Category Archives: Elon Musk

Visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk is the co-founder of PayPal (PYPL), Tesla Motors (TSLA), and SolarCity (SCTY),and is the founder of SpaceX. His astounding success has given rise to comparisons of Musk andSteve Jobs, Howard Hughes, Henry Ford, and Bill Gates. Amid an often difficult childhood, Musk developed a relentless work ethic (he is known to work as many as 80 to 100 hours per week) and a tenacious single-minded vision.

On September 7, 2018 Musk appeared to be smoking marijuana while interviewing for a podcast. Coupled with the exit of Tesla's head of human resources and chief accounting officer, that news saw the stock drop in trade. This was just another addition to the string of bad news for the company, including a shareholder lawsuit against Musk and the company for his infamous tweet on August 7.Musk had tweetedthat he is considering taking Tesla private. The company later decided against the move.

We look at the early life and education of the man behind a string of companies that have disrupted multiple industries.

Elon Reeve Musk was born in 1971in Pretoria, one of South Africa's three capital cities. His father was an engineer and his mother was a model and nutritionist. He is the oldest of three children in an ambitious family. His brother Kimbal Musk is currently a venture capitalist and environmentalist. His sister Tosca Musk is an award-winning producer and director.

After his parents divorced when he was a child, Musk lived mostly with his father. Musk started school a year early, attending the private Waterkloof House Preparatory School and later graduating from Pretoria Boys High School. He read voraciously and was also an avid fan of comics. Self-described as a bookworm and something of a smart aleck, he was bullied in school and withdrew to his books at the expense of his social life.

At the age of 10, Musk was introduced to computers with the Commodore VIC-20. He quickly learned how to program and at the age of 12 sold a game called Blastar to Spectravideo for $500.

In one telling incident at that time, Musk, along with his brother, planned to open a video game arcade near their school. Ultimately, their parents nixed the plan. But apparently the only thing stopping them was the need for a city permit which had to be applied for by an adult.

Musks intellectual aptitude did him few favors as a child. He found few friends in the tough-minded Afrikaner culture he encountered in school.

"I had a terrible upbringing. I had a lot of adversity growing up. One thing I worry about with my kids is they don't face enough adversity," he would later say in an interview.

Musk attended the English-speaking Waterkloof House Preparatory School, and later graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. The years were lonely and brutal, from his descriptions.

They got my best friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that hurt, Musk said. For some reason they decided that I was it, and they were going to go after me nonstop. Thats what made growing up difficult. For a number of years there was no respite. You get chased around by gangs at school who tried to beat the (expletive) out of me, and then Id come home, and it would just be awful there as well.

If there was a point of bright escape for Musk; it was technology. When he was only 10, he became acquainted with programming via the Commodore VIC-20, an inexpensive home computer. Before long, he had become proficient enough to create Blastar a video game in the style of Space-Invaders. He sold the BASIC code for the game to a magazine called PC and Office Technology for $500.

At 17, Musk moved to Canada to avoid serving in the South African military, whose main duty in the late 1980s was enforcing apartheid. He would later obtain Canadian citizenship through his mother.

After emigrating to Canada, Muskenrolled inQueen's University in Kingston, Ontario. It was there that he met Justine Wilson, an aspiring writer. They would marry and have five sons together, twins and triplets, before divorcing in 2008.

After two years at Queen's University, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. He took on two majors, but his time there wasnt all work and no play. With a fellow student, he bought a 10-bedroom fraternity house, which they used as an ad hoc nightclub.

Musk graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from theWharton School. The two majors speak to the direction Musks career would take later, but it was physics that made the deepest impression on his thinking.

(Physics is) a good framework for thinking, hed later say. Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.

Musk was 24 years old when he moved to California to pursue a PhD in applied physics at Stanford University. With the internet exploding and Silicon Valley booming, Musk had entrepreneurial visions dancing in his head. He left the PhD program after just two days.

In 1995, with $28,000 and his younger brother Kimbal at his side, Musk started Zip2, a web software company that would help newspapers develop online city guides. The company got bought out, and Musk used his Zip2buyout money to create X.com, which he intended to shape into the future of banking. X was merged with a company called Confinity and the resulting company came to be known as PayPal. Musk was then ousted from the company before it wasbought by eBay.

After PayPal slipped away, Musk helped generate funding for an electric car startupcalled Tesla. You probably know the rest.

His early interest in reading philosophy, science fiction, and fantasy novels is reflected in his sense of idealism and concern with human progress. He aims to work in the areas he has identified as crucial to our future, specifically the Internet, the transition to renewable energy sources, and space colonization. With his work with PayPal, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, and SpaceX, he has defied critics and made advances in all three of these frontiers. (See also4 Real-Life Tony Starks.)

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How Elon Musk Became Elon Musk: Elon Musk's Early Years

What has happened to Elon Musk?

A highlight reel of the billionaire Tesla CEOs activities since early March includes his pooh-poohing the coronavirus panic as dumb; keeping his northern California factory open in defiance of local public health orders; falsely asserting that children are essentially immune from the virus; providing a giant platform to promoters of an unproven and potentially dangerous treatment; predicting (inaccurately) that the US would have no new cases of Covid-19 by the end of April; attempting to re-open the factory before the end of the local shelter-in-place order; and calling shelter-in-place orders fascist. (Lets not even get into the drama over whether the BiPap machines he donated to some hospitals count as ventilators.)

Musks dissemination of misinformation about the virus is not without consequences

Musks dissemination of misinformation about the virus is not without consequences. He has more than 33m followers on Twitter and a fan base that tends to exalt him as a cross between Tony Stark and God. A recent study published as a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine linked his tweet about chloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that was subsequently touted as a potential Covid-19 treatment by Donald Trump, to a dramatic surge in online demand for the prescription medication. They werent aware of it, they werent interested in it they were trying to buy it, John Ayers, a UC San Diego professor of medicine and one of the studys authors, told the Guardian in an interview.

The chloroquine document that Musk shared was an example of what the infectious disease expert Carl Bergstrom has described as quantitative bullshit the use of statistics and data to persuade someone by overwhelming and intimidating them, without any allegiance to truth or accuracy. Last week, Musk was apparently taken in by another pair of coronavirus bullshit artists, this time a pair of doctors from Bakersfield, California.

Drs Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi held a press conference to promote the idea that Covid-19 is much more widespread and much less deadly than what ivory tower figures such as Dr Anthony Fauci have said. Docs make good points, Musk tweeted, with a link to a YouTube video of the 50-minute press conference. (YouTube removed the video for spreading misinformation, but not before it received millions of views; one of the doctors has gone on to make appearances on Fox News.)

The docs did not make good points. After opening his remarks by defining science like a high schooler writing a term paper (What is science? Essentially, its the study of the natural world through experiment, through observation, so thats what were doing) Erickson presented testing data from the chain of urgent care clinics they own. The clinics have performed 5,213 Covid-19 tests and had 340 positive results, which they claimed means that there is a 6.5% rate of infection in the local population. The pair performed the same math (positive tests divided by total tests) on the statewide numbers of 33,865 positive tests out of 280,900 total, to arrive at a 12% infection rate for the state. From there, they calculated that California has had a total of 4.7m infections and calculated that the death rate for people who contract Covid-19 in California is just 0.03% much lower than that of the seasonal flu.

None of this stands up to scrutiny. In order to assume that the rate of infection amongst a small number of people can apply to the entire population, you have to use a random and representative sample. But the people who are getting tested at urgent care clinics in California are neither random nor representative; they are people with severe symptoms or who are performing certain essential jobs. Figuring out the actual infection rate across the broader population will require careful sampling that avoids this selection bias.

The Bakersfield duo used their meaningless numbers to argue that shelter-in-place orders must be lifted a position that Musk clearly also holds. (In an extraordinary joint statement, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine jointly and emphatically condemn[ed] the pair, and suggested they were releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the publics health.)

The issue is not that Musk has staked out a contrarian stance on the coronavirus. There are difficult debates that need to be had over how and when to restart the economy in order to minimize long term economic harms and maximize public health. We can and should have that discussion, and we should do it without impugning the moral character of everyone who argues for a faster loosening of restrictions.

But its increasingly difficult to take Musk seriously when he makes his argument by cherry-picking numbers or relying on blatant misuse of data. Please, make your case, but make it using real facts, and not by playing fast and loose with numbers in an effort to mislead the public about what is actually happening. Otherwise you look and sound a lot less like the brilliant engineer and entrepreneur, and a lot more like just another used car salesman.

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Coronavirus has Elon Musk acting like just another used car salesman - The Guardian

A number of significant tidbits of information came forth from Teslas first quarter earnings report for 2020, which added together have confirmed just how far Tesla is ahead of the electric vehicle game.

Not least is the fact that the Californian auto maker has posted a modest but still positive $US16 million ($A24.5 million) profit, even amid the economic challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic which has seen Teslas Model 3 factory in Fremont, Alameda County, shut down by government order to help contain the spread of the highly contagious virus.

Musk is railing against the extension of closures, going so far as to call the stay-at-home measures fascist during the companys earnings call, but Tesla has fared better than fellow car makers Ford and GM and other auto makers have also faced factory closures, as noted by Giles Parkinson on Thursday.

Exactly

Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 1, 2020

While Musks opinions on how to get back to a flourishing economy as the pandemic seemingly comes under control in some US states have divided many, one thing is clear: following Musks vision, Tesla has already put itself in a position to ride the waves of the crisis.

And car makers are reportedly worried. CleanTechnica author Alex Voigt last Sunday shared on Twitter comments made by VW boss Herbert Diess in an internal meeting that Teslas autonomous driving systems was giving him a headache.

500,000 Teslas function as a neural network that continuously collects data and offers the customer a new driving experience every 14 days, with improved features,Diess was quoted as saying by Voigt.

No other automaker can do that today.

Diess showed his Top Managers a graph illustrating Tesla 2 times as high stock market valuation & explained Tesla did do that despite all the valuable brands like Porsche, Audi, Bentley..

Diess concluded his confidence Tesla to increase volumes

"We still have a long way to go."

Alex (@alex_avoigt) April 26, 2020

Tesla, which has just released its latest Full Self Driving feature the ability to detect and stop at traffic lights and stop signs will soon be collecting data from 1 billion intersections a month as the feature is rolled out across markets, giving the company access to far more valuable and voluminous information about autonomous driving as drivers effectively label objects for Tesla as they drive.

No wonder car makers are worried.

Autonomous driving aside, other developments shared by Musk during the Q1 2020 earnings call also reveal Teslas strong hand.

Learnings from the ramping of production of Teslas first mass-volume electric car, the Model 3, have afforded the car maker the opportunity to leapfrog ahead of its own production schedule for its next mass-volume vehicle, the Model Y.

First deliveries of the Model Y began a full three months ahead, and Musk reported that it is now Teslas first vehicle to become profitable in its first quarter of production, with more Model Ys produced in its first quarter than were Model 3s in its first two quarters.

Thus the Model Y ramp has been even faster than the Giga Shanghai ramp, said Musk. In other words, we are ahead of the schedule that we were ahead of already.

Both profits and Teslas ability to ramp production quickly can be attributed to the incremental efficiencies Musk has spoken about in past earnings calls, and which for the Model Y have been partially revealed by auto engineering expert Sandy Munro as he bit by bit tears down a Model Y to reveal cost cuts and improvements.

One significant improvement noted by Munro is the Model Ys octovalve (see video at the bottom of this article), a key component of the Model Ys heat pump which replaces the Model 3s resistive heating system.

We also introduced a revolutionary new heat pump which allows the [Model] Y to have better range, said Musk, adding that it makes the Model Ys driving range slightly better than Model 3 despite being a bigger car that weighs more.

Other efficiencies are in the works for the Model Y, says Musk, including a single piece casting for the rear third of the Model Y body that will also reduce the weight, cost and noise/vibration of the Model Y.

The Model 3 has not been left out of the picture, as Tesla continues to work towards localisation of parts in Shanghai, allowing it to drop the price of the made-in-China Model 3 to RMB291,800 ($A63,859 converted) so that Chinese drivers can access the countrys new energy vehicle subsidies.

Last but by no means least in the vehicle department came another announcement from Musk that the Model S is now capable of 400 miles (643km) driving range, although according to Musk the EPA scored its official rating at 391 miles due to user error.

The real Model S range is 400 miles, but when we took the last EPA test unfortunately the EPA left the car door open and the keys in car overnight so the car lost 2% range, he said.

To be clear, for the Model S for the past two months, the true range has been 400 miles.

Which leads to a final but possibly the most significant announcement from the Tesla Q1 2020 call: that with Battery Day is now slated for the third week of May, either in California or Texas depending on Covid-19 restrictions, and the latter location is a nod to an announcement expected in weeks around what may now be known as a Tera-factory.

There will be a lot of exciting news to tell, Musk said. It will be one of the most exciting days in Teslas history.

Bridie Schmidt is lead reporter for The Driven, sister site of Renew Economy. She specialises in writing about new technology, and has a keen interest in the role that zero emissions transport has to play in sustainability.

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A lot of exciting news: Elon Musk reveals just how far ahead of the game Tesla is now - The Driven

Trevor Noahs Daily Social Distancing Show examined the new Apple feature that will attempt to overcome the inability of the phone to read a masked face.

Noah noted the feature, which calls for punching in a secret code, will take us back in time. Thats a time where theres no corona, and also gives him a second chance at a failed girlfriend.

Shifting his focus, Noah then turned to Elon Musk, who is being criticized for an expletive-laden rant on how the governments pandemic lockdown was breaking peoples freedoms. Musk claimed To say that they cannot leave their house is facist

Hes trying to stir up civil unrest, said Noah, saying that Musks long-standing contention that were living in a computer simulation is coming true.

Finally, if youve ever wondered whether President Trump pays attention to the replies on his Twitter rants, wonder no more. A random tweeter with 75 followers sent the President a note saying that he could supply ICU ventilators. Soon after, he had a $69 million contract with New York State, which was acting on the recommendation of the White House task force.

If someone tells you the price of anything is $69 million, it is a joke, said Noah.

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Trevor Noah Unlocks The Mysteries Of Apple Phones, Elon Musk, And Trumps Twitter - Deadline

Elon Musk has been one of the most vocal figures spouting coronavirus misinformation on Twitter. Hes touted unproven medications, falsely claimed kids are immune, over-promised on ventilators, and made wildly inaccurate prediction that new US cases would be probably close to zero by the end of this month. Now, the Telsa founder has doubled down on his coronavirus panic is dumb remarks in a series of anti-lockdown tweets.

Musks latest spree was focused on reopening the country, with the most recent tweet reading simply, FREE AMERICA NOW. He also shared stories about social distancing restrictions being lifted in Texas and Iowa, praising the moves and demanding governments Give people their freedom back!

He even agreed with a well-known Trump firster (someone who responds to Trumps tweets first to gain prominent placement in threads) who tweeted that the scariest thing about the crisis was seeing American so easily bow down & give up their blood bought freedom to corrupt politicians who promise them safety [sic].

Now, there are arguments to be made that the careful rolling back of restrictions in certain locales could be okay; even New York, the worldwide hot spot, is beginning to discuss it. At the same time, the very reason the infection and mortality rate hasnt been as bad as some projected is because those measures are in place, and removing them too quickly could easily cause a renewed spike in cases and deaths.

The fact that Musk, ostensibly a man of science and above-average intelligence, would promote such coronavirus truther theories without an appropriate level of nuance has set Twitter ablaze. For one, pop star Ariana Grandes mom wasnt shy about voicing her opinion on Musks careless words.

How incredibly irresponsible of you, Joan Grande tweeted. And you think you are a person of science and technology Youre a disgrace. and now I have to get ride of my TESLAs. (Yeah, we caught that pluralization there, Mama Grande. #HumbleBrag is back.)

As it has been since the start, the coronavirus pandemic is a very fluid situation, and the scientific community is learning new information daily. Even the numbers we do have are likely flawed due to a lack of accurate, widely available testing, especially when it comes to antibodies. While its true the curve has begun to flatten and its understandable workers are itching to get back to earning a living, theres a reason experts are called experts and Musk is called engineer, industrial designer, technology entrepreneur, and philanthropist.

Some have even pointed out Musks own belief in this, posting screenshots of a November 2017 tweet he sent out quoting Mustafa Kemal Atatrk: If one day, my words are against science, choose science.

That said, Musk has tried to help, sending CPAP and BiPAP machines to hospitals (though the safety and effectiveness of the non-invasive ventilators without modifications has been questioned). Regardless, guidelines from the CDC and the White House caution against opening states back up too soon instructions a number of states are already ignoring.

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Elon Musk Demands COVID-19 Restrictions Be Lifted: Give People Their Freedom Back! - Consequence of Sound

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Elon Musk: The TSLA stock price is too high in my opinion - ForexLive