Tag: Elon Musk

Elon Musk says this crucial skill is what made Steve Jobs and Bill Gates successful

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Despite being rivals at various points in their careers, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates shared many commonalities.

“They’re obviously very driven and they’re very talented,” says SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk in an interview with Autobild.tv.

Yet what really helped them build such successful companies, says Musk, was their ability to attract top talent and earn employee loyalty.

“The ability to attract and motivate great people is critical to the success of a company, because a company is just a group of people that are assembled to create a product or service,” Musk explains, noting that people sometimes forget this “elementary truth.”

“If you’re able to get great people to join the company and work together towards a common goal,” he says, “ then you will end up with a great product.” Musk adds that a great product attracts buyers, and the more buyers you have the more successful your company will be.

As simple as this concept may seem, it’s still challenging to find and hire top talent, which is why more companies are employing various tactics beyond standard compensation to attract new hires. Over the years, these incentives have become more and more extravagant, with perks like pet-friendly offices and catered lunches becoming more common, particularly in the tech sector where there’s already a shortage of talent.

At their Redmond, Washington campus, Microsoft employees have access to an organic spa and receive benefits like pet insurance and a free shuttle to and from work. Apple employees receive discounts on company products and have access to an onsite wellness center at their Cupertino, California headquarters.

As indulgent as these benefits may seem, the results speak for themselves. Both Microsoft and Apple consistently top the lists of companies where job seekers want to work.

However, companies must provide more than free perks in order to engage and retain top performers, which is where motivation comes into play. According to organizational experts, employees who feel like they’re contributing toward a shared vision for the company are much more productive and driven than their counterparts.

During Microsoft’s early years, for example, all employees were awarded stock options. This incentive pushed employees to be innovative thinkers and created “Microsoft millionaires” when the company went public in 2003. (The company has since eliminated this program).

At Apple, Jobs included his employees in the decision-making process, says Willie Pietersen, a management professor at Columbia Business School and author of “Strategic Learning: How to Be Smarter Than Your Competition and Turn Key Insights into Competitive Advantage.”

The late founder would create different teams to work on projects that had breakthrough potential. When they reported their findings, he listened to all of their ideas before picking the strongest ones and shelving the others.

Although Jobs could be a harsh leader at times, Pietersen tells CNBC Make It, his management strategy was based on creating the most innovative products, which galvanized his employees and won their support.

Musk uses his own unique strategy to inspire his workers and make them feel like they’re part of a larger team at SpaceX. The billionaire entrepreneur requires that senior executives lead their employees through “selflessness.”

“We want our leaders to find ways of motivating and inspiring their teams, reduce the noise in their work and help remove blockers,” Musk tells Glassdoor. “If you are a manager or leading at any level at SpaceX, we stress that your team is not there to serve you. You are there to serve your team and help them do the best possible job for the company.”

Source: Make It, CNBC.com

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Tesla chief Elon Musk sends engineers to Thailand to help in cave rescue

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Tesla chief Elon Musk on Friday said he is sending engineers from two of his companies, SpaceX and The Boring Company, to help with the rescue of a boys’ soccer team, which is trapped in a cave in Thailand, CNBC reported.

Musk, the chief executive officer of the electric carmaker, took to Twitter to express his concern and intention to support the Thailand government in the rescue efforts.

SpaceX & Boring Co engineers headed to Thailand tomorrow to see if we can be helpful to govt. There are probably many complexities that are hard to appreciate without being there in person.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2018

Thirteen boys and their soccer coach have been trapped inside the flooded Tham Luang cave system in Chiang Rai in Thailand.

An ex-navy diver was found dead in one of the the cave’s passageways, after his oxygen tank ran out inside the cave during the operation, the report said.

Here is how Elon Musk proposes to help with the rescue efforts:

• Engineers from his space exploration company SpaceX and tunneling firm, The Boring Company, would travel to Thailand on Saturday.
• Technicians could pump water through the cave and provide Tesla-made “Powerpack” battery packs to provide electricity to boost the pump rate, Musk said earlier this week.

Looks like 1st bit of water is close enough to entrance to be pumped out. 2nd & 3rd would need battery packs, air pumps & tubes. If depth of 2nd is accurate, would need ~0.5 bar tube pressure. Prob need to enter tube, zip up & then transit.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2018

• Musk also raised the possibility of a nylon tube being inserted into the cave to inflate it with air “like a bouncy castle.”
• The Tesla owner said that he is “happy to help” if there is a way to do so.

Boring Co has advanced ground penetrating radar & is pretty good at digging holes. Don’t know if pump rate is limited by electric power or pumps are too smal. If so, could dropship fully charged Powerpacks and pumps.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 5, 2018

• The Tesla chief executive suggested ways of helping the rescue efforts, involving the use of his companies’ technology to pinpoint the exact location of the boys and pump out water to reach them.
• The boys, aged between 11 and 16, and their assistant coach were found inside the Tham Luang cave in northern Chiang Rai province on Monday, after nine days underground. They went missing after setting out to explore the cave on June 23.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Shouting CEO, changing rules: Inside Tesla’s Model 3-building sprint

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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A tense and short-tempered Chief Executive Elon Musk barked at engineers on the Fremont, California assembly line. Tesla Inc pulled workers from other departments to keep pumping out the Model 3 electric sedans, disrupting production of the Model S and X lines. And weekend shifts were mandatory.

Tesla pulled out all the stops in the final week of June to meet its goal of making 5,000 Model 3s in a week, according to employees who spoke to Reuters.

Whether Tesla can do it week in and week out – and without relying on overtime and extra hands – is another question, and one that weighed on investors Monday, as shares slumped 2.3 percent.

Leading up to Sunday morning’s production milestone, Musk paced the Model 3 line, snapping at his engineers when the around-the-clock production slowed or stopped due to problems with robots, one worker said. Tesla built a new line in just two weeks in a huge tent outside the main factory, an unprecedented move in an industry that takes years to plan out its assembly lines, and said the tented production area accounted for 20 percent of the Model 3s produced last week.

“They were borrowing people from our line all day to cover their (Model 3) breaks so the line would continue to move,” said a Model S worker on Sunday.

Because of the focus on the Model 3, the S line is about 800 cars behind, the worker said.

“They’ve been throwing Model 3s ahead of the S to get painted to try to assure that they make their goal of 5,000,” the worker said. “The paint department can’t handle the volume.”

Disruption of the Model S and X lines could threaten Tesla’s target of building 100,000 of those vehicles in 2018. Tesla built 49,489 of those cars in the first half of this year.

Asked about the potential S and X impact, Tesla said it also produced 1,913 of those vehicles during the last week of the quarter along with its Model 3s.

Tesla said it built a total of 28,578 Model 3s in the second quarter, and 40,989 since production began last July.

Last week’s big push also brought a rewrite of the employee attendance policy. After mandatory weekend shifts were assigned, two workers said, Tesla rescinded a policy promising workers at least one week’s notice before weekend work.

“The manager and supervisor are verbally going around and saying: ‘If you don’t come in, you’ll be written up’,” one of the workers told Reuters last week.

Some employees are worried the frenetic pace plus long hours could burn out workers. One employee said they were told to keep working until they met their daily production mark, not when their shifts ended.

“They said starting tomorrow be prepared to work up to 12 hours,” said the Model S employee on Monday. “It’s gonna be basically 12 hours from now on and I’ve got a feeling it’s gonna be six days a week.”

To make its number, Tesla was willing to “spend any kind of money,” a Gigafactory worker said, pointing to the new battery assembly-line flown in from Europe via cargo planes to the Gigafactory in May.

In the morning of Sunday, July 5, about five hours after the self-imposed second-quarter deadline had passed, the number 5,000 flashed on a countdown screen viewed by Tesla’s Model 3 assembly-line workers. The Model 3 itself bore a “5,000” sign in its front window.

Tesla said on Monday that some of its Model 3 production would be on break as part of the July 4 holiday, with production to resume on Thursday. Tesla plans to build 6,000 Model 3s per week by August.

But the worker told to expect longer shifts warned that pushing assembly-line workers too hard could backfire.

“He (Musk) is gonna go through an awful lot of people because people are gonna start getting hurt left and right,” by the fast-moving assembly line, the worker said.

“There’s only so fast a person can move.”

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Elon Musk sleeps under his desk, even after a YouTube star raised $9,000 to buy him a couch

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Today, Tesla announced it had had its “most productive quarter” in company history, exceeding its goal to produce 5,000 Model 3 cars in a week.

This latest victory follows countless all-nighters at the Tesla factory for CEO Elon Musk, as the company hustled to meet delayed production targets. When Musk shared that he’d been sleeping in a Tesla factory conference room earlier this year, YouTube vlogger and Tesla fan Ben Sullins started a tongue-in-cheek fundraising campaign to get the billionaire a comfy new couch.

“The idea was that he should have a decent place to sleep when he’s pulling all-nighters,” Sullins tells CNBC Make It. Fans raised over $9,000 in less than a week, and twice that amount ended up going to a good cause — Musk matched the funds from his foundation, bringing the total donation to charity to more than $18,000.

After Sullins personally delivered a brand new couch to Tesla’s Fremont factory, Musk tweeted his gratitude – though it appears he still isn’t making much use of the gift.

The billionaire now sleeps on the floor under his desk, the Wall Street Journal reports. Writers Tim Higgins and Susan Pulliam note Musk keeps a pillow on a nearby chair so that he can stay close, around the clock, to the two general assembly lines building the Model 3 sedan.

Sullins, a full-time YouTube content producer and data scientist, says that he started the campaign on April 16 as a joke: “I thought zero people would donate.”

Between $7,609 in donations from 591 people on the GoFundMe site and an additional $1,500 donation collected by the Tesla Club Sweden(neither group is affiliated with Tesla), Sullins collected a total of $9,109 in less than a week. After furniture company Wayfair offered to donate the new couch, donors voted to give the money to U.K.-based renewable energy organization Renewable World.

Once Tesla confirmed that it would accept the gift, Sullins traveled from San Diego to the Fremont factory where Musk has been pulling his all-nighters to help orchestrate delivery.

Sullins didn’t get to meet Musk, but he was still surprised and pleased to get a shout-out from him over Twitter. “I consider him to live on a different planet so the fact that he responded was pretty special.”

Ultimately, the vlogger says he’s glad his joke turned into a more meaningful project.

As for Musk, he tells the Wall Street Journal that he recognizes he has been spread thin lately, but his focus remains on continuing to hit Tesla’s production goal.

“I’m feeling good about things,” Musk says. “I think there’s a good vibe — I think the energy is good.”

Source: Make It, CNBC.com.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Tesla makes good on 5,000 Model 3 production target

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Tesla Inc produced 5,031 Model 3 electric cars in the last seven days of its second quarter, the company said on Monday, beating its long-elusive production target after several hiccups.

The company also said 11,166 Model 3 vehicles were in transit to customers at the end of the second quarter, and would be delivered early next quarter.

Model 3 production tripled to 28,578 in the company’s second quarter from the previous quarter, Tesla said, adding that it expects to increase production to 6,000 per week by late next month.

The remaining net Model 3 reservations at the end of the second quarter stood at roughly 420,000, the company said. More than 450,000 people had ordered Model 3 cars at the end of the first quarter.

Tesla has been trying to hit a 5,000 per week production target of its Model 3 sedans for months after facing production obstacles. Last month, Musk said the carmaker should achieve its target by the end of June.

The company’s shares were up 4.5% at $358.48 in pre-market trading on the Nasdaq.

“The last 12 months were some of the most difficult in Tesla’s history,” the company said in a statement.

Money-losing Tesla has been burning through cash to produce the Model 3, and delays have also potentially compromised Tesla’s first-to-market position for a mid-priced, long-range battery electric car as a host of competitors prepare to launch rival vehicles.

Tesla also reaffirmed its positive cash flow outlook for the third and fourth quarters.

Despite originally touting the Model 3 as a $35,000 vehicle, Tesla has yet to begin building that basic version and instead is currently building a higher-priced version.

To meet its goal, Tesla had set up a new production line inside a tent on the campus of its Fremont factory. The company said the new general assembly line was responsible for about 20 percent of Model 3s produced last week.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Jeff Bezos heats up space race against Musk, aims Blue Origin commercial flight next year

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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While Elon Musk-founded SpaceX is hitting all the headlines on future space travel, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin is catching up fast, aiming to sell tickets for commercial flights to space next year.

Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are in the race to develop reusable rockets and are part of NASA’s sub-orbital reusable launch vehicle flight contract.

Powered by Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) high-performance computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities, Kent, Washington State-based Blue Origin has now solidified its mission to see “millions of people” working and living in space.

“We need to dramatically cut down the cost to send humans in space so that we can expand humanity in our solar system. To begin this journey, we plan to sell tickets for commercial flights from next year,” Rob Meyerson, Senior Vice President at Blue Origin, told the gathering at the AWS public sector summit in Washington.

“Setting up colonies on the Moon and other planets is our primary target and we will need large payloads for surface landing. We are building the appropriate technology for that,” Meyerson informed.

The statement is in line with US President Donald Trump’s directive to put NASA on a path to lead the return of Americans to the Moon.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has postponed its plans to send space tourists this year to circle the Moon, owing to technical and production challenges.

Another space junkie and Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson in May said he is training to become an astronaut and will be one of the first space tourists “within months”.

In Blue Origin’s kitty is “New Shepard” — a fully reusable vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) space vehicle, consisting of a pressurised capsule atop a booster that can be reused for at least 25 times.

Named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard, it can carry six astronauts to spend approximately three minutes in a high-quality, microgravity environment at an apogee of over 100 km.

April 30 marked the company’s first test-flight of “New Shepard” in 2018 and second flight of the New Shepard 2.0 spacecraft.

Blue Origin launched “New Shepard” to a target altitude of about 107 km, slightly higher than the typical target of about 100 km. It was Blue Origin’s eighth spaceflight since the company began flight testing “New Shepard” vehicles.

“Right now, we are living in a world where we need to throw away rockets within a year to ocean floors and millions of dollars go down the drain. With ‘New Shepard’, we can reuse the vehicle multiple times to significantly lower the travel cost,” Meyerson announced.

Currently, nearly 1,000 people are working at Blue Origin — diving deep into prototyping, research and development and designing the Next-Gen space vehicles.

“The sub-orbital space tours will make a good market for us and our customers are very excited. Once we become the most-skilled reusable rocket company in the low-orbit, we can plan to go further, deeper into the space,” the Blue Origin executive noted.

The company is currently hiring principal technologists and talent in machine learning and data learning who can help the company make a long and viable space road-map.

3D printing or Additive Manufacturing (AM) is crucial for the development of new materials and the company has deployed the technology for rocket propulsion and cryogenic systems.

“AWS is the key enabler for us. We are using high-performance computing from AWS for the entire product life cycle, R&D, data storage and processing, predictive analytics and system-level anatomy to make sense of the massive data-sets that we have,” Meyerson explained.

The company is now working on a larger rocket called “New Glenn” that could directly compete with SpaceX for commercial launch contracts, which is expected to be ready by 2020. John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth.

Featuring a fully reusable first stage, “New Glenn” will carry people and payloads routinely to Earth orbit. Blue Origin is constructing a state-of-the-art facility to build, integrate and launch “New Glenn” on Florida’s Space Coast.

Not just rockets, Blue Origin has also built reusable engines.

The BE-3 is the first new liquid hydrogen-fueled rocket engine to be developed for production in the US in over a decade. It’s been designed to withstand the extremely low temperatures of liquid hydrogen.

“The BE-4 is our fourth-generation liquid rocket engine, made to take us into orbital space and beyond. Using the latest design and manufacturing techniques, it’s made for both commercial and government missions,” the company said.

The BE-4 is currently under development and will fly on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket in 2019.

“Space travel is a marathon not a sprint. We are on the right track to write another chapter in the history of space travel,” Meyerson said.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

The central question that inspired all of Elon Musk’s businesses

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has had a busy year keeping up with the electric car company’s production and the resulting challenges. Even though Musk has pulled all-nighters in the Tesla factory, he still finds his work fun because he gets to accomplish what he first set out to do: be useful to other people.

“It’s actually pretty fun building electric cars. Product is useful to other people and good for environment,” Musk tweeted on Thursday. “I think that’s fundamental goodness.”

It’s actually pretty fun building electric cars. Product is useful to other people & good for environment. I think that’s fundamental goodness.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 22, 2018

When Musk was 20 years old and studying physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania, he focused on five big ideas: the internet, sustainable energy, interplanetary travel, genetics and artificial intelligence. Since then, Musk, 46, has founded and led companies that revolutionized each of those areas.

The underlying question behind all of Musk’s business ventures seems to be: “What can I do that would actually be useful?”

“If somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that’s a good thing,” Musk told Y Combinator CEO Sam Altman in a 2016 interview. “It doesn’t have to change the world.”

To be successful, it’s important to measure the impact you will have on others, Musk argued. “That’s why I think having something that makes a big difference, but affects a sort of small-to-moderate number of people is great,” he said.

In college, he explained, the first task he wanted to tackle was electric car innovations. After moving to Stanford to get a Ph.D. in energy physics, Musk got a summer internship at an energy storage start-up called Pinnacle Research. “That’s actually what I worked on as an intern, [it] was advanced ultra-capacitors, to see if there would be a breakthrough relative to batteries for energy storage in cars,” he said.

But Musk dropped out of Stanford in 1995 with $110,000 in college debt to do something he thought was more useful: go start an internet company. The result, Zip2, aimed to make media companies like the New York Times and Hearst go digital. For perspective, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had just launched his online bookstore in 1994.

Here is the invite to celebrate the new Zip2 offices. Julia Perry hung posters on the wall, and I did the catering. @georgezachary @kimbal @elonmusk @ToscaMusk #thestart pic.twitter.com/18k0DNu9Ss

— Maye Musk (@mayemusk) June 21, 2018

Musk couldn’t bear watching online businesses boom without getting in on the action: “I didn’t want to do a Ph.D. at Stanford and watch it all happen,” he said.

“You can get a doctorate on many things that ultimately do not a have practical bearing on the world,” Musk added. “And I really was just trying to be useful.”

Shortly afterward, in 1999, he co-founded online financial services company X.com, which a year later merged with entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s own financial site to become PayPal. By 2001, Musk left the company, but he made millions when PayPal sold to eBay.

Several years later, when he explained his plans to colonize Mars and improve high-speed travel around earth with SpaceX, Musk said plenty of people thought his ideas were “crazy” — and “they were not shy in saying that.” Even Musk thought his idea was crazy, but as he noted, technology “only gets better if smart people work like crazy to make it better.”

Top SpaceX HR exec: Here’s what it takes to score a job at Elon Musk’s company

“When starting SpaceX, I thought the odds of success were less than 10 percent, and I just accepted that actually probably I would just lose everything,” Musk said.

But on the other hand, maybe his progress could change the world.

“We could just move the ball forward, even if we died, maybe some other company could pick up the baton and keep moving it forward, so we would still do some good,” he said.

“Same with Tesla,” he continued. “I thought the odds of a car company succeeding were extremely low.”

Although he never expected to be involved in all five of the areas he aspired to work in during his college years, his inventions in those areas have boosted his net worth to an estimated $20 billion, according to Forbes.

“If you make something that has high value to people — and frankly if it’s just a little game or some improvement in photo sharing or something — if it has a small amount of good for a large number of people, I think that’s fine. Stuff doesn’t need to change the world just to be good,” Musk said.

Source: Make It, CNBC.com

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Elon Musk: Free cash handouts ‘will be necessary’ if robots take humans’ jobs

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Billionaire tech titan Elon Musk has been tweeting quite a lot of late — about everything from his philosophical mentors (Douglas Adams and Isaac Asimov) to his political leanings (he’s a socialist).

But nearly lost in a flurry of tweets, Musk now says that universal basic income (UBI) — essentially, free cash handouts — “will be necessary over time if AI [artificial intelligence] takes over most human jobs.”

That’s what Musk tweeted Friday in response to a question from a Twitter user who asked him if he supported UBI.

Universal basic income is a cash handout distributed to the people of a state or region irrespective of employment status. In November 2016, Musk himself told CNBC automation would lead to the need for cash handouts.

“There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation,” Musk told CNBC. “Yeah, I am not sure what else one would do. I think that is what would happen.”

And Musk isn’t the only Silicon Valley titan to surface the idea.

Billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has indicated his support for universal basic income as a way to inspire more entrepreneurial creativity.

“Let’s face it: There is something wrong with our system when I can leave [Harvard] and make billions of dollars in 10 years, while millions of students can’t afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business,” Zuckerberg said in his May 2017 commencement address at his alma mater. “Now it’s our time to define a new social contract for our generation. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things.”

And billionaire serial entrepreneur Richard Branson has said he supports investigating the idea for similar reasons to Musk.

“With the acceleration of [artificial intelligence] and other new technology … the world is changing fast,” Branson wrote in an August 2017 post. “A lot of exciting new innovations are going to be created, which will generate a lot of opportunities and a lot of wealth, but there is a real danger it could also reduce the amount of jobs. This will make experimenting with ideas like basic income even more important in the years to come.”

The idea of universal basic income is not exclusively the brain fodder of billionaires.

One young democratic presidential hopeful is banking his 2020 run for the White House on the idea of giving $1,000 per month to all citizens between the ages of 18 and 64. Entrepreneur and author Andrew Yangcalls his payment “the Freedom Dividend.”

Also, the young mayor of Stockton, Calif., Michael Tubbs, is piloting a universal basic income experiment as a way to alleviate poverty there. And UBI is officially part of the California Democratic Party’s 2018 party platform— a move that could potentially bring the idea of universal basic income out of the purely theoretical stage and into practice.

While Musk believes that automation could make universal basic income a necessity, he also says it could create more equality in the marketplace by encouraging greater competition for consumers’ money.

“Ironically, future automation will naturally lead to greater equality of consumption. Monopolies are true enemy of people. Competing to serve is good,” Musk added on Twitter on Saturday.

Source: Make It, CNBC.com.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Elon Musk: ‘I arrived in North America at 17 with $2,000’

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Forty-six-year-old tech titan Elon Musk is currently worth more than $20 billion, according to Forbes.

But the Tesla and SpaceX boss hasn’t always been so wealthy. On Saturday, Musk tweeted about the early years of his career.

“I arrived in North America at 17 w $2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books. Paid my own way thru college. Dropped out of Stanford Eng/Phys grad school w $110k in college debt. Created Internet startup w bro & Greg Khouri (love bro & loved Greg, may he RIP),” the billionaire tweeted on Saturday.

Musk was born in in Pretoria, South Africa, he said in an interview with entrepreneur and investor Kevin Rose published on YouTube in 2012. Musk also lived in Johannesburg and Durban in South Africa but wanted to move to America.

“It always seemed like when there was cool technology or things happening, it was kinda of in the United States. So, my goal as a kid was to get to get to America basically,” Musk told Rose.

Musk’s first stop in North America was in Canada, where his mother was born. Musk filled out the required forms to get both his mother — and then himself — a Canadian passport, he said in a 2013 interview at the Computer History Museum.

“Within three weeks of my getting my Canadian passport, I was in Canada,” said Musk. He spent a few years in Canada at Queen’s University, he says, and then got a scholarship to go to the University of Pennsylvania.

He didn’t know he wanted to be an entrepreneur, he said.

“I actually wasn’t sure what I wanted to do growing up. I think at one point I thought inventing stuff or creating things would be a cool thing to do. But I wasn’t really sure if that meant starting a company or whether that meant working for a company that made cool stuff,” Musk told Rose.

Musk moved to Silicon Valley to attend Stanford University graduate school. He tried, and failed, to get a job at Netscape Communications, the company that created the first web browser, Netscape Navigator.

“In ’95 I kinda thought the Internet would be something that would change the world in a major way and I wanted to be a part of it. Actually, what I first tried to do, was I tried to get a job at Netscape. I wouldn’t actually try to start a company, I’d try to get a job at Netscape,” he told Rose.

He even took to hanging around the Netscape lobby hoping to get a job there.

“I didn’t get any reply. I mean I had a physics and economics degree, or physics and business degree from Wharton, and I was doing grad studies in applied physics and materials science. I guess that… I mean, I didn’t have a computer science degree or several years working at a software company,” he tells Rose. “For whatever reason, I didn’t get a reply from Netscape and I actually tried hanging out in the lobby, but I was too shy to talk to anyone. So I’m just like standing in the lobby.

“It was pretty embarrassing. I was just sort of standing there trying to see if there’s someone I could talk to and then I just couldn’t, I couldn’t… I was too scared to talk to anyone. So then I left.”

Musk left Stanford to start Zip2, which was founded in 1996, according to Crunchbase.

“I was just writing software that summer, and it got to the start of the quarter for Stanford and I had to make a decision, so I decided to go on deferment. I figured if I start a company and it doesn’t work, then I can always go back to grad school,” Musk told Rose. “So I talked to the chairman of the department and he let me go on deferment, and I said I’d probably be back in six months and he said he was probably never going to hear from me again, and he was correct. I’ve never spoken to him since.”

Zip2 aimed to bring media companies to the internet, he told Rose. The “initial idea was to create software that could help bring the media companies online. So we helped, in a small way, bring companies like New York Times, Hearst, Knight-Ridder and so forth, bring them online. They weren’t actually always online — people don’t realize that,” Musk told Rose in 2012.

Saturday, Musk Tweeted about his work at Zip2.

According to Musk, his work with Zip2 in the 1990s is the reason he understands the way newsrooms work now. Musk has gone on tweet storms criticizing the media recently (one of which attracted anti-semitic rhetoric) and said he wants to launch a platform to rate the credibility of journalists, which he plans to call, Pravduh. “Pravda” means “truth” in Russian.

At the end of May, Musk tweeted that he had bought the domain name Pravduh.com.

Musk also dropped cryptic clues in March that he was launching an “intergalactic media empire,” called “Thud!” for which he reportedly tapped editors from The Onion.

As for Zip2, Compaq bought the company in 1999. Musk said that, at the time, he had to choose between buying a house and a sports car with his windfall. He opted for the sportscar, he tweeted.

Musk wrecked that car, a McLaren F1, in 2000 while driving with his PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, he revealed in a 2012 interview with PandoDaily.

“Peter said, ‘So what can this do?’ and like probably No. 1 on the list of famous last words, I said, ‘Watch this.’ So I floored it and did a lane change on Sand Hill,” said Musk, referring to the famous Silicon Valley road. “We hit an embankment, like a 45-degree embankment on Sand Hill, which tossed the car into the air like a discus and it kept rotating with about three foot of air clearance.”

Saturday’s tweets from Musk about his early years came after he revealed some details about a SpaceX version of the Tesla supercar, the Roadster.

While the idea of a rocket-powered Tesla may feel like a joke, Musk insists he is serious.

Source: Make It, CNBC.com.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Tesla to lay off 9% workers, says Elon Musk

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced that the luxury auto manufacturing firm will lay off 9 percent of its workforce to show that it can be profitable after being unable to move into the black so far in the 15 years since it was founded.

Musk sent a letter to Tesla employees on Tuesday saying that “As part of this effort, and the need to reduce costs and become profitable, we have made the difficult decision to let go of approximately 9 percent of our colleagues across the company.”

Difficult, but necessary Tesla reorg underway. My email to the company has already leaked to media. Here it is unfiltered: pic.twitter.com/4LToWoxScx

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 12, 2018

“These cuts were almost entirely made from our salaried population and no production associates were included, so this will not affect our ability to reach Model 3 production targets in the coming months,” he added, referring to the firm’s premier electric vehicle.

The measure means that some 4,100 of the firm’s 46,000 employees will lose their jobs, although the layoffs will not affect operations at the factory producing the Model 3, Efe reported.

The firm’s billionaire founder also told Tesla employees that the company will not renew the agreement it has with Home Depot to rent space at some 800 of the latter’s stores to sell its home solar panel products.

Musk said that “In order to minimise the impact, Tesla is providing significant salary and stock vesting (proportionate to length of service) to those we are letting go,” and – regarding the massive layoffs, he added that he was “making this hard decision now so that we never have to do this again.”

In May, Musk announced a significant reorganisation of Tesla in the face of the economic difficulties it was facing and inability to turn a profit.

Tesla’s losses increased by 97.5 percent to just under $785 million in the first quarter of 2018, despite the fact that earnings rose by 26.4 percent to more than $3.4 billion.

Musk has denied that the firm was having financial problems, although key sector analysts have said that Tesla has been rapidly consuming its capital reserves and will probably need cash to stay afloat by the end of this year or the beginning of 2019.

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow