Category Archives: Elon Musk

Veteran investor Ron Baron has made it big betting on Tesla. Now hes turning his attention to SpaceX.

ometimes it feels like its just millennials and Robinhood traders who are making money off investing in electric carmaker Tesla. Think again. Meet billionaire money manager Ron Baron and his many retiree investors. Folks who maybe arent quite sure what TikTok is and struggle with Zoom meetings have made an average annual return of 38% over the past five years because they own Tesla full tilt through one of Barons mutual funds.

Even after trimming some Tesla holdings, Baron has a staggering 41% of one of his largest funds invested in the carmakers stockwhich makes him just about the biggest Tesla bull on the planet. That massive bet also helped to nearly double Barons net worth since March 2020.

Among Barons 17 funds, two in particular are heavily weighted in Tesla. The $7.3 billion (assets) Baron Partners fund, which Ron Baron runs with his son Michael, returned nearly 150% last year. At the end of 2020, 47% of its assets were in Tesla. After scaling back its holdings in the carmaker, at the end of March the stock still accounted for a very significant 41% of assets. The Baron Focused Growth fund, which Baron manages with his son David, has $671 million in assets and returned 122% last year; its gone from having 39% of assets in Tesla at the end of 2020 to 32% as of March 31.

Tesla has been the most impactful investment Ive ever made, Baron says.

At the end of 2020, Baron Funds was the 12th largest shareholder in Tesla, according to filings. Among the carmakers top 50 largest institutional shareholders, Baron Funds also had the highest percentage of its overall portfolio allocated to Tesla, with 12%. Other notable investors include Edinburgh, Scotland-based firm Baillie Gifford, with 11% of its portfolio in Tesla, and Cathie Woods ARK Invest, which has 8.3% of its portfolio in the electric car maker.

Baron says he started building his firms position in Tesla in 2014, four years after the company went public, and increased it by 2016, investing a total of $387 million at an average (split-adjusted) cost of just over $43 per share. He hasnt added to the position since. His firms investment has generated billions of dollars in gains for clients as the stock has skyrocketed over recent years, to nearly $750 per share as of April 16.

Barons fortune has surged in tandem with his funds successful bet on Tesla. His net worth has grown to $4.5 billion, Forbes estimates, up from $2.3 billion in mid-March 2020, due largely to Teslas explosive 728% rise during the previous 12 months.

So far, 2021 has been less lucrative. While the market is off to a solid startwith stock indices hitting record levels amid optimism about reopening the economymany investors remain wary due to ongoing concerns about the pandemic and rising fears of inflation. After rising more than sevenfold last year, Tesla shares have struggled in 2021, falling 8.5% in the first quarter ending March 31. During that same period, the Baron Partners and Baron Focused Growth funds returned -0.44% and 0.02%, respectively, well below the S&P 500s gain of around 8%.

Ron Baron with his two sons, David Baron (left) and Michael Baron (right).

As usual, 78-year-old Baron remains his upbeat self, positive about the markets prospects going forward. My confidence is in the long term, he tells Forbes, Zooming from his East Hampton estate last month. Im an optimistic person.

A respected buy-and-hold investor, Baron founded his asset management firm, Baron Capital, in 1982, with just $10 million under management. He oversaw decades of strong performance, building a reputation for successfully betting on small growth companies in the 1990s and 2000s. Today, his Baron Funds group manages some $52 billion in assets. His funds are pricey: the annual expense ratio for Baron Partners is 2.22%, and 1.35% for Baron Focused Growth. So Ron Baron gets paid well for his stock picks.

While many investors try to predict what will happen with the economy, the president or interest rates, Baron doesnt fret about such matters, sticking to his tried and true method. His firm focuses on high-growth companies with a competitive advantage over the long-term. When we make an investment we aim to double our money every five years, Baron explains.

None of Barons investments have fit the mold more than electric vehicle maker Tesla, run by billionaire CEO Elon Musk, whose net worth is nearly $180 billion, according to Forbes. Hes perhaps the best engineer on the planet, Baron says of Musk. I expect hell be the worlds first trillionaire.

Pre-pandemic, Baron hosted an annual gathering for investors and members of the media in Manhattan with a surprise musical performanceFaith Hill and Tim McGraw one year, Jon Bon Jovi another. Like many of Barons clients, the attendees were mostly retirees whod been investors since the 1990sfolks you would not expect to be so bullish on an upstart electric carmaker with an outspoken, unpredictable CEO.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has had a stellar year; shares of his electric car company surged more than sevenfold in 2020.

In early March, Baron announced that his firm had sold 1.9 million shares of Tesla over the six months ending in February 2021 at an average cost of $629.40 per share. He cited risk mitigation for clients, as the stock had become too large a percentage of some portfolios. Another reason for selling shares, Baron explains, was to reduce debt and pay off credit in the leveraged Baron Partners fund.

But Baron maintains his long-time bullish price target for Tesla, predicting shares will reach $2,000 apiece within ten years, more than double its recent price of $740 per share.

While Baron says that everyone still refers to him as the Tesla man, Musks privately-owned rocket company, SpaceX, is his next big obsession. It could potentially become as large as Tesla, Baron says, adding that he predicts a 30x to 50x return on investment in the next ten years. So far, Baron Funds has invested several hundred million dollars and counting into Musks rocket producer, which completed its latest round of funding in February at a reported $74 billion valuation. Baron is particularly excited about the companys upcoming satellite broadband service, Starlink, which he thinks could bring in hundreds of billions of dollars in the future.

I want to be known as the SpaceX guy in a few years, he says.

Here are Barons top five stock picks that he thinks are primed for high growth in the next few years.

Despite scaling back some of his funds holdings in Tesla, Baron is adamant that he remains bullish on the electric vehicle makers long-term prospects. Baron says he thinks Tesla stock is fairly priced at around $700 to $800 per share, but sees more upside ahead in 2022. If autonomous driving is as successful as I believe it will be, and Tesla continues to open new plants and grow its sales, which I think it will, by the end of the year the stock should be doing better again, he predicts.

A longtime holding of Baron Funds, Penn shares returned 230% in 2020 and are up nearly 30% so far in 2021. Baron believes the casino company is well positioned for growth: With some 20 states having now legalized sports gambling, Penn has benefitted from a widespread uptick in demand. Whats more, states will need more revenue coming out of the pandemic, he says, and a potential source could come from taxes on legal online gambling. Another key advantage that Penn is able to leverage is Barstool, the sports media company Penn bought a 36% stake in last year for $163 million. Barstool boasts roughly 100 million unique visitors each year and high retention rates, Michael and David Baron point out. Plus, they say, people love Dave PortnoyBarstools founder who achieved celebrity-like status among investors when he turned to day-trading amid the pandemic.

Currently one of Barons largest holdings, he bought a major position in the ski resort company back in 2006. Its stock rose by nearly 15% last year and is up another 13% so far in 2021. Baron and his sons are big fans of current CEO, Rob Katz, who has served in that role for around 15 years. They credit Katz with not only using excess cash flow to make key acquisitions of smaller resorts, but also reinvesting it into the town itself to attract more visitors. Baron especially likes the fact that Vail sells most of its ski passes ahead of time, meaning a big chunk of revenue gets locked in before the season even starts. While some investors may think Vail is a mature business, the company saw demand for ski passes grow 20% last year amid the pandemic, Barons sons point out.

Another of Barons largest holdings today is animal medicine company IDEXX Laboratories, shares of which jumped by almost 90% in 2020. The veteran investor loves IDEXXs huge margins, arguing that the companys economies of scale help it gobble up market share. (Idexx has a market capitalization of $45 billion, compared to rivals like VCA Antech, which has a market cap of just $5 billion). The company is able to leverage its national lab network into higher margins than small-scale labs can offer, Baron points out. Given that IDEXX is growing at a high single-digit rate and maintains a strong balance sheet, Baron forecasts that he will double his investment over the next five years.

Baron also likes commercial real estate data provider CoStar, which he started buying during the early 2000s for around $20 to $30 per share. Today, the stock trades at over $900 per share, having jumped nearly 50% last year despite the pandemic wreaking havoc on many commercial properties. Baron calls CoStar, which is growing its business at around 20% annually, the Bloomberg of real estate and sees further upside ahead. We want companies in big, adjustable markets that can take large shares, says his son, David. CoStar is the perfect example of that. The company has also been reinvesting its capital to make its business harder to replicateCoStar has invested over $1 billion towards building its proprietary database over the years. Baron points out that this should only add to its competitive advantage. Any potential competitor would have to spend years and potentially billions of dollars to replicate CoStars data offering, writes Morningstar analyst Kevin Brown.

Read more:

This Billionaire Investor Thinks Elon Musk Will Be A 'Trillion Dollar Man' - Forbes

SpaceX currently has several launch sites in the US - but could it have one in Indonesia?

Indonesia has offered up one of its islands in West Papua as a potential launch site for Elon Musk's ambitious Space X project - which aims to put humans on the moon.

Though Mr Musk has yet to accept the proposal, Indonesia has still made it clear that it has big space ambitions for Biak island- which is worrying its residents.

Markus Abrauw who has spent his whole life in Biak is one of them.

The 54-year-old grandfather of eight belongs to the island's indigenous Abrauw clan which has called the island home for generations.

But he now fears that their home could be threatened should Biak be used as a launch site.

"If it is built, it would mean our children and grandchildren would no longer be able to rely on the land to make a living," he told BBC Indonesian.

"It would destroy the sea and forests."

Biak is just 1,746 km - slightly bigger than the city of London - and located in the Indonesian portion of New Guinea known as West Papua and home to around 100,000 residents.

The island is inhabited by over a dozen different indigenous ethnic groups and though there are several urban centres, most of the island is still relatively rural.

"Most Papuans in the area still derive their subsistence from the area around them - fishing, gathering - they are still very much dependent on their surroundings," Sophie Chao, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sydney told the BBC.

But Biak also has several features that make it attractive for anyone with space ambitions.

It is flush with nickel and copper - both used to manufacture rockets.

It also sits one degree below the equator, which makes it ideal for launching spacecraft as less fuel is needed to reach orbit.

Graphic

In fact, Indonesia's space ambitions for Biak begin well before Elon Musk entered the scene.

Its Aeronautical and Space Agency (Lapan) has had its eye on the island for decades - and in 1980, even bought up a 100 hectare parcel of land. However, due to various challenges, nothing happened on this front.

Story continues

The site is an important hunting ground with a fishing spot nearby.

But most importantly, it sits around 2km away from the nearest residential area, Saukobye village - and villagers fear they will be forced to relocate.

Most West Papuans have customary claims to specific parcels of land, passed down from generation to generation.

"We Papuans have to live in [the area of land that is passed on to us]," said Mr Abrauw.

"We cannot move to any other place. If we are, there will be hereditary killings. There will be conflict between clans that have the rights to the land, and clans who want to enter the land."

Apolos Sroyer, head of the customary councils in Biak adds that the SpaceX proposal showed how Indonesia does not take the rights of indigenous people into consideration.

"Most projects in Papua only create conflict for us [locals]," he said.

The relationship between West Papua and Indonesia is a troubled one. The former Dutch colony did not become part of Indonesia until 1963 - and many are still calling for independence, with feelings of resentment towards the government.

The head of Lapan, Thomas Djamaluddin told BBC News that the project would bring much needed modernisation to the island.

A potential launch pad he says, would stimulate the tourism and satellite industry in Biak, changing it to a more "modern society" within the next decade.

"We will maintain the traditional values of Biak, but [people there] may no longer need to depend on the land as a hunting ground, or a place to grow crops. The use of the land may change with the entry of more advanced industries," he said.

Mr Djamaluddin also added that he had received letters of support from around 60 traditional leaders in Biak - a fact disputed by Mr Abrauw.

According to Mr Djamaluddin, Lapan is currently exploring two possible scenarios - the first, a small-scale launch site capable of sending satellites under 100kg into space.

This would fit the brief of what a project like SpaceX might need, and would only require the 100 hectares of land it currently owns.

The second more ambitious plan would see it build a large scale international space port - which would presumably require a lot more land.

SpaceX has yet to officially confirm their interest in building a launch pad on Biak, but according to Mr Djamaluddin, Mr Musk seemed "interested" when Indonesian president Joko Widodo mentioned it.

In a follow-up meeting with SpaceX representatives last January, Mr Djamaluddin said the issues did not come up. The BBC has reached out to SpaceX for comment.

But that's not stopping Lapan's big space ambitions for the island.

In addition to SpaceX, it has also approached Japan, Korea, China and India as potential investors. But why might Indonesia be so keen to offer up Biak?

"It would bring in a huge amount of political capital for Indonesia, for it to [establish itself] as a strong player in the realm of ASEAN," Associate Professor Wolfram Dressler of the University of Melbourne said.

"It is also one way to pull a politically contentious arena closer to the [capital]. So this isn't something that's just about a space launch and possible economic revenue - it's also a political operation if you will."

Ultimately, says Ms Chao, both scenarios - the lush Biak that the the villagers want and the space powerhouse envisioned by the government - cannot co-exist.

"The [space] project is a very visionary project - its about dreams of extra-terrestrial exploration and is full of wonder. But the danger is that these technological dreams are coming [at the cost] of the Papuans, whose dreams are much more modest," said Ms Chao.

"Biak is a place of many dreams - but these dreams cannot all be realised."

View post:

The Indonesian island that could host Elon Musk's new SpaceX site - Yahoo News

KATWIJK, NETHERLANDS - JANUARY 29: In this photo illustration, visual representations of digital cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin and Bitcoin are arranged on January 29, 2021 in Katwijk, Netherlands. (Photo by Yuriko Nakao/Getty Images)

Jed Rawson has reached an unescapable conclusion. Im pretty sure its the greatest accumulation of wealth in my family going back 500 years in my family tree, Rawson, 38, declares. My dad was a teacher, Im one of seven kids. And if you do go back 500 years, its all sock-knitters and coal miners in England. He says this with one eye on the climbing price of Dogecoinnearing a total market cap of around $50 billion, up more than sixfold in two weeksand the other on R/Dogecoin, the Reddit community devoted to this latest fad in cryptocurrency.

Rawson has become a star on R/Dogecoin, where he has posted daily screenshots of his Robinhood brokerage account. On Monday, it totaled well over $700,000, some 1.7 million Dogecoins. One guy on Reddit today called me the DFV of Dogecoin, he says proudly. Hes alluding, elliptically, to the Redditor known as Deep Fking Value, or DFV, who helped spark the months-long run on GameStop shares. Ive been riding this wave, and its been pretty wild, says Rawson, who runs his own e-commerce consultancy in San Diego during his spare time away from Dogecoin.

Wild may be something of an understatement. Dogecoin is today the sixth most valuable cryptocurrency, an all-time high for what was originally conceived eight years ago as a meta joke about monetary value and the internet, its mascot a Shiba Inu, an oft-memed dog breed. The tokens price has increased from about 6 cents two weeks ago to over 40 cents, and its low price per coin has surely contributed its rise, allowing investors who might be unable to afford more expensive cryptos such as Bitcoin or Ether to buy up Dogecoins. Purchasing Dogecoins is a bet they could become a permanently viable currencyand an unquestionable gamble given the frequent fluctuations in value across crypto, including industry-leading Bitcoin.

As more people wager on Dogecoin, R/Dogecoin is experiencing a spike in popularity, too, with the Reddit forum emerging as the latest virtual epicenter of a financial mania. It now has over 1.5 million members, a 25% increase in about a week, and bears an increasingly close resemblance to R/WallStreetBets, the group on Reddit that played such an active role in the GameStop mania in late January.

Back then, it was hard to know precisely how much GameStop trading came from R/WallStreetBets. And its pretty much impossible to pinpoint exactly which Dogecoin trades originate from R/Dogecoin, since these are mostly anonymous social media users buying and selling digital tokens designed to obscure their holders identities.

Nonetheless the Reddit communities and the assets seem to have interlinked relationshipsself-inforcing feedback loops. As Dogecoin prices keep going up, it sparks greater conversation and interest on the Reddit forum, driving more investment in the crypto...which then helps push up prices further, repeating the cycle.

Thats gotta be happeningat least to some extent, says Tanner Sims, a 22-year-old R/Dogecoin member. Thats where a lot of people are finding out about Dogecoin, and its kind of where everyone is in it together.

Like many on R/Dogecoin, Sims is a relative newcomer to the group, which has existed as long as the currency it revolves around. He found it back in July while doing some research on potential crypto investmentsSims helps manages his familys hotel near Big Sur, California, and plans to return to school and study finance at Texas Tech come fall.

To start last summer, I had $20 to spare, he says, so I threw it in, buying up around 500 Dogecoins. I started looking more at Reddit and what people were thinking. Then just throughout the past few months, Ive been putting a lot of my paycheck toward it. And like many on R/Dogecoin, he had an unshakeable belief. I knew it was gonna go up at some point.

Sims and the rest of R/Dogecoin have spent a great deal of time thinking about and discussing Elon Musk. The worlds second-richest person has tweeted positively about Dogecoin nearly a dozen times in the last four months and voiced support for it while speaking on the new audio-chat app Clubhouse: Dogecoin was made as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies, but fate loves irony. The most ironic outcome would be that Dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in the future. R/Dogecoin has come to see Musks interest as the highest form of validation possible. The backing from Elon Musk has been a huge thing, says Sim, whose Dogecoin stake rests around $16,000. It gave me a lot of confidence.

When not talking about Musk, the Reddit community has, unsurprisingly, tended to obsess over the latest price increase and guesses about where the coin could top out. Its recent level of 42 cents drew a thundering round of applause on the message board, partly because someone drew a reference to Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a sci-fi series where 42 is said to be the answer to everything in the universe. And partly because the Redditors had already declared April 20or 4-20as Doge Day, an attempt to co-opt the long-standing subversive holiday dedicated to marijuana culture and weed, which, like cryptocurrency, has spent many years being frowned upon by mainstream culture.

One of the most popular posts of the past month garnered 23,300 upvotes, the Reddit equivalent of Facebook likes, thanks to a personal short story and an accompanying GIF meme. They were the handiwork of Toben Blalock, 48, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who six years ago used a different Reddit forum to swap his Xbox for 1.15 million Dogecoins and currently has close to $200,000 worth of the tokens after actively trading them since 2015. His told this tale in the post and included a bit of self-deprecating humor: an animated video clip of a dog in an astronauts suit floating around a space station, the words I have no idea what Im doing below the weightless canine.

These days Blalock worries too many on R/Dogecoin truly have no idea what theyre doing as they pile into crypto with digitally driven euphoria. Those coins are a great thing to kind of play around with it, he says. But a lot of people are investing their life savings. And I think that's a terrible idea right now.

More here:

Dogecoin, Elon MuskAnd The Latest Reddit Mania - Forbes

The folly of mankind playing god. The inevitability of natures triumph over mans efforts to contain and control it. That life finds a way. Whatever moral or message you took from your first viewing of Jurassic Park, the chances are it wasnt that, yknow what, we really need more dinosaurs about.

But then youre probably not Elon Musks Neuralink business partner Max Hodak, the man alongside whom Musk plans to start putting microchips into peoples brains by the end of the year. We could probably build Jurassic Park if we wanted to, he tweeted earlier this month, to which the only sane response is in the name of all things holy, please dont do that. Wouldnt be genetically authentic dinosaurs but [man shrugging emoji], he continued, maybe 15 years of breeding + engineering to get super exotic novel species

So its mutant armour-plated mega-raptors hes wishing into reality now? Getting a bit cosy and dull up here at the top of the food chain, is it? Time to spice life up a bit by throwing a little angry-thirty-foot-reptilian-carnivore action into the pot? Dont know about you, but if there was a real-life Jurassic Park I wouldnt even dare pop in to use the toilets.

If cinema from Jurassic Park to The Fly and Prometheus has taught us anything about messing around with other species, its that no curious biologist should ever be left alone in a lab for the sake of humanity. If were going to utilise cutting edge modern technology to bring films to life, there are far better options to choose. If were desperate to share a planet with a gigantic, violent reptile, perhaps we should consider genetically engineering our very own Godzilla at least itd be on our side. Plus, as a sea-dwelling nuclear monster, it might be able to melt all the microplastics into an adhesive goo that it can use to stick the ice caps back together.

Why not bring Godzilla into the real world? CREDIT: Alamy

If were going to try to focus our most imagineering billionaires resources away from pointlessly realising The Martian and onto other cinematic fantasies, lets at least make suggestions that might actually benefit us. It seems premature, for instance, to start talking about recreating entire prehistoric hunting grounds before weve even got Iron Man jetpacks or the hoverboards that Back To The Future II promised us would be around by 2015. And once Musk and his boffins have cracked anti-gravity, were halfway to a real-life Blade Runner, driving sky-cars around vertical cities full of personalised holo-adverts 10 storeys high. And who wouldnt relish the chance to live in a smog-clogged sci-fi techno-dystopia, with a summer place, perhaps, in the post-apocalyptic desert wasteland?

Imagine the Star Wars landspeeders, hover bikes and cloud cities we could build. They could solve so many problems we could give one to the Super League (if it ever happens) to play their matches in for millionaire sky people while the rest of us down here get on with having to support Brentford. Or call one Float Britain, cover it in Union Jacks and give it to the Brexit Party and all their supporters to live in, suspended in splendid British isolation three miles above Buckingham Palace. It would certainly be preferable to their own likely cinematic preference to build an actual London-on-wheels that can drive around having fights with other European cities, like in Mortal Engines.

Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. CREDIT: Alamy

Its such twisting of cinematic physics that really fascinates me. Musk has previously discussed the idea of creating a real-life warp drive, which might help bring all manner of intergalactic sci-fi wonders to our doorstep but will probably just mean well all learn how long it takes to do the Kessel Run on a replacement bus service. Meanwhile, lets repurpose the Large Hadron Collider to create the wormhole to an alternate universe from Donnie Darko, so that we might get a glimpse of a world where Dominic Cummings never happened. We should, however, set a strict Nolan Limit on such developments no one wants to find themselves stuck in my recurring nightmare of being naked in a maths exam and if the world starts going backwards like in Tenet well all have to watch Mumford and Sons headline Glastonbury again.

You may say Im a dreamer, but filmic fantasies have become reality before. A simple VR headset could now let us all experience 10 minutes in the head of John Malkovich, and weve all been living in Groundhog Day for a year already. Others are going to become essential James Bonds underwater car from The Spy Who Loved Me will soon be made an inevitability if were still going to get around during all this global warming. But lets retain a calm, sensible, non-dinosaur approach to the future or, before too long, we might find some mad billionaire is trying to turn us all into singing human cats.

More here:

Elon Musks tech could create Jurassic Park? He should build these fictional worlds instead - NME.com

Elon Musk appears to have been unseated as the world's second-richest person.

According to Forbes' real-time billionaires list, Musk has been eclipsed by Bernard Arnault, the CEO of French luxury conglomerate LVMH Mot Hennessy Louis Vuitton. As of Tuesday morning, Arnault's fortune was pegged at $176.3 billion while Musk's clocked in at $174.6 billion.

Another real-time wealth tracker, Bloomberg's billionaires list, still has Arnault in fourth position with a net worth of $146 billion and Musk in the No. 2 slot with $183 billion.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos remains the richest person in the world with a net worth of $197 billion.

Read more: The ultrawealthy are installing home amenities that rival 5-star hotels in the quest to never leave the house, from $50,000 Botox spas to cigar lounges and Zoom theaters

Arnault and his family control 47.5% of LVMH, and his surge in wealth appears to be the result of an impressive first quarter for the company. The luxury house, which owns over 70 brands including Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Fendi, Mot & Chandon, Hennessy, and Veuve Clicquot, recorded 14 billion euros in revenue about $16.9 billion in the first quarter, up 32% from the same quarter in 2020.

Following multiple quarters of declining growth due to the pandemic, the company said it saw strong sales in fashion and leather goods in the beginning of the year. LVMH also noted a uptick in alcohol sales in the first quarter, particularly when it comes to Champagne: Champagne volumes were up 22% compared to the same time last year as vaccinations continue worldwide.

Last fall, LVMH completed its nearly $16 billion acquisition of jeweler Tiffany & Co., a history-making deal in the luxury sector. The contentious deal came after multiple lawsuits, a public war of words, and a $400 million discount.

Following the acquisition, Arnault's 28-year-old son, Alexandre, was named Tiffany's executive vice president of product and communications following a stint at the helm of LVMH-owned luggage brand Rimowa. Last June, Arnault's 26-year-old son, Frdric, was named CEO of Tag Heuer, the luxury watch brand also owned by LVMH. Arnault's daughter, Delphine, is the executive vice president of Louis Vuitton, and his son, Antoine, is the CEO of Berluti and chairman of Loro Piana, two fashion houses owned by LVMH.

See the original post here:

Elon Musk has been unseated as the world's second-richest person by luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault - Business Insider

Mr Davis said: "Bitcoin miners are going wherever in the world they can buy the cheapest electricity, without any regard to the environmental consequences of how that electricity is generated."

Michel Rauchs, a research affiliate at CCAF, declined to comment specifically on Square's report. He said miners in the US and Europe are wary of the "existential threat" from new regulations and hope to cut their emissions, while miners elsewhere are less concerned.

Asked whether renewables offer miners any cost advantage, he said: "Stranded energy assets like hydro dams, that are far from demand centres and need to be curtailed when generating too much power, are certainly more economical. But that would also be the case for stranded energy assets based on fossil fuels in which case one might argue that Bitcoin mining causes those operations to be economic again."

Christopher Knittel, an economics professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said miners would need specific incentives to switch off their machines at certain times rather than simply consuming any available power 24/7.

Bitcoin is also far from the only way to reduce curtailment. Other companies are experimenting with using excess power to generate hydrogen fuel, trading it other regions and countries, or even sending special train carriages up hills and recouping the energy when they slowly roll back down.

Other solutions involve reducing consumption during peak hours, such as through smart thermometers or companies like OhmConnect, which pays Californians to shift electricity use from evenings to daytimes.

"There's a lot of smart people across a lot of sectors thinking about how to use the lower-price periods," said Mr Davis.

Visit link:

Elon Musk is wrong, Bitcoin won't help us save the planet - Telegraph.co.uk

David Millstone and David Winter, co-CEOs of Standard Industries, are working on a top-secret design for a new solar roof that they expect to launch within the yeara new, direct competitor to Teslas flashy one, for which there is a multiyear waitlist. For more than a year, researchers at their solar companys San Jose, California, R&D center have been tinkering with the design. Their advantage: Their New York City-based company is the parent of the countrys largest roofing manufacturer and has already sold well over 2,000 solar roofs with an earlier iteration called Decotech. We have put more solar roofs out there than Elon Musk has, Winter says, in a swipe at one of the worlds richest people. Over the next decade, they hope to install millions of these new roofs helped by a price point designed for the masses and an army of certified installers. If you can crack rooftop solar that is functional, affordable and aesthetic, we think that is life-changing for Europe, the U.S. and around the world, Winter says. If somebody could crack it, it was going to be us.

Dont underestimate the two Davids, as Millstone and Winter, who are both 44, are sometimes called. Through their family-owned conglomerate, which has $6.4 billion in revenue and Ebitda of roughly $1.4 billion, theyre on a mission to use technology to change the way that people think about the simple notion of having a roof over ones head. They expect to spend $1 billion over the next several years to get there.

Solar is their biggest, boldest bet, but its hardly the only one. Last year, they retooled ten plants in sevenmonthsan unheard-of speed for an industrial operationto launch a new version of their flagship asphalt shingles that can withstand hurricane-force winds. This year, theyre working on a prototype for a new 5G roof concept that will allow telecoms to more seamlessly incorporate the technology into its residential roofs. Theyve rolled out new digital tools like 3-D modeling and aerial measuring to make their 12,000 certified roofing contractors jobs easier, especially during the pandemic. Beyond roofing, theyve got a massive, related investment arm, 40 North, which has some $5 billion in assets and is betting heavily on industrial innovation.

Were at the beginning of the golden age with embracing industrial technology, like with the Internet in 1990, when we had decades of growth ahead of us, says Millstone.

It looks like the playbook of a VC-backed upstart, but Standard (which has its own related VC arm) is something else entirely. Dating back to 1983, when corporate raider Sam Heyman, a onetime member of The Forbes 400 and the father-in-law of Millstone and Winter, won a proxy battle for roofing-and-chemicals company GAF, Standard today is an industrial powerhouse, ranked No. 69 on Forbes list of Americas largest private companies. The interlinked businesses under the Standard Industries umbrella and related investment operations continue to be owned by the Millstone-Winter-Heyman families; the family is worth well over $10 billion, according to Forbes estimates.

Millstone and Winter, who have run Standard together since 2005 and have rarely spoken to the press during those years, would rather talk about their vision for roofing and being modern industrialists than their wealth.

With GAFs roofs on roughly one in four North American homes, they have the potential to shake up their staid industry using everything from new materials to sensors and artificial intelligence. As weve begun to reimagine what a roof is, whether it is a green roof or a solar roof or real estate for 5G, we have the ability to reinvent the way that people live, Winter says.

Standards history dates back to the 1980s heyday of corporate raiders, when Sam Heyman made a fortune investing in undervalued companies using Drexel-backed debt. Hes best known for his successful battle for GAF and the chemical concern he spun out of it, International Specialty Products. Though he had four children, none joined the business. So after Millstone and Winter married into the familyMillstone to Jennifer, Winter to ElizabethHeyman brought them in.

David Millstone grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, to parents who worked for the federal government. He studied math and philosophy during college and wanted to be a philosophy professor. He rowed crew at Yale (he met Jen Heyman during his sophomore year through his rowing partner, who was her fifth-grade boyfriend) and still loves endurance sports, including marathons, triathlons and ski mountaineering.

In 1999, he cofounded an internet company that would send online profiles of college students to employers. If we had been at all thoughtful about this we would have had LinkedIn before LinkedIn, he says. Instead, they floundered. We failed in every way a company can, other than going to jail, he says.

After that, he followed Jen Heyman to New York, getting a job as an analyst at Bear Stearns. I am slightly claustrophobic and afraid of elevators, and I remember going to the office at 3 a.m. and hoping that the elevator would break down so that I could go to sleep in the elevator, he recalls.

He soon left and went to law school at Harvard. After graduation, he was about to join Apollo, the private equity firm, when Sam Heyman invited him to join the business. I asked everybody I respected, all these mentors I had, whether I should do it, and to a person they said, No, its a terrible idea, but I did it anyway, he says. In hindsight, thank God I came in when I did.

David Winter, meanwhile, grew up in the New York City suburb of Rye, the eldest son in the fourth generation of a family of real estate developers. His great-grandfather, an immigrant from Poland, started as a painter of tenements and eventually became a top developer in midtown Manhattan. After college at the University of Pennsylvania, where he double-majored in political science and economics, Winter went to work in the real estate group at Morgan Stanley, knowing he would soon join his familys business. After he married Liz Heyman, who he met through family friends, Sam Heyman asked him how they might work together. He started doing risk arbitrage for Heyman while continuing to work at his own familys real estate firm alongside his father, Benjamin, with whom he is very close. I effectively pulled double duty, he says. (Standards related businesses now include real estate investment arm, Winter Properties, spun out of Winters family operation.)

In 2009, when Millstone and Winter were both 32, Heyman died unexpectedly after complications from open-heart surgery at age 70. The company was struggling, and they stepped into the breach. The global financial crisis had strained the balance sheet and GAF was dealing with a long asbestos-related bankruptcy. The groups revenue when they took over was around $3 billion, but Ebitda was just $250 million. There wasnt a lot of David and I sitting around wondering what we wanted to be growing up, Winter says. The things we had to do were pretty clear.

Over the next two years, they dealt with the litigation, recapitalized the balance sheet and sold off the chemical company to Ashland for $3.2 billion. Ultimately, they reconfigured the operation into its current form, adopting the bland Standard Industries name as a nod to the companys earliest history as Standard Paint Co. more than a century ago. That name, as well as the alphabet soup of company names like GAF, BMI and SGI, may have helped to keep it under the radar. Even some developers, one step removed from roofing manufacturers like GAF and its chief competitor, Owens Corning, pay little attention to whose materials end up on their buildings. Its not a brand like a dishwasher; roofing materials are roofing materials, says billionaire real estate developer Jeff Greene.

Though Winter was divorced in 2012 (and has since remarried and split up again), he and Millstone continue to divide operations 50-50. Co-CEO arrangements have a rocky history, but Millstone and Winter insist it works for them. In any family business, you have to put the business first or youll look up in a few years and it will stop being a business, Winter says. Execs who work for them tend to talk about David and David, rather than one or the other.

In 2016, they made a big splash, spending $2.3 billion on the acquisitions of European roofing companies Icopal and Braas Monier. Those two deals not only created BMI, they also were the first big moves of 40 North, Standards related investment firm (though the two are so interconnected that they were completed by Standard).

Today, 40 North has its sights on another big target: W.R. Grace, the specialty chemicals maker with 2020 revenue of $1.7 billion, down from nearly $2 billion the previous year. The math and the numbers and the value destruction frankly speaks for itself, Winter said in December. Its initial bid in November 2020 was rejected. In January, it upped its offer to $4.3 billion, or $65 a share in cash, a proposal the chemicals firm said it was willing to discuss. In April, it again increased its bid, to $70 a share, as the two sides continued to talk. If Millstone and Winter win the business, it would in some ways bring it full circle to before they sold off the specialty chemicals operation that Heyman had acquired as part of GAF.

Not all of 40 Norths investments are meant to change Standards operating businesses. Its largest position, by far, is DuPont, where it built a stake, recently worth $1.6 billion, largely in the first quarter when its shares were pummeled by the spreading coronavirus. But its venture arm, 40 North Ventures, is betting heavily on startups with its roughly $200 million portfolio. It has invested in 15 companies, including 3-D printing firm Carbon, electric bus maker Proterra and Everactive, which makes battery-free wireless sensors.

Across the industrial landscape, new technologies are changing old-school businesses. Within factories, AI-enhanced software is helping factories become more productive, while sensors are changing old-line businesses, from elevators to construction. Materials science has opened up new options for products like roofing that havent changed much in decades. Millstone and Winter, who graduated college in the 1999 tech bubble, bring a Gen-X view to an old-school industry. A lot of the changes have to do with the generation that we were born into, Winter says. It was personal to us.

One of the biggest deals for the future is solar. The residential solar market in the United States has grown over the past ten years from almost nothing to a total of 19.1 gigawatts of solar capacity, according to data from the Solar Energy Industry Association. And its future is bright, thanks to the declining cost of photovoltaic cells, a solar investment tax credit and a push by the Biden Administration.

So far, though, integrated solar roofs, as opposed to rack-mounted solar panels, are just a speck of the total, too small for the trade association to even track. Tesla, with its sleek black-tile version that Musk has called a killer product, has the most buzz and the longest waitlist. But Teslas rollout has been slow and rocky. Millstone and Winter hope to gain with roofs priced for the masses and easy installation by its army of contractors. Thats a big bet, and one that might make it harder for Standard to keep flying under the radar going forward. Says energy investor John Tough, managing partner of Energize Ventures: I wouldnt bet against Standard, thats for sure.

Header image of Standard Industries David Winter and David Millstone on the roof of the Chrysler Building in New York City. Standards Siplast division replaced these setback roofs with red granule surfaces that mimicked the original quarry tiles in 2000.

See original here:

Meet The Billionaire Family Building America's RoofsAnd Taking On Elon Musk - Forbes

Tesla CEO and Dogecoin enthusiast Elon Musk has been a market catalyst for the popular cryptocurrency based on a meme of a Shiba Inu, but hes far from the only one moving the market.

At least one New York-based family office has devised quant algorithms for trading in and out of Doge, Crypto Investor has learned.

And analysis shows Musks most popular tweets about Doge typically occur after the price has already started moving. Before he began a string of Doge tweets in early January, subreddit WallStreetBets generated interest in the coin sending it soaring days before Musk weighed in, potentially propelling it further.

Dogecoin's stratospheric move in the last week has made it a media darling again. An online movement was started to make April 20 #DogeDay in hopes of buoying the price further, but it ultimately fell approximately 25% and sits at just over 30 cents as of this writing.

Still, it hasn't stopped brands from trying to capitalize.

D8 Holdings, a company that creates Delta-8 THC products,announcedTuesdaythat it will begin accepting Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin. The company said that it would even give out a free pack of gummies to customers who pay in crypto.

Our customers are early adopters, many of whom are heavily involved in the crypto market. With $2 trillion dollars sitting in crypto assets, and $45 billion parked in Dogecoin, the ability to accept crypto currency presents a big opportunity for our company.

For more insider info on crypto, sign up for Crypto Investor today.

Tesla CEO and Dogecoin enthusiast Elon Musk has been a market catalyst for the popular cryptocurrency based on a meme of a Shiba Inu, but hes far from the only one moving the market. Subscribe for full article

Already subscribed?Log In

Read this article:

Doge gets moved by more than Tesla's Elon Musk - The Street Crypto: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency news, advice, analysis and more - TheStreet

NEW YORK: Elon Musk appears to have been unseated as the world's second-richest person, foreign media has reported. According to Forbes' real-time billionaires list, Musk has been eclipsed by Bernard Arnault, the CEO of French luxury conglomerate LVMH Mot Hennessy - Louis Vuitton. As of Tuesday morning, Arnault's fortune was pegged at $176.3 billion while Musks clocked in at $174.6 billion. Another real-time wealth tracker, Bloomberg's billionaires list, still has Arnault in fourth position with a net worth of $146 billion and Musk in the No. 2 slot with $183 billion.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos remains the richest person in the world with a net worth of $197 billion.

Arnault and his family control 47.5% of LVMH, and his surge in wealth appears to be the result of an impressive first quarter for the company. The luxury house, which owns over 70 brands including Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Fendi, Mot & Chandon, Hennessy, and Veuve Clicquot, recorded 14 billion euros in revenue - about $16.9 billion - in the first quarter, up 32% from the same quarter in 2020.

Read the original post:

Luxury magnate Arnault knocks off Elon Musk on world billionaire ranking - The News International

In its March 25decision, the NLRB unanimously held that: (1) Tesla violated the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) after prohibiting employees from talking to the media; (2) Tesla didnotviolate the Act by calling employees into a meeting to discuss their potential unionization; and (3) Tesla must order CEO Elon Musk to delete his tweet about the employees attempt to unionize, as it was unlawfully coercive in violation of the Act.

In 2016, Tesla required its employees to sign a confidentiality agreement in response to leaks of confidential company information. As part of the agreement, Tesla reminded its employees that it is never OK to communicate with the media or someone closely related to the media about Tesla, unless [the employee has] been specifically authorized in writing to do so.

Here, the Administrative Law Judge found that the confidentiality agreement was lawful because considering that it was sent in response to leaks of confidential information, employees would reasonably interpret the agreement to apply only to proprietary information. Further, the Judge found that any potential interference with Section 7 rights was outweighed by Teslas interest in protecting such confidential information.

In 2017, the NLRB set a new standard for determining whether facially neutral work rules or policies would unlawfully interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in violation of Section 7 of the NLRA. InBoeing Co., 365 NLRB No. 154 (2017), the Board held that: [W]hen evaluating a facially neutral policy, rule or handbook provision that, when reasonably interpreted, would potentially interfere with the exercise of NLRA rights, the Board will evaluate two things: (i) the nature and extent of the potential impact on NLRA rights,and(ii) legitimate justifications associated with the rule. In conducting this balancing test, the Board considers the rule or policy from the employees perspective. If the balance favors general employer interests, the rule or policy will be deemed lawful, but if the potential interference with Section 7 rights outweighs any possible employer justification, the rule will be deemed unlawful.

The Board applied theBoeingstandard for facially-neutral work rules and reversed the ALJ, and held that the provision in the agreement that prohibited employees from talking to the media without permission was unlawful in violation of Section 8(a)(1). The Board applied prior precedent and found that the language in the media-contact provision applied to information beyond what the confidentiality agreement defined to be confidential information, even if read in conjunction with the introduction explaining that the policy was created in response to leaked information.

The Board held that [t]hat general statement d[id] not change the meaning of the plain language of the media-contact provision, which employees would reasonably interpret to apply to communications with the media about any matter regarding [Tesla], including working conditions, labor disputes, or other terms and conditions of employment.

Additionally, because the provision did not include language limiting the restrictions to statements made to the mediaon behalfof Tesla, and required prior approval for any statements whatsoever, it clearly infringed on the employees Section 7 rights. Teslas justification for attempting such restriction did not outweigh the right of its employees to communicate with the media about labor disputes and their terms and conditions of employmenta concept central to the Actand, as such, Tesla violated Section 8(a)(1) by maintaining such a provision.

In 2017, a Tesla employee sent a petition to HR and to CEO Elon Musk, discussing the safety concerns of many employees and noting their intent to form a union in order to protect themselves and ensure their safety. Shortly after circulating the petition, HR brought the employee to a conference room with Musk, seeking to directly discuss the employees safety concerns. During the meeting, the employee noted that he thought a union would help give the employees a voice. Musk responded, [Y]ou dont really have a voice. The [Union] is a secondlike two-class system where [the Union] is the only one that has a voice and not the workers.

First,the Board found that the meeting with Musk didnotviolate Section 8(a)(1), as Tesla did not unlawfully solicit the employees safety concerns and impliedly promise to remedy them. The meeting was a result of the employees petition that had been sent directly to HR and Musk, and was an attempt to understandably learn more about the serious safety concerns alleged in the petition. Further, the petition did not detail any specific hazards and there was no explicit or implicit promise to remedy the safety concerns. As such, the meeting could not be categorized as an unlawful solicitation of grievances.

Second,the Board concluded that Musks statement was lawful because an employer may criticize, disparage, or denigrate a union without running afoul of Section 8(a)(1), as long as the employer does not threaten an employees Section 7 rights. Musk did not imply that Tesla would use unlawful means to ensure the employees were unable to unionize, and simply explained one effect of unionizationthat employees would take up any grievances with Teslathroughthe Union, who would speak on their behalf.

Even though the Board found that Tesla did not violate the act by calling an employee into a meeting to discuss unionization, the Board affirmed the ALJs finding that Musks subsequent tweet on May 20, 2018to approximately 22 million of his followerswas unlawfully coercive: Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues and give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare. The Board agreed that Musks commentary lost the protection of the Act because it amounted to a threat that employees would lose their stock options if they unionized; it was not a prediction carefully phrased based on objective fact[s] of what may occur as the result of good-faith collective bargaining. As part of its decision, the Board ordered Tesla to have Musk delete his unlawful tweet and take steps to ensure he complies.

This decision instructively highlights the pitfalls with public communications on social media by the employer and supervisors in response to unionization, reaffirming the principle that while employers have a right to free speech during an organizing campaign, that right must be exercised in a manner that is not overly coercive. The Board held that Musks tweet, to his 22 million followers, was unlawful principally because of the reference to the fact that Tesla employees would give up stock options for nothing. This was construed as a threatwhich is unlawfulrather than a potential consequence of good-faith collective bargaining negotiations if a Union were selected by the employees, which could have been lawful. A fine distinction can be drawn based on the manner in which the statement is phrased and the surrounding context.

In addition, this decision reinforces that employers may lawfully restrict employees from talking to the media about proprietary information, but such provisions must be carefully crafted to ensure that they do not infringe on employees Section 7 rights. Employers should take care in ensuring that they do not categorically restrict employees from talking to the media without prior authorization.

2020 Proskauer Rose LLP. National Law Review, Volume XI, Number 91

Link:

Elon Musk Ordered to Delete Union Tweet and Eliminate Policies - The National Law Review