Monthly Archives: February 2021

Founder of Amazon as well as space company Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos, speaks about the future of commercial space travel.

Brent Lewis | Denver Post | Getty Images

The satellite internet projects of the two richest men on the planet continue to spar behind the scenes with federal regulators, with Amazon on Thursday clarifying its position in response to recent accusations from Elon Musk and SpaceX that Jeff Bezos' company is attempting to "stifle competition" in the sector.

Representatives of Amazon spoke to Federal Communications Commission officials earlier this week, doubling down on its position that the FCC should not approve SpaceX's modification request for parts of its Starlink satellite network. Amazon and SpaceX are working to build space-based internet networks called Kuiper and Starlink, respectively by launching thousands of satellites into orbit, known in the industry as a constellation.

While Amazon emphasized that it "supports the ability of operators to modify their system designs," the company argued that SpaceX's proposed changes to Starlink are too significant to be considered as a simple modification by the FCC. Rather, Amazon says the FCC should consider Starlink as a "newly designed system" and include it in a broader regulatory processing round that was open when SpaceX submitted the request last year.

"Doing so would be consistent with Commission precedent, protect the public interest, encourage coordination, and promote competition," Amazon corporate counsel Mariah Dodson Shuman wrote in a letter to the FCC.

Amazon is not alone in pushing back on Starlink's modification request, with satellite operators Viasat, SES and Kepler Communications also filing objections.

60 Starlink satellites deploy into orbit after the company's 17th mission.

SpaceX

Amazon's concern with SpaceX's modification focuses around issues of safety and interference, with the company arguing that the Starlink change "would significantly increase interference to Kuiper" and other satellite systems, while also making Starlink "more susceptible to interference from Kuiper" and others.

SpaceX Director David Goldman told the FCC in January that Starlink's modification would "be able to achieve the advantages of lower altitudes without causing a significant increase in interference." Additionally, Goldman highlighted that Amazon representatives have had "30 meetings to oppose SpaceX" but "no meetings to authorize its own system," which he interpreted as an attempt to stifle competition.

But, while SpaceX argued that Amazon and other companies "cherry pick data ... to reach misleading claims of interference," Kuiper's Shuman alleged that SpaceX "omitted" comparative data from its analysis. Shuman said that data shows Starlink's modification "increases interference into Kuiper" connectivity stations on the ground.

A Project Kuiper engineer sets up a a prototype antenna for a test.

Amazon

Both companies' satellite networks represent ambitious projects, with SpaceX, like Amazon, saying its network will cost about $10 billion or more to build. SpaceX leadership has previously estimated that Starlink could bring in as much as $30 billion a year, or more than 10 times the annual revenue of its rocket business.

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Amazon responds to Elon Musk's accusations of impeding SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet plans - CNBC

THE CHANGING FORTUNES OF THE WORLDS RICHEST

F

ollowing strong earnings reports and bullish new takes from Wall Street analysts, tech stocks soared this week, padding the fortunes of worlds richest. The top ten gainers added a combined $74 billion to their net worths.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk was the weeks biggest gainer with $11.5 billion. Tesla shares climbed 7.4% this week after Piper Sandler analyst Alexander Potter gave it a $1,200 price target, anticipating strong growth. Tesla outperformed strong showings by the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average, which rose 4.6% and 3.9%, respectively.

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page gained $10.4 billion and $10 billion, respectively, after a strong week for Google parent company, Alphabet. Alphabets stock jumped more than 14% this week after falling 3.4% last week. The company reported strong earnings on Tuesday, bolstered by a comeback in its digital advertising business, which took a serious hit during the pandemic.

Amazon gained 4.6% this week after last weeks 2.7% loss, and Jeff Bezos added $7.7 billion to his net worth, even after announcing on Tuesday that he would step down as CEO of the company later this year, after 26 years at the helm. Bezos is leaving on a high. Amazons stock has risen by more than 63% in the past year, as ecommerce boomed during the pandemic. At the end of 2020, Amazon had its biggest quarter ever, bringing in more than $125 billion in revenue. Bezos, who will focus on side companies like Blue Origin and The Washington Post, will become executive chair of Amazons board. Amazon Web Services chief Andy Jassy will replace him as CEO.

SHANGHAI, CHINA - JULY 26: Colin Huang Zheng, founder and CEO of Pinduoduo, speaks during the company's listing ceremony at Shanghai Tower on July 26, 2018 in Shanghai, China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Bezos was not the only ecommerce billionaire to have a positive week. Pinduoduo founder Colin Huang got $10.7 billion richer this week after the stock gained more than 18%. The discount ecommerce platform, whose shares trade on Nasdaq, is becoming increasingly popular in China, challenging the dominance of established giants like Alibaba and JD.com. With a net worth of $69.1 billion, Huang has more than quadrupled his fortune in the past year. He now ranks as the 16th richest person in the world, and the third richest man in China.

There are now four Chinese billionaires who rank in the top 20 richest people in the world. A year ago, there were only two Tencent chair Ma Huateng and Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma. Huateng and Ma still rank in the top 20, at No. 15 and No. 20, respectively, and are now joined by Huang and No. 6 richest Zhong Shanshan, who had a stunning rise in 2020 thanks to the blockbuster IPO of his bottled water company, Nongfu Spring.

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Elon Musk Is $11.5 Billion Richer This Week As Tech Stocks Soar - Forbes

Going green is increasingly becoming a way to make bank.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, is the richest of the billionaires who owe their fortune to technologies that reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Green that was published Tuesday.

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A full $180.7 billion of Musk's $199.2 billion net worth was deemed "green net worth" by Bloomberg.

Though Musk's fortune is largely thanks to electric vehicle maker Tesla, some is from his holdings in SpaceX, and rockets emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when they blast off. For this reason, Musk's wealth from SpaceX was not included in his "green" net worth.

Many of the rest of the so-called "green billionaires" are from China, according to Bloomberg Green, as China is a front-runner in the development and sale of technology to build clean energy economies.The list is also dominated by billionaires in the electric vehicle industry (and related component parts) and the solar energy industry.

For the ranking, Bloomberg Green used the net worth of each individual based on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index on Jan. 28, and also calculated the portion of their wealth driven by businesses that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (In some cases, those numbers are one in the same.)

Further, if several business leaders made their fortune from a particular company, the billionaires and their collective net worths are grouped together in one entry by Bloomberg Green. (For example, Zeng Yuqun, Huang Shilin, Pei Zhenhua and Li Ping owe their status as billionaires to CATL, the battery maker. Bloomberg Green did not delineate how much of the total $60.7 billion in wealth generated from CATL is owned by each stakeholder.)

Here are the top global green billionaires, according to Bloomberg Green. For the complete list, see Bloomberg Green's ranking.

Elon MuskNet worth: $199.2 billionGreen net worth: $180.7 billionCountry: U.S.Company: Tesla, makes electric vehicles

Zeng Yuqun, Huang Shilin, Pei Zhenhua, Li PingNet worth: $61.6 billionGreen net worth: $ 60.7 billionCountry: ChinaCompany: CATL, the world's largest maker of electric vehicle batteries, supplies carmakers including Tesla, Toyota, BMW, Volvo

Li Zhenguo, Li Chunan, Li Xiyan, Zhong BaoshenNet worth: $16.1 billionGreen net worth: $16.1 billionCountry: ChinaCompany: Longi, the world's largest manufacturer of "solar wafers," which is what is used to build solar panels

Wang Chuanfu, Lv Xiangyang, Xia ZuoquanNet worth: $ 33.5 billionGreen net worth: $13.4 billion Country: ChinaCompany: BYD, electric vehicle maker currently converting Shenzhen, China's fleet of buses, taxis, and trucks into electric vehicles. Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company led by Warren Buffett, has owned a portion of BYD since 2008.

Liu JinchengNet worth: $10.9 billionGreen net worth: $10.9 billionCountry: ChinaCompany: Eve Energy, a supplier to electric vehicle manufacturers, including clients such as Daimler, BMW, and Xpeng

Other notable billionaires on the list include Anthony Pratt, the owner of Pratt Industries, and Aloys Wobben, the founder of Enercon. Pratt Industries is the largest privately held producer of 100% recycled paper and packages and is located in Georgia (though Pratt himself hails from Australia). Wobben built his first wind turbine in the 1970s and started the wind-turbine manufacturing company Enercon in 1984.

Climate tech making new, green fortunes is not likely to slow. A report released in September from PricewaterhouseCoopers found investment into the space is accelerating. In 2013, early-stage venture capital funding for climate tech funding was $418 million and in 2019, venture funding in climate tech was $16.1 billion, according to the report.

"The bottom line is that demand for climate tech is only going to accelerate. With global corporations, investors, and governments pledging to transition to net zero value chains, portfolios and jurisdictions, they are all betting on climate technology breakthroughs to be found, scaled and to transform industries and society," co-authors Celine Herweijer and Azeem Azhar wrote in the PricewaterhouseCoopers. "Demand is not yet at a stampede but the market is heating up and it's time for all stakeholders to help back the innovations the world really needs."

See also:

Carbon capture technology has been around for decades here's why it hasn't taken off

The '1%' are driving climate change, but it hits the poor the hardest: Oxfam report

Executives from Jeff Bezos to Ford Motor Co.'s Bill Ford: Fighting climate change means job creation

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Tesla, Elon Musk and beyond: The green companies making billionaires - CNBC

NASA is teaming up with Elon Musks SpaceX on a two-year astrophysics mission to help better understand the birth of the universe and the development of galaxies.

NASA on Thursday revealed it has awarded a contract to SpaceX for the launch of SPHEREx, which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer.

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The spacecraft is due to launch via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in June 2024 from Space Launch Complex-4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The total cost to launch SPHEREx is about $98.8 million.

NASA says the spacecraft will survey the sky in near-infrared light, which is not visible to the human eye, as a tool to help answer questions about the origins of the universe and how galaxies form.

It also will search for water and organic molecules essentials for life as we know it in regions where stars are born from gas and dust, known as stellar nurseries, as well as disks around stars where new planets could be forming, NASA said in a news release.

The mission will gather data from more than 300 million galaxies and more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

The contract is the latest NASA has awarded SpaceX over the past several years. SpaceX last year launched astronauts to space for the first time. It was the first privately designed and built spacecraft to launch astronauts to space and the first time NASA had launched its own astronauts since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011.

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NASA chooses Elon Musk's SpaceX for nearly $100M mission to map the beginning of our universe | TheHill - The Hill

Elon Musk broke his Twitter silence with tweets on Dogecoin.

Elon Musk is back on Twitter less than two days after he announced he would be taking a break from the microblogging platform. The Tesla CEO broke his self-imposed Twitter silence with a series of tweets this morning praising Dogecoin - the meme-based cryptocurrency which was initially started as a joke. As the value of Dogecoin surged, Mr Musk, in his trademark style, 'welcomed' investors with a meme.

It all started when Elon Musk shared a picture of a rocket to the moon and followed it up with a one-word tweet: Doge.

The tweet was enough to send the value of Dogecoin surging by over 44 percent, reports Market Watch.

"The most entertaining outcome is the most likely," he wrote - likely referring to his past record of fortune-making tweets. His posts on Twitter recently drove up the stock of Etsy and Signal, and helped boost the GameStop surge.

The tweets were not the only time Musk moved markets on the platform in recent weeks. When he changed his Twitter profile to read simply "#bitcoin" last Friday, the cryptocurrency's price temporarily skyrocketed by around 20 percent.

This time, as Dogecoin surged, Elon Musk shared a meme based on the iconic Lion King scene of Rafiki showing Simba his kingdom. He posted a pic with his face superimposed over Rafiki, holding up the Doge meme which is the logo for the cryptocurrency.

The meme was followed by two more Dogecoin tweets.

"Dogecoin is the people's crypto," reads one, while the other says, "No highs, no lows, only Doge."

Mr Musk overtook Amazon boss Jeff Bezos to become the world's wealthiest person last month, with a fortune estimated at $185 billion following a nine-fold surge in Tesla's share price over the past year.

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Elon Musk's Twitter Break Is Over. See What He Posted - NDTV

Robinhood co-founder and co-CEO Vlad Tenev speaks onstage during the TechCrunch Disrupt New York event on May 10, 2016.

Noam Galai | Getty Images for TechCrunch

The co-founder of Robinhood took to invitation-only audio chat app Clubhouse to defend the investment platform's decision to restrict trading in GameStop and other volatile stocks.

GameStop shares have climbed more than 1,500% since the start of the year, fueled in no small part by a wave of retail investors inspired by the Reddit board WallStreetBets. Such investors piled into GameStop and other heavily shorted stocks, resulting in huge losses for some hedge funds.

Robinhood moved to restrict trading in several stocks, including GameStop and AMC Entertainment, on Thursday. Vlad Tenev, co-CEO at Robinhood, said at the time that the decision was aimed at protecting the firm and its customers.

In the session on Clubhouse late Sunday (Pacific time), Tesla CEO Elon Musk pressed Tenev on why the platform, a pioneer of commission-free trading, decided to restrict trading last week. The online brokerage firm limited trading in 13 equities, allowing clients to sell positions but not open new ones in certain securities, provoking fury from users.

"We had no choice in this case," Tenev said. "We had to conform to our regulatory capital requirements."

Tenev said Robinhood's operations team received a request at 3:30 a.m. PT on Thursday from the National Securities Clearing Corp. Robinhood and other brokers are required to meet certain deposit requirements from clearinghouses like NSCC each day. The amount required is based on factors such as volatility and concentration in certain securities, Tenev said.

Robinhood got a request for a security deposit of $3 billion from NSCC to back up trades, "an order of magnitude more than what it typically is," Tenev said. The company raised an additional $1 billion in emergency capital from existing investors in an effort to shore up its balance sheet and enable it to ease the trading curbs.

"Did something maybe shady go down here?" Musk asked Tenev. The Tesla chief has shown support for WallStreetBets on Twitter.

"I wouldn't impute shadiness to it or anything like that," Tenev responded. "The NSCC was reasonable subsequent to this."

Robinhood and the NSCC later agreed to reduce the $3 billion number down to around $1.4 billion, but Tenev said his firm was still forced to take action to limit trades.

Tenev's explanation of the situation echoed a blog post from Robinhood, in which the brokerage explained it put temporary buying restrictions on some securities due to a tenfold increase in clearinghouse deposit requirements.

Robinhood will continue to limit trading on Monday in short-squeeze names likeGameStop. Customers can only buy one share of GameStop's stock and five options contracts. However, the millennial-favored stock trading app did cut down its list of restricted stocks from as many as 50 to eight.

Asked by Musk whether there would be any further limits on trading in future, Tenev said: "I think there's always going to be some theoretical limit. We don't have infinite capital."

Musk also quizzed Tenev on whether Citadel Securities the largest market maker in options in the U.S. had pushed the firm to impose trading limits. Robinhood gains a significant chunk of its revenues from routing orders to market makers likeCitadel Securitiesand Virtu. Citadel,a separate hedge fund business, helped infuse close to $3 billion intoMelvin Capital, a hedge fund that bet against stocks like GameStop.

"To what degree are you beholden to Citadel?" Musk asked, to which Tenev replied: "There is a rumor that Citadel or other market makers pressured us into doing this and that's just false."

"This was a clearinghouse decision and it was just based on the capital requirements," Tenev added. "From our perspective, Citadel and other market makers weren't involved in that."

"Citadel Securities has not instructed or otherwise caused any brokerage firm to stop, suspend, or limit trading or otherwise refuse to do business," a Citadel Securities spokesperson told CNBC. "Citadel Securities remains focused on continuously providing liquidity to our clients across all market conditions."

CNBC's Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

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Robinhood CEO explains to Elon Musk why his platform restricted trading last week - CNBC

As Tesla reaches new heights and Wall Street firms start acknowledging the electric car makers potential, CEO Elon Musk has blazed the trail for a new breed of billionaires across the globe. Interestingly enough, Musk and his fellow billionaires are making their fortune not through non-sustainable commodities like fossil fuels. Instead, they are creating empires established on the shoulders of sustainable energy and renewable technologies.

In a report published on Tuesday,Bloomberg Greennoted that as the climate crisis accelerates, the fastest-growing fortunes in the world are now green, thanks in no small part to tycoons like the Tesla CEO who have amassed their wealth amidst the clean energy boom. Musk, for example, saw his net worth soar 622% last year to $199.2 billion, with 91% of that amount (around $180.8 billion) representing his holdings in EV maker Tesla.

So notable was the rise in Musks net worth that he recently came the closest of any modern billionaire to matching the inflation-adjusted value of John D. Rockefellers Standard Oil empire. In a way, this is almost symbolic, considering that one and a half centuries ago, Rockefeller emerged as the richest person in history by revolutionizing the oil industry. Elon Musks emergence as the worlds richest man now means he has a shot at taking Rockefellers crown by rendering the oil magnates main product obsolete.

Bloombergnotes that Teslas remarkable rally in 2020 indicates that the world is now essentially acknowledging the dangers posed by climate change. Together with the election of new US President Joe Biden, an avid advocate of sustainable technologies like electric cars, the renewable energy movement has gained a lot of momentum. The S&P Global Clean Energy Index has soared 231% since April, for example, and the 15 biggest fortunes derived from the climate-solutions industry have totaled $355 billion. Thats over twice the market cap of Royal Dutch Shell Plc and 4x that of BP Plc.

Following Musk as the worlds green billionaires are tycoons from China, such as CATLs Zeng Yuqun, Huang Shilin, Pei Zhenhua, and Li Ping, whose green net worth stands at $60.7 billion. Chinese executives that are involved in the electric vehicle movement, such as Wang Chuanfu, Lv Xiangyang, and Xia Zuoquan of BYD and Li Bin of NIO, have seen their fortunes rise amidst the widespread adoption of green technology.Anthony Pratt of Pratt Industries, the worlds largest privately-held producer of 100% recycled paper and packaging, and Aloys Wobben, a wind turbine magnate, saw their net worth sit comfortably in the billions as well.

Andy Wong, chief investment strategist of LW Asset Management, described the momentum of the sustainable energy sector in a statement to the publication. Its a new generation of growth in the clean energy sector, and it has just started. With the technology upgrades in smart grid and energy storage, the rollout of new productsno matter whether its for solar panels or electric vehiclesis faster than before and consumers are also adapting to the upgrades quickly, Wong said.

Check outBloomberg Greens full rankings of the worlds Top 15 Climate Billionaires here.

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Teslas Elon Musk is trailblazing the emergence of green billionaires - Teslarati