Monthly Archives: May 2021

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What do Cathie Wood, ESG investors, and central bankers have in common? Theyre all involved in the bull and bear debate over Bitcoinand theyre all vying for space in Tesla CEO Elon Musks mind.

Wood is a big Bitcoin bull. Her price target is $500,000, and cryptocurrency brokerage Coinbase is a top 10 holdings in her ARK Innovation exchange-traded fund. Musk, for his part, regularly tweets about crypto. And Tesla holds some $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin.

ESG investors, however, worry that Bitcoin is feeding global warming. Lots of electricity used to mine Bitcoin comes from burning coal and natural gas. Musk cited climate concerns when he stopped accepting Bitcoin as payment for Tesla cars in May (after accepting it in March).

But Wood still sees Musk as a bull. Elon probably got a few calls from institutions, she told CoinDesk, noting that BlackRock is a big Tesla shareholder, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and European Tesla investors are attuned to climate issues. Wood believes demand from crypto mining can provide utilities with cash to invest in renewables and that environmental issues will fade as the grid transforms. As for central bankers, many believe Bitcoin is too volatile to be used globally.

They have a point. Bitcoin closed on Friday, May 21 at just over $35,000. On Friday, May 28, Bitcoin was trading at just over $35,000. In-between, prices rose as high as $42,000 and fell as low as $31,000a 30% swing. If Musk stays sidelined, Bitcoin could struggle. If Wood is right, and Musks Bitcoin bearishness passes, well, that could be a catalyst.

Stocks rose as the new week dawned, and Bitcoin and other cryptos firmed, only to slip again on Tuesday. Meme stocks got traction in midweek as indexes slipped. Initial jobless claims fell to their pandemic low, sparking a rally, and April consumer spending rose 0.5% and prices 0.7%. On the week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which celebrated its 125th birthday on Wednesday, rose 0.9%, to 34,529.45; the S&P 500 was up 1.2%, to 4204.11; and the Nasdaq Composite advanced 2.1%, to 13,748.74.

In a much-anticipated Exxon Mobil vote, Engine No. 1 won two board seats, with others still undetermined. The activist had sought four seats and called for Exxon to commit to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. At Chevron, 61% of shareholders voted to cut emissions, and a Dutch court ordered Shell to cut emissions by 45% by 2030.

The G-7 reached a deal on a global tax rate for corporations after the Biden administration came down from a 21% minimum to 15%. The G-7 hopes to press the proposal quickly through the larger Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, though Brazil has already said it would negotiate separately. The administration, meanwhile, reduced its infrastructure plan to $1.75 trillion from $2.25 trillion, and proposed a $6 trillion budget.

A much-debated theory that the coronavirus evolved in a mine in China and ended up in a Wuhan virology lab sprang to life after The Wall Street Journal reported that three Chinese researchers grew ill in November 2019. China denied the theory, and the White House asked the intelligence community to look into the situation and report back in 90 days.

The president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, allegedly ordered a jet fighter to force a Ryanair jetliner to land in Minsk, where a protest leader was removed and arrested. In response, the European Union imposed sanctions and, with the United Kingdom, banned flights in Belarus airspace.

Amazon.com agreed to buy MGM studios for $8.45 billion, a boon to its streaming business AMC Entertainments largest shareholder, Chinas Dalian Wanda, sold most of its shares in the movie-theater chainGerman publisher Axel Springer is in talks to buy U.S. online-media company Axios for over $400 millionU.S. frackers Cabot Oil & Gas and Cimarex Energy agreed to an all-stock merger to create a $14 billion company run by Cimarex CEO Thomas Jorden HSBC exited U.S. retail banking after 40 years, selling much of its branch network to Citizens Financial and Cathay General Bancorp...SoftBank Group paid WeWork founder Adam Neumann $450 million after forcing him out in 2019...Investing app Acorns will go public in a $2.2 billion SPAC deal.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com

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In the Battle over Bitcoin, Its Bull vs. Bear in Elon Musks Brain - Barron's

Looks like the Las Vegas strip has some underground competition. The Boring Company, Elon Musks other brainchild, began offering free rides through its futuristic, neon-lit tunnel system in Sin City this week ahead of the official launch in June.

The company sent a few dozen Teslas along the twin tunnels that its constructed underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. The complimentary rides, which were offered to Las Vegas residents last week, were designed to test the traffic capacity of the tunnels prior to rollout.

To recap, the Las Vegas Convention Center loop comprises roughly 1.7 miles of tunnels that are 30-feet deep. It has a total of three stops: The two stations at either end are above the ground while the middle stop sits below.

Frustrated with LA traffic, Musk established the Boring Company in 2016 to execute his vision of a fleet of autonomous vehicles that could be easily summoned via an app and soar through the tunnels at 150 mph. As a result, convention-goers will be able to navigate the grounds at speed. In fact, the company claims that eventually, the loop will turn a 45-minute walk into a two-minute ride.

Videos of the test runs have surfaced on social media, offering the first real glimpse at the literally groundbreaking infrastructure since the tunnels were opened to the press in April. By the looks of it, theres still a little fine-tuning required.

For the trial, the company enlisted an array of Tesla vehicles, including a handful of Model 3 sedans plus a few Model Y and Model X SUVs. Passengers didnt appear to use an app; instead, they just walked up to the next available Tesla. In one video, a test rider said they had to wait three to five minutes for a car, and there definitely appeared to be a little congestion.

Once aboard, passengers were shuttled between stations and most testers took between seven to 12 rides, as reported by The Verge. What they experienced, though still impressive, was not an autonomous fleet moving at high speeds. Instead, trained drivers piloted the EVs through the tunnels at limited speeds with the majority of clips showing the cars sitting at 40 mph. While this is a far cry from Musks end game, one video does appear to show a Tesla hitting 116 mph.

The goal of The Boring Companys $52.5 million project is to eventually transport 4,400 people per hour through the convention centers loop tunnels. The company has also expressed interest in building underground loops in several other major cities, including Miami. There are, of course, regulatory hurdles that the company must clear first. But if the Vegas trials are any indication, Musks dream appears to be at least one step closer to reality.

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Watch: Elon Musks Other Company Tests Its Tesla Tunnel System in Las Vegas With Real Passengers - Robb Report

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: This is a graph of Elon Musk's wealth to date. Every single day, this graph fluctuates, sometimes by billions of dollars. This point here, near the very bottom of the graph, is roughly $10 billion.

That's the GDP of Malawi. This was three years ago. This is the market cap of Ford, the GDP of Puerto Rico, the market cap of McDonald's, Kazakhstan's GDP, and this, at the very top, that's $210 billion. That's the current GDP of Greece.

That's every single thing that Greece produces in a year, one billion tons of tomatoes, 500 million tons of watermelons, all of their cheese, wheat, oil, the entire tourism industry, and every single other good and service across the country.

But one thing this graph doesn't get across is just how fast this rise has been. Here's the same graph over a much longer period. Again, here's McDonald's, Ford, and Kazakhstan. Compare any of these to Elon Musk's line and you can see his growth is almost vertical. So let's take a closer look to find out what that growth means.

So to get a better understanding of this graph, it really helps to know what this worth actually is. Musk's wealth is made up mostly of the stocks he owns, the majority of them in Tesla. In fact, if you draw a graph of Tesla's stock over the top of his wealth, you can see it's almost exactly the same.

So this is just Tesla. For comparison, here are the two biggest car companies in the world, VW and Toyota. You can see see how out of balance this is with production. VW made eight million cars last year, Tesla made 500,000. Putting Musk's wealth back in the same scale, you can see the point where his personal wealth overtook VW in August last year, and briefly overtook the value of Toyota.

This spike follows a similar trend to past bubbles. For comparison, here's the gold bubble of 1979, the Japanese housing crash, which the country has never recovered from, and the .com bubble in percentage increases. Here's Tesla. So let's go back to just Elon Musk's graph. Getting an exact figure on his worth is difficult, as his private wealth is, well, private, and everyone calculates their estimates slightly differently but to get an understanding of just how rich Elon Musk is, it helps to understand the value of a billion.

Let's compare distance. Traveling one million miles would get Elon Musk 1/34 of the way to Mars, even at its closest point in orbit. One billion would get you there 29 times, but this is just one billion. Musk's current 176 billion in miles would be 5,104 trips.

This is just April, 2020, to April, 2021. And over the course of this year, Elon Musk's wealth has gone from 30 billion to $172 billion. That's a rise of 383 million per day. This much, every single day for a year. Even when compared to the recent rapid growth of other US tech billionaires, like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, his wealth has really taken off in the last year.

This specific section though is even more dramatic. This almost vertical line is a five-day period where Elon Musk suddenly became the richest person in the world as his wealth jumped by $39 billion. This amount alone would make him the 35th richest person in the world, just beating Giovanni Ferrero and family, the owners of Nutella.

That one week of earnings could buy Musk the New York Yankees, the Dallas Cowboys, the LA Lakers, the Toronto Maple Leafs, Manchester United, and once he's run out of big sports teams to buy, enough Boeing 747s to start an airline. But that's just five days of growth.

His total wealth would buy him a lot more. If Elon Musk was to cash in on this $172 billion worth, he could buy himself 5,030,710 Tesla Model 3s. That's more cars than exists in Sweden. Those cars, bumper to bumper, would take up so much space that they would stretch 11 kilometers long and four kilometers wide, enough to cover almost the whole of Manhattan.

If he wanted to actually access the cars, he would need to also flatten a large area of New Jersey and Brooklyn to construct the world's largest car park. And if he didn't want to invest in Teslas, he could buy almost four million Bitcoins at $40,000 each, almost 20% of the world's supply, or if he wanted a less volatile investment, a 5.5 meter solid block of 24 karat gold. Gold is really expensive.

And that $172 billion would be enough to buy him the world's third largest army, bigger than Russia and India's armies combined. But this isn't just a static number. If the trajectory of the last year was to continue, that would make Must a trillionaire in just five years.

But with his current investments, that would mean that Tesla would likely have to be valued at over $3 trillion by that point. Another 10 years from now and Musk would hit two trillion, more money than there is currency circulating in the US, and larger than the whole of the current FTSE 100.

But for Musk to reach this incredible value, Tesla may have a problem keeping up with demand. To maintain this growth, Tesla is going to have to start building a lot of new cars, "20 million of them by 2030," according to Elon Musk, and 20 million cars are going to need a lot of batteries.

It's predicted that EVs will need the equivalent of 225 billion iPhone 11 batteries by 2030. That's 100 times the amount of iPhones ever sold. These batteries need materials. Here's the estimated supply of lithium in the world, and here's what we're going to need to sustain this growth, which means in just five years time, this demand could completely outstrip supply.

And soon after that, we could run out of lithium entirely. There are other questions around whether this growth is sustainable, not just feasibly, but ethically too.

As the extreme wealth of Elon Musk and other billionaires has grown, and the income of the bottom 50% of Americans has shrunk, it's a problem that's hard not to raise. But there's another thing that could slow Elon's rapid growth in future, taxes. The highest marginal tax rate in the US is currently incredibly low, not just compared to other Western countries, but also compared to the US's recent history.

And here's another interesting correlation. Here's a graph of Union Membership in America, the thing Musk broke labor laws tweeting about a few years ago according to the NLRB, but that's not important for now. Currently, the income disparity between billionaires like Musk and the bottom 50% of Americans is at a similar point to 1930. And that period led to a huge 40% income tax hike, followed shortly by another 13% hike, and another 20% increase during the war.

And if taxes were to once again follow this trend, this inequality could be addressed before it gets even further out of hand. But with the current plan to raise the top tax rate by just 2.6%, this graph may not be changing for a while. Thanks for watching. Let us know in the comments if there are any other stories you want us to cover and make sure you subscribe for more Data on Data.

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Here's Elon Musk's wealth compared to everything, from McDonald's to Kazakhstan - Insider

SpaceX tycoon Elon Musk has shared a picture of his latest Starship prototype, the SN16, which is being readied for the projects biggest test yet: the first orbital flight of a Mars-bound ship, due for blast off in July.

The towering 50-metre-long stainless steel craft is seen in a hangar at Mr Musks Starbase facility at Boca Chica in Cameron County, Texas, its sci-fi nose cone and fins cast against the night sky.

Starships development brings the Tesla billionaire closer to realising his dream of landing an astronaut on the hostile surface of Mars this decade, with a view to ultimately colonising the Red Planet and even constructing cities among its craters by 2050, a project that has already seen him secure a multi-billion dollar contract with Nasa.

SpaceX has ambitions to launch crewed missions to Mars as early as 2024 and currently has the field to itself, with no government agency or rival private company on course to challenge it.

Such a plan would involve Mr Musks company building up to 100 Starships a year, with each one capable of housing 100 crew members and boasting private cabins, large common areas, centralised storage, solar storm shelters and a viewing gallery, according to SpaceXs user guide for the rocket.

The firm only began testing Starship prototypes in January 2020 but has so far set about its task at an astonishing rate.

After two successful 150-metre hops at its Starbase centre, SpaceX began a series of high-altitude flight tests at a frequency of nearly one a month. Although the first four of these ended in explosions, each represented a milestone in Starships progress.

Alongside Starship, the company is also building a 70-metre Super Heavy booster that will also be fully reusable and capable of supporting regular rocket launches from Earth.

When combined, this two-stage rocket will stand at 120 metres and make for the worlds most powerful launch vehicle ever developed.

The craft features six Raptor engines fed with liquid methane and liquid oxygen by propellant tanks, producing methalox in a combustion process that takes place in several stages, the engine design serving to minimise waste, according to the BBC.

Mr Musk hopes the use of methane as its fuel will mean it can be synthesised with subsurface water and atmospheric carbon dioxide should it eventually reach Mars, creating a Sabatier reaction that would enable it to power its way back to Earth self-sufficiently.

The Super Heavy rocket will meanwhile be filled with 3,400 tonnes of cryogenic methalox and be powered by a further 28 Raptor engines, providing 72 Meganewtons of maximum thrust and rendering it more powerful than the huge Saturn V launcher that was used for the Apollo Moon missions in the 1960s and 70s.

Speaking at a Nasa panel event in April, Mr Musk observed that it is now almost 50 years since man last landed on the Moon and commented: We need to have a big permanently occupied base on the Moon, and then build a city on Mars and become a spacefaring civilisation. We dont want to be one of those single planet species, we want to be a multi-planetary species.

The tech developer has previously described his motivation as lying in the prospect of existential threats to our planet, telling a conference in Mexico in 2016 that the future for the human species amounts to staying on Earth and awaiting some eventual extinction event - like the planet succumbing to the effects of the climate crisis or being struck by an asteroid - or establish new colonies elsewhere to increase humanitys chances of survival.

Mr Musk has been serious about cultivating life on Mars since at least 2001, when he attempted to buy three intercontinental ballistic missiles for $20 million in order to blast a robotic greenhouse to the planet in order to grow plants in its soil.

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Elon Musk reveals Starship progress ahead of first orbital flight of Mars-bound craft - The Independent

Absurdist-in-chief and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has struck again! Known for using Twitter to push out uncanny takes, Musk has now inspired confusion among many.

In pure-Musk style, no one could decipher the tone of the Tweet wherein Musk suggested that dinosaurs wouldnt have perished millions of years ago if they had access to spaceships.

Was he being sarcastic or is this a belief clutched close to his heart? Well never know. But we do know that the tech billionaire believes spaceship development could prevent future mass extinction events from causing massive population erasures.

Musks Tweet was in response to a meme about dinosaurs which he had himself shared. Twitterati were quick to respond - staying true to the ambivalent tone. One user wondered whethersome dinosaurs actually left Earth on spaceships, saying Maybe the opposite. They had spaceships & left :).

Another user wondered how the creatures would operate the spaceship.

Scientists blame the extinction of dinosaurs on an asteroid collision, but have never explored what would have happened had the creatures developed spaceships to escape the planet.

Even then, new research continues to shed light on varying factors that caused the extinction of dinosaurs. Earlier this year, experts found that volcanic activities may have played a considerable role in the extinction process.

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research claimed that harmful gases released from a volcano in India may have considerably contribution to mass extinction of dinosaurs.

Also read:Eyeing Mars, Elon Musk wants humans to be 'multi-planet species'

Regardless, Musk is Twitter famous for such hot takes. The space enthusiast recently suggested establishing permanent colonies on different planets, starting with Mars.

We dont want to be one of those single planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species, Musk said in Aprilafter the launch of SpaceXs Crew-2 mission. Musk added how it had been almost 50 years since human beings set foot on the moon. Thats too long, he said.

Excerpt from:

Would dinosaurs be alive if they had spaceships? Tech mogul Elon Musk believes so - WION

The Boring Company began offering rides in Teslas through its tunnel system in Las Vegas this week.

Elon Musk's company provided the complimentary rides through the tunnels as a final test before the system officially debuts in June.

Videos and pictures of the event have popped up online as people shared their first experience riding through Musk's futuristic transportation system. It is the first true glimpse of The Boring Company's work in action with public passengers since the tunnels were opened to the press in April.

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Overall, the experience is toned down from Musk's original vision, which involved autonomous vehicles that could be summoned via an app and rides through the tunnels at 150 miles per hour.

The tunnel system is meant to shuttle up to 4,400 passengers per hour, but documents obtained by TechCrunch in October show that the $52.5 million loop may only be able to accommodate 1,200 people due to fire regulations.

The Las Vegas Loop is one of many projects that Musk's company has been working on. The company has already expressed interest in building tunnels in several other major cities, including Miami and Fort Lauderdale. In February, Musk offered to build a tunnel under Miami for about $30 million, and the city's mayor told Insider in May that he expected initial planning paperwork to be ready in about three months.

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Watch Elon Musk's Boring Company test its Tesla tunnel system in Las Vegas with members of the public - Business Insider India

In the past decade, Elon Musk has been ruling the headlines with exploding rockets, combusting Teslas, investigations surrounding US Securities and Exchange Commission and a defamation case. And now the SpaceX leader wants to build his own space-centric colony in Boca Chica in South Texas. Many of Musks wild ideas have taken off, while a few have not. Looking at his track record, it feels that Musk will be able to create Starbase. However, the world does not know much about this utopian world of Musk.

Heres what we know so far.

Space Xs rocket testing facility has already been operational at Boca Chica Beach. It has been known that public beaches are frequently shut down during the tests and a little warning sign or notice is put up.

Locals claim Musks company ushered out some residents using heavy-handed tactics or pressured them into selling their homes in order to make space for the facility.

A report by The Dallas Morning News recently stated the history of company towns. In the past, it has been seen how a company, that owns the employees homes and surroundings, is able to grip on every part of their life. This often turns into exploitation.

In March this year, Musk announced that he will donate $30 million to Brownsville in order to get the project started. Of the total amount, $20 million will be given to county schools and $10 million will be used for the revitalisation of Brownsville.

Musk earlier claimed that Starbase will have thousands of residents in a few years. He is also planning to hire engineers, technicians and other employees for some specialised roles.

Musk had visited the facility in rural Texas. He also posted a picture of the same and the proposed space city.

Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Coronavirus News here

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Elon Musk is Building a Starbase in Texas: Heres What We Know So Far - News18