked about the electric car’s entry into the Indian market, TRS Working President KT Rama Rao has invited the billionaire businessman to “set shop” in Telangana.

Rao said Telangana is a champion in sustainability initiatives and his government would be happy to partner with Tesla in working through the challenges.

“Hey Elon, I am the Industry and Commerce Minister of Telangana state in India. Will be happy to partner Tesla in working through the challenges to set shop in India/Telangana,” Rao said in a reply to Musk’s tweet.

“Our state is a champion in sustainability initiatives and a top notch business destination in India,” he added.

Musk on Thursday informed that the EV-maker is facing a “lot of challenges” for its car launch in India.

“Still working through a lot of challenges with the government,” Musk tweeted.

Musk was replying to a Twitter user, who asked: “Yo @elonmusk any further update as to when Tesla’s will launch in India? They’re pretty awesome and deserve to be in every corner of the world!”

Tesla wants to begin selling imported cars in India this year but says taxes in the country are among the highest in the world.

With a $39,990 global price tag, Tesla Model 3 may remain as an affordable model in the US but with import duties, it would become unaffordable in the Indian market with an expected price tag of around Rs 60 lakh.

Currently, India levies 100 per cent tax on the imported cars of price more than $40,000 (Rs 30 lakh) inclusive of insurance and shipping expenses, and cars less than $40,000 are subject to 60 per cent import tax.

ALSO READ: High taxes hinder Tesla’s India entry

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-Top News Tech Lite

Musk: NASA’s DART mission will avenge dinosaurs

Known as the Chicxulub impactor, this large object has an estimated width of 9.6 kilometres and produced a crater in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula that spans 145 kilometres, space.com reported…reports Asian Lite News.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk on Thursday said that NASA’s asteroid defence mission will avenge the wipeout of dinosaurs from the face of Earth.

NASA on Wednesday launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, intended to deliberately crash into an asteroid.

The DART mission lifted off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket developed by Musk’s space venture SpaceX.

Asteroids that have been hitting the Earth for billions of years are believed to be a reason behind the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

“Avenge the dinosaurs!!” Musk said in a tweet.

The asteroid credited with the extinction of the dinosaurs is likely to have originated from the outer half of the solar system’s main asteroid belt, according to recent research by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI).

Known as the Chicxulub impactor, this large object has an estimated width of 9.6 kilometres and produced a crater in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula that spans 145 kilometres, space.com reported.

After its sudden contact with Earth, the asteroid wiped out not only the dinosaurs but around 75 per cent of the planet’s animal species. It is widely accepted that this explosive force created was responsible for the mass extinction that ended the Mesozoic era, the report said.

The DART mission aims to make Earth better prepared if an asteroid is discovered in the future.

The spacecraft target is the binary near-Earth asteroid Didymos and its moonlet Dimorphos, which pose no threat to Earth.

DART is currently scheduled to reach the Didymos binary asteroid system between September 26 and October 1 next year.

Once DART identifies and locks onto Dimorphos, it will kinetically impact the asteroid moonlet at a speed of roughly 24,000 kilometres per hour and shift its orbit.

While “Didymos system is not a threat to Earth… we need to be prepared should we ever be threatened by one of these enormous bodies emerging from the void of space,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for the science mission directorate, in a blog post.

ALSO READ-Twitter poll: Musk sells $5bn of Tesla stock

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Business

Twitter poll: Musk sells $5bn of Tesla stock

The world’s richest man had earlier posted two of the costliest tweets in the history of Global Inc….reports Asian Lite News

Elon Musk has offloaded Tesla shares worth $5 billion, after he was trolled on Twitter for a controversial poll last weekend where he proposed selling 10 per cent of his stock in the electric car-maker.

Initial filings in the US showed that Musk had sold 934,091 shares for about $1.1 billion, out of more than 2.1 million options he received as part of a compensation package.

The filings that were posted later on Wednesday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed that Musk sold another 3.58 million shares in Tesla. That sale was valued at about $4 billion, reports TechCrunch.

The world’s richest man had earlier posted two of the costliest tweets in the history of Global Inc.

In a tweet announcing the poll over the weekend, Musk said: “Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10 per cent of my Tesla stock.

“I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes.”

Nearly 58 per cent of Elon Musk’s followers who participated in his Twitter poll told him to sell 10 per cent of his stock (worth $24 billion) in the electric car company, ostensibly to pay more tax.

Musk posted: “Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere. I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock.”

The bloodbath that followed sunk Tesla stock by $200 billion (market capitalisation was $1,211 billion on November 5 end of day and $1,023 bn on Tuesday).

Musk’s own net worth took a $50 billion beating.

He has been a vocal critic of a proposal to tax unrealised gains on publicly traded assets in the US.

ALSO READ: Musk holds twitter poll on $24 bn Tesla stock sale

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-Top News Business USA

Musk holds twitter poll on $24 bn Tesla stock sale

The Tesla CEO has argued against taxing those unrealised gains, but he has now taken to Twitter to offer an alternative….reports Asian Lite News

 Tech billionaire Elon Musk has said that he is prepared to sell about $24 billion worth of his electric vehicle company Tesla’s stocks if his Twitter followers vote for it.

According to the auto-tech website Electrek, the Tesla CEO said that it is to address the accusation that he is not paying taxes.

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about some of the richest people in the world not paying taxes. Many of the world’s richest people have most of their wealth tied to stocks.

While their net worth is reported in the billions of dollars and can fluctuate by billions of dollars every month, that value is not liquid unless they were to sell those stocks — otherwise known as unrealised gains.

The Tesla CEO has argued against taxing those unrealised gains, but he has now taken to Twitter to offer an alternative.

He says that if Twitter votes for it, he will sell 10 per cent of his stake in Tesla, which is going to have to pay taxes on.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk. (File photo: IANS)

The CEO said that he will do whatever the results of the Twitter poll.

As of the time of writing, over half a million people voted on the poll and ‘Yes’ is winning by a significant margin.

Currently, 10 per cent of Musk’s stake in Tesla is worth around $24 billion, which he is going to have to pay taxes on.

If Musk was to sell that many Tesla stocks, it would likely have a significant negative impact on the price, the report said.

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-Top News World News

Musk accepts UN’s $6 billion challenge

Replying to Beasley, Musk posted late on Sunday that he is ready to help if the WFP can describe on the same Twitter thread how $6 billion will help solve world hunger…reports Asian Lite News

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said he is willing to sell his stock to help solve world hunger if a top United Nations official, who said that just 2 per cent of the entrepreneur’s income could help solve world hunger, can back up the claim.

Speaking to CNN, David Beasley, the director of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), called on Musk and Jeff Bezos (the second richest person on the planet) to reconsider where they are putting their money.

“$6 billion to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don’t reach them. It’s not complicated,” he had said.

Replying to Beasley, Musk posted late on Sunday that he is ready to help if the WFP can describe on the same Twitter thread how $6 billion will help solve world hunger.

“If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it”, Musk posted.

“But it must be open source accounting, so the public sees precisely how the money is spent,” he added.

The WFP provides assistance to over 115 million people in 84 countries through food or cash distributions in emergencies, nutrition support programmes and other activities.

Musk is currently worth a colossal $300 billion and Beasley claimed that just two percent of his wealth could save more than 40 million people “who are literally going to die”.

The increase in wealth was due to a rise in Tesla shares after the electric car firm inked a huge deal with Hertz for the rental giant to buy 100,000 of its vehicles.

Musk is now worth more than the annual GDP of nations like Egypt, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Greece, Qatar, and Finland.

He’s also worth more than the market value of PayPal, the company he co-founded, as well as streaming giant Netflix.

ALSO READ: Nikola allowed to continue $2bn lawsuit against Tesla

ALSO READ: Tesla, Apple eye big bang India entry in 2022

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-Top News USA

Musk To Set Up Tech Uni in Texas

Tesla CEO Elon Musk. (File photo: IANS)

A Twitter user asked him if the funding was secured, to which Musk replied: “Funding secured”, adding that it “will have epic merchandise”. ….reports Asian Lite News

Elon Musk, whose fortune recently exceeded $300 billion, said on Friday that he aims to start a new university in the US called “Texas Institute of Technology & Science”.

“Am thinking of starting a new university: Texas Institute of Technology & Science,” Musk said in a tweet.

Twitter user asked him if the funding was secured, to which Musk replied: “Funding secured”, adding that it “will have epic merchandise”.

Twitter follower said: “You should make it tuition free and guarantee high scoring graduates jobs at Tesla or SpaceX”.

“If you don’t believe in college education…why build a University,” said another user.

At the ‘Satellite 2020’ conference in Washington DC, recently, Musk responded to an audience member by saying that college was unnecessary because “you can learn anything you want for free”.

“I think college is basically for fun and to prove that you can do your chores, but they’re not for learning,” Musk said.

He also said that he hopes to make sure his electric car company Tesla does not have university requirements for jobs, “because that’s absurd”.

Musk-run electric car company Tesla has become the fifth US company to join the $1 trillion club, after Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet.

The rally came after the US-based rental car company Hertz said that it has ordered 100,000 Tesla vehicles (worth at least $4.2 billion) by the end of 2022 as part of an ambitious plan to electrify its fleet.

The move includes new EV charging infrastructure across the company’s global operations.

ALSO READ: Nikola allowed to continue $2bn lawsuit against Tesla

ALSO READ: Tesla, Apple eye big bang India entry in 2022

Categories
-Top News Technology USA

Musk slams Biden after EV summit snub

Tesla CEO Elon Musk

The Biden administration invited auto executives to the White House last month to discuss the shared goal of increasing the production of electric vehicles…reports Asian Lite News.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has criticised US President Joe Biden as “not the friendliest administration” after the White House snubbed his company last month.

Musk’s comments came during a Code Conference interview and followed a tweet in which the Tesla CEO mocked Biden using similar insults as former President Donald Trump, reports The Verge.

US President Joe Biden (Source_twitter@POTUS)

The Biden administration invited auto executives to the White House last month to discuss the shared goal of increasing the production of electric vehicles.

Top officials from Ford, General Motors and Stellantis were invited. But Tesla, which is the largest EV maker in the world, was not.

One potential reason that Tesla wasn’t invited is that its factory workforce is not unionised, while Biden is a big supporter of unions.

During the Code interview, Musk went a step further, claiming that Biden’s administration was “controlled by the unions”.

Tesla has been actively fighting against an attempt to organise Tesla workers at the company’s Fremont, California plant. Musk himself was found to have violated labour law when he tweeted anti-union comments in 2019.

Musk has been tweaking Biden on Twitter for weeks. Last week, when asked why Biden didn’t issue a statement about SpaceX’s recent rocket launch, Musk tweeted, “He’s still sleeping,” echoing a Trump nickname for Biden, “Sleepy Joe”.

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READ MORE-Elon Musk ‘visits UK’ amid plans for Tesla plant

Categories
-Top News USA

Debris of Falcon 9 lands on private farm in US

A pressure vessel from SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket was found at a man's farm in the US (Photo: Grant County Sheriff's Office)

An expert said that re-entries of this kind into atmosphere happen every couple of weeks but it is “just unusual that it happens over a densely populated area”, reports Asian Lite News

In a bizarre incident, a farm owner in the US was left in shock when a pressure vessel from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket fell on his property in Washington State, leaving a “4-inch dent in the soil.”

In a normal course, most second stage parts either hang out in orbit for years or re-enter Earth over the ocean.

Also Read – SpaceX Crew Dragon Opens New Era

The debris was identified as Composite-Overwrapped Pressure Vessel (COPV) from the breakup of a Falcon 9 second stage over Oregon and Washington State on March 26, reports The Verge, quoting local officials.

The stage re-entered the atmosphere in an unusual spot in the sky after sending a payload of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites to orbit.

The farm owner in Grant County, Washington State, found the pressure vessel and reported it to the Grant County Sheriff’s Office.

“Neither the property owner nor our sergeant is rocket scientist, of course, but judging from what had happened a few days prior, it looked to them like it was possibly debris from the Falcon 9 reentry,” Grant County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Kyle Foreman was quoted as saying in the report.

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A sergeant then called Elon Musk-run SpaceX, which confirmed the remnant of the rocket belonged to the company and dispatched its workers to retrieve the debris.

“Of course, we didn’t have a protocol for this, so we just erred on the side of returning someone’s property to them,” Foreman said.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk

A COPV is a part of the Falcon 9’s second stage, the smaller section of the rocket that detaches from the main stage at the edge of space and boosts satellites farther from Earth.

The COPV stores helium at pressures of nearly 6,000psi, which is used to pressurise the second stage’s large tanks of propellant.

Also Read – Musk keeps his ‘Indian promise’

According to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, re-entries of this kind happen every couple of weeks but it is “just unusual that it happens over a densely populated area”.

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-Top News China USA

Tesla cars banned in China’s military, govt premises

The latest move by China can be considered as its technological battle with the United States, reports Asian Lite News

China is reportedly barring military and government personnel from using Tesla vehicles, citing a potential data security risk posed by the Elon Musk-run electric carmaker.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal citing sources, people who work for the “military, state-owned enterprises in sensitive industries, and other government agencies” will be asked not to drive a Tesla vehicle.

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“The Chinese government has informed some of its agencies to ask their employees to stop driving Tesla cars to work,” the report mentioned.

Tesla cars have also been reportedly banned from driving into housing compounds for families of personnel working in sensitive industries and state agencies.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk. (File photo: IANS)

“They were told by their agencies that among the government’s concerns is that Tesla vehicles can be constantly in record mode, using cameras and other sensors to log various details, including short videos”.

The Chinese government is concerned that those images can be sent back to the US.

The Chinese regulators are also taking a closer look at Tesla operations in the country after recent videos on social media showed a Model 3 battery fire and malfunctioning vehicles.

Also Read – Tesla officially enters India

Tesla said in a statement that its “privacy protection policy complies with Chinese laws and regulations”.

“Tesla attaches great importance to the protection of users’ privacy,” the electric carmaker added.

Tesla Model Y. (Photo: Twitter/@Tesla)

The restriction on Tesla comes as Chinese President Xi Jinping “increasingly moves China away from foreign technology as Beijing’s technological battle with the US intensifies”.

The move comes at a time when the US has labeled smartphone maker Huawei a national security threat, restricting its business activities with the US companies.

Tesla which has its Gigafactory in Shangai is set to enter India this year to tap into the million-dollar opportunity as the country warms up to EVs.

Also Read – China’s cyber warfare after Pangong pullout

China is the largest market for electric vehicles in the world, and Tesla is the top seller of such vehicles.

The company also plans to build a supercharger manufacturing factory in Shanghai, which is expected to be operational soon.

On January 7, the US electric carmaker launched a project to manufacture Model Y vehicles in the Shanghai Gigafactory, its first overseas plant outside the US.

Tesla has opened its largest supercharger station worldwide, with 72 charging piles set up in the Jing’an District of Shanghai.

As of the end of 2020, the automaker has built more than 600 supercharger stations in China.

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