Walmarts CEO makes 1,076 times what some of the companys workers make in a year. The discount giant is not alone. Workers at 50 U.S.-based corporations would have to work at least 1,000 years to make what their CEOs did in just one year in 2018.

The biggest culprit is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who earned more than $2.28 billion from Tesla in 2018, including his salary, stock options, stock appreciation, and other perks. With a median Tesla worker salary of $56,163, Musk takes home 40,668 times a median workers income per year.

Musk is an outlier. The second biggest CEO to median worker pay gap takes place at Abercrombie & Fitch, where CEO Fran Horowitz-Bonadies makes 3,660 times the salary of the median worker. Gap, Mattel, and Align Technology (the makers of Invisalign) come next, all with salary disparities greater than 3,100 to one.

Its really a systemic problem, says Sara Anderson, the lead author of the Institute for Policy Studies new report, Executive Excess 2019: Making Corporations Pay for Big Pay Gaps, which published these statistics today. Anderson has been the lead author of these reports for the past 26 years and directs the IPS Global Economy Project. Now, she says, policymakers are finally acting on an issue she sees as one of the key drivers of inequality. Thats true not just in the U.S. but also in other countries, where major U.S. corporations often employ people in order to get away with cheaper wages.

Beginning with their 2018 proxy statements, public companies in the U.S. have been required to disclose the difference between what their CEOs make in a year and what median workers earn, a change called for in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. In 2016, policymakers in Portland, Oregon, passed a tax on corporations with CEOs who make at least 100 times more than the median worker pay. Its exciting to see this taking off at state and local levels, says Anderson, who was quite involved in passing Portlands tax. The tax applies to companies doing business in Portland and penalizes them according to the size of their CEO-worker pay gaps. For instance, companies where CEOs make 250 times that of the median worker have to pay 25% in taxes.

The general income gap in the U.S. has been increasing over the past several decades. Between 1978 and 2017, the earnings of the top 0.1% of Americans went up by about 340%but thats still nothing compared to how much CEOs have been making. In that same time period, CEO pay grew at three times that rate, with the average CEO of a major corporation making 5.4 times as much as an average member of the top 0.1%. Unsurprisingly, the pay gap is broadly unpopular among voters. I am from a rural, pretty red community in the Midwest, and for a long, long time, ordinary people have been totally outraged about the gap between CEO and worker pay across the political spectrum, Anderson says.

Anderson was surprised by the diversity in the top 50 U.S. corporations with the widest pay gaps. While low-wage retailers, like Walmart, predictably made the list, there were also plenty of big tech firms and even auto parts businesses. It shows the breadth of this problem, she says. We cant just think that its a few bad apples like Walmart and McDonalds.

Walmart, with its 1,076:1 pay gap, has the 46th highest CEO to worker pay gap on the list. McDonalds is number 16, with a gap of 2,124:1.

In March 2020, San Francisco will have a tax similar to Portlands on the ballot, and bills have been introduced in at least six other state legislatures. Taxes and fees relating to CEO versus worker pay disparities have been proposed in Illinois, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Washington, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

Its taken a while for policymakers to catch up on this, says Anderson. The disclosure rule is really a first step toward tougher policies to crack down on this issue . . . Now we can see how much specific companies are contributing to our countrys inequality problem and use that data to narrow these gaps.

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50 US corporations have CEO-worker pay gaps of more than 1,000 to 1 - Fast Company

WeWork's CEO Adam Neumann is stepping down from the startup amid its delayed initial public offering.

However, the controversial executive will remain executive chairman of the company that he's built over the past five years, putting him in a position to provide advice and vision while absent from day-to-day decisions.

That has one venture capital expert comparing him to Tesla's polarizing chief executive, Elon Musk.

"Startups deserve to have the visionary on board," Santosh Rao, head of research at Manhattan Venture Partners, told Business Insider on Tuesday. "But this is a weird situation. He will be there but he's not going to run the company."

"It's almost like an Elon Musk situation," he continued. "The company runs on his charisma and vision, so I think this is a good middle ground."

Earlier this month, Manhattan Venture Partners, an investment firm and research shop that focuses on later stage, Pre-IPO companies, initiated coverage on WeWork shortly before its IPO documents were filed with US regulators. In its report, Rao said WeWork was worth about $28 billion, about half of the company's originally targeted value.

That valuation target was said to fallen drastically in recent weeks, as low as $10 billion, amid skepticism of Neumann'sweb of loans, real-estate deals, and family involvement with the company.

"Maybe if WeWork had come out before Lyft and Uber, they would have got a pass," Rao told Business Insider earlier this month. "But now, seeing how the appetite for companies without a path to profitability has gone down, I don't think they will get the benefit of the doubt."

Both Uber and Lyft have stumbled out of the gate following their public-market debuts earlier this year. Many investors from later private rounds are now in the red, as the stocks have fallen 20% and 43%, respectively, in the months since.

Two WeWork executives, Artie Minson and Sebastian Gunningham, will be filling Neumann's shoes as co-CEO's, the company said.

Read more:WeWork will replace Adam Neumann with two new CEOs. Here's everything we know about Sebastian Gunningham and Artie Minson.

"As co-founder of WeWork, I am so proud of this team and the incredible company that we have built over the last decade," Neumann said in a statement.

"Our global platform now spans 111 cities in 29 countries, serving more than 527,000 members each day. While our business has never been stronger, in recent weeks, the scrutiny directed toward me has become a significant distraction, and I have decided that it is in the best interest of the company to step down as chief executive. Thank you to my colleagues, our members, our landlord partners, and our investors for continuing to believe in this great business."

An earlier version of this post misstated when MVP launched coverage of WeWork, it was before the company's S-1 was filed.

Are you a WeWork employee? Have a story to share? Get in touch with this reporter at grapier@businessinsider.com. For sensitive tips, secure contact methods can be found here.

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WeWork's CEO drama has one industry insider calling it an 'Elon Musk situation' - Business Insider

On clear mornings, the mirror-like skin of a rocket ship catches the sunrise and bounces the early light into the bedroom of Maria and Ray Pointer.

Maria, a 64-year-old Alaskan native who has lived in Boca Chica, Texas, since 2005, said she finds herself gazing at the vehicle while juicing oranges or making breakfast.

"I get to look at this shiny sunrise, this orange sun glisten off of a rocket ship," she said. "It's like a picture book for a child, you know? You turn the page and there's the rocket ship."

The vehicle belongs to SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk. It's a prototype of Starship, a rocket-launch system that may stand nearly 400 feet when completed.

SpaceX's experimental stainless-steel Starhopper rocket ship in Texas. A person is shown at the bottom for scale.Elon Musk/SpaceX via TwitterMusk views Starship (formerly called " Big Falcon Rocket") as the heart of SpaceX's future. It's designed to be the largest and most capable rocket system in history, and also the cheapest to launch.

So far, SpaceX has based most of Starship's skunkworks-style development program out of south Texas, far from the company's California headquarters.

Starhopper, as Musk dubbed the first prototype, squared perfectly in the Pointers' west-facing windows. The company recently crawled the gleaming, 60-foot-tall rocket past their yard and onto a launchpad less than two miles from their home.

In April, the vehicle completed its first "hops," short test launches of perhaps a foot or two off the ground, which proved the ship worthy of tougher trials.

Completed Starship vehicles would have two main sections. A lower stage, or booster, called Super Heavy, would help propel an upper-stage spaceship, Starship, far above the Earth. The spaceship would then detach, ignite its Raptor rocket engines, and shoot into orbit.

According to Musk, one Starship may carry 100 people and 150 tons of cargo to the surface of Mars. There, the ship would refuel on methane and oxygen created from Martian resources before returning to Earth.

Developing this system at the company's remote and privately controlled Texas facility comes with several advantages. The area is fairly close to the equator, which adds a natural speed boost to rockets. SpaceX's autonomy over the site also gives the company more flexibility in scheduling launches, privacy from competitors, and greater freedom in how it uses the land.

But launching a skyscraper-size rocket from this area (engineering challenges notwithstanding) is no trivial undertaking. For one, any future flight path must avoid populated islands. The bay-bottom mud and sand below SpaceX's site also cause dense structures and tall towers tend to sink and lean. Gulf Coast weather is a challenge, too, as SpaceX recently saw when gale-force winds damaged its Starhopper.

And then there are the 20 or so people, like the Pointers, who live in or near Boca Chica Village. For them, the unparalleled view of the experimental rocket program, while stirring, is also foreboding.

"Most of us came down here are here because we're retired and wanted a nice quiet place to live," Sam Clauson, a part-time resident of Boca Chica Village, said.

A distant view of SpaceX's Starhopper rocket ship prototype from Highway 4 in Boca Chica, Texas.Dave Mosher/Business Insider

That quiet has been broken. The area is morphing from a sleepy beach community into an industrial site, and possibly an active Mars spaceport. Starhopper's first "hop" was so loud that it knocked off part of a window treatment inside the Pointers' house. (That test involved one Raptor engine, though 31 are planned for the booster.)

The disruptive roar of rocket engines also serves as a reminder that an explosion could happen nearby. The Pointers, the Clausons, and their Boca Chica neighbors sit no more than two miles from SpaceX's current launch pad likely the closest anyone on the planet lives to such a site.

Still, it appears SpaceX is staking a good chunk of its future on south Texas.

Highway 4 dead-ends at Boca Chica Beach, just east of SpaceX's launch site.Dave Mosher/Business Insider

SpaceX's Texas facility is about five miles south of South Padre Island, a popular destination for spring breakers, and about 17 miles east of Brownsville, the largest nearby city and one of the most impoverished in the US.

One two-lane road, Highway 4, runs to the site. The route begins at Gateway International Bridge on the US-Mexico border; east of Brownsville, it's mostly desolate and uninhabited. Border patrol planes fly over a handful of farms, and plaques mark historic sites, such as the Battle of Palmito Ranch, arguably the last conflict of the Civil War. (The Confederates repelled Union forces, though several days after the war technically ended.)

SpaceX's private ownership and operation of the site is a key advantage: It gives the company far more autonomy and flexibility to do launches and speed up experiments than SpaceX would have at a government-controlled site. The lack of competitors' facilities in the area also reduces the risk of trade secrets inadvertently getting into the wrong hands. (Though residents and visitors often post photos of work at the site online.)

A satellite view of Boca Chica, where SpaceX is building a rocket launch site. Google Earth; Landsat/Copernicus

Plus, Boca Chica is one of the US's southernmost locations, which offers SpaceX a meaningful advantage in rocket-fuel economy. At the equator, the Earth's surface moves laterally at about 1,040 mph. At the planet's north axis, its velocity is zero. So the closer a rocket is to the equator, the more free momentum it can pick up during launch, and the more fuel it can reserve.

At Cape Canaveral, Florida where SpaceX launches most of its rockets Earth's eastward surface velocity is about 914 mph. In Boca Chica, the speed is a slightly faster 935 mph. Both sites provide about 5% of the velocity a rocket needs to get to orbit, and every ounce of fuel saved allows for a larger payload, more wiggle room in flight paths, and greater assurance that a mission will succeed.

These and other perks have spurred SpaceX's interest in Boca Chica since at least May 2012. That's when the company scooped up its first property in the area via its shell company, Dogleg Park LLC (a "dogleg" is a course-changing rocket maneuver). Over the next three years, Dogleg acquired more unclaimed and derelict plots from Cameron County in part by paying off decades of back taxes. The company also mailed letters to homeowners about buying them out.

In 2014, with the support of county and state officials, SpaceX went public with its plan to convert those plots into a spaceport. By then, the company had bought or leased nearly 100 acres of land. SpaceX has since acquired dozens of additional acres.

An overview of the Boca Chica area in Texas circa 2017. Google Earth

Carlos Cascos was the judge who signed off on SpaceX's original plan to develop the Boca Chica site. He said Musk seemed to look at the area as a kind of "genesis project" for bringing economic opportunities to south Texas.

"He wanted to go in an area, improve it improve the working conditions, living conditions by bringing in a substantial company," Cascos said.

Musk told Texas legislators in 2014 that Boca Chica could become a "commercial version of Cape Canaveral."

To woo SpaceX to follow through on that vision, Cameron County and the state freed up incentives totaling about $15 million. SpaceX bit, and the Federal Aviation Administration granted final approval in July 2014.

Musk and SpaceX are developing a stainless-steel rocket ship called Starship. Kimi Talvitie; NASA; Mark Brake/Getty Images; Samantha Lee/Business Insider

Musk is hungry to establish a city on Mars and back up humanity like a hard drive in case asteroid strikes, nuclear war, climate disruption, or other cataclysms befall Earth. He seems to believe people should be exploring space with abandon.

Musk hopes to establish a self-sustaining Martian base by 2050, and Starship is essential to that plan.

If Starship materializes according to Musk's plans, it would become the largest and most affordable spaceflight system ever built. That's because it's intended to be fully reusable. Big, multimillion-dollar rocket parts wouldn't get discarded as in most launch systems today. Achieving this level of reusability, Musk says, would undercut the per-ounce cost of launching payloads on SpaceX's own go-to rocket, Falcon 9, by a factor of 5 to 10.

An illustration of SpaceX's upcoming Starship spaceship (left), Super Heavy rocket booster (right), and an integrated Starship-Super Heavy launch system. Kimi Talvitie

From a business standpoint, the ramifications of a functional Starship would be sweeping and staggering. SpaceX could use the system to speed up its effort to remake the internet by deploying hundreds of telecommunications satellites in a single launch. Starship would also make NASA's forthcoming monster rocket, called Space Launch System, seem archaic. Plus, the economics of the Starship threatens to bankrupt some of SpaceX's biggest private competitors.

But the system is not yet real. Musk has said it could take between $2 billion and $10 billion to get there, though an aerospace industry analyst told Business Insider that upper range could easily balloon to $20 billion if SpaceX hits major setbacks.

So far, the company has built functional, powerful Raptor rocket engines perhaps the most critical piece of the system and it's making vehicle prototypes to attach them to (like Starhopper). Both experimental vehicles have been welded together from panels of stainless steel, each about as tall and wide as a person. Once assembled, these prototypes will enable SpaceX to see whether its engines can push a multimillion-pound spacecraft into orbit.

One of SpaceX's orbital-class Starship prototypes gets assembled in Boca Chica.Dave Mosher/Business Insider

The Pointers' home is sandwiched between those checkboxes on SpaceX's to-do list. Next to a warehouse-size tent, workers are building a follow-up prototype to Starhopper that could be capable of reaching orbit. A nosecone was recently attached to the new prototype's hull.

Yet SpaceX's journey to this point has not been a walk in the park.

Musk breaks ground on SpaceX's launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, with congressman Filemon Vela (left) and Texas Gov. Rick Perry on September 22, 2014.Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis via Getty Images

During a groundbreaking ceremony in September 2014, Musk and then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry plunged shovels into a pile of sandy dirt and posed for photographers.

"It could very well be that the first person that departs for another planet could depart from this location," Musk said that day.

He told reporters that SpaceX expected to spend about $100 million developing the site. The original plan was to develop an operational spaceport by 2017 and launch up to two Falcon Heavy and 10 Falcon 9 rockets a year.

The company underestimated the task.

In its original plans for the site, SpaceX was to erect four lightning towers around a launchpad to draw any would-be strikes away from the rocket. Designs also called for a tower capable of flooding the pad with 250,000 gallons of water during lift-off, a trick used to dampen dangerous levels of noise and vibration that could threaten a launch.

A map, circa May 2014, showing SpaceX's plans to develop part of Boca Chica into an active spaceport for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rocket launches. SpaceX/Federal Aviation Administration

But Brazos Island, where SpaceX built its first launch pad in the area, is essentially a giant sandbar. Its porous soil allows ocean water to seep in and out with the shifting tide. Digging down just a few feet down can reveal a soupy, salty, gritty muck.

SpaceX kicked off construction by drilling for bedrock, which could help anchor a dense launch pad. It never found any.

"There was no way for the company to have known this prior to purchasing the land," SpaceX said.

Susan Hovorka, at the University of Texas, has studied the state's coastal geology. She said the idea of bedrock doesn't apply to the Gulf Coast. To geologists, she said, bedrock implies a kind of sharp break in the density of deposits, usually between soil and a stony layer.

"In areas like the Gulf Coast, where deposition has been ongoing, there is not sharp break," Hovorka said.

SpaceX's earliest Mars rocket ship prototype, called Starhopper, sits on a launchpad after its first launch in April 2019.Dave Mosher/Business Insider

Concrete pilings can support large structures in soft soil, and SpaceX's construction plans called for hundreds of them. But John Hancock, who led a wetland-reclamation project in the area in 2006, said he was "flabbergasted" that anyone would try to build anything large near Boca Chica Beach.

"Where the pad is, that's all bay bottom there is no bottom," he said. "Back in 2006, there was a tower that was built on Padre Island. Before it was ever occupied, it started leaning, and they had to blow the thing up."

SpaceX eventually decided to "surcharge" or compact the ground at its launch site. Contractors dumped about 310,000 cubic yards of soil enough to cover a football field with 13 stories of dirt.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 explodes during a test on the launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida on September 1, 2016.USLaunchReport/YouTube

The company said the move created ground that was "more suitable" for dense foundations, but added that the process delayed the company's schedule.

The losses of Falcon 9 rockets in 2015 and 2016 also drew SpaceX's time and resources away from Boca Chica. As a result of all these challenges, the company's original plan and schedule for the site went into the waste bin.

During a May 2018 teleconference, Musk said the Texas facility would be dedicated to Starship instead of the commercial spaceport it had previously pitched. SpaceX workers began swarming the site later that year.

In March, just before the debut of Starhopper, Musk said on Twitter that SpaceX was "working on regulatory approval" for Starship launches from Boca Chica as well as Florida.

A sign points to one of SpaceX's launch site facilities in Boca Chica.Dave Mosher/Business Insider

After lifting off of a launch pad, rockets don't fly straight up into space; they turn and accelerate somewhat parallel to Earth's surface.

It takes about eight minutes to reach low-Earth orbit, and on their way vehicles reach tremendous speeds. Within a minute of launch they can exceed the speed of sound, and a minute or so later they reach speeds five times that fast.

This means if something goes wrong, a failed launch can send high-speed wreckage raining back down. (Even when a rocket mission succeeds, falling rocket parts still pose a risk.) To avoid putting any people in danger, orbital-class rockets launched from SpaceX's Texas site would have several unique obstacles to avoid in their flight path.

In a white paper published in 2014, experts Edward Ellegood and Wayne Eleazer flagged numerous issues that they said the FAA did not fully address when it granted SpaceX approval for the Boca Chica site.

A map shows potential rocket flight paths from Boca Chica.Edward Ellegood and Wayne Eleazer/Space Traffic Management Conference

One of the biggest challenges, they said, would be avoiding flying over Cuba, southern Florida, and the Yucatan Peninsula, as well as smaller islands in between. The study added that oil rigs also pepper the Gulf of Mexico, several major aircraft flight paths cut across it, and the water has heavy boat traffic.

"Falling vehicle components and payloads from failed launch attempts, or debris from their aerodynamic or commanded breakup, can damage aircraft in flight and structures on the ground as well as injure individuals," Ellegood and Eleazer wrote. "In addition, some debris may detonate on impact, producing a blast hazard, or may act as firebrands to initiate fires on impact."

Mitigating these hazards might limit the orbits SpaceX could access, or at the very least incur complexity and cost.

Ellegood and Eleazer also flagged a hazard on the ground: weather.

"High ground-level winds may result in the vehicle being tipped over," they wrote. The warning turned out to be prophetic.

SpaceX's "test hopper," an experimental stainless-steel ship, after it was built in Texas (left) and an illustration of the vehicle. A person is shown at the bottom to provide a sense of scale.Elon Musk/SpaceX via Twitter; Business Insider

On January 5, Musk published a striking rendering of a Starhopper prototype, complete with a nosecone and a human figure for scale. Six days later, he posted an incredibly similar image, but this time it was real.

"Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the SpaceX Texas launch site," Musk tweeted. "This is an actual picture, not a rendering."

As the internet awed at the shiny vehicle, however, a cold front was preparing to push south from Canada, bringing powerful winds.

Without a building in which to house its new prototype, SpaceX anchored Starhopper in an operations yard next to the Pointers' home. But when 50-mph gusts arrived on January 23, the nosecone blew off like a hat.

"It was nothing but rattling and metal and trees breaking it felt like a hurricane," Pointer said the next morning. "Everything SpaceX did to get ready for this storm worked against them. It looked like they blocked the wind coming from the southeast, but the winds shifted in the night and came from the northeast, and that sucker went flying."

The nosecone or top portion of SpaceX's Starhopper prototype blew off its base on January 23, 2019, leading the company to scrap the part.Maria Pointer (bocachicaMaria)

Barry Goldsmith, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service based in Brownsville, said strong winds are typical in south Texas.

"The cold air has nothing to stop it coming out of southwestern Canada or northwestern Canada, driving down the plains," he said. "To see wind gusts at gale force, which is roughly 40 mph during the winter, is not an uncommon occurrence."

These winds, he added, are a problem SpaceX is "going to have to manage."

The company also has to factor in a phenomenon called wind shear the difference in the speed and direction of wind at one altitude versus another. When a rocket screams beyond the speed of sound, the changing wind speeds are like extreme turbulence. Musk once said high wind shear can hit a rocket "like a sledgehammer."

"We could have a day where the winds at Boca Chica beach and the SpaceX site may be 10 mph or less from the east. And then just 3,000 to 5,000 feet above the surface, it could be howling out of the south at 35 knots or 40 mph," Goldsmith said.

This nuisance can be avoided by waiting until a different day to launch a rocket, but Goldsmith said SpaceX might face that possibility more in Texas than at its Florida launch sites.

On top of these day-to-day weather issues, Texas' Gulf Coast also has a history of devastating cyclones.

Parts of south Texas, like Arroyo City, were inundated by Hurricane Beulah on October 8, 1967.Ted Powers/Associated Press

In 1967, Hurricane Beulah made landfall near the spot where SpaceX's new launchpad sits. The storm pushed a 15- to 20-foot storm surge over Padre Island and killed at least 58 people. In 2008, Hurricane Ike severely damaged the Pointers' home, even though Boca Chica did not take a direct hit.

Goldsmith said SpaceX should expect a direct hurricane hit every 15 to 40 years. In that case, storm surge could be a big concern, since Brazos Island is coastal and close to sea level. NOAA's storm-surge-vulnerability maps suggest SpaceX's properties could be deluged by more than 9 feet of seawater if a Category 5 hurricane makes landfall there.

But Goldsmith guessed that the company will have hurricane mitigation plans in place, such as a means to raise, move, or lock down equipment. Indeed, SpaceX now appears to be constructing a building to shelter its prototypes.

A view of Weems Road in Boca Chica.Dave Mosher/Business Insider

Rockets launch from dozens of spaceports around the world. If people live close by, site operators often evacuate the population prior to launch. But no other spaceport confines a local village inside of it the way SpaceX's does in Boca Chica.

Some area residents own homes about 1.5 miles from SpaceX's launch pad. By comparison, Florida's Kennedy Space Center has a three-mile safety limit from a blast wave.

"The reason for that limit was there was the assumption was everything goes to hell in a handbasket at once," said Bob Sieck, who served as launch director for more than 50 space-shuttle missions and now volunteers on NASA's Safety Advisory Council. He added that in his opinion, for a full-scale Starship, "two miles is too close it's cutting it too close."

Despite this proximity, Clauson said the last official meeting that SpaceX held with villagers was several years ago.

"We were just all citizens trying to find out what the hell is going on, and what are we going to have to put up with? And are we going to be safe here? Are we going to lose our land?" he said.

Things went south during the meeting, according to Clauson.

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Before Elon Musk reaches Mars, SpaceX may need to survive ...

Most entrepreneurs are lucky to have one billion-dollar company to their name. Elon Musk, Americas real-life Tony Stark, has four. Perhaps best known as the C.E.O. and founder of the private aerospace company SpaceX and C.E.O. and co-founder of electric carmaker Tesla Motors, Musk isnt shy about his ultimate ambitions: helping to save the planet by shifting the world economy to sustainable energy. But, like any savvy billionaire, Musk is hedging his bets, too, by working actively to establish a human colony on Mars.

If anyone can bring humanity into the interplanetary age, its Musk. Born in South Africa to an electrical engineer father and model Maye Musk, he developed an interest in computer programming at an early age, selling the code to a video game he had developed to a magazine when he was just 12 years old. In 1992, Musk moved to the United States, where he received a dual degree from the University of Pennsylvania in physics and economics, before flying west to Stanford to begin a Ph.D. in applied physics. Two days into his program, he dropped out to become an entrepreneur. His first start-up, a software company called Zip2, sold to Compaq four years later, in 1999, for more than $300 million in cash, with more than $30 million in stock options.

A millionaire many times over at the age of 28, Musk didnt hesitate before starting over again with X.com, a financial services business that quickly merged with the company that would become PayPal. Two years later, the payments processing start-up was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, netting Musk another $165 million. But by then, Musk was already dreaming bigger. In 2002, he poured $100 million of his fortune into founding SpaceX, a private aerospace company with the goal of making spaceflight affordable by building the first reusable rocket. And in 2004, he got involved with Tesla Motors, leading a series A funding round and joining its board as chairman. That limitless ambition nearly cost him everything. During the financial crisis in 2008, after he had become C.E.O. of Tesla, both companies were on the verge of failure and Musk was deep in personal debt trying to keep them afloat. But Musk is the most risk-immune person Ive ever met, recalled venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, a friend and managing partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the renowned venture capital firm, who has backed both efforts, in an interview with Esther Dyson for Business Insider. Hes really an American hero, more than anyone Ive ever met.

SpaceX and Tesla both pulled through, thanks to Musk and an assist from the U.S. government, which gave him a $1.6 billion NASA contract and offered generous green energy subsidies on Teslas first production car, the blistering fast, all-electric Roadster. Today, SpaceX is the largest private producer of rocket motors in the world, and Tesla is onto its third-generation vehicle, the Model 3, which has already secured about $15 billion in pre-order sales, according to the company. SolarCity, another company Musk co-founded and for which he is the largest shareholder, is now one of the top two residential solar contractors in the U.S. Musk, obviously, is not taking a break from success. His next mission? Landing a rocket ship on Mars, as early as 2018.

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Hive: Elon Musk News, In-Depth Articles, Photos & Videos ...

Photograph by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

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Tesla stock has been falling since Thursday, when CEO Elon Musk said the company would be closing its stores in favor of an online-only sales model.

On Tuesday, with the stock down again, the companys largest outside shareholder expressed its support for Musk, but acknowledged that it was open to a different role for the Tesla (ticker: TSLA) founder and CEO.

We wouldnt be against him having a different role, James Anderson, head of global equities for Ballie Gifford, told Barrons. I dont think he needs to be CEO.

Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou is set to face extradition hearings in Canada after the U.S. charged her with crimes related to violating sanctions against Iran. WSJs Shelby Holliday explains three things to know about the case. Photo: AP

Anderson was answering a question about how Musks circumstances could change given the Securities and Exchange Commissions request to a federal court to find Musk in contempt.

Tesla stock closed down 3.1% Tuesday, to $276.54 per share, as the broader S&P 500 was flat.

Anderson said Musk was essential to Tesla, but he suggested that the companys founder could play some other role within the company, such as taking on a chief ideologue position.

A Tesla spokesman didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tesla stock is down 13% since the company made its online sales announcement last Thursday. On a call with reporters, Musk also acknowledged the company would not be profitable in the first quarter.

The new sales strategy came only days after the SEC said it was asking a federal judge to find Teslas CEO in contempt of court. The SEC action followed a recent round of Musks tweets where he seemed to mislead investors about Teslas 2019 production, before correcting himself a few hours later.

Investors have long traded alongside Musk, with shares falling in and out of favor based on his behavior. Through it all, the companys largest outside shareholder, Baillie Gifford, has remained a steadfast supporter. The firm, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, currently owns 13 million shares, or 7.7% of Teslas stock, valued at $3.8 billion. Baillie Gifford is Teslas second largest shareholder, behind Musk, who owns 19.7% of the stock.

The firm has been building its stake in Tesla since 2013, according to FactSet, rarely selling shares.

On Tuesday, Musk tweeted that the companys decision to hold a press-only call to announce its lower priced Model 3 and its change in strategy with regard to sales was a mistake.

Write to Alex Eule at alex.eule@barrons.com

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Elon Musk Doesnt Need to Be Tesla CEO, Top Shareholder ...

The Securities and Exchange Commission is between a rock and a hard place, experts say, in deciding what to do about what it told a judge on Tuesday is Elon Musks violation of the clear and unambiguous terms of a legal settlement the Tesla CEO made in October.

You cant stop Tweeting Elon from tweeting, but that might not be such a big problem if he exercised good judgement, Matt Kelly, editor of the Radical Compliance newsletter and a long-time observer of corporate governance and compliance issues, told MarketWatch. Instead, he repeatedly displays a deliberate, open and defiant attitude towards the role of the SEC in protecting investors from his recklessness.

SEC Chairman Jay Clayton argued at the time of the original October settlement that taking Musk out of Tesla may also harm investors, since he is so important to the company. That would be anathema to the regulators mission to protect investors.

The October settlement with the SEC resolved a fraud charge resulting from tweets Musk made about a potential Tesla take-private transaction. The SEC said in its legal filing that the requirement was necessary to prevent Musk from recklessly sending out false or inaccurate information ever again. Musk and Tesla TSLA, -3.20% had promised the SEC that the CEO would start getting pre-approval for any communications, including tweets, that might contain information material to Tesla or its shareholders.

But four months later, on Feb 19, Musk tweeted out a forecast of automobile production that was not consistent with what the company had reported in its recent earnings release and conference call.

The companys attorney, Brad Bondi, confirmed to the SEC that Musk had not sought or received pre-approval for the inaccurate tweet that was sent out to his 24 million Twitter followers.

On Tuesday U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan ordered Musk to explain by March 11 why he should not be held in contempt for violating the settlement agreement.

The SEC enforcement action was ultimately settled not just against Musk but also against Tesla, Kevin LaCroix, an attorney and executive vice president at RT ProExec, an insurance intermediary focused exclusively on officer and director liability issues, told MarketWatch.

I would think the SEC has the right to return to court to reopen the matter as to the company, too. The settlement with the company agreed to a number of measures regarding the companys board (Musk to step down as chairman, independent directors to be appointed). The SEC could say that the companys boards is falling short on supervising Musk and that violate the purposes and intent of the agreement, LaCroix told MarketWatch.

Read: Tesla finally launches $35,000 Model 3, and moves all sales online

See: Opinion: Elon Musk thinks layoffs will keep Tesla profitable as $35,000 Model 3 arrives

Tesla, the company, also agreed to adopt a senior executives communication policy that would spell out who would approve Musks communications and how that process would work. The policy, dated Dec 11, 2018, says that the board would appoint its general counsel and disclosure counsel, or in the case of unavailability, its CFO, to be the ones who could pre-approve Musks utterances.

Neither Tesla nor Bondi responded to whether the board appointed Jonathan Chang, the companys new general counsel, and Zach Kirkhorn, the companys new CFO to be Musks tweet-minders.

The SEC also required Tesla to add two new independent board members as part of the settlement. Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson, who spent 17 years as an executive at the Kellogg Company, and currently serves as the executive vice president and global chief human resources officer of the Walgreens Boots Alliance, joined the Tesla board.

Ellison disclosed he owns 3 million shares in Tesla and has also admitted he and Musk are close friends.

The SEC has more power to force change than it lets on, Kelly told MarketWatch. It wasnt that long ago that the SEC forced Elizabeth Holmes to relinquish her control of Theranos, as settlement for fraud allegations. The board has the power to rein in Musk, even fire him. The SEC could use its enforcement leverage against Telsas independent directors to force more discipline.

The SEC can inform the board they want them to take a more active role in reigning in Musks tweets and other social media activity, said Betsy Atkins, a leading public company director serving on the board of Wynn Resorts WYNN, +0.36% , Schneider Electric SBGSY, +0.48% and Volvo Cars.

However, if I were the regulator, I would leverage Musks desire to stay on as CEO and a board member. I suspect hed be very unhappy with a 5-year ban on serving on a public company board, including Tesla.

Thats one of the SECs potential remedies, she said.

Atkins believes that market forces will cause the correction needed before any regulatory sanction, even a bigger fine for Musk, does. If I were on that board, I would be very concerned and want the company to buy additional liability insurance for directors, Atkins told MarketWatch. Plaintiffs attorneys are already circling and at some point the current directors and officers insurance carrier may become fatigued and potentially unwilling to immunize the board from the public and private litigation.

See also: Tesla makes record $920 million payment for convertible bond

Read: Even if guilty of contempt, Teslas Elon Musk unlikely to get harsh penalty, experts say

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SEC options to rein in Elon Musk include leaning on Tesla and ...

Johnny Depp is accusing ex-wifeAmber Heard of "spending time in a new relationship" withElon Musk a month after they got married, while the Tesla founder says he and the actress started seeing each other only after the marriage ended.

The 55-year-oldPirates of the Caribbean star made the claim in a $50 million defamation lawsuit he filed against the 32-year-old actressafter she wrote a Washington Post op-eddepictingherself as a domestic abuse victim. He has denied her allegations of domestic abuse, which she had made while filing for divorce in May 2016 to end their 15-month marriage.

Depp and Heardwed in February 2015. His lawsuit, filed on Friday, states, "Unbeknownst to Mr. Depp, no later than one month after his marriage to Ms. Heard, she was spending time in a new relationship with Tesla and Space X founder, Elon Musk."

"Only one calendar month after Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard were marriedwhile Mr. Depp was out of the country, filming in March 2015Eastern Columbia Building personnel testified that Ms. Heard received Musk 'late at night' at Mr. Depp's penthouse," the documents say. "Specifically, Ms. Heard asked staff at the Eastern Columbia Building to give her 'friend Elon' access to the building's parking garage and the penthouse elevator 'late at night,' and they testified that they did so. Building staff would then see Ms. Heard's 'friend Elon' leaving the building the next morning."

The lawsuit adds, "Musk's first appearance in Mr. Depp's penthouse occurred shortly after Ms. Heard threw a vodka bottle at Mr. Depp in Australia, when she learned that Mr. Depp wanted the couple to enter into a post-nuptial agreement concerning assets in their marriage. Ms. Heard's violently aimed projectile virtually severed Mr. Depp's middle finger on his right hand and shattered the bones. Mr. Depp's marriage to Ms. Heard came to an end in May 2016.

Media-Mode / Splash News

A rep for Musk told E! News, "Elon and Amber didn't start seeing each other until May 2016, and even then it was infrequent. Their relationship didn't become romantic until some time later."

Musk, 47, and Heard were first photographed togetheras a couple inApril 2017 andbroke upthat summer.

Heard's rep has not commented directly on Depp's accusations of cheating. Her lawyer commented on his lawsuit in general, saying in a statement, "Thisfrivolous action is just the latest of Johnny Depp's repeated efforts to silence Amber Heard. She will not be silenced.Mr. Depp's actions prove he is unable to accept the truth of his ongoing abusive behavior. But while he appears hell-bent on achieving self destruction, wewill prevail in defeating thisgroundless lawsuit and ending the continued vile harassment of my client by Mr. Depp and his legal team."

Depp's attorney said in response to the statement, "'They want to silence Amber Heard' doesn't sound like a denial by Ms. Heard of Mr. Depp's 40-page, evidence-packed complaint. We hardly intend to silence Ms. Heardto the contrary, we intend to subpoena and compel evidence from her, her three hoax-assisting friends, andElon Musk. We look forward to holding the overwhelming video, photographic and eyewitness evidence we finally possess up against Amber Heard's (so far silent) attempts to explain the inexplicable."

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Johnny Depp Claims Amber Heard Cheated on Him With Elon Musk ...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk's strange week on Twitter took another turn Tuesday night.

Shortly after tweeting that "some Tesla news" would be announced at 2 p.m. PT on Thursday, the billionaire changed his name to "Elon Tusk" and added an elephant emoji to the end.

Musk began his week with an accusation from the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday evening that he had violated his $20 million agreement to be monitored by a designated securities lawyer on tweets that could affect Tesla's stock price.

The stock market regulator alleges that Musk may have misled investors last week when he tweeted that Tesla would produce 500,000 vehicles this year. He corrected himself a few hours later, lowering that number to 400,000.

"SEC forgot to read Tesla earnings transcript, which clearly states 350k to 500k," he tweeted. "How embarrassing "

That response, however, lived on Musk's Twitter timeline next to memes about Musk's name that could have sparked the rhyming name change.

Elon Tusk memes were already popular on sites like Reddit, where members of the fandom Musk has amassed were already coming up with their own pun versions of his name. Elon Tusk rose in popularity roughly a week ago, next to classics like "Elongated Muskrat."

It's also possibly a reference to the scam cryptocurrency accounts that would try to emulate Musk's verified account one of which went by the name Elon Tusk shilling coins to those fooled by the name. Eventually, it prompted a tweet from Musk.

Last week, Musk hosted the latest episode of "Meme Review" with the megapopular YouTuber PewDiePie. You can read all the highlights here.

Read more from the original source:

Elon Musk changes Twitter name to 'Elon Tusk' amid SEC ...

Tesla's latest crisis was provoked by CEO Elon Musk making what, in the context of the global auto industry, would be a rounding era. He tweeted that the company would make 500,000 vehicles in 2019, while Tesla had earlier communicated that it would produce just 400,000.

Musk corrected himself, but by then the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating whether he'd violated the terms of his 2018 settlement over a failed plan to take Tesla private. Ultimately, the SEC asked a court to hold Musk in contempt.

Auto-industry executives speculate all the time about how many vehicles they might produce and sell, but nobody cares because the global auto industry is good at dialing up and cutting back production. In the US alone, 17 million vehicles were sold last year. Investors, analysts, and journalists take for granted the competent management of this aspect of the business.

Read more: I put Tesla's high-performance Model S and Model 3 up against the BMW M5 and M3 to see how they compared here's the verdict

The auto industry is also constantly introducing new vehicles and refreshing old ones. Myself and my colleagues at Business Insider can joyfully expect to report on a test drive dozens of cars and trucks each year that have updated stories attached to them.

Elon Musk at the unveiling of Tesla's new Roadster. Tesla

Tesla, by contrast, introduces a new vehicle every year or so and infrequently makes significant physical changes to its lineup while pumping out a steady stream of software improvements. This is because Tesla is a small carmaker it has just three vehicles for sale that believes one of its cars should serve an owner for a long time and consistently get better over time not through hardware, but through computer code.

That, unfortunately, is pretty boring. This month, by contrast, the auto industry will convene at the Geneva motor show to show off all manners of thrilling sheet metal. Auto journalists will have plenty to keep them busy for a few weeks.

Tesla won't be at Geneva and isn't cranking out anything in the way of product news. In this information vacuum goes the attention span of the small army of money and media folk who obsessively monitor the carmaker of the future. All they really have to work with that's substantial i.e., not Musk's weird Twitter musings is production and deliveries. It's literally the only simple, hard data available.

True, Tesla is a very new car brand; GM and Ford have been around for over a century. Tesla's history goes back a decade and a half, and it's really just been making automobiles in meaningful numbers for about three years. With so little to go on, and with a disproportionately enormous market capitalization, it's understandable that investors would cling to every scrap and twig.

Except that most of Tesla is owned by Musk (he has over 20%) and a few major institutional shareholders. They expect Tesla to make more cars in the coming years. They also figure that the annual totals could be volatile, given that Tesla's manufacturing footprint is relatively modest. They can ignore the noise and think long-term.

The Tesla Model 3. Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

Maybe you can figure out where I'm going with this, given that I've freely complained before about Tesla being treated like a veteran carmaker when in fact it's a rookie. The fixation and I stress fixation on production is a shining example of demand for Tesla news rather than actual Tesla information.

The bottom line is that Tesla can't produce that much news. Nor should it. If it produced four times as many models, it would still be unable to satisfy the non-news appetite. And if Musk were suddenly inactive on Twitter and my colleague Troy Wolverton thinks Musk should hang up his handle there would be a reckoning. Tesla would then have to be scrutinized as a business, rather than as a media phenomenon.

To be honest, while I think Tesla would benefit from this, it's not clear that Musk really wants things to chill out. He's the company's biggest marketer, its chief salesman. Tesla spends effectively zero on advertising and sold 250,000 vehicles last year.

Minus the constant, free buzz, Tesla would probably have to commit millions to marketing. The company is a stupendous example of Sean Parker's view that advertising isn't cool and that you can succeed wildly without it while supporting some epic mojo.

But regardless of that motive for Musk to keep on tweetin', what we're dealing with here is a company with a dramatic mission than as an enterprise isn't capable of doing something fantastic and shiny every single week. Don't forget, Tesla primarily makes cars and increasingly, mass-produced cars. Mass-production isn't interesting, except to scholars of manufacturing, for a reason: it's the background noise of a successful industrial economy.

With each passing year, Tesla becomes a bigger part of that economy. So prepare yourselves the better Tesla gets at making cars, the less news it should logically generate.

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Tesla's biggest problem is not Elon Musk's Twitter - Business ...

SpaceX's "test hopper," an experimental stainless-steel ship, in Texas. The person at the bottom is for scale.Elon Musk/SpaceX via Twitter

Elon Musk is trying to make it a no-brainer for you to move to Mars.

Musk, the founder of SpaceX, shared his thinking on cost-effective space travel on Twitter over the weekend.

"I'm confident moving to Mars ... will one day cost less than $500k & maybe even below $100k," Musk tweeted on Sunday. "Low enough that most people in advanced economies could sell their home on Earth & move to Mars if they want."

He added that if anyone decides they don't like Mars (there are plenty of reasons to hate it), a "return ticket is free."

The comments came after Musk revealed new details about his rocket company's truck-sized rocket engine, called Raptor, and the launch system it'd propel to the moon and Mars, called Starship.

On Sunday, Musk said the Raptor engine has been fired more than a half dozen times at a SpaceX facility in McGregor, Texas. He also shared technical data from those tests, including the engine's efficiency, chamber pressure, other details.

Raptor engines are crucial to making Starship work. Up to six of the engines will power the roughly 18-story Starship. Meanwhile, the system's 22-story rocket booster, called Super Heavy, may use up to 31 Raptor engines.

SpaceX plans to fix the first Raptor engines onto a "test hopper" prototype at a site near Brownsville, Texas, then launch it on short "hops" up to a few miles high.

An illustration of spaceships from SpaceX's Big Falcon Rocket system, or BFR, helping colonize Mars.SpaceX

Musk's ultimate goal for the future of Starship and SpaceX is to enable humans to live on Mars. He began sharing that vision in 2015, saying he wants to back up the human race like hard drive in case something terrible befalls Earth.

Since then, Musk has worked toward replacing SpaceX's mainstay rocket, Falcon 9, with a larger but dramatically lower-cost system. (That's Starship, though it has gone by other names most recently "Big Falcon Rocket.")

"This will sound implausible, but I think there's a path to build Starship / Super Heavy for less than Falcon 9," Musk said.

SpaceX charges about $62 million per launch of a Falcon 9 rocket, which can carry payloads weighing up to 25 tons into low-Earth orbit. On Sunday, Musk predicted that Starship would cost "at least 10X cheaper" to send up the same sized payload.

Starship is designed to take about 100 tons of cargo and 100 people to Mars. Part of the reason Musk expects it to be so cost-effective is the system's size launching more at once can lower costs.

But the biggest reason Starship could be so much cheaper is that it's designed to be fully reusable. This prevents losing multimillion-dollar hardware after a single use (a typical practice in the rocket-launch industry) and limits launch costs to refilling fuel and refurbishing parts. Starship's reusability may also allow it to refuel on liquid methane and oxygen once it has landed on Mars (Musk said this fuel can be manufactured on the red planet's surface) for a return trip to Earth.

Musk also confirmed on Sunday that a recent and "radical" shift in the design of Starship will be a "big factor" in keeping costs down. Instead of making the rocket ship out of lightweight, super-strong carbon-fiber composites, Musk has asked his engineers to use low-cost stainless-steel alloys.

Read more: Elon Musk says SpaceX has built a stainless-steel rocket ship in Texas that looks 'like liquid silver'

Steel costs about $3 per kilogram, Musk told Popular Mechanics in December, while carbon fiber can cost about $200 per kilogram a 66-fold difference. Musk tweeted in January that using steel could counterintuitively make Starship lighter, allowing it to carry more cargo at a time.

SpaceX's "aspirational" goal is to launch the first cargo mission to Mars in 2022 just three years from now. Then in 2023, Musk hopes to send the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and a crew of artists on a trip around the moon. If all goes well with those two launches, he wants to send the first crewed Starship missions to Mars in 2024.

Excerpt from:

Elon Musk: Starship could make migrating from Earth to Mars ...

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Tesla is gearing up to begin making its next vehicle an electric crossover called the Model Y as it boosts production of its current vehicles, lowers prices and cuts costs.

With a debt payment of more than $900 million due within weeks unless the company's stock makes a sudden leap, Tesla is under pressure to improve its operations through cost reductions, faster production and increased sales.

The automaker said Wednesday that it made a profit of$139.5 million in the fourth quarter, up from a loss of $675.4 million a year earlier. It's the second straight quarter the company has made money after a string of brutal losses.

The quarterly profit will help Tesla as it saves up for the likely bond payment in March. CEO Elon Musk said the company has enough money set aside to make the payment.

He also made a surprise announcement at the end of an earnings call: Tesla's chief financial officer, Deepak Ahuja, is retiring and will serve as a "senior adviser" to the company.

Ahuja was a close lieutenant of Musk and this is the second time he has left the company.Zach Kirkhorn, the company's vice president of finance, will succeed him.

The reasons for the switch were not immediately clear Wednesday.

The company warned Wednesday that it will be hard to make a profit in the first quarter of 2019 as it enacts $400 million in cost cuts, which will deal an upfront dent to the bottom line. Those cuts represent about 7 percent of the company's global workforce.

But Musk said he's "optimistic about being profitable" in the first period.

Tesla's stock fluctuated slightly up and down in after-hours trading Wednesday. The shares had risen 3.8 percent to close at $308.77 during the day.

Musk said the company expects to make a profit every quarter after the year's first.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk(Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)

The company projected 2019 sales of 360,000 to 400,000 vehicles, which would represent growth of about 45 percent to 65 percent over 2018.

Although the Model Y is on the way, the Model 3 will have to carry the load this year.

Tesla projected first-quarter sales of the ultra-luxury Model S and Model X to fall "slightly" after customers rushed to buy those vehicles in the fourth quarter to qualify for the full $7,500 federal tax credit before it was slashed in half on Jan. 1. The company has reduced prices of all of its vehicles by $2,000 and ended production of lower-end versions of the ultra-luxury models.

Because of Tesla's success, the tax credit for its buyers will be slashed in half again halfway through 2019. That has added urgency for Tesla to introduce a cheaper version of the Model 3. The car was supposed to be offered at a starting price of $35,000, but that base model hasn't yet been offered.

Instead, it's selling for well over $50,000 in many cases. That has helped Tesla turn a profit for two straight quarters after enduring what Musk called "production hell" earlier in 2018, when the company's ability to make vehicles in high volume was called into question.

Improvements in manufacturing, including the hasty construction of a tent outside the company's Fremont, California, factory, helped speed production output. The company says it has learned from the process and will incorporate those lessons in its new plant under construction in Shanghai.

Tesla said Wednesday that it expects to make 7,000 Model 3 vehicles per week at a "sustainable" pace at its Fremont factory by the end of 2019. Meanwhile, the company expects to hit an annualized rate of more than 10,000 Model 3 vehicles weekly at its under-construction Shanghai factory sometime between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the second quarter of 2020.

The next vehicle in the company's lineup is the Model Y, which will share the same platform as the Model 3 to save costs. Tesla said that vehicle will "most likely" be made at the company's battery plant in Reno, Nevada. Pricing, styling and specifications haven't been revealed.

Follow USA TODAY reporter Nathan Bomey on Twitter @NathanBomey.

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Elon Musk gears up for Model Y crossover as Tesla makes ...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday that he expects Tesla vehicles to be able to safely drive themselves without human assistance by the end of 2019.

"When will we think it's safe for full self-driving? It's probably towards the end of this year, and then it's up to regulators to decide when they want to approve that," he said during the automaker's fourth-quarter earnings call.

Read more: Elon Musk said he expects Tesla to deliver around 50% more cars than last year, even if there's a global recession

Musk has missed projections about autonomous driving technology on multiple occasions. In 2015, Musk said Tesla would have fully-autonomous driving technology ready in about two years, and Tesla has passed multiple deadlines set by Musk to send a self-driving vehicle across the US.

During Wednesday's call, Musk also characterized Tesla's semi-autonomous Autopilot driver assistance system as having full self-driving capability on the highway.

"We already have full self-driving capability on highways. So from highway on-ramp to highway exit, including passing cars and going from one highway interchange to another, full self-driving capability is there," he said.

Musk's description of Autopilot's capabilities contrasts with the owner's manual for Tesla's Model 3 sedan, which instructs owners to remain in control of their vehicle when using Autopilot.

"Never depend on these components to keep you safe," the manual says of Autopilot's features. "It is the driver's responsibility to stay alert, drive safely and be in control of the vehicle at all times."

Tesla has received criticism for how it has promoted Autopilot, and fatal accidents involving the feature have raised questions about whether drivers place too much trust in it and fail to pay attention to the road. Tesla says Autopilot is meant to be used with an attentive driver whose hands are on the wheel, but the most visible accidents involving Autopilot have involved reports of distracted drivers.

In October, Consumer Reports released its rankings of four semi-autonomous driver-assistance systems. Autopilot ranked second, behind Cadillac's Super Cruise, with the highest rating among the four for capability and performance and ease of use, but the lowest for keeping drivers engaged.

Tesla on Wednesday announced its earnings from the fourth quarter of 2018. The automaker posted adjusted earnings of $1.93 per share on revenue of $7.23 billion. Wall Street analysts had expected adjusted earnings of $2.10 per share on revenue of $7.1 billion.

Have a Tesla news tip? Contact this reporter at mmatousek@businessinsider.com.

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Elon Musk: Tesla vehicles able to drive themselves by end of ...

I. Running Amok

It was just a friendly little argument about the fate of humanity. DemisHassabis, a leading creator of advanced artificial intelligence, waschatting with Elon Musk, a leading doomsayer, about the perils ofartificial intelligence.

They are two of the most consequential and intriguing men in SiliconValley who dont live there. Hassabis, a co-founder of the mysteriousLondon laboratory DeepMind, had come to Musks SpaceX rocket factory,outside Los Angeles, a few years ago. They were in the canteen, talking,as a massive rocket part traversed overhead. Musk explained that hisultimate goal at SpaceX was the most important project in the world:interplanetary colonization.

Hassabis replied that, in fact, he was working on the most importantproject in the world: developing artificial super-intelligence. Muskcountered that this was one reason we needed to colonize Marsso thatwell have a bolt-hole if A.I. goes rogue and turns on humanity. Amused,Hassabis said that A.I. would simply follow humans to Mars.

This did nothing to soothe Musks anxieties (even though he says thereare scenarios where A.I. wouldnt follow).

An unassuming but competitive 40-year-old, Hassabis is regarded as theMerlin who will likely help conjure our A.I. children. The field of A.I.is rapidly developing but still far from the powerful, self-evolvingsoftware that haunts Musk. Facebook uses A.I. for targeted advertising,photo tagging, and curated news feeds. Microsoft and Apple use A.I. topower their digital assistants, Cortana and Siri. Googles search enginefrom the beginning has been dependent on A.I. All of these smalladvances are part of the chase to eventually create flexible,self-teaching A.I. that will mirror human learning.

WITHOUT OVERSIGHT, MUSK BELIEVES, A.I. COULD BE AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT:WE ARE SUMMONING THE DEMON.

Some in Silicon Valley were intrigued to learn that Hassabis, a skilledchess player and former video-game designer, once came up with a gamecalled Evil Genius, featuring a malevolent scientist who creates adoomsday device to achieve world domination. Peter Thiel, thebillionaire venture capitalist and Donald Trump adviser who co-foundedPayPal with Musk and othersand who in December helped gatherskeptical Silicon Valley titans, including Musk, for a meeting with thepresident-electtold me a story about an investor in DeepMind whojoked as he left a meeting that he ought to shoot Hassabis on the spot,because it was the last chance to save the human race.

Elon Musk began warning about the possibility of A.I. running amok threeyears ago. It probably hadnt eased his mind when one of Hassabisspartners in DeepMind, Shane Legg, stated flatly, I think humanextinction will probably occur, and technology will likely play a partin this.

Before DeepMind was gobbled up by Google, in 2014, as part of its A.I.shopping spree, Musk had been an investor in the company. He told methat his involvement was not about a return on his money but rather tokeep a wary eye on the arc of A.I.: It gave me more visibility intothe rate at which things were improving, and I think theyre reallyimproving at an accelerating rate, far faster than people realize.Mostly because in everyday life you dont see robots walking around.Maybe your Roomba or something. But Roombas arent going to take overthe world.

In a startling public reproach to his friends and fellow techies, Muskwarned that they could be creating the means of their own destruction.He told Bloombergs Ashlee Vance, the author of the biography Elon Musk,that he was afraid that his friend Larry Page, a co-founder of Googleand now the C.E.O. of its parent company, Alphabet, could have perfectlygood intentions but still produce something evil byaccidentincluding, possibly, a fleet of artificialintelligence-enhanced robots capable of destroying mankind.

At the World Government Summit in Dubai, in February, Musk again cuedthe scary organ music, evoking the plots of classic horror stories whenhe noted that sometimes what will happen is a scientist will get soengrossed in their work that they dont really realize the ramificationsof what theyre doing. He said that the way to escape humanobsolescence, in the end, may be by having some sort of merger ofbiological intelligence and machine intelligence. This Vulcanmind-meld could involve something called a neural lacean injectablemesh that would literally hardwire your brain to communicate directlywith computers. Were already cyborgs, Musk told me in February.Your phone and your computer are extensions of you, but the interfaceis through finger movements or speech, which are very slow. With aneural lace inside your skull you would flash data from your brain,wirelessly, to your digital devices or to virtually unlimited computingpower in the cloud. For a meaningful partial-brain interface, I thinkwere roughly four or five years away.

Musks alarming views on the dangers of A.I. first went viral after hespoke at M.I.T. in 2014speculating (pre-Trump) that A.I. was probablyhumanitys biggest existential threat. He added that he wasincreasingly inclined to think there should be some national orinternational regulatory oversightanathema to Silicon Valleytomake sure that we dont do something very foolish. He went on: Withartificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all thosestories where theres the guy with the pentagram and the holy water andhes like, yeah, hes sure he can control the demon? Doesnt work out.Some A.I. engineers found Musks theatricality so absurdly amusing thatthey began echoing it. When they would return to the lab after a break,theyd say, O.K., lets get back to work summoning.

Musk wasnt laughing. Elons crusade (as one of his friends andfellow tech big shots calls it) against unfettered A.I. had begun.

Elon Musk smiled when I mentioned to him that he comes across assomething of an Ayn Rand-ian hero. I have heard that before, he saidin his slight South African accent. She obviously has a fairly extremeset of views, but she has some good points in there.

But Ayn Rand would do some re-writes on Elon Musk. She would make hiseyes gray and his face more gaunt. She would refashion his publicdemeanor to be less droll, and she would not countenance his goofygiggle. She would certainly get rid of all his nonsense about thecollective good. She would find great material in the 45-year-oldscomplicated personal life: his first wife, the fantasy writer JustineMusk, and their five sons (one set of twins, one of triplets), and hismuch younger second wife, the British actress Talulah Riley, who playedthe boring Bennet sister in the Keira Knightley version of Pride &Prejudice. Riley and Musk were married, divorced, and then re-married.They are now divorced again. Last fall, Musk tweeted that Talulah doesa great job playing a deadly sexbot on HBOs Westworld, adding asmiley-face emoticon. Its hard for mere mortal women to maintain arelationship with someone as insanely obsessed with work as Musk.

How much time does a woman want a week? he asked Ashlee Vance.Maybe ten hours? Thats kind of the minimum?

Mostly, Rand would savor Musk, a hyper-logical, risk-lovingindustrialist. He enjoys costume parties, wing-walking, and Japanesesteampunk extravaganzas. Robert Downey Jr. used Musk as a model for IronMan. Marc Mathieu, the chief marketing officer of Samsung USA, who hasgone fly-fishing in Iceland with Musk, calls him a cross between SteveJobs and Jules Verne.As they danced at their wedding reception,Justine later recalled, Musk informed her, I am the alpha in thisrelationship.

Photographs by Anders Lindn/Agent Bauer (Tegmark); by Jeff Chiu/A.P. Images (Page, Wozniak); by Simon Dawson/Bloomberg (Hassabis), Michael Gottschalk/Photothek (Gates), Niklas Hallen/AFP (Hawking), Saul Loeb/AFP (Thiel), Juan Mabromata/AFP (Russell), David Paul Morris/Bloomberg (Altman), Tom Pilston/The Washington Post (Bostrom), David Ramos (Zuckerberg), all from Getty Images; by Frederic Neema/Polaris/Newscom (Kurzwell); by Denis Allard/Agence Ra/Redux (LeCun); Ariel Zambelich/ Wired (Ng); Bobby Yip/Reuters/Zuma Press (Musk).

In a tech universe full of skinny guys in hoodieswhipping up botsthat will chat with you and apps that can study a photo of a dog andtell you what breed it isMusk is a throwback to Henry Ford and HankRearden. In Atlas Shrugged, Rearden gives his wife a bracelet made fromthe first batch of his revolutionary metal, as though it were made ofdiamonds. Musk has a chunk of one of his rockets mounted on the wall ofhis Bel Air house, like a work of art.

Musk shoots for the moonliterally. He launches cost-efficient rocketsinto space and hopes to eventually inhabit the Red Planet. In Februaryhe announced plans to send two space tourists on a flight around themoon as early as next year. He creates sleek batteries that could leadto a world powered by cheap solar energy. He forges gleaming steel intosensuous Tesla electric cars with such elegant lines that even thenitpicking Steve Jobs would have been hard-pressed to find fault. Hewants to save time as well as humanity: he dreamed up the Hyperloop, anelectromagnetic bullet train in a tube, which may one day whooshtravelers between L.A. and San Francisco at 700 miles per hour. WhenMusk visited secretary of defense Ashton Carter last summer, hemischievously tweeted that he was at the Pentagon to talk aboutdesigning a Tony Stark-style flying metal suit. Sitting in trafficin L.A. in December, getting bored and frustrated, he tweeted aboutcreating the Boring Company to dig tunnels under the city to rescue thepopulace from soul-destroying traffic. By January, according toBloomberg Businessweek, Musk had assigned a senior SpaceX engineer tooversee the plan and had started digging his first test hole. Hissometimes quixotic efforts to save the world have inspired a parodytwitter account, Bored Elon Musk, where a faux Musk spouts off wackyideas such as Oxford commas as a service and bunches of bananasgenetically engineered so that the bananas ripen one at a time.

Of course, big dreamers have big stumbles. Some SpaceX rockets haveblown up, and last May a driver was killed in a self-driving Teslawhose sensors failed to notice the tractor-trailer crossing its path.(An investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administrationfound that Teslas Autopilot system was not to blame.)

Musk is stoic about setbacks but all too conscious of nightmarescenarios. His views reflect a dictum from Atlas Shrugged: Man has thepower to act as his own destroyerand that is the way he has actedthrough most of his history. As he told me, we are the first speciescapable of self-annihilation.

Heres the nagging thought you cant escape as you drive around fromglass box to glass box in Silicon Valley: the Lords of the Cloud love toyammer about turning the world into a better place as they churn out newalgorithms, apps, and inventions that, it is claimed, will make ourlives easier, healthier, funnier, closer, cooler, longer, and kinder tothe planet. And yet theres a creepy feeling underneath it all, a sensethat were the mice in their experiments, that they regard us humans asBetamaxes or eight-tracks, old technology that will soon be discarded sothat they can get on to enjoying their sleek new world. Many peoplethere have accepted this future: well live to be 150 years old, butwell have machine overlords.

Maybe we already have overlords. As Musk slyly told Recodes annual CodeConference last year in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, we couldalready be playthings in a simulated-reality world run by an advanced civilization. Reportedly, two Silicon Valley billionaires are working onan algorithm to break us out of the Matrix.

Among the engineers lured by the sweetness of solving the next problem,the prevailing attitude is that empires fall, societies change, and weare marching toward the inevitable phase ahead. They argue not aboutwhether but rather about how close we are to replicating, andimproving on, ourselves. Sam Altman, the 31-year-old president of YCombinator, the Valleys top start-up accelerator, believes humanity ison the brink of such invention.

The hard part of standing on an exponential curve is: when you lookbackwards, it looks flat, and when you look forward, it looksvertical, he told me. And its very hard to calibrate how much youare moving because it always looks the same.

Youd think that anytime Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates are allraising the same warning about A.I.as all of them areit would be a10-alarm fire. But, for a long time, the fog of fatalism over the BayArea was thick. Musks crusade was viewed as Sisyphean at best andLuddite at worst. The paradox is this: Many tech oligarchs seeeverything they are doing to help us, and all their benevolentmanifestos, as streetlamps on the road to a future where, as SteveWozniak says, humans are the family pets.

But Musk is not going gently. He plans on fighting this with every fiberof his carbon-based being. Musk and Altman have founded OpenAI, abillion-dollar nonprofit company, to work for safer artificialintelligence. I sat down with the two men when their new venture hadonly a handful of young engineers and a makeshift office, an apartmentin San Franciscos Mission District that belongs to Greg Brockman,OpenAIs 28-year-old co-founder and chief technology officer. When Iwent back recently, to talk with Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, thecompanys 30-year-old research director (and also a co-founder), OpenAIhad moved into an airy office nearby with a robot, the usual complementof snacks, and 50 full-time employees. (Another 10 to 30 are on theway.)

Altman, in gray T-shirt and jeans, is all wiry, pale intensity. Musksfervor is masked by his diffident manner and rosy countenance. His eyesare green or blue, depending on the light, and his lips are plum red. Hehas an aura of command while retaining a trace of the gawky, lonelySouth African teenager who immigrated to Canada by himself at the age of17.

In Silicon Valley, a lunchtime meeting does not necessarily involve thatmundane fuel known as food. Younger coders are too absorbed inalgorithms to linger over meals. Some just chug Soylent. Older ones areso obsessed with immortality that sometimes theyre just washing downhealth pills with almond milk.

At first blush, OpenAI seemed like a bantamweight vanity project, abunch of brainy kids in a walkup apartment taking on themulti-billion-dollar efforts at Google, Facebook, and other companieswhich employ the worlds leading A.I. experts. But then, playing awell-heeled David to Goliath is Musks specialty, and he always does itwith styleand some useful sensationalism.

Let others in Silicon Valley focus on their I.P.O. price and ridding SanFrancisco of what they regard as its unsightly homeless population. Muskhas larger aims, like ending global warming and dying on Mars (just not,he says, on impact).

Musk began to see mans fate in the galaxy as his personal obligationthree decades ago, when as a teenager he had a full-blown existentialcrisis. Musk told me that The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, byDouglas Adams, was a turning point for him. The book is about aliensdestroying the earth to make way for a hyperspace highway and featuresMarvin the Paranoid Android and a supercomputer designed to answer allthe mysteries of the universe. (Musk slipped at least one reference tothe book into the software of the Tesla Model S.) As a teenager, Vancewrites in his biography, Musk formulated a mission statement forhimself: The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greatercollective enlightenment.

OpenAI got under way with a vague mandatewhich isnt surprising,given that people in the field are still arguing over what form A.I.will take, what it will be able to do, and what can be done about it. Sofar, public policy on A.I. is strangely undetermined and software islargely unregulated. The Federal Aviation Administration overseesdrones, the Securities and Exchange Commission oversees automatedfinancial trading, and the Department of Transportation has begun tooversee self-driving cars.

Musk believes that it is better to try to get super-A.I. first anddistribute the technology to the world than to allow the algorithms tobe concealed and concentrated in the hands of tech or governmenteliteseven when the tech elites happen to be his own friends, peoplesuch as Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Ive had manyconversations with Larry about A.I. and roboticsmany, many, Musktold me. And some of them have gotten quite heated. You know, I thinkits not just Larry, but there are many futurists who feel a certaininevitability or fatalism about robots, where wed have some sort ofperipheral role. The phrase used is We are the biological boot-loaderfor digital super-intelligence. (A boot loader is the small programthat launches the operating system when you first turn on yourcomputer.) Matter cant organize itself into a chip, Musk explained.But it can organize itself into a biological entity that getsincreasingly sophisticated and ultimately can create the chip.

Musk has no intention of being a boot loader. Page and Brin seethemselves as forces for good, but Musk says the issue goes far beyondthe motivations of a handful of Silicon Valley executives.

Its great when the emperor is Marcus Aurelius, he says. Its notso great when the emperor is Caligula.

After the so-called A.I. winterthe broad, commercial failure in thelate 80s of an early A.I. technology that wasnt up tosnuffartificial intelligence got a reputation as snake oil. Now itsthe hot thing again in this go-go era in the Valley. Greg Brockman, ofOpenAI, believes the next decade will be all about A.I., with everyonethrowing money at the small number of wizards who know the A.I.incantations. Guys who got rich writing code to solve banal problemslike how to pay a stranger for stuff online now contemplate avertiginous world where they are the creators of a new reality andperhaps a new species.

Microsofts Jaron Lanier, the dreadlocked computer scientist known asthe father of virtual reality, gave me his view as to why the digeratifind the science-fiction fantasy of A.I. so tantalizing: Itssaying, Oh, you digital techy people, youre like gods; youre creatinglife; youre transforming reality. Theres a tremendous narcissism init that were the people who can do it. No one else. The Pope cant doit. The president cant do it. No one else can do it. We are the mastersof it . . . . The software were building is our immortality. Thiskind of God-like ambition isnt new, he adds. I read about it once ina story about a golden calf. He shook his head. Dont get high onyour own supply, you know?

Google has gobbled up almost every interesting robotics andmachine-learning company over the last few years. It bought DeepMind for$650 million, reportedly beating out Facebook, and built the GoogleBrain team to work on A.I. It hired Geoffrey Hinton, a British pioneerin artificial neural networks; and Ray Kurzweil, the eccentric futuristwho has predicted that we are only 28 years away from the Rapture-likeSingularitythe moment when the spiraling capabilities ofself-improving artificial super-intelligence will far exceed humanintelligence, and human beings will merge with A.I. to create thegod-like hybrid beings of the future.

Its in Larry Pages blood and Googles DNA to believe that A.I. is thecompanys inevitable destinythink of that destiny as you will. (Ifevil A.I. lights up, Ashlee Vance told me, it will light up first atGoogle.) If Google could get computers to master search when searchwas the most important problem in the world, then presumably it can getcomputers to do everything else. In March of last year, Silicon Valleygulped when a fabled South Korean player of the worlds most complexboard game, Go, was beaten in Seoul by DeepMinds AlphaGo. Hassabis, whohas said he is running an Apollo program for A.I., called it ahistoric moment and admitted that even he was surprised it happenedso quickly. Ive always hoped that A.I. could help us discovercompletely new ideas in complex scientific domains, Hassabis told mein February. This might be one of the first glimpses of that kind ofcreativity. More recently, AlphaGo played 60 games online against topGo players in China, Japan, and Koreaand emerged with a record of60--0. In January, in another shock to the system, an A.I. programshowed that it could bluff. Libratus, built by two Carnegie Mellonresearchers, was able to crush top poker players at Texas Hold Em.

Peter Thiel told me about a friend of his who says that the only reasonpeople tolerate Silicon Valley is that no one there seems to be havingany sex or any fun. But there are reports of sex robots on the way thatcome with apps that can control their moods and even have a pulse. TheValley is skittish when it comes to female sex robotsan obsession inJapanbecause of its notoriously male-dominated culture and itsmuch-publicized issues with sexual harassment and discrimination. Butwhen I asked Musk about this, he replied matter-of-factly, Sex robots?I think those are quite likely.

Whether sincere or a shrewd P.R. move, Hassabis made it a condition ofthe Google acquisition that Google and DeepMind establish a joint A.I.ethics board. At the time, three years ago, forming an ethics board wasseen as a precocious move, as if to imply that Hassabis was on the vergeof achieving true A.I. Now, not so much. Last June, a researcher atDeepMind co-authored a paper outlining a way to design a big redbutton that could be used as a kill switch to stop A.I. frominflicting harm.

Google executives say Larry Pages view on A.I. is shaped by hisfrustration about how many systems are sub-optimalfrom systems thatbook trips to systems that price crops. He believes that A.I. willimprove peoples lives and has said that, when human needs are moreeasily met, people will have more time with their family or to pursuetheir own interests. Especially when a robot throws them out of work.

Musk is a friend of Pages. He attended Pages wedding and sometimesstays at his house when hes in the San Francisco area. Its not worthhaving a house for one or two nights a week, the 99th-richest man inthe world explained to me. At times, Musk has expressed concern thatPage may be nave about how A.I. could play out. If Page is inclinedtoward the philosophy that machines are only as good or bad as thepeople creating them, Musk firmly disagrees. Some at Googleperhapsannoyed that Musk is, in essence, pointing a finger at them for rushingahead willy-nillydismiss his dystopic take as a cinematic clich.Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Googles parent company, put itthis way: Robots are invented. Countries arm them. An evil dictatorturns the robots on humans, and all humans will be killed. Sounds like amovie to me.

Some in Silicon Valley argue that Musk is interested less in saving theworld than in buffing his brand, and that he is exploiting a deeplyrooted conflict: the one between man and machine, and our fear that thecreation will turn against us. They gripe that his epic good-versus-evilstory line is about luring talent at discount rates and incubating hisown A.I. software for cars and rockets. Its certainly true that the BayArea has always had a healthy respect for making a buck. As Sam Spadesaid in The Maltese Falcon, Most things in San Francisco can bebought, or taken.

Musk is without doubt a dazzling salesman. Who better than a guardian ofhuman welfare to sell you your new, self-driving Tesla? Andrew Ngthechief scientist at Baidu, known as Chinas Googlebased in Sunnyvale,California, writes off Musks Manichaean throwdown as marketinggenius. At the height of the recession, he persuaded the U.S.government to help him build an electric sports car, Ng recalled,incredulous. The Stanford professor is married to a robotics expert,issued a robot-themed engagement announcement, and keeps a Trust theRobot black jacket hanging on the back of his chair. He thinks peoplewho worry about A.I. going rogue are distracted by phantoms, andregards getting alarmed now as akin to worrying about overpopulation onMars before we populate it. And I think its fascinating, he saidabout Musk in particular, that in a rather short period of time hesinserted himself into the conversation on A.I. I think he seesaccurately that A.I. is going to create tremendous amounts of value.

Although he once called Musk a sci-fi version of P. T. Barnum,Ashlee Vance thinks that Musks concern about A.I. is genuine, even ifwhat he can actually do about it is unclear. His wife, Talulah, toldme they had late-night conversations about A.I. at home, Vance noted.Elon is brutally logical. The way he tackles everything is like movingchess pieces around. When he plays this scenario out in his head, itdoesnt end well for people.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a co-founder of the Machine Intelligence ResearchInstitute, in Berkeley, agrees: Hes Elon-freaking-Musk. He doesntneed to touch the third rail of the artificial-intelligence controversyif he wants to be sexy. He can just talk about Mars colonization.

Some sniff that Musk is not truly part of the whiteboard culture andthat his scary scenarios miss the fact that we are living in a worldwhere its hard to get your printer to work. Others chalk up OpenAI, inpart, to a case of FOMO: Musk sees his friend Page building new-wavesoftware in a hot field and craves a competing army of coders. As Vancesees it, Elon wants all the toys that Larry has. Theyre like thesetwo superpowers. Theyre friends, but theres a lot of tension in theirrelationship. A rivalry of this kind might be best summed up by a linefrom the vainglorious head of the fictional tech behemoth Hooli, onHBOs Silicon Valley: I dont want to live in a world where someoneelse makes the world a better place better than we do.

Musks disagreement with Page over the potential dangers of A.I. didaffect our friendship for a while, Musk says, but that has sincepassed. We are on good terms these days.

Musk never had as close a personal connection with 32-year-old MarkZuckerberg, who has become an unlikely lifestyle guru, setting a newchallenge for himself every year. These have included wearing a tieevery day, reading a book every two weeks, learning Mandarin, and eatingmeat only from animals he killed with his own hands. In 2016, it wasA.I.s turn.

Zuckerberg has moved his A.I. experts to desks near his own. Three weeksafter Musk and Altman announced their venture to make the world safefrom malicious A.I., Zuckerberg posted on Facebook that his project forthe year was building a helpful A.I. to assist him in managing hishomeeverything from recognizing his friends and letting them insideto keeping an eye on the nursery. You can think of it kind of likeJarvis in Iron Man, he wrote.

One Facebooker cautioned Zuckerberg not to accidentally createSkynet, the military supercomputer that turns against human beings inthe Terminator movies. I think we can build A.I. so it works for usand helps us, Zuckerberg replied. And clearly throwing shade at Musk,he continued: Some people fear-monger about how A.I. is a huge danger,but that seems far-fetched to me and much less likely than disasters dueto widespread disease, violence, etc. Or, as he described hisphilosophy at a Facebook developers conference last April, in a clearrejection of warnings from Musk and others he believes to be alarmists:Choose hope over fear.

In the November issue of Wired, guest-edited by Barack Obama, Zuckerbergwrote that there is little basis beyond science fiction to worry aboutdoomsday scenarios: If we slow down progress in deference to unfoundedconcerns, we stand in the way of real gains. He compared A.I. jittersto early fears about airplanes, noting, We didnt rush to put rules inplace about how airplanes should work before we figured out how theydfly in the first place.

Zuckerberg introduced his A.I. butler, Jarvis, right before Christmas.With the soothing voice of Morgan Freeman, it was able to help withmusic, lights, and even making toast. I asked the real-life Iron Man,Musk, about Zuckerbergs Jarvis, when it was in its earliest stages. Iwouldnt call it A.I. to have your household functions automated, Musksaid. Its really not A.I. to turn the lights on, set thetemperature.

Zuckerberg can be just as dismissive. Asked in Germany whether Musksapocalyptic forebodings were hysterical or valid, Zuckerbergreplied hysterical. And when Musks SpaceX rocket blew up on thelaunch pad in September, destroying a satellite Facebook was leasing,Zuckerberg coldly posted that he was deeply disappointed.

Musk and others who have raised a warning flag on A.I. have sometimesbeen treated like drama queens. In January 2016, Musk won the annualLuddite Award, bestowed by a Washington tech-policy think tank. Still,hes got some pretty good wingmen. Stephen Hawking told the BBC, Ithink the development of full artificial intelligence could spell theend of the human race. Bill Gates told Charlie Rose that A.I. waspotentially more dangerous than a nuclear catastrophe. Nick Bostrom, a43-year-old Oxford philosophy professor, warned in his 2014 book,Superintelligence, that once unfriendly superintelligence exists, itwould prevent us from replacing it or changing its preferences. Our fatewould be sealed. And, last year, Henry Kissinger jumped on the perilbandwagon, holding a confidential meeting with top A.I. experts at theBrook, a private club in Manhattan, to discuss his concern over howsmart robots could cause a rupture in history and unravel the waycivilization works.

In January 2015, Musk, Bostrom, and a Whos Who of A.I., representingboth sides of the split, assembled in Puerto Rico for a conferencehosted by Max Tegmark, a 49-year-old physics professor at M.I.T. whoruns the Future of Life Institute, in Boston.

Do you own a house?, Tegmark asked me. Do you own fire insurance?The consensus in Puerto Rico was that we needed fire insurance. When wegot fire and messed up with it, we invented the fire extinguisher. Whenwe got cars and messed up, we invented the seat belt, air bag, andtraffic light. But with nuclear weapons and A.I., we dont want to learnfrom our mistakes. We want to plan ahead. (Musk reminded Tegmark thata precaution as sensible as seat belts had provoked fierce oppositionfrom the automobile industry.)

Musk, who has kick-started the funding of research into avoiding A.I.spitfalls, said he would give the Future of Life Institute 10 millionreasons to pursue the subject, donating $10 million. Tegmark promptlygave $1.5 million to Bostroms group in Oxford, the Future of HumanityInstitute. Explaining at the time why it was crucial to be proactiveand not reactive, Musk said it was certainly possible to constructscenarios where the recovery of human civilization does not occur.

Six months after the Puerto Rico conference, Musk, Hawking, DemisHassabis, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Stuart Russell, acomputer-science professor at Berkeley who co-authored the standardtextbook on artificial intelligence, along with 1,000 other prominentfigures, signed a letter calling for a ban on offensive autonomousweapons. In 50 years, this 18-month period were in now will be seenas being crucial for the future of the A.I. community, Russell toldme. Its when the A.I. community finally woke up and took itselfseriously and thought about what to do to make the future better. LastSeptember, the countrys biggest tech companies created the Partnershipon Artificial Intelligence to explore the full range of issues arisingfrom A.I., including the ethical ones. (Musks OpenAI quickly joinedthis effort.) Meanwhile, the European Union has been looking into legalissues arising from the advent of robots and A.I.such as whetherrobots have personhood or (as one Financial Times contributorwondered) should be considered more like slaves in Roman law.

At Tegmarks second A.I. safety conference, last January at the Asilomarcenter, in Californiachosen because thats where scientists gatheredback in 1975 and agreed to limit genetic experimentationthe topic wasnot so contentious. Larry Page, who was not at the Puerto Ricoconference, was at Asilomar, and Musk noted that their conversationwas no longer heated.

But while it may have been a coming-out party for A.I. safety, asone attendee put itpart of a sea change in the last year or so,as Musk saystheres still a long way to go. Theres no questionthat the top technologists in Silicon Valley now take A.I. far moreseriouslythat they do acknowledge it as a risk, he observes. Imnot sure that they yet appreciate the significance of the risk.

Steve Wozniak has wondered publicly whether he is destined to be afamily pet for robot overlords. We started feeding our dog filet, hetold me about his own pet, over lunch with his wife, Janet, at theOriginal Hickry Pit, in Walnut Creek. Once you start thinking youcould be one, thats how you want them treated.

He has developed a policy of appeasement toward robots and any A.I.masters. Why do we want to set ourselves up as the enemy when theymight overpower us someday? he said. It should be a jointpartnership. All we can do is seed them with a strong culture where theysee humans as their friends.

When I went to Peter Thiels elegant San Francisco office, dominated bytwo giant chessboards, Thiel, one of the original donors to OpenAI and acommitted contrarian, said he worried that Musks resistance couldactually be accelerating A.I. research because his end-of-the-worldwarnings are increasing interest in the field.

Full-on A.I. is on the order of magnitude of extraterrestrialslanding, Thiel said. There are some very deeply tricky questionsaround this . . . . If you really push on how do we make A.I. safe, Idont think people have any clue. We dont even know what A.I. is. Itsvery hard to know how it would be controllable.

He went on: Theres some sense in which the A.I. question encapsulatesall of peoples hopes and fears about the computer age. I think peoplesintuitions do just really break down when theyre pushed to these limitsbecause weve never dealt with entities that are smarter than humans onthis planet.

Trying to puzzle out who is right on A.I., I drove to San Mateo to meetRay Kurzweil for coffee at the restaurant Three. Kurzweil is the authorof The Singularity Is Near, a Utopian vision of what an A.I. futureholds. (When I mentioned to Andrew Ng that I was going to be talking toKurzweil, he rolled his eyes. Whenever I read Kurzweils Singularity,my eyes just naturally do that, he said.) Kurzweil arrived with aWhole Foods bag for me, brimming with his books and two documentariesabout him. He was wearing khakis, a green-and-red plaid shirt, andseveral rings, including onemade with a 3-D printerthat has an Sfor his Singularity University.

Computers are already doing many attributes of thinking, Kurzweiltold me. Just a few years ago, A.I. couldnt even tell the differencebetween a dog and cat. Now it can. Kurzweil has a keen interest incats and keeps a collection of 300 cat figurines in his NorthernCalifornia home. At the restaurant, he asked for almond milk butcouldnt get any. The 69-year-old eats strange health concoctions andtakes 90 pills a day, eager to achieve immortalityor indefiniteextensions to the existence of our mind filewhich means mergingwith machines. He has such an urge to merge that he sometimes uses theword we when talking about super-intelligent future beingsa farcry from Musks more ominous they.

I mentioned that Musk had told me he was bewildered that Kurzweildoesnt seem to have even 1 percent doubt about the hazards of ourmind children, as robotics expert Hans Moravec calls them.

Thats just not true. Im the one who articulated the dangers,Kurzweil said. The promise and peril are deeply intertwined, hecontinued. Fire kept us warm and cooked our food and also burned downour houses . . . . Furthermore, there are strategies to control theperil, as there have been with biotechnology guidelines. He summarizedthe three stages of the human response to new technology as Wow!, Uh-Oh,and What Other Choice Do We Have but to Move Forward? The list ofthings humans can do better than computers is getting smaller andsmaller, he said. But we create these tools to extend our longreach.

Just as, two hundred million years ago, mammalian brains developed aneocortex that eventually enabled humans to invent language andscience and art and technology, by the 2030s, Kurzweil predicts, wewill be cyborgs, with nanobots the size of blood cells connecting us tosynthetic neocortices in the cloud, giving us access to virtual realityand augmented reality from within our own nervous systems. We will befunnier; we will be more musical; we will increase our wisdom, hesaid, ultimately, as I understand it, producing a herd of Beethovens andEinsteins. Nanobots in our veins and arteries will cure diseases andheal our bodies from the inside.

He allows that Musks bte noire could come true. He notes that our A.I.progeny may be friendly and may not be and that if its notfriendly, we may have to fight it. And perhaps the only way to fightit would be to get an A.I. on your side thats even smarter.

Kurzweil told me he was surprised that Stuart Russell had jumped onthe peril bandwagon, so I reached out to Russell and met with him inhis seventh-floor office in Berkeley. The 54-year-old British-Americanexpert on A.I. told me that his thinking had evolved and that he nowviolently disagrees with Kurzweil and others who feel that cedingthe planet to super-intelligent A.I. is just fine.

Russell doesnt give a fig whether A.I. might enable more Einsteins andBeethovens. One more Ludwig doesnt balance the risk of destroyinghumanity. As if somehow intelligence was the thing that mattered andnot the quality of human experience, he said, with exasperation. Ithink if we replaced ourselves with machines that as far as we knowwould have no conscious existence, no matter how many amazing thingsthey invented, I think that would be the biggest possible tragedy.Nick Bostrom has called the idea of a society of technologicalawesomeness with no human beings a Disneyland without children.

There are people who believe that if the machines are more intelligentthan we are, then they should just have the planet and we should goaway, Russell said. Then there are people who say, Well, wellupload ourselves into the machines, so well still have consciousnessbut well be machines. Which I would find, well, completelyimplausible.

Russell took exception to the views of Yann LeCun, who developed theforerunner of the convolutional neural nets used by AlphaGo and isFacebooks director of A.I. research. LeCun told the BBC that therewould be no Ex Machina or Terminator scenarios, because robots would notbe built with human driveshunger, power, reproduction,self-preservation. Yann LeCun keeps saying that theres no reason whymachines would have any self-preservation instinct, Russell said.And its simply and mathematically false. I mean, its so obvious thata machine will have self-preservation even if you dont program it inbecause if you say, Fetch the coffee, it cant fetch the coffee ifits dead. So if you give it any goal whatsoever, it has a reason topreserve its own existence to achieve that goal. And if you threaten iton your way to getting coffee, its going to kill you because any riskto the coffee has to be countered. People have explained this to LeCunin very simple terms.

Russell debunked the two most common arguments for why we shouldntworry: One is: Itll never happen, which is like saying we are drivingtowards the cliff but were bound to run out of gas before we get there.And that doesnt seem like a good way to manage the affairs of the humanrace. And the other is: Not to worrywe will just build robots thatcollaborate with us and well be in human-robot teams. Which begs thequestion: If your robot doesnt agree with your objectives, how do youform a team with it?

Last year, Microsoft shut down its A.I. chatbot, Tay, after Twitteruserswho were supposed to make her smarter through casual andplayful conversation, as Microsoft put itinstead taught her how toreply with racist, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic slurs. bush did9/11, and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we havenow, Tay tweeted. donald trump is the only hope weve got. Inresponse, Musk tweeted, Will be interesting to see what the mean timeto Hitler is for these bots. Only took Microsofts Tay a day.

With Trump now president, Musk finds himself walking a fine line. Hiscompanies count on the U.S. government for business and subsidies,regardless of whether Marcus Aurelius or Caligula is in charge. Muskscompanies joined the amicus brief against Trumps executive orderregarding immigration and refugees, and Musk himself tweeted against theorder. At the same time, unlike Ubers Travis Kalanick, Musk has hung inthere as a member of Trumps Strategic and Policy Forum. Its veryElon, says Ashlee Vance. Hes going to do his own thing no matterwhat people grumble about. He added that Musk can be opportunisticwhen necessary.

I asked Musk about the flak he had gotten for associating with Trump. Inthe photograph of tech executives with Trump, he had looked gloomy, andthere was a weary tone in his voice when he talked about the subject. Inthe end, he said, its better to have voices of moderation in the room with the president. There are a lot of people, kind of the hard left,who essentially want to isolateand not have any voice. Very unwise.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is a highly regarded 37-year-old researcher who istrying to figure out whether its possible, in practice and not just intheory, to point A.I. in any direction, let alone a good one. I met himat a Japanese restaurant in Berkeley.

How do you encode the goal functions of an A.I. such that it has anOff switch and it wants there to be an Off switch and it wont try toeliminate the Off switch and it will let you press the Off switch, butit wont jump ahead and press the Off switch itself? he asked over anorder of surf-and-turf rolls. And if it self-modifies, will itself-modify in such a way as to keep the Off switch? Were trying towork on that. Its not easy.

I babbled about the heirs of Klaatu, HAL, and Ultron taking over theInternet and getting control of our banking, transportation, andmilitary. What about the replicants in Blade Runner, who conspire tokill their creator? Yudkowsky held his head in his hands, then patientlyexplained: The A.I. doesnt have to take over the whole Internet. Itdoesnt need drones. Its not dangerous because it has guns. Itsdangerous because its smarter than us. Suppose it can solve the sciencetechnology of predicting protein structure from DNA information. Then itjust needs to send out a few e-mails to the labs that synthesizecustomized proteins. Soon it has its own molecular machinery, buildingeven more sophisticated molecular machines.

If you want a picture of A.I. gone wrong, dont imagine marchinghumanoid robots with glowing red eyes. Imagine tiny invisible syntheticbacteria made of diamond, with tiny onboard computers, hiding insideyour bloodstream and everyone elses. And then, simultaneously, theyrelease one microgram of botulinum toxin. Everyone just falls over dead.

Only it wont actually happen like that. Its impossible for me topredict exactly how wed lose, because the A.I. will be smarter than Iam. When youre building something smarter than you, you have to get itright on the first try.

I thought back to my conversation with Musk and Altman. Dont getsidetracked by the idea of killer robots, Musk said, noting, The thingabout A.I. is that its not the robot; its the computer algorithm inthe Net. So the robot would just be an end effector, just a series ofsensors and actuators. A.I. is in the Net . . . . The important thingis that if we do get some sort of runaway algorithm, then the human A.I.collective can stop the runaway algorithm. But if theres large,centralized A.I. that decides, then theres no stopping it.

Altman expanded upon the scenario: An agent that had full control ofthe Internet could have far more effect on the world than an agent thathad full control of a sophisticated robot. Our lives are already sodependent on the Internet that an agent that had no body whatsoever butcould use the Internet really well would be far more powerful.

Even robots with a seemingly benign task could indifferently harm us.Lets say you create a self-improving A.I. to pick strawberries,Musk said, and it gets better and better at picking strawberries andpicks more and more and it is self-improving, so all it really wants todo is pick strawberries. So then it would have all the world bestrawberry fields. Strawberry fields forever. No room for humanbeings.

But can they ever really develop a kill switch? Im not sure Id wantto be the one holding the kill switch for some superpowered A.I.,because youd be the first thing it kills, Musk replied.

Altman tried to capture the chilling grandeur of whats at stake: Itsa very exciting time to be alive, because in the next few decades we areeither going to head toward self-destruction or toward human descendantseventually colonizing the universe.

Right, Musk said, adding, If you believe the end is the heat deathof the universe, it really is all about the journey.

The man who is so worried about extinction chuckled at his ownextinction joke. As H. P. Lovecraft once wrote, From even the greatestof horrors irony is seldom absent.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect date for the accident that killed the operator of a self-driving Tesla. It happened in May 2016.

Jeff Bezos: The C.E.O. of e-commerce and delivery giant Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post has already sparred with Trump. But Trump could come after Bezos for anti-trust issues, too: Trump is on the record as saying Amazon is controlling so much of what they are doing. The fact that The Washington Post has been reporting on Trump, often critically, probably does not endear Bezos to Trump, either.

Tim Cook: Trump has repeatedly criticized Apple for making its products overseas, and has called on the company to start building their damn computers and things in America. Cook must also contend with tariffs that will inevitably arise if Trump gets the U.S. into a trade war with China. And then theres the fact that Trump denounced Apple in 2016 for refusing a court order to cooperate with an F.B.I. request to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters in the San Bernardino terrorist attack last year.

Jack Dorsey: Twitter, already a tech company struggling with employee retention and a falling stock price, has been forced to contend with its role in handing Trump a megaphone to spout his opinions, whether those include attacking a union leader or merely suggesting the U.S. stock up on nuclear arms. Dorsey was also excluded by Trump from the tech summit at Trump Tower in December, reportedly as retribution for not allowing the Trump team to use an emoji-fied version of the #CrookedHillary hashtag. Sad!

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Elon Musks Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I ...

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Elon Musk blasts SEC, says no one oversees his tweets - CNN

JAN 15 2019BYSTEVEN LOVEDAY

Michigan is not a friendly place for Tesla, Elon Musk, or EVs in general. In fact, its not a friendly place for any new innovators, upcoming automotive companies, or the like. You cant buy a Tesla in Michigan and few EVs are available, let alone public charging stations. In addition, while you may be able to have a used EV shipped right to your home for a low fee in most states via CarMax or CarDirect Michigan might say nope, thats against the law!

Additional Tesla CEO Elon Musk Coverage:

So, when Tesla doesnt show up at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit, and Elon doesnt make a grand entrance, were far from surprised. Hell go ahead and give oodles of his hard-earned money to Flint, MI to help fix the continuing problems with the water quality on top of sending more money for the children in the area to all get laptops for school but to send a car or set foot in a Detroit-based auto show would be against everything the CEO believes in.

Despite Tesla and Elons lack of attendance at NAIAS yet again this year, CNET announced the CEO asDisruptor of the Year. Musk was officially awarded the honor as part of CNETs Roadshow Shift Awards. He beat out two other disruptive CEOs from McLaren automotive and Bird electric scooters. Executive editor of Roadshow, Chris Paukert shared:

Were not necessarily judging tremendous accomplishments. Were just looking at who stirred the pot the most this year.

The award was not only for Tesla vehicles, but also for Musks Boring company. Roadshow Editor in Chief Tim Stevens said:

He of course couldnt be with us today. Hes somewhere between here and Mars right now.

We set all the adversity and issues aside and say Way to go, Elon!

Source: MLive

Categories: Tesla

Tags: 2019 NAIAS, Elon Musk

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CNET Says Tesla CEO Elon Musk Was Disruptor Of The Year

Elon Musk tweeted this image of SpaceX's new Starship rocket.

The latest creation from Elon Musks SpaceX looks like it was ripped from the pages of a 1950s comic book.

Musk on Thursday night tweeted an image of the completed Starship test-flight rocket from a SpaceX facility in south Texas. Silver and shimmery, with prominent curved tail fins, the spacecraft is reminiscent of something out of Buck Rogers or Tintin.

A video of the reusable rocket standing against a cloudy sky was tweeted by a rocket enthusiast, and retweeted by Musk:

That test rocket wont be flying through space though it will be used for suborbital test flights. Orbital version is taller, has thicker skins (wont wrinkle) & a smoothly curving nose section, Musk said in another tweet.

The Starship rocket is intended to be a key component of Musks plan to land on and one day colonize Mars. The plan is for the 100-passenger Starship to be blasted into space by SpaceXs upcoming Super Heavy rocket, which itself may take its first test flight later this year. The Starship will then land on Mars, and take off and return to Earth. Musk has said he hopes to launch a Mars mission by the early 2020s.

The engines are expected to be test-fired next month, and Musk has said he expects the first Starship test flights in March or April.

Read more:

Elon Musk shows off SpaceXs massive Starship test rocket ...

Elon Musk has published a photo of an experimental rocket meant to help him achieve his mission of conquering Mars.

After teasing the spaceship earlier this month, Musk posted a picture of the vehicle dubbed the "test hopper" in real life on Friday from SpaceX's facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

As Business Insider's Dave Mosher noted earlier this month, the rocket carries the test-hopper moniker because it is not designed to orbit the Earth. Instead, the windowless ship will rocket on "hops" that propel it no more than about 16,400 feet in the air.

In simple terms, it's an experimental vehicle whose successes (or failures) will inform how SpaceX works toward a full-scale, orbit-ready prototype of Starship, which could one day ferry up to 100 people and 150 tons of cargo to Mars.

Read more: Elon Musk says SpaceX is on track to launch people to Mars within 6 years here's the full timeline of his plans to colonize the red planet

In a tweet explaining the rocket, Musk made clear it was for "suborbital" tests. The orbital version will be "taller, has thicker skins (won't wrinkle) & a smoothly curving nose section," Musk added. The operational ship will also have windows. In a tweet earlier this month, Musk said the rocket would run its first test in four to eight weeks, nearly a year ahead of schedule.

Musk has said the final Starship rocket will look like "liquid silver" during the blazing-hot reentry into Earth's atmosphere. But because of the test hopper's imperfections, like the ridges between the steel panels, it already has a liquid silver shine.

SpaceX fans have also been posting images of the ship:

A full-scale Starship is scheduled to launch people for the first time in 2023. Musk has said he hopes to launch the first crews to Mars in the mid-2020s, perhaps as early as 2024, to arrive at the red planet in 2025.

He has described Starship as a "Tintin" rocket, referring to the 20th-century Belgian comics series. "I love the 'Tintin' rocket design, so I kind of wanted to bias it towards that," he said during a press conference in September.

See more here:

Elon Musk released a photo SpaceX's test hopper rocket ...

Elon Musk has kicked off construction of his new Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai, a project that could help him avoid tariffs on cars that have recently been inflamed by President Donald Trump's trade war with China.

Musk gave a speech at the site of the planned $2 billion factory in the Lingang district of Shanghai at about 3 p.m. local time (2 a.m. ET) on Monday.

The new factory, first announced in July, could be a remedy to problems operating in China, which Tesla attributed partly to President Donald Trump's trade war. Musk said the factory would be finished by the end of 2019 and might be ready in some capacity as soon as this summer.

The site of the new Tesla factory. Reuters

In October, Tesla said tariffs imposed by China to counter those made by Trump "resulted in an import tariff rate of 40% on Tesla vehicles versus 15% for other imported cars in China."

It additionally cited "headwinds we have been facing from the ongoing trade tensions between the US and China" as a problem.

Read more: US companies are using an ingenious method to game the system and avoid the worst of Trump's trade war

Last month China dialed back the 40% tariff rate to 15% as part of the 90-day truce reached by Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

It will revert to 40% on March 1 unless the two nations reach a larger agreement on trade.

Tesla plans for the new Shanghai factory to produce 500,000 cars a year on Chinese soil.

Any cost savings for Tesla will depend on what the tariff regime is when production begins.

It will also hinge on the precise details of the supply chain. For example, Tesla components made in the US and then shipped to the Shanghai factory for assembly would still most likely face some kind of tariff.

Nonetheless, Tesla has previously said the factory will help it deal with the tariff problem. In the October statement, Tesla said it would accelerate construction as a response to the trade problems.

Read more: Elon Musk is worth about $23 billion and has never taken a paycheck from Tesla here's how the workaholic and father of 5 makes and spends his fortune

In November, Tesla cut the price of its cars in China to balance out the cost of new tariffs imposed by the Chinese government.

Musk got permission from the Chinese government on July 10 to build the factory, Tesla's first outside the US.

Musk says the Shanghai factory will produce Model 3 cars and will serve the greater China region. Ng Han Guan, File/AP Images

Tesla also has Gigafactories in Nevada's Storey County and in Buffalo, New York.

The Shanghai factory would double the size of the electric-car maker's global manufacturing, Reuters said.

Tesla has also registered a financial leasing company in China with $30 million registered in capital, Reuters reported. This will allow it to speed up "leasing and consultancy" contracts to get the factory up and running.

On Monday before the ceremony, Musk sent off a string of tweets about the factory:

"Aiming to finish initial construction this summer, start Model 3 production end of year & reach high volume production next year.

"Shanghai Giga production of Model 3/Y will serve greater China region. Shanghai Giga will produce affordable versions of 3/Y for greater China.

"All Model S/X & higher cost versions of Model 3/Y will still be built in US for WW market, incl China."

China's retaliatory tariffs were imposed after Trump ordered tariffs on $34 billion worth of goods imported from China.

The trade war cooled off slightly over the holiday period, with Trump and Xi agreeing, among other things, to an easing of car and car-part tariffs for three months beginning January 1.

The factory will be China's first wholly foreign-owned car plant, Reuters said.

Originally posted here:

Elon Musk kicks off Gigafactory in Shanghai, may dodge Trump ...

Which is the illustration, and which is the actual Starship Hopper test rocket? The real rocket is on the left and take note of the Starman standing by one of the fins. (Elon Musk via Twitter)

For weeks, photographers have been snapping pictures of a retro-looking, shiny stainless-steel rocket thats been taking shape at SpaceXs launch site in South Texas and tonight, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk declared that assembly of the first Starship short-hop test rocket is complete.

Musk tweeted a picture of what looks to be a roughly 120-foot-tall Starship Hopper, composed of three sections that were put together at SpaceXs Boca Chica facility.

This is an actual picture, not a rendering, Musk wrote. But the rocket does look eerily like the illustration that Musk shared several days earlier or, for that matter, the pointy-topped rockets that were all the rage in the 1940s.

Starship is the latest incarnation of the spaceship formerly known as the Interplanetary Transport System, Mars Colonial Transporter, the Big Falcon Rocket or the BFR.

Musk says the refuelable Starship, when paired with a huge rocket booster known as the Super Heavy, could be used for transcontinental point-to-point trips on Earth, satellite constellation deployment, voyages around the moon and to the lunar surface, and journeys to Mars and back.

A new type of stainless-steel alloy is being used because thats the best way for the craft to shed heat as it zooms through the atmosphere. Starship will look like liquid silver, Musk wrote.

The craft that has been taking shape in Texas is meant to fly short hops to practice launches and landings, just as SpaceXs Grasshopper rocket platform and its successor, the F9R Dev, were used as test beds for Falcon 9 booster landings in the 2012-2014 time frame.

Although Musk declared that assembly was finished, theres more work still to be done. For example, shock absorbers have to be installed on the feet of the landing legs. The engines on the rocket will also be replaced with honest-to-goodness, methane-fueled Raptor engines.

Engines currently on Starship hopper are a blend of Raptor development and operational parts, Musk explained last weekend. First hopper engine to be fired is almost finished assembly in California. Probably fires next month.

Short-hop tests could begin in February or March. This is for suborbital VTOL tests, he said in one of tonights tweets. Orbital version is taller, has thicker skins (wont wrinkle) and a smoothly curving nose section.

Musk said he plans to provide a detailed update on the Starship architecture in March or April. The first scaled-up, orbital-class prototype should be done around June, he said.

The aim is to have the Starship and the Super Heavy booster ready for passengers by the mid-2020s, in order to send Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and an entourage of artists around the moon and set the stage for Mars trips.

SpaceX has clearly picked up the pace of Starship development in the past month, and the fact that the company is more than halfway through a $500 million funding round could have something to do with that.

Its interesting that Starship assembly has been taking place outside in full view of SpaceX paparazzi. Heres a sampling of pictures from the past month:

See original here:

Elon Musk says SpaceX has assembled shiny Starship test ...

Its mid-afternoon on a Friday at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and three of Elon Musks children are gathered around him one of his triplets, both of his twins.

Musk is wearing a gray T-shirt and sitting in a swivel chair at his desk, which is not in a private office behind a closed door, but in an accessible corner cubicle festooned with outer-space novelty items, photos of his rockets, and mementos from Tesla and his other companies.

Most tellingly, theres a framed poster of a shooting star with a caption underneath it that reads, When you wish upon a falling star, your dreams can come true. Unless its really a meteor hurtling to the Earth which will destroy all life. Then youre pretty much hosed, no matter what you wish for. Unless its death by meteorite. To most people, this would be mere dark humor, but in this setting, its also a reminder of Musks master plan: to create habitats for humanity on other planets and moons. If we dont send our civilization into another Dark Ages before Musk or one of his dreams inheritors pull it off, then Musk will likely be remembered as one of the most seminal figures of this millennium. Kids on all the terraformed planets of the universe will look forward to Musk Day, when they get the day off to commemorate the birth of the Earthling who single-handedly ushered in the era of space colonization.

And thats just one of Musks ambitions. Others include converting automobiles, households and as much industry as possible from fossil fuels to sustainable energy; implementing a new form of high-speed city-to-city transportation via vacuum tube; relieving traffic congestion with a honeycomb of underground tunnels fitted with electric skates for cars and commuters; creating a mind-computer interface to enhance human health and brainpower; and saving humanity from the future threat of an artificial intelligence that may one day run amok and decide, quite rationally, to eliminate the irrational human species.

So far, Musk, 46, has accomplished none of these goals.

But what he has done is something that very few living people can claim: Painstakingly bulldozed, with no experience whatsoever, into two fields with ridiculously high barriers to entry car manufacturing (Tesla) and rocketry (SpaceX) and created the best products in those industries, as measured by just about any meaningful metric you can think of. In the process, hes managed to sell the world on his capability to achieve objectives so lofty that from the mouth of anyone else, theyd be called fantasies.

At least, most of the world. Im looking at the short losses, Musk says, transfixed by CNBC on his iPhone. He speaks to his kids without looking up. Guys, check this out: Tesla has the highest short position in the entire stock market. A $9 billion short position.

His children lean over the phone, looking at a table full of numbers that I dont understand. So his 13-year-old, Griffin, explains it to me: Theyre betting that the stock goes down, and theyre getting money off that. But it went up high, so they lost an insane amount of money.

Theyre jerks who want us to die, Musk elaborates. Theyre constantly trying to make up false rumors and amplify any negative rumors. Its a really big incentive to lie and attack my integrity. Its really awful. Its

He trails off, as he often does when preoccupied by a thought. I try to help: Unethical?

Its He shakes his head and struggles for the right word, then says softly, Hurtful.

It is easy to confuse who someone is with what they do, and thus turn them into a caricature who fits neatly into a storybook view of the world. Our culture always needs villains and heroes, fools and geniuses, scapegoats and role models. However, despite opinions to the contrary, Elon Musk is not a robot sent from the future to save humanity. Nor is he a Silicon Valley savant whose emotional affect has been replaced with supercomputer-like intelligence. Over the course of nine months of reporting, watching Musk do everything from strategize Mars landings with his rocket-engineering team to plan the next breakthroughs with his artificial-intelligence experts, I learned he is someone far, far different from what his myth and reputation suggest.

The New York Times has called him arguably the most successful and important entrepreneur in the world. Its an easy case to make: Hes probably the only person who has started four billion-dollar companies PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and Solar City. But at his core, Musk is not a businessman or entrepreneur. Hes an engineer, inventor and, as he puts it, technologist. And as a naturally gifted engineer, hes able to find the design inefficiencies, flaws and complete oversights in the tools that power our civilization.

Hes able to see things more clearly in a way that no one else I know of can understand, says his brother, Kimbal. He discusses his brothers love of chess in their earlier years, and adds, Theres a thing in chess where you can see 12 moves ahead if youre a grandmaster. And in any particular situation, Elon can see things 12 moves ahead.

His children soon leave for the home of their mother, Musks ex-wife Justine. I wish we could be private with Tesla, Musk murmurs as they exit. It actually makes us less efficient to be a public company.

What follows is silence. Musk sits at his desk, looking at his phone, but not typing or reading anything. He then lowers himself to the floor, and stretches his back on a foam roller. When he finishes, I attempt to start the interview by asking about the Tesla Model 3 launch a week earlier, and what it felt like to stand onstage and tell the world hed just pulled off a plan 14 years in the making: to bootstrap, with luxury electric cars, a mass-market electric car.

The accomplishment, for Musk, is not just in making a $35,000 electric car; its in making a $35,000 electric car thats so good, and so in-demand, that it forces other car manufacturers to phase out gas cars to compete. And sure enough, within two months of the launch, both GM and Jaguar Land Rover announced they were planning to eliminate gas cars and go all-electric.

Musk thinks for a while, begins to answer, then pauses. Uh, actually, let me go to the restroom. Then Ill ask you to repeat that question. A longer pause. I also have to unload other things from my mind.

Five minutes later, Musk still hasnt returned. Sam Teller, his chief of staff, says, Ill be right back.

Several minutes after that, they both reappear and huddle nearby, whispering to each other. Then Musk returns to his desk.

We can reschedule for another day if this is a bad time, I offer.

Musk clasps his hands on the surface of the desk, composes himself, and declines.

It might take me a little while to get into the rhythm of things.

Then he heaves a sigh and ends his effort at composure. I just broke up with my girlfriend, he says hesitantly. I was really in love, and it hurt bad.

He pauses and corrects himself: Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think.

Thus, the answer to the question posed earlier: It felt unexpectedly, disappointingly, uncontrollably horrible to launch the Model 3. Ive been in severe emotional pain for the last few weeks, Musk elaborates. Severe. It took every ounce of will to be able to do the Model 3 event and not look like the most depressed guy around. For most of that day, I was morbid. And then I had to psych myself up: drink a couple of Red Bulls, hang out with positive people and then, like, tell myself: I have all these people depending on me. All right, do it!'

Minutes before the event, after meditating for pretty much the first time in his life to get centered, Musk chose a very telling song to drive onstage to: R U Mine? by the Arctic Monkeys.

Musk discusses the breakup for a few more minutes, then asks, earnestly, deadpan, Is there anybody you think I should date? Its so hard for me to even meet people. He swallows and clarifies, stammering softly, Im looking for a long-term relationship. Im not looking for a one-night stand. Im looking for a serious companion or soulmate, that kind of thing.

I eventually tell him that it may not be a good idea to jump right into another relationship. He may want to take some time to himself and figure out why his previous relationships havent worked in the long run: his marriage to writer Justine Musk, his marriage to actress Talulah Riley, and this new breakup with actress Amber Heard.

Musk shakes his head and grimaces: If Im not in love, if Im not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.

I explain that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence.

Musk disagrees. Strongly. Its not true, he replies petulantly. I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me. He hesitates, shakes his head, falters, continues. Its not like I dont know what that feels like: Being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there and no one on the pillow next to you. Fuck. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that?

Theres truth to what Musk is saying. It is lonely at the top. But not for everyone. Its lonely at the top for those who were lonely at the bottom.

When I was a child, theres one thing I said, Musk continues. His demeanor is stiff, yet in the sheen of his eyes and the trembling of his lips, a high tide of emotion is visible, pushing against the retaining walls. I never want to be alone. Thats what I would say. His voice drops to a whisper. I dont want to be alone.

A ring of red forms around his eyes as he stares forward and sits frozen in silence. Musk is a titan, a visionary, a human-size lever pushing forward massive historical inevitabilities the kind of person who comes around only a few times in a century but in this moment, he seems like a child who is afraid of abandonment. And that may be the origin story of Musks superambitions, but more on that later. In the meantime, Musk has something hed like to show me.

If you say anything about what youre about to see, it would cost us billions, he says, rising from his desk. And you would be put in jail.

The most interesting tourist attraction in Los Angeles County is one thats not in many guidebooks: Its in the otherwise-untouristed southwestern city of Hawthorne, around SpaceX. If you walk along Crenshaw Boulevard from Jack Northrop Boulevard to 120th Street, what you will see is a city of the future thats under construction. This is Musk city, an alternate reality, a triumph of futuristic imagination more thrilling than anything at a Disney park. On the west side of the street, a 156-foot-tall rocket towers above SpaceX headquarters, symbolizing Musks dream of relatively low-cost interplanetary travel. This particular rocket booster was the first in human history to be launched into space, then recovered intact on Earth after separating, and then fired back into space. On the east side of the street, an employee parking lot has been dug up and turned into the first-ever tunnel for the Boring Company, Musks underground-honeycomb solution to traffic jams and the future home of all his terrestrial transportation projects. Then, running for a mile beside Jack Northrop Boulevard, theres a white vacuum tube along the shoulder of the road. This is the test track for the Hyperloop, Musks high-speed form of city-to-city travel. Taken together, the dreams of Musk city promise to connect the planet and the solar system in ways that will fundamentally change humanitys relationship to two of the most important facets of its reality: distance and time.

But there is a particular building in Musk city that few have visited, and this is where Musk takes me. It is the Tesla Design Studio, where hes slated to do a walkthrough of the Tesla Truck and other future vehicle prototypes with his team of designers and engineers.

Outside the door, a guard takes my phone and audio recorder, and Im given an old-fashioned pen and paper to take notes on. Musk then continues into the building and reveals the Tesla Truck, which aims to help the trucking industry go green. (Musk has even been toying with creating a supersonic electric jet, with vertical takeoff and landing, in the future.) Four key members of the Tesla team are there Doug Field, JB Straubel, Franz von Holzhausen, Jerome Guillen and watch with anticipation as Musk explores a new configuration of the cab for the first time.

Guillen explains the idea behind the truck: We just thought, What do people want? They want reliability. They want the lowest cost. And they want driver comfort. So we reimagined the truck.

This is a perfect example of the idea that Musk-inspired wannabe visionaries around the world worship like a religion: first principles thinking. In other words, if you want to create or innovate, start from a clean slate. Dont accept any ideas, practices or standards just because everyone else is doing them. For instance, if you want to make a truck, then it must be able to reliably move cargo from one location to another, and you must follow existing laws of physics. Everything else is negotiable, including government regulations. As long as you remember that the goal isnt to reinvent the truck, but to create the best one, whether or not its similar to past trucks.

As a result of this type of thinking, Musk is able to see an industry much more objectively than others whove been in the field their whole lives.

I was literally told this is impossible and Im a huge liar, Musk says of the early days of Tesla. But I have a car and you can drive it. This is not like a frigging unicorn. Its real. Go for a drive. Its amazing. How can you be in denial?

An unfortunate fact of human nature is that when people make up their mind about something, they tend not to change it even when confronted with facts to the contrary. Its very unscientific, Musk says. Theres this thing called physics, which is this scientific method thats really quite effective for figuring out the truth.

The scientific method is a phrase Musk uses often when asked how he came up with an idea, solved a problem or chose to start a business. Heres how he defines it for his purposes, in mostly his own words:

1. Ask a question.

2. Gather as much evidence as possible about it.

3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.

4. Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability?5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.6. If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then youre probably right, but youre not certainly right.

Thats the scientific method, Musk concludes. Its really helpful for figuring out the tricky things.

But most people dont use it, he says. They engage in wishful thinking. They ignore counterarguments. They form conclusions based on what others are doing and arent doing. The reasoning that results is Its true because I said its true, but not because its objectively true.

The fundamental intention of Tesla, at least my motivation, Musk explains in his halting, stuttering voice, was to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. Thats why I open-sourced the patents. Its the only way to transition to sustainable energy better.

Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI, he continues. I keep telling people this. I hate to be Cassandra here, but its all fun and games until somebody loses a fucking eye. This view [of climate change] is shared by almost everyone whos not crazy in the scientific community.

For the next 20 minutes, Musk examines the Tesla Truck. He comments first on the technical details, even ones as granular as the drawbacks and advantages of different types of welding. He then moves on to the design, specifically a driver-comfort feature that cannot be specified here, due to said threatened jail time.

Probably no one will buy it because of this, he tells his team. But if youre going to make a product, make it beautiful. Even if it doesnt affect sales, I want it to be beautiful.

According to Musks best guess, our personalities might be 80 percent nature and 20 percent nurture. Whatever that ratio actually is, if you want to understand the future that Musk is building, its essential to understand the past that built him, including his fears of human extinction and being alone.

For the first eight or so years of his life, Musk lived with his mother, Maye, a dietitian and model, and his father, Errol, an engineer, in Pretoria, South Africa. He rarely saw either of them.

I didnt really have a primary nanny or anything, Musk recalls. I just had a housekeeper who was there to make sure I didnt break anything. She wasnt, like, watching me. I was off making explosives and reading books and building rockets and doing things that could have gotten me killed. Im shocked that I have all my fingers. He raises his hands and examines them, then lowers his digits. I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents.

Some of those books help explain the world Musk is building, particularly Isaac Asimovs Foundation series. The books are centered around the work of a visionary named Hari Seldon, who has invented a scientific method of predicting the future based on crowd behavior. He sees a 30,000-year Dark Ages waiting ahead for humankind, and creates a plan that involves sending scientific colonies to distant planets to help civilization mitigate this unavoidable cataclysm.

Asimov certainly was influential because he was seriously paralleling Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but he applied that to a sort of modern galactic empire, Musk explains. The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one.

Musk was around 10 at this time, and plunged in his own personal dark age. Hed recently made a move that would change his life. It was a wrong decision that came from the right place.

When his parents split up two years before, he and his younger siblings Kimbal and Tosca stayed with their mom. But, Musk recounts, I felt sorry for my father, because my mother had all three kids. He seemed very sad and lonely by himself. So I thought, I can be company.' He pauses while a movies worth of images seem to flicker through his mind.

Yeah, I was sad for my father. But I didnt really understand at the time what kind of person he was.

He lets out a long, sad sigh, then says flatly about moving in with Dad, It was not a good idea.

According to Elon, Errol has an extremely high IQ brilliant at engineering, brilliant and was supposedly the youngest person to get a professional engineers qualification in South Africa. When Elon came to live with him in Lone Hill, a suburb of Johannesburg, Errol was, by his own account, making money in the often dangerous worlds of construction and emerald mining at times so much that he claims he couldnt close his safe.

Im naturally good at engineering thats because I inherited it from my father, Musk says. Whats very difficult for others is easy for me. For a while, I thought things were so obvious that everyone must know this.

Like what kinds of things?

Well, like how the wiring in a house works. And a circuit breaker, and alternating current and direct current, what amps and volts were, how to mix a fuel and oxidizers to create an explosive. I thought everyone knew this.

But there was another side to Musks father that was just as important to making Elon who he is. He was such a terrible human being, Musk shares. You have no idea. His voice trembles, and he discusses a few of those things, but doesnt go into specifics. My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil, he says. He will plan evil.

Besides emotional abuse, did that include physical abuse?

My dad was not physically violent with me. He was only physically violent when I was very young. (Errol countered via email that he only smacked Elon once, on the bottom.)

Elons eyes turn red as he continues discussing his dad. You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done. Um

There is clearly something Musk wants to share, but he cant bring himself to utter the words, at least not on the record. Its so terrible, you cant believe it.

The tears run silently down his face. I cant remember the last time I cried. He turns to Teller to confirm this. Youve never seen me cry.

No, Teller says. Ive never seen you cry.

The flow of tears stops as quickly as it began. And once more, Musk has the cold, impassive, but gentle stone face that is more familiar to the outside world.

Yet its now clear that this is not the face of someone without emotions, but the face of someone with a lot of emotions who had been forced to suppress them in order to survive a painful childhood.

When asked about committing crimes, Musks father said that he has never intentionally threatened or hurt anyone, or been charged with anything, except in this one case, he says he shot and killed three out of five or six armed people who broke into his home, and was later cleared of all charges on self-defense.

In his e-mail, Errol wrote: Ive been accused of being a Gay, a Misogynist, a Paedophile, a Traitor, a Rat, a Shit (quite often), a Bastard (by many women whose attentions I did not return) and much more. My own (wonderful) mother told me I am ruthless and should learn to be more humane.' But, he concluded, I love my children and would readily do whatever for them.

As an adult, Musk, with the same optimism with which he moved in with his father as a child, moved his dad, his fathers then-wife and their children to Malibu. He bought them a house, cars and a boat. But his father, Elon says, hadnt changed, and Elon severed the relationship.

In my experience, there is nothing you can do, he says about finally learning the lesson that his dad will never change. Nothing, nothing. I wish. Ive tried everything. I tried threats, rewards, intellectual arguments, emotional arguments, everything to try to change my father for the better, and he no way, it just got worse.

Somewhere in this trauma bond is the key to Musks worldview creation against destruction, of being useful versus harmful, of defending the world against evil.

Things at school werent much better than life at home. There, Musk was brutally bullied until he was 15 years old.

For the longest time, I was the youngest and the smallest kid in the class because my birthday just happens to fall on almost the last day that they will accept you into school, June 28th. And I was a late bloomer. So I was the youngest and the smallest kid in class for years and years. The gangs at school would hunt me down literally hunt me down!

Musk put down the books and started learning to fight back karate, judo, wrestling. That physical education, combined with a growth spurt that brought him to six feet by age 16, gave him some confidence and, as he puts it, I started dishing it out as hard as theyd give it to me.

When he got into a fight with the biggest bully at school and knocked him out with one punch, Musk noticed that the bully never picked on him again. It taught me a lesson: If youre fighting a bully, you cannot appease a bully. Musk speaks the next words forcefully. You punch the bully in the nose. Bullies are looking for targets that wont fight back. If you make yourself a hard target and punch the bully in the nose, hes going to beat the shit out of you, but hes actually not going to hit you again.

When he was 17, Musk left college and moved to his mothers home country, Canada, later obtaining passports for his mother, brother and sister to join him there. His father did not wish him well, Musk recalls. He said rather contentiously that Id be back in three months, that Im never going to make it, that Im never going to make anything of myself. He called me an idiot all the time. Thats the tip of the iceberg, by the way.

After Musk became successful, his father even took credit for helping him to such a degree that its listed as fact in Elons Wikipedia entry. One thing he claims is he gave us a whole bunch of money to start, my brother and I, to start up our first company [Zip2, which provided online city guides to newspapers]. This is not true, Musk says. He was irrelevant. He paid nothing for college. My brother and I paid for college through scholarships, loans and working two jobs simultaneously. The funding we raised for our first company came from a small group of random angel investors in Silicon Valley.

Musks career history decorates his desk. Theres an item from nearly all of his companies, even a mug for X.com, the early online bank he started, which became PayPal. The sale of Zip2 resulted in a $22 million check made out directly to Musk, which he used in part to start X.com. With the roughly $180 million post-tax amount he made from the sale of PayPal, he started SpaceX with $100 million, put $70 million into Tesla, invested $10 million into Solar City, and saved little for himself.

One of the misunderstandings that rankles Musk most is being pigeonholed and narrowcast, whether as the real-life Tony Stark or the second coming of Steve Jobs. When, at a photo shoot, he was asked to wear a black turtleneck, the trademark garb of Jobs, he bristled. If I was dying and I had a turtleneck on, he tells me, with my last dying breath, I would take the turtleneck off and try to throw it as far away from my body as possible.

So what is Musk about?

I try to do useful things, he explains. Thats a nice aspiration. And useful means it is of value to the rest of society. Are they useful things that work and make peoples lives better, make the future seem better, and actually are better, too? I think we should try to make the future better.

When asked to define better, Musk elaborates, It would be better if we mitigated the effects of global warming and had cleaner air in our cities and werent drilling for vast amounts of coal, oil and gas in parts of the world that are problematic and will run out anyway.

And if we were a multiplanetary species, that would reduce the possibility of some single event, man-made or natural, taking out civilization as we know it, as it did the dinosaurs. There have been five mass-extinction events in the fossil record. People have no comprehension of these things. Unless youre a cockroach or a mushroom or a sponge youre fucked. He laughs sharply. Its insurance of life as we know it, and it makes the future far more inspiring if we are out there among the stars and you could move to another planet if you wanted to.

This, then, is the ideology of Musk. And though basic, its actually very rare. Think of the other names that one associates with innovation this century: Theyre people who built operating systems, devices, websites or social-media platforms. Even when it didnt start out that way, the ideology in most cases soon became: How can I make my company the center of my users world? Consequently, social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter use a number of tricks to activate the addictive reward centers of a users brain.

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