Elon Musk said he felt like he “was dying” after his second COVID-19 booster shot.
“I had major side effects from my second booster shot,” the new Twitter boss wrote in a social media post. “Felt like I was dying for several days. Hopefully, no permanent damage, but I don’t know.”
Musk didn’t provide medical records to back his claim. Neither did he say which company’s COVID booster he took.
The Epoch Times can’t verify his claim independently.
Moderna and Pfizer didn’t respond to requests for comments at the time when the article was published.
He took Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine and the first mRNA booster without side effects, Musk said.
Musk posted a string of Twitter posts in response to a post by Rasmussen Reports which is criticizing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s narrative that major side effects after COVID vaccination are “rare.”
Americans Link COVID Vaccines to Mysterious Deaths
A new Rasmussen Reports poll, released on Jan. 2 and based on a representative sample of 1,000 American adults, shows that nearly half of Americans believe that the COVID-19 vaccines probably caused a “significant number of unexplained deaths,” while over a quarter said they personally know someone whose death may have been caused by vaccination side effects.
Pollsters asked people a series of questions, including whether they got the COVID-19 shot and how likely is it that the jab’s side effects “have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths.”
Forty-nine percent of the respondents said they think it’s “likely” that the COVID-19 vaccine’s side effects are responsible for a significant number of deaths that remain unexplained.
A large majority (71 percent) said they themselves have been vaccinated against COVID-19, with 38 percent of those believing that the vaccine side effects are at least somewhat likely responsible for unexplained deaths.
A nurse administers a COVID-19 vaccine booster to a person at a hospital in Hines, Ill., on April 1, 2022. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Among the 26 percent who said they haven’t been jabbed, 77 percent said it’s at least somewhat likely that the vaccination’s side effects caused significant numbers of mysterious deaths, the survey found.
Another question was whether people think there are “legitimate reasons” to be worried about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, or whether people who are concerned about vaccine safety “are spreading conspiracy theories.”
Forty-eight percent of respondents said they think there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about COVID-19 vaccine safety, 37 percent think people who are worried about this issue are pushing conspiracy theories, and 15 percent aren’t sure.
Alex Spiro, attorney to Elon Musk, center, departs court in San Francisco, California, US, on Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2023.
Benjamin Fanjoy | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared in a San Francisco federal court on Friday to defend tweets he posted to his tens of millions of followers in August 2018.
The tweets said he had “funding secured” to take his electric vehicle company private for $420 per share, and that “investor support” for such a deal was “confirmed.”
Tesla’s stock trading initially halted after the tweets, then shares were highly volatile for weeks. Musk later said that he had been in discussions with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and felt sure that funding would come through at his proposed price. A deal never materialized.
The SEC charged Musk and Tesla with civil securities fraud after the tweets. Musk and Tesla each paid $20 million fines to the agency, and struck a revised settlement agreement that required Musk to temporarily relinquish his role as chairman of the board at Tesla.
His 2018 tweets also triggered a shareholder class action lawsuit from Tesla investors. They alleged that Musk’s tweets misled them and said relying on his statements to make trades cost them significant amounts of money.
The shareholders’ trades in question took place during a 10-day period before Musk seemed to admit a take-private deal was not going to happen in 2018.
Musk said under oath on Friday that it’s difficult to link Tesla’s stock price to his tweets.
“There have been many cases where I thought that if I were to tweet something, the stock price would go down,” Musk said. “For example, at one point I tweeted that I thought that, in my opinion, the stock price was too high…and it went went higher, which was, which is, you know, counterintuitive.”
A big increase in trading volume after he tweeted
It’s rare for top executives at publicly traded companies to discuss their stock price because any commentary can influence price movements.
Daniel Taylor, director of the Wharton Forensics Analytics Lab and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed every trade in Tesla stock occurring on Aug. 7, 2018, the day that Musk tweeted. He calculated the total trading volume every minute from the time the market opened through the time of Musk’s tweets about a buyout.
Taylor found that the trading volume the minute Musk tweeted, at 12:48 p.m. ET that day, was over $350 million, and the trading volume for Tesla shares the next minute was over $250 million. By comparison, the average volume five minutes before Musk tweeted was $32 million per minute. The minute before Musk tweeted, trading volume was $24 million.
“It is generally true that correlation is not causation,” Taylor told CNBC on Friday, after Musk’s first day on the witness stand. “However, I am unaware of any alternative explanation for a 10-fold increase in trading volume the same minute that Elon Musk tweeted.”
Musk also testified about his low opinion of short sellers on Friday.
“I believe short selling should be made illegal,” Musk said, referring to short sellers as “bad people on Wall Street” who “steal” from other investors. He said they also plant stories in the media to “get the stock to go down” and will “do anything in their power to make a company die.”
Tesla was among the most heavily shorted stocks in August 2018, when Musk made the statements about taking Tesla private. Tesla’s share price surged about 10% during trading that day. Short sellers face enormous losses when shares in a given company climb higher.
Some of the plaintiffs in the trial that’s underway claim that Musk’s “funding secured” tweets were intended to put upward price pressure on Tesla’s stock driving a so-called “short squeeze.”
Musk’s testimony is not yet complete and the court plans to hear from him again on Monday.
Musk had said in November that Twitter was facing “a massive drop in revenue” as advertisers dropped out.
San Francisco:
Twitter Inc plans to lay off 50 workers in the social media site’s product division in the coming weeks, news site Insider reported on Wednesday, citing two people familiar with the company.
The layoffs, which come six weeks after top boss Elon Musk reportedly told staff that there would not be further retrenchment, could reduce the company’s headcount to under 2,000, according to the report.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Musk took over Twitter in October and swiftly moved through a number of product and organizational changes. The company rolled out Twitter-verified Blue check-mark as a paid service and also laid off about 50% staff.
Musk had said in November that Twitter was facing “a massive drop in revenue” as advertisers dropped out.
Twitter’s revenue for the fourth quarter fell about 35% to $1.025 billion, a top ad executive revealed at a staff meeting, online publication the Information reported on Wednesday.
Staff cuts so far, which also included employees working in the content moderation division, have stoked fears of a surge in hate speech on the platform.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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is headed to court in a securities-fraud trial over tweets from 2018 in which he floated the possibility of taking
Tesla Inc.
private, with in-person jury selection poised to begin Tuesday.
The class-action case originates with an Aug. 7, 2018 tweet in which the Tesla chief executive said, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.”
An investor,
Glen Littleton,
sued Tesla, Mr. Musk and members of Tesla’s board at the time, alleging that Mr. Musk’s tweets were false and cost investors billions by spurring swings in the prices for Tesla stock, options and bonds. In court filings, Mr. Musk has said he was indeed considering taking Tesla private and believed he had the support of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund to do so. The deal, which would have been valued around $72 billion, never materialized.
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U.S. District Judge
Edward Chen,
who is overseeing the San Francisco jury trial that is scheduled to run through Feb. 1, has ruled that Mr. Musk’s tweets about taking the company private weren’t true and that he acted recklessly in making them.
Questions for the jury include whether Mr. Musk’s tweets were material to investors and whether he knew they were untrue.
The case is unusual in that securities-fraud cases usually resolve before going to trial, such as through a settlement, said
Jill Fisch,
a securities-law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The defendants in this case face “an uphill battle” in light of the judge’s pretrial decision about the veracity of Mr. Musk’s statements, she said.
Attorneys for the lead plaintiff didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor did an attorney for Tesla, Mr. Musk and the other board members.
Twitter has been in turmoil since Elon Musk took over. To get a sense of what’s going on behind the scenes, The Wall Street Journal spoke with former Tesla and SpaceX employees to better understand how Musk leads companies. Illustration: Ryan Trefes
Mr. Musk is expected to take the stand as early as Wednesday, some two months after he did so in Delaware in a trial over his pay package at Tesla. In 2021, he also appeared before Delaware’s business-law court to defend Tesla’s roughly $2.1 billion 2016 takeover of home-solar company SolarCity Corp.
Also on the list of possible witnesses are Tesla board chair
Robyn Denholm,
board members
Ira Ehrenpreis,
James Murdoch
and
Kimbal Musk
—the CEO’s brother. The head of investor relations,
Martin Viecha,
also may be called.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
What do you think will be the outcome of the case over Elon Musk’s 2018 Tesla tweet? Join the conversation below.
This week’s trial comes at a busy time for Mr. Musk, who has been scrambling to turn around Twitter Inc. after buying the social-media company last fall in a deal valued at $44 billion. His rocket company SpaceX is pushing for the first orbital launch of a new rocket Mr. Musk wants to use for deep-space missions.
Tesla, meanwhile, has slashed prices across its vehicle lineup, with some of last week’s cuts in the U.S. nearing 20%, in a bid to juice demand. The company’s stock has fallen roughly 70% since its peak in November 2021, erasing around $850 billion in market value. Mr. Musk’s personal wealth has fallen more than $200 billion in that time, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Court proceedings involving Mr. Musk can be feisty. In the SolarCity case, for example, Mr. Musk called opposing counsel a “bad human being.”
Tesla has reduced prices across its vehicle lineup in an effort to boost demand.
Photo:
Jay Janner/USA TODAY NETWORK/Reuters
In advance of this week’s trial, Mr. Musk asked the court to move the trial to Texas on the basis that potential jurors in San Francisco could be biased against him. Judge Chen rejected the request.
“It isn’t that hard it seems to me to find 15 people,” he said.
The court requires nine jurors and six alternates to proceed with the case. Roughly 190 potential jurors were asked to fill out questionnaires about their views of Mr. Musk and other issues. The court plans to bring in about 50 of them for further questioning Tuesday.
Opening arguments could start as early as Tuesday after the jury is selected.
The lead plaintiff is seeking damages for investor losses he alleges stemmed from Mr. Musk’s and Tesla’s statements. Tesla stock closed up 11% the day Mr. Musk initially tweeted about potentially taking Tesla private, later giving back all those gains and falling further as questions emerged about the deal.
The defendants have said the plaintiff won’t be able to prove to a jury that the statements were materially false. Mr. Musk was considering taking Tesla private, the defendants have said, even if some of his assertions about the deal may not have been literally accurate.
Defendants, in a trial brief, said Mr. Musk believed he had secured backing to take the car maker private from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund. A lawyer for the defendants said Friday that his team had chosen not to enforce subpoenas calling on fund representatives to testify. The sovereign-wealth fund didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk and Tesla each agreed in 2018 to pay $20 million to settle civil charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission over the same tweets. Mr. Musk also agreed to step down as chairman of the company, while remaining CEO. He later said in legal filings that he felt pressured to settle with the SEC. Last year, a federal judge denied Mr. Musk’s request to scrap his settlement.
Write to Rebecca Elliott at rebecca.elliott@wsj.com and Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com
(TWTR) has secured a ruling allowing the social media company to force several laid-off workers suing over their termination to pursue their claims via individual arbitration rather than a class-action lawsuit.
US District Judge James Donato on Friday ruled that five former Twitter employees pursuing a proposed class action accusing the company of failing to give adequate notice before laying them off after its acquisition by Elon Musk must pursue their claims in private arbitration.
Donato granted Twitter’s request to force the five ex-employees to pursue their claims individually, citing agreements they signed with the company.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The San Francisco judge left for another day “as warranted by developments in the case” whether the entire class action lawsuit must be dismissed, though, as he noted three other former Twitter employees who alleged they had opted out of the company’s arbitration agreement have joined the lawsuit after it was first filed.
The lawyer who represents the plaintiffs, Shannon Liss-Riordan, said on Monday that she had already filed 300 demands for arbitration on behalf of former Twitter employees and would likely file hundreds more.
Those workers all claim they have not received the full severance package promised by Twitter before Musk took over. Some have also alleged sex or disability discrimination.
Last year, Donato had ruled that Twitter must notify the thousands of workers who were laid off after its acquisition by Musk following a proposed class action accusing the company of failing to give adequate notice before terminating them.
The judge said that before asking workers to sign severance agreements waiving their ability to sue the company, Twitter must give them “a succinct and plainly worded notice.”
Twitter laid off roughly 3,700 employees in early November in a cost-cutting measure by Musk, and hundreds more subsequently resigned.
In December last year, Twitter was also accused by dozens of former employees of various legal violations stemming from Musk’s takeover of the company, including targeting women for layoffs and failing to pay promised severance.
Twitter is also facing at least three complaints filed with a US labor board claiming workers were fired for criticizing the company, attempting to organize a strike, and other conduct protected by federal labor law.
While Elon Musk’s Neuralink expects to begin human trials in six months, a neurotech company unveiled a device that treats depression and is now in the skull of the first patient.
Inner Cosmos’s ‘digital pill’ includes two parts: An electrode that sits under the skin of the scalp and the ‘prescription pod’ that snaps onto the users’ hair to power the device.
The implant sends tiny electrical pulses to the brain region affected by depression – the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex – once daily for 15 minutes.
And the external device does not need to be on the head when treatment is not being administered.
The trial patient from St Louise, Missouri, is scheduled to test Inner Cosmos innovation for one year, and the company has another human trial set to start next month.
Inner Cosmos has unveiled the first brain implant to treat depression. The digital pill is the smallest and least invasive technology to date – the implant is about the size of a penny
Implants to treat all alignments of the brain are making waves in the industry, as several companies are racing to get theirs to market first.
Musk’s Neuralink recently conducted a product demonstration that showed its chip in a monkey’s brain, allowing it to control a keyboard on a screen to type out complete sentences.
Synchron began human trials of its brain implant in July, which lets the wearer control a computer using thought alone.
The firm’s Stentrode brain implant, about the size of a paperclip, will be implanted in six New York and Pittsburgh patients with severe paralysis.
Stentrode will let patients control digital devices just by thinking and give them the ability to perform daily tasks, including texting, emailing and shopping online.
Research facilities are also developing brain chips.
Southmead Hospital in Bristol is believed to be the first in the world to implant a device to reverse symptoms of Parkinson’s.
However, Inner cosmos digital pill is the smallest and least invasive technology to date – the implant is about the size of a penny.
And the company likens the external pod to charging an Apple Watch.
The surgery for the implant takes 30 minutes in an outpatient facility.
Inner Cosmos was founded by entrepreneur Meron Gribetz, who was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder as a child.
‘Our mission is to create a world that restores humanity’s cognitive power by rebalancing the human mind,’ said Gribetz.
‘The world is in a state of severe disorder, leading to a disordered cognition
‘The effects are being felt by millions, leading to surging levels of depression.
‘We believe our approach can allay the lives of those suffering from depression, and eventually scale to other cognitive disorders.’
The goal of Inner Cosmos is to move away from prescription drugs and toward a more ‘effective treatment.’
‘Depression, attention and anxiety, which we treat. Just to underscore this point, there’s 140 million Americans every year that use attention or depression drugs, that’s more users than have iPhones,’ Gribetz said in a 2022 presentation.
Inner Cosmos’s ‘digital pill’ includes two parts: An electrode that sits under the skin of the scalp and the ‘prescription pod’ that snaps onto the users’ hair to power the device
The implant sends pulses to the brain region affected by depression – the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex – once a day for 15 minutes. And the external device does not need to be on the head when treatment is not being administered
Inner Cosmos digital pill is powered by a smartphone app, which also displays mood and depression graphs that can be shared with a physician.
Gribetz said this is the first time doctors will have access to this type of data, ‘saving the healthcare industry billions for misdiagnosis of severe suicidal depression,’ he said.
‘[The implant] is 10 times smaller than anything else that you’ve heard of globally, on the brain chips BCI [brain computer interface] market, and we’re really excited,’ said Gribetz. ‘It took us six years to build this thing.’
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Elon Musk’s Neuralink rival Synchron begins human trials of its BRAIN IMPLANT that lets the wearer control a computer using thought alone
Elon Musk is used to facing critics, haters and detractors.
He even likes these battles very much.
Sometimes he even tends to provoke his supposed enemies. The Techno King, as he’s known at Tesla (TSLA) – Get Free Report, likes to turn his opponents’ attacks into counterattacks. The serial entrepreneur is never as lethal as when he is on defense.
These adversaries he knows them. He knows their angles of attack. Certainly some of these criticisms annoy him but he always finds the line of response to repel the detractors.
He can also count on his legion of fans, many of whom are Tesla die-hard fans. They believe in his promises of transforming the world and beyond our civilization. They applaud his iconoclastic side and do not hesitate to cry genius when he announces a new product. The billionaire always knew he could count on these admirers.
The Revolt of the Retail Investor
But what he never anticipated was that some of these fans would come after him. He therefore never prepared for it because he always counted on their loyalty to him. It turns out that Musk was wrong.
For several weeks now, the CEO of Tesla has been the target of repeated criticism from some retail investors. Investor Leo KuGuan, who is the car maker’s third largest individual shareholder after Musk and Oracle (ORCL) – Get Free Report co-founder Larry Ellison, went so far as to sound a revolt against Musk.
“I am 100% in Tesla bc I believe in Elon Musk and Tesla,” KoGuan wrote on Twitter on Jan. 7. “But he is killing SH and Tesla. If I knew I wouldn’t invest in Tesla.”
“Elon invested ≈$200mm but took out $40B, Larry invested $1B, I invested over $3B, I have no choice but to act and speak out. I cry out to U for help!”
The criticisms of these investors are the consequence of Tesla’s stock market rout. In 2022, Tesla stock lost 65% of its value, translating to more than $600 billion in market capitalization evaporated in a year. Tesla’s market value is currently $357 billion, down from over $1 trillion at the start of 2022. Over the first four trading sessions of 2023, Tesla shares lost 8.2% to $113.06.
While Musk attributes this stock market disaster to macroeconomic factors like the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hike to fight inflation and the energy crisis in Europe, many Tesla shareholders believe that his acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion is the big problem.
They claim that when Musk set his sights on the social media platform, he completely left Tesla behind. Worse, he has alienated many Tesla buyers by attacking progressives and Democrats on Twitter regularly.
Tesla Outperforms Its Rivals
Retail investors together own 41.9% of Tesla shares as of Dec. 5, according to WallStreetZen. Institutional investors hold the biggest block with 43.01% of the shares. The balance is held by the company’s executives, ie 15%.
While Musk once responded to some criticism a while back, he’s been quiet lately. This is no doubt due to the fact that he must observe the quiet period until the publication of the company’s earnings on January 25. Until that date, the management team musk remain silent so as not to influence the share price to the benefit of certain shareholders or to the detriment of others.
But Musk has just found a subtle and striking way to respond to the criticism, which has turned violent in recent days. The entrepreneur has just retweeted a chart which shows that of all the major automakers present on the American market, only Tesla and General Motors (GM) – Get Free Report have managed to increase their sales of light vehicles in 2022 compared to 2021. All the rest of the vehicle manufacturers have seen their sales decrease compared to 2021.
Tesla saw its sales increase by 44% over one year while those of GM only increased by 3%.
Everything from the economy, to inflation, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine dealt body blow after body blow to the electric carmaker—and the rest of the tech and auto industry at large. However, the recent actions of company CEO Elon Musk, following his reluctant purchase of Twitter, have only dragged the beleaguered Tesla further into the deep trenches of a financial crisis. In fact, Tesla has lost nearly 70 percent of its market cap over the year to date.
It’s a whiplash shift from just a year ago when the company, valued at an eye-popping $1 trillion, seemed like it could do no wrong. Some are questioning Musk’s leadership, while others are going further—speculating that this might just be the beginning of the end of Tesla.
There’s no denying the impact that the company has had in both producing and selling electric cars. After all, it did something that once seemed impossible: convincing the public that EVs are pretty damn cool, actually. Now legacy automakers are playing catchup to get customers to buy their own takes on electric cars.
Tesla revolutionized the way the world sees and drives EVs—but with its back against the wall and the financial situation looking more and more bleak by the tweet, we might very well soon find ourselves in a situation where the biggest name in the game has gone belly up.
Let’s be clear: there’s a fairly low chance of that happening… but what if it does?
How to Make (and Burst) an EV Bubble
To understand the impact Tesla’s disappearance would have on the future of EVs, it’s important to wrap our minds around how exactly we got here.
“I give Elon Musk a lot of credit. He almost single-handedly made electric vehicles glamorous and sexy,” Ragunathan “Raj” Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and autonomous vehicle researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, told The Daily Beast. “People associated them with the person who was transforming the automotive industry and doing the right thing for the planet.”
However, this was a double-edged sword. Musk hyped Tesla up through lofty—if a bit unrealistic—promises and shitposts on Twitter. He cultivated an army of Elon stans willing to go to war for him online to defend his companies from the smallest of slights. Meanwhile, the cars were finally selling well. All this resulted in the perfect mixture to fuel the rise of Tesla’s stock into the stratosphere like so many SpaceX rockets.
“If Tesla collapses and they’re completely out of business, I believe that there’ll be dancing in the streets at every giant [automaker] on the planet.”
— Sandy Munro
But the value was always tenuous at best. It’s not like other automakers weren’t ever going to make electric cars. So Tesla’s market cap became a bubble of epic proportions.
One of the people who held a needle was Musk himself—which he wound up popping with the acquisition of his favorite social media platform, Twitter.
“It was just complete baloney,” Rajkumar added. “At the end of the day, business has to be a business. Sooner or later, things that go up have to come down, and that’s what we’re seeing, and will continue to see.”
There’s also fundamental economic factors. Demand is low across the board due to a flailing economy. Plus the market looks vastly different than it did even a year ago. Tesla’s not the only horse in the race anymore. The EV industry is much bigger now, and with the added competition, it was really only a matter of time that Musk’s company started feeling the pressure.
That sink in feeling: Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter unintentionally caused further turmoil and instability for Tesla’s finances.
Getty
A World Without Tesla
Given the profound impact of Tesla on the automotive industry and consumer habits, there’s really no question that it would have a profoundly negative impact on the future of EVs.
“If Tesla collapses and they’re completely out of business, I believe that there’ll be dancing in the streets at every giant [automaker] on the planet,” Sandy Munro, an independent automotive engineer, consultant, and industry expert, told The Daily Beast.
Munro’s known for his famous teardown reports providing incredibly detailed analysis of different vehicles. His glowing review of Tesla’s Model Y in 2020 resulted in him not only being bullish on the future of the company but also electric vehicles in general. A few years ago, he predicted that EVs would make up more than 50 percent of total vehicles on the market by 2030. Due to Tesla’s success, he’s updated that prediction to 2028.
However, Munro admits that, if Tesla were ever to go bankrupt, neither prediction would likely ever happen and he would “definitely walk away from EVs.”
That’s because, to him, the fall of Tesla would put out the proverbial fire underneath the asses of every legacy automaker to pivot to new, emerging technologies—and instead, incentivize them to go back to old ones. No longer would there be the push to build new plants and devote so much of their resources into R&D for batteries, charging stations, and electric powertrains. Even regulators would have much less incentive to make the change in the nation’s transportation and energy infrastructure.
Overall, we’d see a return to our gas-guzzling, greenhouse gas emitting normal. “If Tesla goes out of business, you watch how fast that Keystone pipeline goes through,” Munro added.
Rajkumar’s assessment isn’t quite as dire. He believes that the technologies and innovations that Tesla has championed will ultimately continue. After all, consumers already want EVs more than ever—and that number is only expected to grow. Car companies see this too, and are ready to capitalize on it.
“The global automotive industry has been emphasizing EVs now, and many companies are publicly announcing that they will switch to a completely electric line of products. I don’t think it’s going to stop anytime soon.,” Rajkumar said. However, he concedes that it’s not clear if many of the goals outlined by these automakers are realistic due to an inadequate charging infrastructure and a slow rate of EV adoption by consumers overall.
The only real winner that would emerge from the death of Tesla would be China. The country is already making a concerted effort towards electrifying its transportation infrastructure, with goals to have 40 percent of all vehicles sold domestically be EVs by 2030, and have enough charging stations to service more than 20 million vehicles.
Munro said that this might cause a kind of geopolitical tortoise-and-hare situation where China plays catchup and soon advances much more exponentially than the Western world, eventually eclipsing the sleeping U.S. with technologies like EVs that will be vital for our collective future.
“China will survive,” Munro explained. He added that we might get to the point where the U.S. has relatively little EVs because we were so focused on short term gains.
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Employees work on the assembly line of electric vehicles at a factory of Dayun Automobile Co., Ltd on Dec. 8, 2022 in Yuncheng, Shanxi Province of China.
Getty
Tesla Will Die Another Day
The future might seem a bit uncertain for Tesla—but it will likely survive its current downturn. Sure, it might not reach the $1 trillion zenith it hit last year (at least, for a while) but it will probably see this through.
“There’s no way Tesla is going to go belly up,” Munro said. “It’s just not going to happen.” He added that there are two primary factors why the company will keep driving along.
The first is actually Musk. Though many might be bothered by his antics on Twitter (Tesla stock investors chief among them), there’s no denying that he helped revolutionize and championsome of the very industries that the world will be relying on the most in the future: electric cars and space travel. If he can pull himself away from the social media albatross that he’s wrapped around his neck, he might be able to help usher Tesla through a rapidly crowding EV market and beyond 2030.
The second, said Munro, is children. Yes, children. He believes that kids—more than any other market indicator, stock trend, or McKinsey consultant—accurately point the way for the future of things like automobiles and, therefore, Tesla.
“If you talk to kids, all of a sudden you understand what they don’t like,” he said. “‘I don’t like the smell of gasoline. I don’t like the black smoke coming out of the car. I want to do more for the environment.’ That’s why I don’t think Tesla is going away.”
A long exposure photo shows the path of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket as it launched the ispace mission on Dec. 11, 2022, with the rocket booster’s return and landing visible as well.
SpaceX
Elon Musk’s re-usable rocket maker and satellite internet company, SpaceX, is raising $750 million in a new round of funding that values the company at $137 billion, according to correspondence obtained by CNBC.
Last month, Bloomberg first reported that SpaceX was allowing insiders to sell at $77 per share, which would have put the company’s valuation near $140 billion. The company raised more than $2 billion in 2022, including a $250 million round in July, and was valued at $127 billion during an equity round in May, CNBC previously reported.
According to an e-mail sent to prospective SpaceX investors, Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z) will likely lead the new funding round. Early SpaceX investors included Founders Fund, Sequoia, Gigafund and many others.
A16z also participated in Elon Musk’s leveraged buyout of Twitter, a $44 billion deal that closed in late October 2022.
SpaceX and a16z did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last year, SpaceX achieved several new milestones but faced delays to its Starship program, which is part of NASA’s effort to bring astronauts back to the moon.
On the upside, the company’s satellite internet service, Starlink, exceeded 1 million subscribers and provided a lifeline to users in Ukraine who suffered infrastructure disruptions after Russia’s invasion. SpaceX also managed to surpass 60 reusable rocket launches in a single year via its Falcon program.
The company is currently continuing development of its Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicles at the company’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. It’s not clear when the company will move to the next step of the program, which entails an orbital launch test of these larger vehicles.
As Musk has repeatedly sounded off about geopolitical issues on Twitter, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson recently asked SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell whether his “distraction” as the new owner and CEO of Twitter might affect SpaceX’s work with the space agency, NBC News reported. Nelson said that Shotwell reassured him it would not.
NASA is now considering whether SpaceX can help rescue residents on the International Space Station, including an astronaut and two cosmonauts with Russia’s Roscomos, according to CNET. Russia’s Soyuz capsule sprung a coolant leak in December, and an investigation is underway to determine if the spacecraft can safely return the crew home or if emergency measures will need to be taken instead.
Tesla just published its fourth-quarter vehicle production and delivery report for 2022.
Here are the key numbers.
Total deliveries Q4 2022: 405,278 Total production Q4 2022: 439,701 Total annual deliveries 2022: 1.31 million Total annual production 2022: 1.37 million
Deliveries are the closest approximation of sales disclosed by Tesla. These numbers represented a new record for the Elon Musk-led automaker and growth of 40%in deliveries year-over-year.
However, the fourth quarter numbers fell shy of analysts’ expectations.
According to a consensus of analysts’ estimates compiled by FactSet, as of Dec. 31, 2022 Wall Street was expecting Tesla to report deliveries around 427,000 for the final quarter of the year. Estimates updated in December, and included in the FactSet consensus, ranged from 409,000 to 433,000.
Those more recent estimates were in line with a company-compiled consensus distributed by Tesla investor relations Vice President Martin Viecha. That consensus, published by electric vehicle industry researcher @TroyTeslike, said that 24 sell-side analysts expected Tesla deliveries of about 417,957 on average for the quarter (and about 1.33 million deliveries for the full year).
Tesla started production at two new factories this year — in Austin, Texas and Brandenburg, Germany — and ramped up production in Fremont, California and in Shanghai, but it does not disclose production and delivery numbers by region.
In the fourth quarter of 2022, Tesla said deliveries of its entry level Model 3 sedan and Model Y crossover amounted to 325,158, while deliveries of its higher end Model S sedan and Model X SUV amounted to 18,672.
In its third-quarter shareholder presentation, Tesla wrote: “Over a multi-year horizon we expect to achieve 50% average annual growth in vehicle deliveries. The rate of growth will depend on our equipment capacity, factory uptime, operational efficiency and the capacity and stability of the supply chain.”
The period ending Dec. 31, 2022 was marked by challenges for Tesla, including Covid outbreaks in China, which caused the company to temporarily suspend and reduce production at its Shanghai factory.
During the fourth quarter, Tesla also offered steep price cuts and other promotions in the U.S., China and elsewhere in order to spur demand, even though doing so could put pressure on its margins.
In a recent e-mail to Tesla staff, Elon Musk asked employees to “volunteer” to deliver as many cars to customers as possible before the end of 2022. In his e-mail, Musk also encouraged employees not to be “bothered” by what he characterized as “stock market craziness.”
Shares of Tesla plunged by more than 45% over the last six months.
In December, several analysts expressed concern about weakening demand for Tesla electric vehicles, which are relatively expensive compared with an increasing number of hybrid and fully electric products from competitors.
Along with competitors ranging from industry veterans Ford and GM to upstart Rivian, Tesla is poised to reap the benefits of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act this year, which includes incentives for domestic production and purchases of fully electric cars.
Retail shareholders and analysts alike attributed some of Tesla’s falling share price in 2022 to a so-called “Twitter overhang.”
Musk sold billions of dollars worth of his Tesla holdings last year to finance a leveraged buyout of the social media business Twitter. That deal closed in late October. Musk appointed himself CEO of Twitter and has stirred controversy by making sweeping changes to the company and its social media platform.
Shares of Tesla started to rise again in the final days of December 2022, in anticipation of record fourth-quarter and full-year deliveries.
