Category Archives: Elon Musk

The initial kit to link Kerry's remote Black Valley to Elon Musk's Starlink internet has arrived in the Kingdom and is to be installed within days.

The pilot project in the valley is being conducted by the Department of Rural and Community Development, under license by the Commission for Communications Regulation, more commonly known as ComReg.

Shrouded in secrecy, the Starlink company has been liaising directly with Kerry County Council since late 2020 to trial the technology.

The size of a small satellite dish, the kit that has made its way to Kerry includes a long cable and an indoor box said to be "the size of a lump of turf".

It will need a sheltered location, according to the councils digital officer.

Community groups in the valley have been co-operating eagerly, and a location where the device could serve a number of single houses would be selected this week, Brian Looney confirmed.

The only requirement is to see the sky, he said of the location for the dish.

Simple to use, he said that he had already run a test on it.

Communications blackspot

The satellite beta pilot was among a suite of solutions being looked at to solve the communications problems of the valley, Mr Looney said.

While it would speed up internet, companies such as Eir would also be trying to resolve the valleys long-term landline and poor mobile problems, he added.

Mayor of Kerry and Kenmare area councillor Patrick OConnor-Scarteen has welcomed the multi-span approach.

Cumeendiff lake in The Black Valley, Killarney County Kerry Ireland. Picture: Don MacMonagle

Given the valley was the last area to get telephone or electricity, he said he did not want it to be left trailing again.

There was a time when running water was the essential issue. Now it is access to the internet which is necessary now for most Government services, Mr OConnor-Scarteen said.

Light pollution

Mr Musk, founder of SpaceX and electric carmaker Tesla, is deploying a chain of satellites into space to provide cheap and fast broadband connection for remote rural locations across the world.

However, the impact of the low-hanging satellites on Kerrys international dark sky reserve, the only gold reserve in the Northern Hemisphere has been raised in the Dil by Fine Gael TD, Eoghan Murphy.

The status was awarded to south Kerry in 2014 because of the pristine view of the constellations in the Kells to Skelligs area.

Low light bulbs have been put on the street lights in Cahersiveen, and the amount of light emanating from a single house is assessed in planning applications by the local council, lest they impact on the night sky.

Environment minister, Eamon Ryan, told the South Dublin TD there is currently no legislation in Ireland dealing specifically with environmental light pollution.

The decision to proceed with the pilot project was a matter for Kerry County Council and his department had no role in the matter, Mr Ryan said.

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Elon Musk's Starlink kit arrives in Kerry ahead of broadband plan - Irish Examiner

SpaceX has revealed a new design for the Dragon capsule that includes a glass pod at the top of the craft that astronauts can sit in.

Tweeted by the official SpaceX account with the caption A new view for crew, the Dragon capsule will carry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk retweeted the picture, saying that it was probably most in space you could possibly feel by being in a glass dome.

Having completed a successful trip to the space station in 2019, the Dragon capsule is part of Nasas plan to move travel between Earth and the orbiting craft from government organisations or foreign rockets to private companies.

Nasa astronauts previously had to use Russian rockets after space shuttle missions were retired in 2011, but the use of crafts from SpaceX and Boeing presents new opportunities for the space agency.

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The Dragon capsule is capable of carrying up to seven passengers at one time, via 16 Draco thrusters used to power and orient the craft during flight. Each thruster is capable of generating 90 pounds of force as it manoeuvres, adjusts its orbit, and controls the capsules altitude.

The new design of the Dragon capsule is not the only development SpaceX has made today: the SN11 starship, which launched from Boca Chica, Texas, crashed and exploded.

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The failed landing came after previous launch attempts on Friday and Monday were delayed due to technical issues and an absent FAA inspector, respectively.

Looks like engine 2 had issues on ascent & didnt reach operating chamber pressure during landing burn, but, in theory, it wasnt needed, he wrote on Twitter.

Something significant happened shortly after landing burn start. Should know what it was once we can examine the bits later today.

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Elon Musk reveals new design for Dragon capsule that will let astronauts stick their head out into space - The Independent

Elon Musk says hes hoarding wealth for a good cause but its not good enough for US Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The left-wing lawmaker targeted the billionaire Tesla CEO after Musk claimed he would use his giant fortune to support life on other planets.

Sanders a Vermont independent whos a powerful gadfly on the Democratic Partys left flank first went after Musk last week by pointing out the massive wealth disparity that he and fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos exemplify.

We are in a moment in American history where two guys Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos own more wealth than the bottom 40 [percent] of people in this country, Sanders tweeted on Thursday. That level of greed and inequality is not only immoral. It is unsustainable.

The website CleanTechnica which frequently covers Tesla took umbrage with Sanders comments in an article calling criticisms of Musk over his wealth ridiculous.

Musk offered his own defense in response to the article on Twitter, saying his fortune will go toward his spacefaring ambitions. His rocket-building company, SpaceX, wants to land humans on Mars by 2026.

I am accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary & extend the light of consciousness to the stars, Musk tweeted early Sunday morning.

But that didnt satisfy Sanders, who introduced a proposal last week to hike corporate taxes on companies that pay top executives at least 50 times more than their median workers pay.

Space travel is an exciting idea, but right now we need to focus on Earth and create a progressive tax system so that children dont go hungry, people are not homeless and all Americans have healthcare, Sanders said in response to Musks tweet. The level of inequality in America is obscene and a threat to our democracy.

Sanders also called out Musk last August when he proposed taxing 60 percent of the wealth that American billionaires gained during the coronavirus pandemic.

Musk was worth less than $30 billion at the start of 2020 before his electric-car makers stock price exploded, giving him a net worth of $170 billion as of Sunday, according to Bloombergs Billionaires Index.

Bezos the Amazon CEO whose $181 billion fortune is the only one to outrank Musks had not responded to Sanders latest criticism online by Monday morning.

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Bernie Sanders clashes with Elon Musk over massive fortune

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez wants the federal government to help pay for Elon Musk's Boring Company to build a congestion-reducing tunnel under his city, he told Bloomberg on Tuesday.

Suarez is aiming for Musk's firm to bankroll a tunnel project and charge a fee for people to use it, but he also plans to ask US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about the potential for federal funding, Bloomberg reported.

"It would be wonderful if the federal government would involve itself in this project," Suarez said during a Bloomberg Radio interview.

Musk first expressed interest in tunneling under Miami in a January tweet, saying "Cars & trucks stuck in traffic generate megatons of toxic gases & particulate, but @boringcompany road tunnels under Miami would solve traffic & be an example to the world." Since then, Suarez has spoken with Musk, toured The Boring Company's Las Vegas tunnel project, and met with company representatives.

Read more: Elon Musk's mastery of memes proves Tesla will never have to pay for traditional marketing

The initial plan centered around a traffic-curbing tunnel under the Miami River, which Musk said would cost $30 million and take six months to build, Suarez said previously. Miami-Dade County transit officials said in 2018 that the project would cost nearly $1 billion and span four years, according to The Miami Herald.

Now, Suarez is considering a more ambitious system that mirrors what The Boring Company is developing in Las Vegas, Bloomberg reported. He told the outlet that he envisions a network of tunnels that would connect several key destinations and potentially slash a 40-minute trip to five minutes.

Suarez also told Bloomberg he hopes Musk will move the headquarters of The Boring Company, Tesla, and SpaceX to Miami.

The Boring Company aims to build underground roadways where people could hail a self-driving Tesla vehicle and get out at a designated stop. The firm's critics say all Musk has done is reinvent public transit, but with vehicles that can carry fewer passengers.

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Miami's mayor wants the federal government to help pay for Elon Musk to tunnel under his city - Business Insider

SpaceX's founder and CEO, Elon Musk, on Tuesday said the company would land Starships on Mars "well before" 2030 and urged Europe to aim higher with its rocket technology to keep up in the space race.

He was responding to an Ars Technica article that said Europe would begin to focus on competitive launch systems as soon as 2030 and that European companies were trailing SpaceX.

"SpaceX will be landing Starships on Mars well before 2030," the billionaire tweeted. "The really hard threshold is making Mars Base Alpha self-sustaining."

Musk eventually plans to build 1,000 Starship rockets and launch three of them a day to send 1 million people to Mars.

In the tweet thread, Musk also said Europe was "aiming too low" with its launch efforts, saying "only rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable will be competitive."

The 387-foot-long Starship rocket is meant to be fully and rapidly reusable. The most recent three prototypes have all exploded during testing. The company is planning to launch Starship serial No. 11, or SN11, this week.

Musk has thrown around various timeframes for landing on Mars, and experts previously told Insider it might take longer than he's forecasting.

In February, Musk said in an interview on the audio app Clubhouse that it would take SpaceX "5 1/2 years" for a crewed mission of its Starship rocket to reach Mars. His time line has remained roughly the same for the past five months.

Read more: Elon Musk is pumping stocks, cryptocurrencies, and the energy of 49 million loyal followers to dizzying heights. Experts break down the risks of his incessant tweets, from legal trouble to losses for small investors.

Musk said in October and December that he was "highly confident" the space company had a "fighting chance" of launching an uncrewed rocket to the planet in 2024, followed by a crewed mission in 2026.

In 2017, he predicted that SpaceX would send cargo ships to Mars in 2022, followed by a crewed mission two years later.

Experts told Insider that SpaceX had only three remaining launch opportunities to successfully land humans on Mars by 2026. They said if everything went perfectly, Musk could achieve his goal.

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Elon Musk: SpaceX will land Starships on Mars 'well before 2030' - Business Insider

Sen. Bernie Sanders responded to Tesla CEO Elon Musk's claim that he needs his vast wealth to fund interplanetary travel by saying that "we need to focus on Earth" and raise taxes on higher earners to tackle "obscene" inequality in the US.

After Sanders criticized his wealth last week, Musk, one of the wealthiest people in the world, said he would use his fortune to fund space exploration.

"I am accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary & extend the light of consciousness to the stars," Musk tweeted on Sunday.

Sanders responded: "Space travel is an exciting idea, but right now we need to focus on Earth and create a progressive tax system so that children don't go hungry, people are not homeless and all Americans have healthcare."

He added that "the level of inequality in America is obscene and a threat to our democracy."

After a rally in Tesla stock, Musk last week overtook Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to become the world's richest person, with an estimated fortune of $182 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.

Musk, who also runs the space-exploration firm SpaceX, said last year that he wanted to send 1 million people to Mars by 2050. He has said he is "highly confident" that SpaceX's Starship will land on Mars by 2026 and has predicted there will be "a lot of jobs" on Mars.

Musk's defense of his wealth was a response to a CleanTechnica column criticizing Sanders' comments about Bezos' and Musk's wealth.

"We are in a moment in American history where two guys Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos own more wealth than the bottom 40% of people in this country," Sanders had said on Thursday. "That level of greed and inequality is not only immoral. It is unsustainable."

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Bernie Sanders tells Elon Musk to 'focus on Earth' and pay more tax - Business Insider

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March23, 20212 min read

A rare photo has surfaced of a fateful meeting between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk 17 years ago.

The photo - which wastweeted by Trung Phan, a writer for business newsletter The Hustle - shows Musk and Bezos smiling while seated together in a restaurant. According to Phan, it was taken in 2004, just as Musk's and Bezos' respective space ambitions were starting to heat up.

Musk responded to the photo, tweeting: "Wow, hard to believe that was 17 years ago!"

The 2004 meeting is widely believed to be the beginning ofa long-standing rivalry between the two mogulsand their competing rocket companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin. While Bezos hasn't publicly discussed the meal, Musk described their meeting to author Christian Davenport for his book,"The Space Barons."Musk said that Bezos was "barking up the wrong tree" about rockets and that SpaceX had already tried several of the ideas Bezos was proposing, calling them "dumb."

Related:Elon Musk Just Trolled Jeff Bezos on Twitter and It Could Reignite a Years-Old Feud Between the Billionaires

"I actually did my best to give good advice, which he largely ignored," Musk said.

Since then, Bezos has made veiled critiques of of Musk's main goal of sending humans to Mars, while Musk has taken jabs at some of Amazon's business ventures, calling Bezos a "copycat" on more than one occasion. SpaceX and Blue Origin have also competed over talent and patents, as well as NASA contracts and access to launch pads.

And for the past several months, Bezos and Musk have also beenjockeying for the titleof the richest person in the world. Bezos iscurrently in the No. 1 spotdue to his $181 billion fortune, while Musk is No. 2 with a net worth of $170 billion.

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A Rare Photo Shows Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Having Dinner 17 Years Ago, Before Their Longstanding Feud Ignited - Entrepreneur

Cybersecurity specialist Luke McOmie lives entirely off-grid on the side of a mountain in Colorado, where theres no cell service or landline broadband internet. Yet he recently gave a talk at a convention hosted in Japan on the lethality of drones. He was live via satellitehis own personal satellite internet connection, that is.

With a constellation of hundreds of satellites, and speeds comparable to U.S. broadband, the Starlink service lets Mr. McOmie do his job despite being in the middle of nowhere. He and his wife Melanie McOmie are living the sort of lifestyle that pandemic-weary, deskbound urbanites might envy: raising chickens, watching out for mountain lions, and taking in an expanse of unsullied forest.

The McOmies are part of a beta testing program for a new kind of internet service from Elon Musks rocket company SpaceX. Their experience has been phenomenal so far, they say. They regularly get download speeds of 120 megabits per second, and because the antenna gives off a fair amount of heat, theyve been able to stay connected through most winter weather. They did have to clear it after a recent blizzard, however.

Its not clear what kind of speeds Starlink will offer to millions of people, versus the more than 10,000 now testing in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Depending on how many people SpaceX signs up, future users could have internet speeds that are only a fraction of whats available during this demo period. And even if Starlink and its soon-to-deploy competitors work as advertised, there are many other potential challenges to their viability, let alone profitability. They include the headaches of shared wireless spectrum, and the threat of space debris.

But with at least three other serious, deep-pocketed contenders in the internet-from-space raceincluding Amazon , OneWeb and longtime operator Telesatgetting fast, reliable internet service from any place on earth with a clear view of the sky could soon seem no more miraculous than a cell signal. It also might not be much more expensive: Current pricing for Starlink is $499 upfront and $99 a month for service.

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Elon Musk and Amazon Are Battling to Put Satellite Internet in Your Backyard - The Wall Street Journal

President of Bolivia Luis Arce accused Elon Musk and Tesla of being involved in the so-called coup back in 2019 that ousted then-President Evo Morales.

At a joint press conference with the President of Mexico Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the Bolivian President thanked Mexico for offering political asylum to Evo Morales and himself after the 2019 events, adding that the financial reason behind the overthrow of Morales was none other than Bolivias vast reserves of lithium, and Tesla, El Sol de Mexico reports.

Read Also: Tesla Has Started Accepting Bitcoin As Payment In The US, Says Musk

There were statements by vice-presidential candidate Samuel Doria Medina who mentioned it would be very interesting if Tesla could come to Bolivia to industrialize lithium. A few weeks later, a statement by a senior Tesla manager was known on social networks saying that they are going to carry out a coup where necessary, said Arce, who served as Minister of Finance between 2006 and 2017 in the Morales government.

Morales was forced to flee the country shortly after the 2019 elections, which ended in a contested vote count, protests, and even calls by the military for Morales to leave. Morales and his supporters said that the whole thing is a coup but he eventually, together with the Vice President, and the top Senate leaders, stepped down.

On July 25, 2020, Elon Musk also called it a coup and showed his support for it; Teslas CEO said back then that a second government stimulus package would not be in the best interests of the people when a Twitter user replied: You know what wasnt in the best interest of people? the U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there. Musk then responded: We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it but later deleted the tweet.

Morales nationalized Bolivias lithium reserves and had agreed with a German company for the production of batteries, but the deal never materialized because the government was overthrown. Musk was reportedly in negotiations to secure lithium deposits from South America for Tesla but Morales move to nationalize Bolivias reserves closed the door ever since.

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Bolivian President Accuses Elon Musk And Tesla Of Being Involved In Countrys 2019 Coup - CarScoops

Stimmy versus bonds. That's what this market has become. The stimmy is the stimulus money that comes into the market because of the checks from the Feds. That money's for younger investors to buy exciting stocks and perhaps bitcoin. The bonds? That's shorthand for the people who sell exciting stocks because they fear interest rates going higher, a signal that inflation is coming and that destroys the long-term value of the exciting stocks. It doesn't hurt bitcoin, but that's another story.

Young investors have had little interest in following Treasury's because interest rates to them mean nothing about the fundamentals of the stocks they are buying.

Case in point? Tesla (TSLA) . This stock is the ultimate growth vehicle and has been a beacon for so many younger investors who want to bet with Elon Musk, the CEO and founder of the company.

However, the stock's been stalled and has fallen from $900 to about $650 until this weekend when the most important person in the stock business, the person the younger people connect with most, Cathie Wood, the manager of ARK Innov (ARKK) , the best performing fund last year, said it's worth far more than that. She thinks Tesla can go to $3000 in 2025, although that's just her base case. Her bull case if $4000. Even her bear case of $1500 is still more than a double from here.

Younger investors have flocked to the stock today because of Wood, who talks about how Tesla could be making five to 10 million cars at a low cost, and there might be fully autonomous cars and Tesla robo-taxis by then. All the intriguing concepts that could truly catch young peoples' fancy. Let's throw in that perhaps Musk reinvents the electric grid in the country, with a gigantic solar farm somewhere in the Northwest of Colorado that powers everything and is owned by Tesla, then you have something worth a lot more than the stock sells for. If you disintermediate the whole national electric grid and create autonomous driving cars you might have something that gets you a much higher stock.

But investors who take their cue from the bond market are taking the other side of this trade betting that the stock will fall if interest rates, which are going down today, reverse direction and head higher as they have the last seven weeks.

The decline in bonds and concomitant rise in rates has led to wholesale destruction of all tech, and is the proximate cause for Tesla's fall from grace. To the majority of big gun managers I bet they think today is just a respite from the selling and they believe that rates are headed higher no matter what. So they want to short Tesla or dump it along with all of the other high growth stocks.

They don't just disagree with Cathie Wood's vision. In fact they don't even care about it because if inflation rages Tesla's stock just isn't worth all that much and certainly less than it is selling for which is about $700 billion, far more than any car company.

Will Tesla's stock start going up now? I think only if rates stop going higher. I just don't think there are enough stimmy checks out there to budge it. I think the younger crowd isn't powerful enough to fight the interest rate-related selling.

Look, I don't want to put the knock on Wood. She's too good. But I think that if you are going to get a multitrillion dollar valuation Musk is certainly behind schedule and the 2025 timeframe might not matter to the stock if the inflationistas win out.

In the end we have a battle not about inflation but about the size of the new cohort that's doing the stimulus check buying. This group managed to take GameStop (GME) from $15 to $483. Who's to say it couldn't do the same thing to Tesla with its concentrated stimmy buying. With Cathie Wood's backing, it's not an insane thought. In fact, it might be the best call of the year. But only if the stimmy crowd keeps throwing money at Wood and is hooked on stocks and can't get enough of what Musk's selling.

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Jim Cramer: The Stimmy Crowd, Cathie Wood, and Elon Musk - RealMoney