Monthly Archives: February 2021

Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave a brief but loaded comment to the Washington Post this week when the newspaper reached out over a story written about him.

"Give my regards to your puppet master," Musk replied to the papers request for its story "Elon Musk Moved to Texas and embraced celebrity. Can Tesla Run on Autopilot?"

Muskwas almost certainly referring to Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post.

There have been reports of a brewingfeuding between the two for years, frequently over their ambitions in space: Musk owns the company SpaceX and Bezos owns Blue Origin.

In 2019, Bezos subtly mocked Musks plans to send people to Mars.

TESLA CEO ELON MUSK SLAMS TEXAS ENERGY AGENCY AS UNRELIABLE: 'NOT EARNING THAT R'

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks during the unveiling of the new Tesla Model Y in Hawthorne, California on March 14, 2019. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo credit should read FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)

"My friends who want to move to Mars, I say, do me a favor and go live on the top of Mount Everest for a year first, and see if you like it, because its a garden paradise compared to Mars," he told SpaceNews.

The two billionaires have also competed for the spot as the world's richest man with Bezos overtaking Musk again last week after Musk's wealth fell by $15 million when he tweeted that Bitcoin prices "seem high."

JEFF BEZOS OVERTAKES ELON MUSK TO BECOME WORLD'S RICHEST PERSON

The Post article reported on Teslas "questionable business moves" and claimed critics have said his personal schedule and "seeming cult of personality that has developed around him, are beginning to show in the car company he runs."

Author Faiz Siddiqui said the story was written following interviews with a dozen of "current and former Tesla employees, investors and analysts."

The Post has said that Bezos has no editorial influence over the paper and it has written plenty of stories casting the company in a negative light, including one last week headlined "New York sues Amazon alleging flagrant disregard of health standards at warehouses."

Former President Trump has also been critical of Bezos and the newspaper, calling it Amazon's "chief strategist" and "fake news."

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The Washington Post told Fox News it had no comment and Tesla did not immediately respond to Fox News' after-hours requestfor comment.

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Elon Musk may have called out Jeff Bezos with puppet ...

A Starlink user terminal installed on the roof of a building in Canada.

SpaceX

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the company's Starlink satellite internet service "will double" speeds to customers "later this year," as it continues to build out the global consumer network.

"Speed will double to ~300Mb/s & latency will drop to ~20ms later this year," Musk said in a tweet on Monday, responding to a user who showed speed tests ranging between 77 and 130 Mbps.

Latency is the amount of delay in an internet network, defining how much time it takes a signal to travel back and forth from a destination. Latency and download speeds are key measures for an internet service provider.

In a following tweet, Musk added that Starlink will reach customers around "most" of the Earth by the end of 2021 and is expecting to have complete global coverage "by next year."

He emphasized that Starlink, like other satellite broadband services, is intended for customers in "low to medium population density area."

"Cellular will always have the advantage in dense urban areas," Musk said.

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

Liesa Johannssen-Koppitz | Bloomberg | Getty Images

To date SpaceX has launched more than 1,000 satellites for Starlink. In October, SpaceX began rolling out early service in a public beta tocustomers in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., with service priced at $99 a month, plus a $499 upfront cost for the hardware needed to connect to the network.

The company recently widened the scope of that public beta,allowing prospective users to place preorders for Starlink service. SpaceX, in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission earlier this month, disclosed that Starlink has "over 10,000 users in the United States and abroad," in just over three months since the public beta began.

SpaceX noted in that FCC filing that Starlink's service is "meeting and exceeding 100/20 megabits per second ('Mbps') throughput to individual users," while most users were seeing latency "at or below 31 milliseconds."

SpaceX deploys 60 Starlink satellites in orbit.

SpaceX

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Elon Musk: SpaceX will double Starlink internet speed ...

INX Limited CMO Douglas Borthwick on bitcoin, Dogecoin and which cryptocurrencies investors should pay attention to.

Billionaire Elon Musk said Thursday that he would welcome a probeby the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)into his tweets aboutmemecryptocurrencyDogecoin.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO was responding to a tweet from a Musk fan account.

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"The SEC investigating dog memes sent by a memer about a memecoin is peak 2021," wrote@RationalEtienne, who has more than 19,000 followers.

"I hope they do! It would be awesome," Musk replied with two crying laughing emojis.

Speculation regarding an investigation by U.S. regulators over his posts was set off by a tweet from a financial markets newswire called First Squawk, according to Newsweek.

In its own tweet, First Squawk wrote that the "SEC IS SAID TO INVESTIGATE TESLA CHIEF EXECUTIVE MUSK FOR HIS TWEETS ONDOGECOIN," according to "SOURCES FAMILIAR WITH THE MATTER."

Musk has repeatedly referenced Dogecoin over the past couple of weeks to his more than 48 million followers.

On Wednesday, Musk tweeted a picture of the Dogecoin Shiba Inu planting a Dogecoin flag "on the actual moon" -- causing the price of Dogecoin to spike again --and on Feb. 21 he posted the phrase, "Dojo 4 Doge."

Earlier in the month, Muskclaimed he hadbought some for his 9-month-old son, X A-Xii.

In addition, on Feb. 8 Tesla announced inan SEC filing that it had bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin.

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No such investigation has been confirmed by the commission.

Nevertheless, Musk has a checkered past with the SEC.

In 2018, he was fined more than $20 million and forced to step down as Tesla's board chairman after tweeting he had "funding secured to take the electric-car maker private at $420 a share.

The announcement caused Telsa shares to surge, but the SEC said Musk had not hammered down financing for the alleged deal and the rocket scientist admittedhe had chosenthe $420 figure to make a joke about marijuana.

In an interview with60 Minuteslater that year, Musk saidhe did not respect the agency and tweeted in the summer of last year: "SEC, three letter acronym, middle word is Elons."

However, speaking on the Clubhouse app at the end of January, Musk said that his jokes about Dogecoin "are really just meant to be jokes."

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Elon Musk: SEC probe over Dogecoin tweets would be 'awesome' - Fox Business

It is no secret that the tycoon feels a preference over this cryptocurrency.

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February26, 20212 min read

The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk responded on his favorite network, Twitter, about an alleged investigation to the different comments about the Dogecoin and the consequences of these, that is, the sudden rise in its price.

First Squawk, a person with access to proprietary information regarding finance and exonomy, revealed that Musk could be investigated by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) according to sources with knowledge of the matter. .

Another Twitter user made him share the information with the millionaire in a lighter and more fun way. He mocks the SEC for inventing "dog memes." In addition, the tweet ends with the words " Hail, Emperor Musk!" and an image of Elon with crown and cape.

In response, the millionaire followed the joke line and replied, I hope they do! It would be great!".

It is a rival cryptocurrency of Bitcoin, which was born as a result of a meme, a dog of the Shiba Inu breed, also known on the internet as Cheems. This is Musk's favorite and he has not been shy about giving his opinion on it. Among the tweets are "Dogecoin is the crypto of the people" and "No ups and downs, just Doge ." After that, it increased its value by more than 50%.

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Elon Musk Responds That 'It Would Be Great' If He Was Investigated For His Dogecoin Memes - Entrepreneur

Why do the worlds two richest men want to get off the planet so badly?

Elon Musk of Tesla and Jeff Bezos of Amazon have more than $350 billion in combined wealth and preside over two of the most valuable companies ever created. But when theyre not innovating on Earth, they have been focusing their considerable brain power on bringing a multiplanetary human habitat to reality.

For Mr. Musk, its through his other company, SpaceX, which has become an ever bigger player in the private space-technology arena. On top of satellite launches and other rocket innovations, the company announced it will send its first all civilian crew into orbit at the end of the year, in a mission called Inspiration4. SpaceX has already carried NASA astronauts to the International Space Station and is planning to transport more, as well as private astronauts, for a high price.

Most ambitiously, Mr. Musk has said that SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2026. To do that, the private company will use a chunk of the close to $3 billion including $850 million announced this week in a regulatory filing that it has raised over the last year to finance this herculean effort.

While Mr. Musk might not be the first human to go to the red planet, he once told me that he wanted to die there, joking, Just not on landing.

Mr. Bezos, who is stepping down as chief executive of Amazon this year, is expected to accelerate his space-travel efforts through his company Blue Origin, whose tag line reads, in part, Earth, in all its beauty, is just our starting place.

Like SpaceX, Blue Origin is working on payload launches and reusable orbital launch vehicles, as well as on moon landing technology, to achieve what Mr. Bezos once called low-cost access to space. Blue Origin executives said recently that the company is close to blasting off into space with humans.

Mr. Bezos most extravagant notion, unveiled in 2019, is a vision of space colonies spinning cylinders floating out there with all kinds of environments.

These are very large structures, miles on end, and they hold a million people or more each, he said, noting they are intended to relieve the stress on Earth and help make it more livable.

Its probably good for space innovation that two billionaires are slugging it out and attracting all kinds of start-ups, investments and interest to the area. But all of their frantic aggression has been overshadowed of late by two spectacular efforts by NASA.

The two NASA missions delivered this week the kind of awe-inspiring moments that make one look up from the wretched news spewing out of our smartphones toward the stunning celestial beauty of the endless universe.

The first was the batch of images from amazing high-definition cameras on the Perseverance rover, a car-size autonomous vehicle that touched down in the Jezero Crater on Mars last week. The photographs are so sharp that you can zoom in close enough to look at the holes in the rocks on the surface and even get a pretty good sense of the dirt itself. The larger panorama is just as arresting, a desert scene that is breathtakingly alien while also feeling quite familiar.

I found myself staring at the scenes for an hour, marveling that I can see the details of an elegant wind-carved boulder from a distance of 133.6 million miles. The $2.7 billion Mars mission includes a search for signs of ancient Martian life, sample-collecting and the flight of a helicopter called Ingenuity.

But the imagery from Mars was quickly topped by an even older NASA mission to Jupiter by the Juno space probe, which entered the planets orbit in 2016. It did some very close fly-bys recently that are yielding perhaps the most stunning photos that weve ever seen of the planet.

Color-enhanced by citizen scientists from publicly available NASA data and images, the images show delicately swirling jet streams that look like a painting of quicksilver created by some space-faring artistic genius. I wish I could be riding on Juno myself to see up close the vast cyclones gather and the angry clouds seethe.

It was just a year ago that Juno sent back another image of Jupiter, looking like the best marble ever made, which NASA titled Massive Beauty.

Perhaps the fact that life on Earth feels so precarious at this moment explains, at least in part, why Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk want to find ways to get off it.

But its important to keep in mind that these two men are just two voices among billions of earthlings. It is incumbent on the rest of us to take more control of how we are going to move into the brave new worlds beyond our own gem of a planet.

We have handed over so much of our fate to so few people over the last decades, especially when it comes to critical technology. As we take tentative steps toward leaving Earth, it feels like we are continuing to place too much of our trust in the hands of tech titans.

Think about it: We the people invented the internet, and the tech moguls pretty much own it. And we the people invented space travel, and it now looks as if the moguls could own that, too.

Lets hope not. NASA, and other government space agencies around the world, need our continued support to increase space exploration.

I get that we have enormous needs on this planet, and money put toward space travel could instead be spent on improving lives here on Earth. But the risk to our planet from climate change means we have to think much bigger.

Keep in mind a hidden message that NASA engineers put onto the descent parachute of the Perseverance rover. The colors on the chute were a binary code that translates into Dare mighty things.

Coming from across the vast and empty universe, it was a message not meant just for Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk. It was actually meant for all of us.

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Opinion | Why Are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos So Interested in Space? - The New York Times