Daily Archives: July 25, 2021

The following is a perfect example: It's a copy of a previously unpublished email Musk sent to Tesla employees a few years ago. Sent with the subject line "Communication Within Tesla," it explains the problem with how information is transmitted in most companies, and how things should be different at Tesla.

Here's the email (which Tesla has verified was sent to all employees):

Subject: Communication Within Tesla

There are two schools of thought about how information should flow within companies. By far the most common way is chain of command, which means that you always flow communication through your manager. The problem with this approach is that, while it serves to enhance the power of the manager, it fails to serve the company.

Instead of a problem getting solved quickly, where a person in one dept talks to a person in another dept and makes the right thing happen, people are forced to talk to their manager who talks to their manager who talks to the manager in the other dept who talks to someone on his team. Then the info has to flow back the other way again. This is incredibly dumb. Any manager who allows this to happen, let alone encourages it, will soon find themselves working at another company. No kidding.

Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. You can talk to your manager's manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else's permission. Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens. The point here is not random chitchat, but rather ensuring that we execute ultra-fast and well. We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do so with intelligence and agility.

One final point is that managers should work hard to ensure that they are not creating silos within the company that create an us vs. them mentality or impede communication in any way. This is unfortunately a natural tendency and needs to be actively fought. How can it possibly help Tesla for depts to erect barriers between themselves or see their success as relative within the company instead of collective? We are all in the same boat. Always view yourself as working for the good of the company and never your dept.

Thanks,Elon

I'm a huge fan of the message this email communicates, namely:

Communication that is forced to go through the "proper channels" is a recipe for

There's only one problem with Musk's proposed solution:

It's extremely difficult to cultivate in the real world.

All companies say they value transparency and honesty. Most are lying.

Has Musk been able to achieve this type of environment (where communication is free-flowing and departments work together) at Tesla? I have no idea.

However, I worked several years for a nonprofit that did exemplify this way of thinking. It was an extremely mission-driven organization, one in which nearly everyone bought into the philosophy because they saw managers and executives walking the walk. (In fact, it was a personal experience there that inspired my very first column on Inc.com.) After leaving that organization and consulting for dozens of others, I realized just how rare this type of workplace is.

So how do you build a company culture in which employees actually work together, instead of against one another?

Ask yourself the following:

Of course, leaders have to set the example. That means looking beyond individual achievements and key performance indicators, which takes courage, insight, and emotional intelligence. It means making yourself available to hear as many voices as possible.

Above all, it means being ready to hear what employees really think.

Because the first step to solving a problem is knowing it's there in the first place.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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This Email From Elon Musk to Tesla Employees Describes ...

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., arrives at the Axel Springer Award ceremony in Berlin, Germany, on Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020.

Liesa Johannssen-Koppitz | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Tesla CEO Elon MusksaidWednesday that his electric vehicle and solar business could help bitcoin miners switch to renewable energy, but is currently limited by tight supply of battery cells.

He also acknowledged that Tesla is still not manufacturing its custom-designed 4680 cells for commercial use in electric cars or energy storage systems yet.

The comments came during an appearance at The B Word Conference, which was focused on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. During a panel, Square Crypto lead Steve Lee asked Musk what the energy-intensive bitcoin industry can do "to accelerate the transition to renewable energy" and "could Tesla Energy play a role?"

Musk replied, "Well, I think Tesla can play a role."

Then, the 50-year-old CEO broke into a reflective moment, implying that Tesla's entire reason for existence was to transition the world to clean energy.

"I would say I've had some pretty tough life experiences andTesla's probably responsible for two-thirds of all personal and professional pain combined to give you a sense of perspective there."

Tesla has been selling commercial and residential solar installations since acquiring SolarCity in 2016 for around $2.6 billion, a deal that landed Musk in a Delaware court this month.

But before it got into the solar business, Tesla created and began selling energy storage products in 2015, including a backup battery for homes called the Powerwall, and larger batteries that can store solar or wind energy generated intermittently so it is available for use whenever utilities need it.

Tesla has installed anumber of these utility-scale energy storage systems, Musk reminded his audience on Wednesday, that have helped utilities with "load-leveling the grid," including in South Australia and elsewhere. But he noted that battery production was currently constraining produciton.

"In fact the limiting factor for us right now is cell production. So we need to both internally get ourTeslainternal battery cells produced as well as increase supply from suppliers."

Musk also repeated that even once Tesla can make its own battery cells, it will still rely on other battery cell makers. Its current cell suppliers include Panasonic, LG and CATL.

"Generally when I talk to our suppliers and they say 'how many cells would you like?' I say 'how many cells can you make?' you know 'cause sometimes they're concerned, isTeslagonna compete with them on cells? I'm like no no, if you want to make the cells be our guest. It's just that we need a crazy number of batteries."

In a Twitter exchange with fans after the bitcoin conference, Musk wrote that Tesla is still "not quite done" getting to "volume production" of its custom-designed 4680 battery cells.

He also acknowledged that Tesla sold Maxwell Technologies' ultra-capacitor business and other assets to a San Diego-based startup called UCap Power, which is led by Gordon Schenk, preivously Tesla's VP of sales for its Maxwell division.

Tesla initially acquired Maxwell in 2019 in a deal valued over $200 million. The exact terms of the sale to UCap Power Inc. were not disclosed, but may be discussed when Tesla holds its second-quarter earnings call on Monday, July 26.

Finally, at The B Word conference, Musk said energy storage systems, combined with solar and wind weren't the only ways to transition bitcoin to cleaner energy. He endorsed existing hydropower, geothermal and nuclear energy to reduce the environmental impact of bitcoin mining.

"My expectation is not like that the energy production must be pure as the driven snow, but it also cannot be using the world's dirtiest coal which it was for a moment there. So. You know, that's just difficult forTeslato support in that situation. I do think long-term renewable energy will actually be the cheapest form of energy, it just doesn't happen overnight."

Link:

Elon Musk says Tesla caused two-thirds of his personal and professional pain - CNBC

Investors usually want to know what the most important story of the day is, the thing responsible for driving stocks with the potential to become an investing theme that drives returns for months or years.

Jeff Bezos going into space is not that thing.

Sometimes, that one big thing is obvious. On Monday, it was Covid-19. The S&P 500 dropped 1.6%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 2%. And for good reason: The Covid-19 variants are a big deal, even if the markets drop proves to be another blip on the way to higher returns.

Sometimes, though, investors need to know what they shouldnt bother to care about, too. Do you know what todays least significant story is? Amazon.coms Jeff Bezos going into space.

The successful flight was a little anti-climactic for livestream watchers. There were a lot of woohoos and awesomes uttered by the crew, even a few amazings. Still, 82-year old newly minted astronaut Wally Funk said It was only about five minutes.

You wouldnt know it from the coverage, of which Ive been a big part. Im addicted to stories about billionaires spending their money, a little like People magazine is addicted to the Kardashians.

The Kardashian analogy is apt. The billionaire space race is entertainment for investors and little more. Its the modern equivalent of a huge baroque garden or a Victorian menagerie complete with wild animals from India.

(The post-launch press conference included its own menagerie of a sort. The New Shepard crew showed off a collection of items carried on the flight including a piece of a Wright brothers plane, a medallion from an early hot air balloon ride, and a pair of Amelia Earharts flight goggles.)

Rich people spending money has always been a thing, and sometimes it benefits everyone else. People can still visit the gardens at Versailles. They are impressive, even inspiring.

Everyone, including Bezos, knows the personal rocket company business is ripe for criticism. The Amazon founder admits critics of space tourism are largely right. Still, space supporters point to the potential benefits of pushing technological boundaries. The world, after all, might end up with superfast commercial jets or flying cars a generation or more down the road.

But the to be sure of the space tourism saga isnt the potential trickle-down technological benefits from billionaire space dalliances. Long-term technological enhancements are the theoretical reason any mania can be positive for society. The dot.com era, for instance, left us with Amazon (ticker: AMZN) and more widespread internet access.

Not all manias are so giving though. The Financial Crisis was driven by financial technologycollateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. No one is thanking their lucky stars for those products. There is no guarantee manias result in useful technology. Just look at the most recent financial innovation of zero-commission trades. Its given us meme-stocks.

But if the space race has done anything, its made traveling to the stars cheaper than its ever been. The Space Shuttle cost about $450 million a mission, according to NASAs numbers. The orbiter itselfthe spacecraft on the back of the rocketscost about $1.7 billion. Ultimately, a generation of investing in higher-than-average cost space shuttle technology left America with movies such as Space Camp, U.S. taxpayers with a little more debt, and the lack of astronaut carrying domestic space launch capabilities for a decade.

Thats changed now, but it has little to do with Bezos or Virgin Galactics (SPCE) Richard Branson. Instead, space lovers should thank Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He, like other billionaires, has expressed lofty goals to make humanity a multi-planetary species. Musk however isnt going into space on a tourist flight. Hes the one that brought launch capabilities back to America by pioneering the use of reusable rockets. It is ferrying NASA astronauts to the International Space Station while launching hundreds of small satellites that offer space-based Wi-Fi to clients around the globe. Partly as a result of that decision, SpaceX is worth an estimated $74 billion in private markets.

Compare that to Virgin Galactic, which is worth about $7 billion after creating what Canaccord analyst Ken Herbert described as Disney for the 1% of the 1%.

That sounds negative, but Herbert rates Galactic shares Buy. He believes clients should put the stock in their portfolios. And his $48 target price values Galactic at roughly $11.5 billion. There might just be a long-term business in space tourism.

That illustrates the real to be sure of a billionaire space story. If Bezos, or Branson, wants to build an organization to take them to space, so be it. Those are high-paying jobs for bright engineers. Billionaires can do what they want with their money.

The trade off might be having to listen to them. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote Wednesday investors should prepare for more influential space tourists to offer their overview effect perspectives.

Not even Amazons stock seemed to care all that much about Bezoss successful flight. Shares closed up about 0.7% on Tuesday, while stock in Virgin Galactic dropped 1.3%. Tesla stock rose 2.2%, rising for the second consecutive day in the run-up to reporting second-quarter numbers on July 26. The S&P 500 gained 1.5%, rebounding from Mondays Covid-19 induced selloff.

Wednesday, a day after the successful launch, Galactic stock is recovering up 4.1% while the S&P has added 0.6%. Amazon stock is down 0.4%.

Write to allen.root@dowjones.com

Originally posted here:

Amazon's Jeff Bezos Went to Space. Tesla's Elon Musk Is the Real Winner. - Barron's

Elon Musk is famous for electric vehicles, reusable rockets, and satellites that can beam down high-speed internet to the most remote regions of the planet. But in 2016, he set his sights lower. The idea was to create a company that would solve traffic by building a system of underground tunnels.

Musk founded The Boring Company in 2017. In a video released that same year, the Boring Company teased a system in which cars and public transportation pods are lowered underground by metal platforms and proceed to zoom through tunnels at 124 mph, unimpeded by pesky traffic.The problem with tunnels, Musk said during an event unveiling the company's first demo tunnel in 2018, was that they take a long time to build and are very expensive.

"The LA subway extension that [was] just completed cost $2 billion for two and a half miles. There was a subway extension in New York that I think cost $2 billion for a mile," Musk said during the event. "So clearly, something needs to be done to revolutionize tunneling technology. We need to be able to build tunnels way faster and for a lot less money."

At the event, reporters were taken on test rides through the tunnel at speeds of up to 50 mph, much slower than the 150 mph that Musk envisioned. The ride was also pretty bumpy, as the alignment wheels attached to the Teslas bounced off the side track walls.

Though still rudimentary, the demo tunnel inspired confidence in investors and customers alike. Early on, the Boring Company was largely floated by Musk, but $1 million also came from the sale of 50,000 hats and another $10 million from the sale of 20,000 company-branded flamethrowers. Musk even tried to sell dirt excavated from the tunnel as Lego-like bricks.

In 2019, the Boring Company brought in its first outside investment. The $120 million funding round came shortly after the company landed its first paying customer: the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop opened to the public in June. The 1.7-mile stretch of underground road cost the convention authority $52 million and took the Boring Company about 18 months to complete. It marked the company's first completed public project, but many of its other proposed projects have hit dead ends.

"Many construction professionals will tell you that, you know, it's not the speed of the tunnel boring that you need to worry about. It's the environmental review. It's the bureaucratic procedure. It's the permits," says NBC News' Cyrus Farivar, who reported on some of the Boring Company's stalled projects.

Despite the challenges, cities such as Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, seem eager to partner with the Boring Company.

"We have now spoken with the Boring Company about building a 2.2-mile tunnel from our railroad station, called the Bright Line Station, which is in the middle of the city, all the way to the beach," Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis told CNBC. "And it would be two tunnels, one going east, one going west. And the business model is that you have Tesla vehicles with drivers that ferry you under the streets, through to the beach, completely eliminating all the traffic."

Trantalis said that rough estimates from the Boring Company put construction costs between $10 million and $15 million per mile, not including the cost of the stations. Details are still being worked out, but users of the tunnel would likely pay a fee for the service. The city is taking other bids for the project, but Trantalis said Fort Lauderdale already worked out a lot of the bureaucratic hang-ups that caused the proposed Boring Company projects to falter in other cities.

Watch the video above to find out more.

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Why Elon Musk's Boring Company is finding that traffic is tough to fix - CNBC

The top cryptocurrencies by market value, including bitcoin and ether, remain in the red on Monday, extending losses from the past week. Dogecoin is also down over 18% in the last seven days.

But a lot is still happening in the crypto world. From Jack Dorsey announcing that Square is building a bitcoin focused decentralized finance business to Elon Musk continuing to tweet about dogecoin, here are six things worth knowing in crypto from the past week.

In his testimony to the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell called for stricter regulations surrounding stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies that are supposed to be pegged to reserve assets like gold or fiat currency.

"If they are going to be a significant part of the payments universe, which we don't think crypto assets will be, but stablecoins might be, then we need an appropriate regulatory framework, which frankly we don't have," Powell said.

Powell also shared his case for the creation of a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, in the U.S. If the U.S. had a digital currency, "you wouldn't need stablecoins. You wouldn't need cryptocurrencies," he said. "I think that's one of the stronger arguments in its favor."

On Friday, U.S. Treasury secretary Janet Yellen said she'd meet with the President's Working Group on Financial Markets on Monday to discuss the role stablecoins could play in the financial system.

Jackson Palmer, the co-creator of the meme-inspired cryptocurrency dogecoin, made a rare return to Twitter on Wednesday with some harsh words about crypto in general.

In 2013, Palmer and Billy Markus created dogecoinas a jokebased on the "Doge" meme, which portrays a shiba inu dog. Theydidn't intendfor dogecoin to be taken seriously. Despite its recent surge in popularity, Markus and Palmer haven't profited, as theyboth sold outbefore dogecoin's meteoric rise.

"I am often asked if I will 'return to cryptocurrency' or begin regularly sharing my thoughts on the topic again. My answer is a wholehearted 'no,'" Palmertweeted on Wednesday.

In his Twitter thread, Palmer criticized those in power in the cryptocurrency space, saying that it is "controlled by a powerful cartel of wealthy figures" who "have evolved to incorporate many of the same institutions tied to the existing centralized financial systemthey supposedly set out to replace."

On Thursday, Jack Dorsey announced that his financial services company Square is creating a new business focused on "decentralized financial services" using bitcoin.

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, applications aim torecreate traditional financial systems, such as banks and exchanges,with cryptocurrency. Most run on the ethereum blockchain.

"Square is creating a new business (joining Seller, Cash App, & Tidal) focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services," Dorsey tweeted. "Our primary focus is #bitcoin. Its name is TBD."

After this announcement, Cathie Wood's investment firm ARK Investbought another 225,937 shares of Square worth around $53.6 million, The Street reported.

On Friday, local Sarawak news outlet Dayak Daily posted a video of Malaysian police destroying 1,069 bitcoin mining rigs, and the video went viral.

In the video, Malaysian authorities used a steamroller to crush all the rigs, which were laid out in a parking lot at police headquarters. Assistant Commissioner of Police Hakemal Hawari told CNBC this came after miners allegedly stole $2 million worth of electricity siphoned from Sarawak Energy power lines.

Anthony Di Iorio, a co-founder of ethereum, told Bloomberg that he's leaving crypto. He plans to sell his softwarecompany Decentral Inc., which isfocused on blockchain technologies.

"It's got a risk profile that I am not too enthused about," Di Iorio said. "I don'tfeelnecessarily safe in this space. If I was focused on larger problems, I think I'd be safer."

Before starting Decentral in 2014, Di Iorio co-founded ethereum in 2013 with eight others, including Vitalik Buterin.

"I want to diversify to not being a crypto guy, but being a guy tackling complex problems," Di Iorio said."I will incorporate crypto when needed, but a lot of times, it's not. It's really a small percentage of what the world needs."

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From Square building a bitcoin DeFi business to Elon Musk's dogecoin tweets: 6 things that happened in crypto this past week - CNBC