Category Archives: Elon Musk

SAN FRANCISCO In the hours after a tech executive was stabbed to death on a street in San Francisco with no clear suspect, billionaire Elon Musk led a charge on Twitter, where fellow tech executives and wealthy investors said they were fed up with violent repeat offenders getting away with crime in the biggest U.S. tech hub.

On Thursday, it became clear that their interpretation of the killing had been wrong.

City officials said at a news conference that the tech executive, Bob Lee, was murdered not randomly but by a man he knew, and San Franciscos chief prosecutor called out Musk by name for having jumped to conclusions.

District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said Musk was reckless when he suggested within hours of the killing that repeat violent offenders were involved.

Reckless and irresponsible statements like those contained in Mr. Musks tweet that assumed incorrect circumstances about Mr. Lees death served to mislead the world in its perceptions of San Francisco, Jenkins said.

The statements, she continued, also negatively impact the pursuit of justice for victims of crime, as it spreads misinformation at a time when the police are trying to solve a very difficult case.

Musk, the countrys wealthiest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to Twitter, where he is the CEO and majority owner.

Musk responded to Lees killing with a tweet April 5 replying to another user who said Lee had been a friend.

Violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately, Musk wrote.

He added that the city should take stronger action to incarcerate repeated violent offenders, and he tagged Jenkins Twitter account.

Lees death and Musks tweet added fuel to what has become a particularly contentious topic in San Francisco. Debates about crime, drugs and homelessness and the citys response to them have become flashpoints, with some in the tech and startup community rallying to push for change. That community helped recall the previous district attorney, Chesa Boudin, who was attacked for seeking alternatives to incarceration.

San Francisco has logged 13 homicides this year, matching last years tally in the same time frame, according to police department data. Robberies and assaults have also stayed relatively consistent over the past year.

San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said in an interview with NBC News on Thursday that every homicide is important, but that Lee was a notable person, which elevated media coverage of the case.

Some of the things that were said because of this case, I think were a little bit unfair, Scott said. Its one case. And I believe this would have happened anywhere.

Musk was not alone in rushing to offer an opinion about Lees killing and its broader significance for San Francisco. Matt Ocko, a venture capitalist, called San Francisco lawless and said the criminal-loving city council had literal blood on their hands.

Michelle Tandler, a startup founder who often tweets about crime, said the killing was part of a disturbing crime wave that justified calling in the National Guard. Michael Arrington, the founder of the news site TechCrunch, tweeted that he hated what San Francisco has become.

And investor Jason Calacanis, rejecting a call to wait for the facts, said the city was run by evil incompetent fools & grifters who accomplish nothing except enabling rampant violence.

Calacanis tweeted Thursday that he stood by his earlier view, independent of any one of the thousands of violent crimes that occur every month. Arrington, Ocko and Tandler did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Rival interpretations of the killing had also played out in the news media, with the San Francisco Chronicle cautioning that violent crime was relatively low in the city, while The New York Times put the lawless quotation in a headline.

Mayor London Breed noted at Thursdays news conference how the case had received wide attention.

There has been a lot of speculation and a lot of things said about our city and crime in the city, Breed said, praising the patient work of prosecutors and police.

Jenkins said people would have been better off waiting for more facts before they weighed in with broad declarations.

We all should and must do better about not contributing to the spread of such misinformation without having actual facts to underlie the statements that we make. Victims deserve that, and the residents of San Francisco deserve that, Jenkins said.

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San Francisco DA blasts Elon Musk over reaction to stabbing death - NBC News

Tesla CEO Elon Musk leans Republican, and hes no friend of Joe Biden. But President Biden and his fellow Democrats have done Musk and his company a favor no Republican would likely consider.

Bidens new rules for tailpipe emissions, which the Environmental Protection Agency proposed on April 12, would sharply limit the pollution cars are allowed to emit for model years 2027 through 2032. If ultimately adopted, in whole or in part, the new rules would effectively force automakers to build far more electric vehicles and far fewer gasoline-powered ones.

That could cause upheaval at many automakers trying to shift from gas-powered cars to electrics at a measured pace that doesnt wreck their profitability. For Tesla, (TSLA) however, it will be business as usualexcept that the competition could end up hobbled by massive new costs, plus the stumbles that often attend large corporate transformations. That makes Tesla the single-biggest beneficiary of the EPAs new effort to slash auto-related emissions.

Ironies abound. Musk and Biden have feuded over labor unions, which Biden considers a key constituency and Musk loathes. When highlighting the rollout of EVs, Biden typically touts new efforts at Ford (F) and General Motors, (GM) which are unionized, while ignoring Tesla, which is not. Yet Tesla is the undisputed leader in EV sales in the United States, with 65% of the US EV market and vastly more sales in the category than Ford, GM or any other automaker.

Musk got so irritated by Bidens dismissiveness that in January 2022 he called Biden a damp sock puppet on Twitter. Later that year, Musk said he had a super bad feeling about the economy, and at a Biden press conference a reporter asked Biden for his response. Lots of luck on his trip to the moon, Biden quipped, referring to Musks hopes for space travel on one of his Space X rockets. Musk continued to tweak Biden on Twitter, and right before the midterm elections last year, Musk advised his 134 million Twitter followers to vote Republican.

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Biden's gift to Tesla? A Model 3 at a showroom in the U.S. REUTERS/Florence Lo

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Democrats, however, are better for his car company. Musk and Tesla deserve credit for foreseeing the electrified future and persevering through near-death experiences. But theyve had some help. The electric-vehicle tax credit that helps subsidize the cost of an EV originated in a 2009 law passed by Democrats and signed by President Obama. That tax break helped goose Teslas sales during difficult years when it lost money and needed every penny. President Trump wanted to kill that tax credit, but wasnt able to.

Tesla has also benefited from regulatory credits in California, largely governed by Democrats. California gives Tesla credits for producing zero-emission vehicles that it can sell to other companies who use them as a pollution offset. Such sales have netted Tesla hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Biden administrations new pollution rules could force the biggest transformation of the auto industry in its history. The EPA estimates that if the rules go into effect as proposed, EVs as a portion of new-car sales would rise from less than 6% now to around 67% by 2032. That would be a remarkable shift for just a 10-year period.

All of Teslas assembly lines produce EVs. At other automakers, EVs are a tiny share of production, even with sizeable new commitments to electrics. It costs billions of dollars to build an automotive assembly line, and more to retire old ones no longer in use. Legacy automakers face massive transformation costs. Tesla doesnt.

Since 2019, North American automakers have announced roughly $80 billion worth of new investments in electric vehicles. The EPA argues that a rapid transition to EVs will happen no matter what, given the industrys own large investments in that direction.

The new EPA rules, however, would still impose new costs on top of investments automakers already have planned. The new rules would raise industry-wide costs by somewhere between $180 and $280 billion during the seven-year period, according to the EPA. There would be savings, too, such as better fuel economy for drivers and reduced maintenance for EVs, compared with gas-powered models. But manufacturers largely bear the costs up front, then pass on to consumers what they can recoup through higher prices. Thats the tricky part for legacy automakers: financing the transition to electrics without racking up losses or too many sell recommendations on their stock.

Ford and GM stock has been largely range-bound for years, with the exception of a modest run-up during the Covid rally, when monetary stimulus goosed the whole market. Those flattish stock trends reflect Wall Street worry about massive transformation costs. Tesla, of course, is a high-flier thats still worth six times as much as GM and Ford combined, even with its stock down by more than half from its 2021 peak. Investors think Tesla is poised to dominate an industry driven by EVs, and that dominance could come sooner if the Biden rules stick.

They may not.

Automakers seem sure to challenge the new proposal, saying they cant shift to EVs that fast. So the final rule could be weaker than the proposal. There will probably also be litigation challenging the Biden administrations authority to make such a big changewithout Congressional legislation. The current Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, has been much more skeptical of executive-branch authority than in the past, and theres a chance they could block such dramatic changes. A final risk to the new rules is a possible change in administration in 2024, with a future Republican president likely to roll back the Biden standards.

All of those risks add up to a lot of uncertainty for legacy automakers already unloved by the market. CEOs of those companies have to plan for a future where the pace of transformation could range from challenging to ruinous. Tesla has challenges, too, but the burden of stringent pollution regulation isnt one of them.

Maybe Biden and Musk should be a little friendlier toward each other.

Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman

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Bidens gift to Elon Musk and Tesla - Yahoo Finance

Rare earths had been considered irreplaceable for building the powerful magnets needed for these vehicles, and Tesla cited the move as removing a crucial production and cost constraint on its operations.

Elon Musks Tesla must cut the use of costly rare earths to meet its goals of making cheaper cars and grow its sales. Bloomberg

Lynas has made it clear that the growing demand for e-vehicles has underpinned demand, and prices, for rare earths. It drove the share price from $1.30 at the start of 2020 to a high of $11 last year, valuing the group at more than $10 billion at its peak.

Since then, Lynas has shredded as much as $2 billion of its market valuation, trading as low as $6. Has Musks declaration shaken the company, or can it keep on trucking?

Industry: Minerals and resources.

Main products: Rare earth ores 17 elements crucial to the manufacture of many hi-tech products such as mobile phones, electric cars and wind turbines. Neodymium and praseodymium (NdPr) are the two elements that have been in particularly high demand due to electric vehicles.

Key figures: Amanda Lacaze has been chief executive since 2014 and the main driver of its success. Kathleen Conlon was appointed chair in 2020 and has been on the board since 2011.

How it started: Lynas, as we know it, was the brainchild of business veteran Nick Curtis who came up with the idea to build a processing plant in Malaysia and set the company up as the only processor of rare earths outside of China. Japanese commercial interests stung by Chinas blocking of rare earth exports in 2010 helped finance the plant.

Operations commenced in 2012, but have been dogged by local controversy over the low-level radioactive material produced by the cracking and leaching process in Malaysia which must now be moved offshore by July this year. A new processing operation in Western Australia will pick up the slack.

How its going: With Lynas setting up the processing plant in Kalgoorlie, it has solved the Malaysia issue. The companys main problem now has been keeping up with demand forecasts which have been sky-high on the back of increased EV production which need rare earths for the powerful and lightweight magnets they need.

Lynas boss Amanda Lacaze. Carla Gottgens

The company has also been in the fortunate position of receiving US government money to fund its plans to set up a processing plant in Texas as governments around the world grow worried about how much they rely on Chinas stranglehold on the supply of crucial elements.

The bear case: When Elon Musk talks, people listen. So, when Musk, and other Tesla executives, unveiled plans to wean the car group off rare earths last month it had a major impact.

You cant run an automotive industry without rare earths, Lacaze told the Melbourne Mining Club just last year. What if you can?

The companys plans to increase rare earths output by 50 per cent by 2025 were deemed to be inadequate precisely due to the boom in car demand.

So, Musks edict to replace rare earth elements from his cars went to the heart of what has made this market a magnet for investors looking to ride the burgeoning demand for e-vehicles of all kinds.

The bull case: Musk might actually be able to pull this rabbit out of the hat and reduce Teslas reliance on rare earths, but not everyone is buying what he is selling.

Especially since Teslas comments say more about the companys aggressive growth targets, and what it needs to do to get there than it does about the attractiveness of rare earths for the electrification of the auto industry.

According to Adamas Intelligence, there is a reason why automakers have not used cheap and accessible alternatives like iron oxide: getting the same performance comes at the price of significantly higher weight.

In one case it cited, the iron oxide magnets were 30 per cent heavier a massive weight penalty, it said.

Tesla might find a cheaper alternative to power its low price cars of the future, but it wont be easy.

Rare earth magnets have been the breakthrough technology that lifted electric vehicles into the same league as conventional cars, Fat Tail Investments James Cooper says.

JP Morgan remains a Lynas fan, it put an Overweight recommendation on the stock this month and an $8.50 price target.

Also this month, UBS analyst Levi Spry upgraded Lynas to a Buy despite lowering its price target to $8.50 due to the 33 per cent slide in the companys share price since January. Tesla was not of any concern.

We remain positive on long-term fundamentals. To this extent, we do not think Teslas intentions to thrift rare earths from its supply chain has a significant impact within our forecast horizon, he said.

UBS is forecasting that Tesla will account for around 7 per cent of demand for NdPr by 2030.

While not insignificant, we still see deficits forming and that inelastic demand (from other OEMs and industries) should keep fundamentals for NdPr strong.

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Has Elon Musk pricked Lynas rare earths bubble? - Sydney Morning Herald