Tag: elon musk

Tesla Received Second Subpoena From US SEC Over Elon Musk’s 2018 Go-Private Tweets

Tesla has received a second subpoena from the US Securities and Exchange Commission over its Chief Executive Elon Musk’s tweets in 2018 about taking the company private, the electric automaker disclosed in a regulatory filing on Monday. The company said it received the subpoena on June 13 and will cooperate with the government authorities. The regulator did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. In November last year, the regulator had subpoenaed Tesla related to a settlement that required Musk’s tweets on material information to be vetted.

Musk had in 2018 settled a lawsuit by the regulator over his go-private tweets by agreeing to let the company’s lawyers pre-approve tweets with material information about the company.

In June, Musk appealed a judge’s refusal to end this 2018 agreement with the SEC.

Separately, Tesla said it has converted about 75 percent of its bitcoin holdings into fiat currency and has recorded an impairment charge of $170 million (roughly Rs. 1,200 crores) related to the asset.

As of June 30, the fair market value of its digital assets was worth $222 million (roughly Rs. 1,700 crore), it said in the filing.

Last week, Tesla asked a US court to dismiss a lawsuit claiming the electric car maker violated federal law by laying off hundreds of workers without advance notice.

Tesla in a filing in federal court in Austin, Texas, where the company is based, said the workers who were terminated signed valid agreements to bring employment-related legal disputes in arbitration and to refrain from participating in class-action lawsuits.

Even if the case remained in court, it should be dismissed because the company was merely “right-sizing” by firing poorly performing workers and not engaging in layoffs that require advance notice, Tesla said.

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Who is Nicole Shanahan, who had an affair with Elon Musk?

The estranged wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin who reportedly had an affair with Elon Musk is a California-based attorney and Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Nicole Shanahan allegedly had a brief fling with the Tesla CEO in December, which prompted her hubby to file for divorce and end his longtime friendship with Musk, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Before making headlines for being at the center of the love triangle between two of the world’s richest men, Shanahan was known for starting ClearAccessIP, a tech company that uses artificial intelligence to manage patents. She sold the company in 2020.

She is also the founder and president of Bia-Echo Foundation, a philanthropic foundation that promotes criminal justice reform, fights for a sustainable future and supports research on fertility and reproductive longevity in women in their mid-30s.

The latter issue is a personal one for Shanahan, who has been open about her difficulty getting pregnant at the launch of the Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

“Like many women who are not quite ready to start a family in their early 30s, I decided, or so I thought at the time, to take matters into my own hands and freeze embryos. However, after three failed attempts at embryo-making and three dozen visits to in vitro fertilization clinics around the Bay Area, I learned that I was not nearly as unshakable as I thought I was,” she said.

Shanahan’s affair with Musk led to her marriage’s dissolution.
AP/Jae C. Hong

Shanahan’s foundation provided the initial funding that launched the center, Page Six previously reported.

“I committed myself to help future generations of women have more choices,” she said of the issue.

Shanahan is the founder and president of Bia-Echo Foundation.
Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty Images for Gold House

She ultimately gave birth to a baby girl, fathered by Brin, in late 2018 — the same year the couple wed in a low-key ceremony after about two years of dating. They met at a yoga retreat in 2015.

Shanahan was previously married to a finance executive before dating Brin.

The entrepreneur grew up in Oakland and worked her way up out of a childhood that relied on food stamps, according to an interview she did with Modern Luxury magazine.

The daughter of a Chinese immigrant mother and a father who struggled with mental health issues, Shanahan told the publication that she “had to figure out how the world works on my own.”

“I had two unemployed parents for the majority of my childhood, so not only was there no money, there was almost no parental guidance, and as you can imagine with a mentally ill father, there was lots of chaos and fear,” she said in the June 2021 issue.

Shanahan bussed tables at 12 years old before pursuing a law degree later in life.

She studied at the University of Puget Sound and attended law school at Santa Clara University.

She also worked as a patent specialist before starting her own company and is a CodeX fellow at Stanford Law School.

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Tesla Reportedly Ordered by German Court to Reimburse Customer for Autopilot Issues

A Munich court has ordered Tesla to reimburse a customer for most of the EUR 112,000 (roughly Rs. 90,00,000) she paid for a Model X SUV because of problems with the Autopilot function, Der Spiegel reported on Friday.

A technical report showed the vehicle did not reliably recognise obstacles like the narrowing of a construction site and would at times activate the brakes unnecessarily.

This could cause a “massive hazard” in city centres and lead to collisions, the court ruled.

Tesla lawyers argued Autopilot was not designed for city traffic, according to Der Spiegel, to which the court said it was not feasible for drivers to switch the feature on and off manually in different settings as it would distract from driving.

Tesla was not immediately available for comment and declined to comment to Der Spiegel. The court was not immediately available for comment.

US safety regulators are investigating Tesla’s Autopilot function after reports of 16 crashes, including seven injury incidents and one death, involving Tesla vehicles in Autopilot that had struck stationary first-responder and road maintenance vehicles.

Tesla says Autopilot allows vehicles to brake and steer automatically within their lanes but does not make them capable of driving themselves.

Musk said in March that Tesla is likely to launch a test version of its new “Full Self-Driving” software in Europe later this year, depending on regulatory approval.

“It’s quite difficult to do full self-driving in Europe,” he told workers at the Berlin factory at the time, saying much work needs to be done to handle tricky driving situations in Europe where roads vary a lot by country.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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Twitter Shares Rise After Hindenburg Takes Long Position Amid Legal Battle Against Elon Musk

Short-seller Hindenburg Research said on Wednesday it had taken a long position in Twitter shares and warned the social media firm’s lawsuit against Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, could pose a threat to his companies.

Twitter‘s shares rose about 6 percent to $35.90 (nearly Rs. 2,900) on the news, a day after the company sued Musk for violating his $44 billion deal (roughly Rs. 3,50,290 crore) and asked a Delaware court to order him to complete the merger at the agreed $54.20 (roughly Rs. 4,300) per Twitter share.

Musk, who is the chief executive officer at Tesla and heads SpaceX, said on Friday he was terminating the deal because Twitter violated the agreement by failing to respond to requests for information regarding fake or spam accounts on the platform.

Hindenburg did not elaborate on the threat the lawsuit poses to Musk, but legal experts have said that from the information that is public, Twitter would appear to have the upper hand.

“We have accumulated a significant long position in shares of Twitter. Twitter’s complaint poses a credible threat to Musk’s empire,” Hindenburg said in a tweet.

Twitter was not immediately available for a comment.

The legal face-off is the latest twist in the months long saga that began after Musk in April bought a stake in Twitter and later offered to buy the company.

Then in May, he put the buyout on hold until Twitter proved that spam bots account for less than 5 percent of its total users, even as he had gathered investors to fund a portion of his deal.

Hindenburg, which earlier had a short position, had said in May that Musk’s offer could get repriced lower if he walked away from the deal.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

 



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Elon Musk Said to Admit Tesla’s Mistake to Car Crash Victim’s Father

Elon Musk told the father of a teenager who died in a Tesla Model S crash that the carmaker made a mistake in removing a speed limiter from the vehicle without the father’s permission, a lawyer for the family said in court.

Curtis Miner, the attorney, told a jury Thursday that the billionaire chief executive officer of Tesla Inc. made a “critical confession” when James Riley asked him in a May 2018 phone conversation how a device that was supposed to prevent the vehicle from going faster than 85 miles per hour (roughly 137km per hour) was removed before 18-year-old Barrett Riley veered off a Florida road at 116 miles per hour (roughly 186km per hour) and hit a wall.

After confirming that James Riley, through his company, was the registered owner of the car, Musk said Tesla technicians shouldn’t have removed the speed limiter without his authorisation, according to the lawyer’s account of the phone call.

“Well, I guess we shouldn’t have taken the limiter off,” Riley recalled Musk saying when he took the witness stand to testify against Tesla. Riley said the CEO told him that Tesla would review its policies.

In his opening argument at a trial that’s scheduled to run through next week in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Miner said the company’s failure to communicate with Barrett’s parents made all the difference.

“If Tesla had taken the most simplest steps to tell Jim and Jenny Riley what they’d done,” this accident wouldn’t have happened, he said.

The negligence case is the first for the world’s most valuable automaker over a fatal crash involving one of its vehicles. The electric car-maker faces a flurry of lawsuits over accidents blamed on its Autopilot driver-assistance feature that have also drawn increasing scrutiny from safety regulators.

Tesla’s attorney presented a very different narrative to the six-person jury.

“A speed limiter is not a safety device,” Vince Galvin said. “Is it all right if they crash at 85 mph instead of 116 mph?”

Tesla has said that Barrett Riley went in person to the Tesla facility where the Model S was being serviced and “tricked” its staff into removing the speed limiter.

“Tesla is not in a position to police the Rileys’ children,” Galvin said.

Galvin disputed what happened on the phone call between Musk and Riley. Musk isn’t a witness in the case.

“If Musk told him they something did something wrong,” Riley would have told the National Transportation Safety Board that during the agency’s investigation of the accident, but he “disclosed nothing,” the lawyer said.

Galvin said Barrett was known among friends and family for driving “recklessly” and “dangerously.” His mother urged his friends to stop him from speeding, saying she was worried for their safety, the lawyer said.

“The Rileys negligently entrusted their vehicle to Barrett because they knew and should have known he had driving issues,” Galvin said.

© 2022 Bloomberg L.P.

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Tesla Said to Pause Production After Shaky Quarter With Historic Production Milestone

Tesla investors have a lot to parse after the July 4 holiday: a disappointing quarter of deliveries, a record month of production, and now several weeks of downtime at multiple plants. The electric-car maker will halt most production on its Model Y assembly line in Shanghai for the first two weeks of July, then stop the Model 3 line for a 20-day stretch starting July 18, Bloomberg reported last month. Upgrade work at the factory to boost the output of both vehicles is expected to be completed by early August, people familiar with the matter said.

On Monday, TeslaMag said the carmaker’s plant near Berlin will take a two-week break starting July 11. The German site reported that Tesla aims to roughly double its production rate from August, citing an unidentified source. The company built 1,000 Model Ys at the factory for during least one week last month.

Tesla didn’t mention these plans in its July 2 production and deliveries statement. The carmaker offered an upbeat line — it made more vehicles in June than any month in its history — while disclosing 254,695 deliveries for the quarter, short of analysts’ estimates.

The “relative weakness” of the quarter was expected, Philippe Houchois, a Jefferies analyst with a buy rating on Tesla shares, said in a July 3 note. He wrote that Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk‘s comments referring to the company’s new plants as “money furnaces” suggest Tesla’s free cash flow may have been affected by significant working capital disruptions.

Tesla shares fell as much as 0.7 percent shortly after the start of premarket trading Tuesday.

The biggest blow to Tesla’s performance last quarter came from Shanghai’s weeks-long lockdown in response to a Covid outbreak. The company went to extraordinary lengths to reopen its factory there and keep it running, with thousands of workers sleeping on-site to maintain partial production.

Whereas Shanghai is Tesla’s most productive plant, its factories near Berlin and Austin, Texas, are only just getting going. Musk staged an opening party at the former on March 22 and at the latter on April 7.

While those were jovial affairs — Musk danced in Germany and donned a cowboy hat and shades in Texas — the CEO sounded much more subdued a few weeks later.

“Berlin and Austin are losing billions of dollars right now because there’s a ton of expense and hardly any output,” Musk told the Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley on May 31. “Getting Berlin and Austin functional and getting Shanghai back in the saddle fully are overwhelmingly our concern.”

The Shanghai shutdown and struggles ramping up new plants contributed to Tesla shares plunging 38 percent in the three months that ended in June, a record quarterly drop. The S&P 500 slumped 16 percent, the biggest decline for the benchmark US stock index since the first quarter of 2020.

Tesla scheduled its quarterly earnings report for July 20.

© 2022 Bloomberg L.P.

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Tesla’s Run of Record Deliveries May Take a Hit This Year Due to COVID-Related Shutdown, Predict Analysts

Tesla is expected to end its nearly two-year-long run of record quarterly deliveries as a prolonged COVID-related shutdown in Shanghai hit its production and supply chain, highlighting the risks of its reliance on China.

While Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has been pursuing the acquisition of social media platform Twitter, his crown jewel, Tesla, has grappled with production glitches in China and slow output growth at new factories in Texas and Berlin.

Analysts expect Tesla to report deliveries of 295,078 vehicles for the second quarter as early as Friday, according to Refinitiv data. Several analysts have slashed their estimates further to about 260,000 due to China’s prolonged lockdown.

This would be down from its record deliveries of 310,048 the preceding quarter, marking Tesla’s first quarter-on-quarter decline in deliveries since the first quarter of 2020.

The world’s most valuable automaker has posted record deliveries every quarter since the third quarter of 2020, weathering pandemic and supply-chain disruptions better than most automakers.

China has been instrumental in Tesla’s rapid increase of vehicle production and Musk has praised workers there for “burning the 3 am oil.”

But China’s prolonged zero-COVID lockdown — Wedbush analyst Dan Ives called it Tesla’s “albatross” this quarter — caused deeper disruptions to output than Musk predicted. Tesla’s low-cost, lucrative Shanghai factory produced roughly half of the company’s total cars delivered last year, and Ives estimated the shutdown wiped out about 70,000 units in the quarter.

Musk said in April that Tesla’s overall vehicle production in the second quarter would be “roughly on par” with the first quarter, driven by a China rebound. But he recently said Tesla had a “very tough quarter,” citing production and supply-chain challenges in China.

Musk also said Tesla’s new factories in Texas and Berlin are “gigantic money furnaces” losing billions of dollars as they struggle to increase production quickly. He said the carmaker’s supply-chain problems are not over and keeping the factories running remains a concern.

“The key question is the magnitude of the (China production) decline and whether the Fremont (California) factory was able to help support volumes,” CFRA Research analyst Garrett Nelson said.

He expects volumes to rebound strongly in the second half of the year, as Tesla boosts production at the Shanghai factory with the easing of a COVID-19 lockdown.

Gene Munster, managing partner at venture capital firm Loup Ventures, was cautious about the outlook, saying the third quarter will be difficult for Tesla and other tech firms, citing a risk of recession.

Tesla has been laying off hundreds of employees in the United States, after Musk early this month told executives that he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy and needed to cut about 10 percent of staff at the electric car maker.

Nevertheless, Musk has said demand for Tesla vehicles remains strong.

Tesla shares have fallen 37 percent since early April, hurt by Musk’s Twitter deal and the China lockdown.

Musk, a prolific Twitter user who this week passed the 100 million follower mark, has not been tweeting for over a week.

Cowen analyst Jeffrey Osborne said in a report, “investors are growing fatigued with Elon’s rants” on the Twitter saga, politics and other topics.

“Many we speak to are questioning if we have reached ‘peak Elon’.”

© Thomson Reuters 2022

 

 

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Amazon Working on Feature to Enable Alexa to Mimic Any Voice, Confirms Senior Vice President

Amazon wants to give customers the chance to make Alexa, the company’s voice assistant, sound just like their grandmother — or anyone else.

The online retailer is developing a system to let Alexa mimic any voice after hearing less than a minute of audio, said Rohit Prasad, an Amazon Senior Vice President, at a conference the company held in Las Vegas on Wednesday. The goal is to “make the memories last” after “so many of us have lost someone we love” during the pandemic, Prasad said.

Amazon declined to share when it would roll out such a feature.

The work wades into an area of technology that has garnered close scrutiny for potential benefits and abuses. For instance, Microsoft recently restricted which businesses could use its software to parrot voices. The goal is to help people with speech impairments or other problems but some worry it could also be used to propagate political deepfakes.

Amazon hopes the project will help Alexa become ubiquitous in shoppers’ lives. But public attention has already shifted elsewhere. At Alphabet‘s Google, an engineer made the highly contested claim that a company chat bot had advanced to sentience. Another Amazon executive said on Tuesday that Alexa had 100 million customers globally, in line with figures the company has provided for device sales since January 2019.

Prasad said Amazon’s aim for Alexa is “generalisable intelligence,” or the ability to adapt to user environments and learn new concepts with little external input. He said that goal is “not to be confused with the all-knowing, all-capable, uber artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, which Alphabet’s DeepMind unit and Elon Musk-co-founded OpenAI are seeking.

Amazon shared its vision for companionship with Alexa at the conference. In a video segment, it portrayed a child who asked, “Alexa, can grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?”

A moment later, Alexa affirmed the command and changed her voice. She spoke soothingly, less robotically, ostensibly sounding like the individual’s grandmother in real life.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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Elon Musk Sued by Tesla Shareholder Over Racism, Sexual Harassment Complaints

A Tesla shareholder has filed legal proceedings against Elon Musk and the company’s board of directors, accusing them of ignoring employee complaints of racism and sexual harassment.

The lawsuit — brought forward Thursday by complainant Solomon Chau in Texas where Tesla is headquartered — argues that an unaddressed “toxic workplace culture” at the company has caused “irreparable” reputational damage and financial harm.

The action was the latest against Tesla, which has been hit by a spate of sexual harassment lawsuits and Black employees complaining of rampant racism.

In February, the state of California sued Tesla over alleged discrimination and harassment against Black employees at its Fremont plant near San Francisco, saying in a complaint that the company had created a “racially segregated workplace.”

Thursday’s court filing stated that a “toxic environment took shape internally for years and the truth about Tesla’s culture has only recently emerged, leading to actions by both regulators and private individuals.”

The lawsuit asserts that Musk, who is Tesla’s executive director, and its 11 board members ignored several “red flags”, which resulted in the departure of numerous highly qualified employees and set off a series of costly legal proceedings.

“These wrongs resulted in significant damages to Tesla’s reputation, goodwill, and standing in the business community”, the lawsuit states, and “exposed Tesla to hundreds of millions of dollars in potential liability for violations of state and federal law.”

In another lawsuit last year, Tesla was ordered to pay $137 million (roughly Rs. 1,070 crore), plus interest, to a former elevator operator at its Fremont factory for turning a blind eye to racism. Earlier this year, the penalty was reduced to $15 million.

Other legal proceedings, in particular from Black women employees who claim to have been victims of racial slurs and inappropriate sexual remarks by colleagues or superiors, are underway.

Tesla, which has barely responded to requests from journalists since late 2020, did not respond to a request from AFP.

Musk was also sued on Thursday by an investor in dogecoin, who says he lost money after investing in the cryptocurrency, and described himself as an “American citizen who was defrauded” by what he called a “Dogecoin Crypto Pyramid Scheme.”

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Tesla Cancels Online Recruitment Events for China in June Days After Issuing Notice for Various Roles

Tesla has cancelled three online recruitment events for China scheduled this month, the latest development after chief executive Elon Musk threatened job cuts at the electric car maker, saying it was “overstaffed” in some areas.

However, Musk had not commented specifically on staffing in China, which made more than half of the vehicles for the automaker globally and contributed a quarter of its revenue in 2021.

The company cancelled the three events for positions in sales, R&D and its supply chain originally scheduled for June 16, 23 and 30, notifications on messaging app WeChat showed late on Thursday, without stating a reason.

Tesla did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on Friday.

Notification of a June 9 event to recruit staff for “smart manufacturing” roles was not visible and it was not immediately clear it had been held as planned.

The China operation is still allowing resume submission for more than 1,000 openings posted on the social media platform, such as aerodynamics engineers, supply chain managers, store managers, factory supervisors and workers.

Musk had a “super bad feeling” about the economy, he said in an email seen by Reuters last week.

In another email to employees on Friday, Musk said Tesla would reduce salaried headcount by a tenth, as it had become “overstaffed in many areas”, but added that hourly headcount would increase.

Production at Tesla’s Shanghai plant was badly hit after the Chinese commercial hub began a two-month COVID-19 lockdown late in March.

Output is set to fall by more than a third this quarter from the previous one, outpacing Musk’s prediction.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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