Connexion
Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk at an opening event for Tesla's Gigafactory on March 22, 2022, in Gruenheide, southeast of Berlin. (credit: Getty Images | Patrick Pleul)
Tesla is asking shareholders to approve a move to Texas and to re-approve a $55.8 billion pay package for CEO Elon Musk that was recently voided by a Delaware judge.
Musk's 2018 pay package was voided in a ruling by Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick, who found that the deal was unfair to shareholders. After the ruling, Musk said he would seek a shareholder vote on transferring Tesla's state of incorporation from Delaware to Texas.
The proposed move to Texas and Musk's pay package will be up for votes at Tesla's 2024 annual meeting on June 13, Tesla Board Chairperson Robyn Denholm wrote in a letter to shareholders that was included in a regulatory filing today.
Enlarge (credit: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin / Contributor | FilmMagic)
Elon Musk confirmed Monday that X (formerly Twitter) plans to start charging new users to post on the platform, TechCrunch reported.
"Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots," Musk wrote on X.
In October, X confirmed that it was testing whether users would pay a small annual fee to access the platform by suddenly charging new users in New Zealand and the Philippines $1. Paying the fee enabled new users in those countries to post, reply, like, and bookmark X posts.
Enlarge / Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting on February 23, 2024. (credit: MANDEL NGAN / Contributor | AFP)
A judge has preliminarily blocked what Media Matters for America (MMFA) described as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's attempt to "rifle through" confidential documents to prove that MMFA fraudulently manipulated X (formerly Twitter) data to ruin X's advertising business, as Elon Musk has alleged.
After Musk accused MMFA of publishing reports that Musk claimed were designed to scare advertisers off X, Paxton promptly launched his own investigation into MMFA last November.
Suing MMFA over alleged violations of Texas' Deceptive Trade Practices Act—which prohibits "disparaging the goods, services, or business of another by false or misleading representation of facts"—Paxton sought a wide range of MMFA documents through a civil investigative demand (CID). Filing a motion to block the CID, MMFA told the court that the CID had violated the media organization's First Amendment rights, providing evidence that Paxton's investigation and CID had chilled MMFA speech.
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
X will soon stop allowing users to hide their blue checkmarks, and some users are not happy.
Previously, a blue tick on Twitter was a mark of a notable account, providing some assurance to followers of the account's authenticity. But then Elon Musk decided to start charging for the blue tick instead, and mayhem ensued as a wave of imposter accounts began jokingly posing as brands.
After that, paying for a blue checkmark began to attract derision, as non-paying users passed around a meme under blue-checked posts, saying, "This MF paid for Twitter." To help spare paid subscribers this embarrassment, X began allowing users to hide their blue check last August, turning "hide your checkmark" into a feature of paid subscriptions.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Nathan Stirk )
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson yesterday issued a statement debunking claims of widespread voter fraud that were amplified by X owner Elon Musk on the social network formerly named Twitter. Election officials in two other states also disputed the "extremely false" information shared by Musk.
Musk is generally a big fan of Texas, but on Tuesday he shared a post by the account "End Wokeness" that claimed, "The number of voters registering without a photo ID is SKYROCKETING in 3 key swing states: Arizona, Texas, and Pennsylvania." The account claimed there were 1.25 million such registrations in Texas since the beginning of 2024, over 580,000 in Pennsylvania, and over 220,000 in Arizona.
"Extremely concerning," Musk wrote in a retweet re-X. The End Wokeness post shared by Musk suggested that "illegals" are registering to vote in large numbers by using Social Security numbers that can be obtained for work authorizations. The End Wokeness post has been viewed 63 million times so far, and Musk's re-post has been viewed 58.2 million times.
X has named a new head of safety about nine months after Ella Irwin resigned last June, following Elon Musk's criticism of Irwin's team's decision to restrict a transphobic documentary. Shortly after Irwin left, former head of brand safety AJ Brown similarly resigned. And that regime notably took over where former safety chief Yoel Roth—who also clashed with Musk—left off.
Stepping into the safety chief role next is Kylie McRoberts, who was promoted after leading X "initiatives to increase transparency in our moderation practices through labels" and "improve security with passkeys," X's announcement said.
As head of safety, McRoberts will oversee X's global safety team, which was rebranded last month to drop "trust" from its name. On X, Musk had said that "any organization that puts ‘Trust’ in their name cannot [be] trusted, as that is obviously a euphemism for censorship."
Enlarge (credit: SUZANNE CORDEIRO / Contributor | AFP)
Ever since Elon Musk's X Corp sued Media Matters for America (MMFA) over a pair of reports that X (formerly Twitter) claims caused an advertiser exodus in 2023, one big question has remained for onlookers: Why is this fight happening in Texas?
In a motion to dismiss filed in Texas' northern district last month, MMFA argued that X's lawsuit should be dismissed not just because of a "fatal jurisdictional defect," but "dismissal is also required for lack of venue."
Notably, MMFA is based in Washington, DC, while "X is organized under Nevada law and maintains its principal place of business in San Francisco, California, where its own terms of service require users of its platform to litigate any disputes."
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey yesterday sued Media Matters in an attempt to protect Elon Musk and X from the nonprofit watchdog group's investigations into hate speech on the social network. Bailey's lawsuit claims that "Media Matters has used fraud to solicit donations from Missourians in order to trick advertisers into removing their advertisements from X, formerly Twitter, one of the last platforms dedicated to free speech in America."
Bailey didn't provide much detail on the alleged fraud but claimed that Media Matters is guilty of "fraudulent manipulation of data on X.com." That's apparently a reference to Media Matters reporting that X placed ads for major brands next to posts touting Hitler and Nazis. X has accused Media Matters of manipulating the site's algorithm by endlessly scrolling and refreshing.
Bailey yesterday issued an investigative demand seeking names and addresses of all Media Matters donors who live in Missouri and a range of internal communications and documents regarding the group's research on Musk and X. Bailey anticipates that Media Matters won't provide the requested materials, so he filed the lawsuit asking Cole County Circuit Court for an order to enforce the investigative demand.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Dan Kitwood )
A US judge has struck down a lawsuit brought by X against a nonprofit group that researched toxic content on the social media platform, finding the Elon Musk-owned company’s case appeared to be an attempt at “punishing” the group for exercising free speech.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate had sought to dismiss the case from X, which alleged the nonprofit unlawfully accessed and scraped X data for its studies. The CCDH found a rise in hate speech and misinformation on the platform. X had also alleged the group “cherry-picked” from posts on the platform to conduct a “scare campaign” to drive away advertisers, costing it tens of millions of dollars.
In a stinging ruling, US judge Charles Breyer in California granted the motion. “Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiff’s true purpose. Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the defendants for their speech,” he wrote in the decision.
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | NurPhoto / Getty Images)
X used to be called Twitter, but soon it will become "the Everything App," and that day is "closer than everyone thinks," X CEO Linda Yaccarino promised in one of her first X posts of 2024.
"Nothing can slow us down," Yaccarino said.
Turning Twitter into an everything app is arguably the reason that Elon Musk purchased Twitter. He openly craved the success of the Chinese everything app WeChat, telling Twitter staff soon after purchasing the app that "you basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life, and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success,” The Guardian reported.
Enlarge (credit: iStock/Getty Images)
X has locked and suspended the accounts of journalists and researchers who shared the alleged identity of a neo-Nazi cartoonist known as Stonetoss after the cartoonist appealed to site owner Elon Musk.
The incident, critics say, highlights once again how Musk has not only welcomed extremists onto his platform but has repeatedly boosted their conspiracies, engaged with their accounts, and seems to have protected them from scrutiny.
A lengthy X thread posted by the antifascist research group Anonymous Comrades Collective last week claimed that Stonetoss is a man named Hans Kristian Graebener from Spring, Texas. Stonetoss cartoons, which feature simple and colorful imagery coupled with racist, homophobic, and antisemitic language, have become hugely popular among right-wing communities since they were first published at least seven years ago.
Enlarge / An AI-generated image released by xAI during the open-weights launch of Grok-1. (credit: xAI)
On Sunday, Elon Musk's AI firm xAI released the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, a large language model designed to compete with the models that power OpenAI's ChatGPT. The open-weights release through GitHub and BitTorrent comes as Musk continues to criticize (and sue) rival OpenAI for not releasing its AI models in an open way.
Announced in November, Grok is an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT that is available to X Premium+ subscribers who pay $16 a month to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. At its heart is a mixture-of-experts LLM called "Grok-1," clocking in at 314 billion parameters. As a reference, GPT-3 included 175 billion parameters. Parameter count is a rough measure of an AI model's complexity, reflecting its potential for generating more useful responses.
xAI is releasing the base model of Grok-1, which is not fine-tuned for a specific task, so it is likely not the same model that X uses to power its Grok AI assistant. "This is the raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pre-training phase, which concluded in October 2023," writes xAI on its release page. "This means that the model is not fine-tuned for any specific application, such as dialogue," meaning it's not necessarily shipping as a chatbot. But it will do next-token prediction, meaning it will complete a sentence (or other text prompt) with its estimation of the most relevant string of text.
Enlarge / SpaceX's Starship soars through the sky over South Texas, powered by 33 methane-burning Raptor engines. (credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica)
SpaceX's new-generation Starship rocket, the most powerful and largest launcher ever built, flew halfway around the world following liftoff from South Texas on Thursday, accomplishing a key demonstration of its ability to carry heavyweight payloads into low-Earth orbit.
SpaceX's third towering Starship rocket, standing some 397 feet (121 meters) tall and wider than the fuselage of a 747 jumbo jet, lifted off at 8:25 am CDT (13:25 UTC) Thursday from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast east of Brownsville. SpaceX delayed the liftoff time by nearly an hour and a half to wait for boats to clear out of restricted waters near the launch base.
The successful launch builds on two Starship test flights last year that achieved some, but not all, of their objectives and appears to put the privately funded rocket program on course to begin launching satellites, allowing SpaceX to ramp up the already-blistering pace of Starlink deployments.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Dan Kitwood )
Elon Musk and X Corp. were sued yesterday by four former Twitter executives who say they were cheated out of more than $128 million in severance when Musk bought the social network and fired them.
Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal, former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, and former General Counsel Sean Edgett filed the lawsuit in US District Court for the Northern District of California. They say they are owed one year's salary, stock awards, and health insurance premiums.
"If anyone around Musk had been willing to tell him the truth, he would have learned that his scheme to deny Plaintiffs their contractual severance payments was a pointless effort that would not withstand legal scrutiny," the lawsuit said.
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
It looks like Elon Musk may lose X's lawsuit against hate speech researchers who encouraged a major brand boycott after flagging ads appearing next to extremist content on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
X is trying to argue that the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) violated the site's terms of service and illegally accessed non-public data to conduct its reporting, allegedly posing a security risk for X. The boycott, X alleged, cost the company tens of millions of dollars by spooking advertisers, while X contends that the CCDH's reporting is misleading and ads are rarely served on extremist content.
But at a hearing Thursday, US district judge Charles Breyer told the CCDH that he would consider dismissing X's lawsuit, repeatedly appearing to mock X's decision to file it in the first place.
Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman for breach of contract, alleging they have compromised the start-up’s original mission of building artificial intelligence systems for the benefit of humanity.
In the lawsuit, filed to a San Francisco court on Thursday, Musk’s lawyers wrote that OpenAI’s multibillion-dollar alliance with Microsoft had broken an agreement to make a major breakthrough in AI “freely available to the public.”
Instead, the lawsuit said, OpenAI was working on “proprietary technology to maximize profits for literally the largest company in the world.”
Enlarge (credit: paul mansfield photography | Moment)
Last April, Twitter quietly edited its abuse and harassment policy to no longer explicitly ban deadnaming (calling transgender people by a former name) or misgendering (purposely using non-preferred pronouns or gender labels).
Twitter's decision came after Elon Musk suggested that his own tweets might violate the long-standing policy, which was first enacted in 2018. And that seemed to be that—until last month, when the platform, now called X, just as quietly reinstated a version of the old policy.
In a section labeled "Use of Prior Names and Pronouns," X's updated policy confirms that X will "reduce the visibility of posts that purposefully use different pronouns to address someone other than what that person uses for themselves, or that use a previous name that someone no longer goes by as part of their transition."
Enlarge / Generations from Gemini AI from the prompt, "Paint me a historically accurate depiction of a medieval British king." (credit: @stratejake / X)
On Thursday morning, Google announced it was pausing its Gemini AI image-synthesis feature in response to criticism that the tool was inserting diversity into its images in a historically inaccurate way, such as depicting multi-racial Nazis and medieval British kings with unlikely nationalities.
"We're already working to address recent issues with Gemini's image generation feature. While we do this, we're going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon," wrote Google in a statement Thursday morning.
As more people on X began to pile on Google for being "woke," the Gemini generations inspired conspiracy theories that Google was purposely discriminating against white people and offering revisionist history to serve political goals. Beyond that angle, as The Verge points out, some of these inaccurate depictions "were essentially erasing the history of race and gender discrimination."
Enlarge / Elon Musk at the New York Times DealBook Summit on November 29, 2023, in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Michael Santiago )
Twitter employees prevented Elon Musk from violating the company's privacy settlement with the US government, according to Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.
After Musk bought Twitter in late 2022, he gave Bari Weiss and other journalists access to company documents in the so-called "Twitter Files" incident. The access given to outside individuals raised concerns that Twitter (which is currently named X) violated a 2022 settlement with the FTC, which has requirements designed to prevent repeats of previous security failures.
Some of Twitter's top privacy and security executives also resigned shortly after Musk's purchase, citing concerns that Musk's rapid changes could cause violations of the settlement.
Enlarge / A Neuralink implant. (credit: Neuralink)
Neuralink co-founder Elon Musk said the first human to be implanted with the company's brain chip is now able to move a mouse cursor just by thinking.
"Progress is good, and the patient seems to have made a full recovery, with no ill effects that we are aware of. Patient is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking," Musk said Monday during an X Spaces event, according to Reuters.
Musk's update came a few weeks after he announced that Neuralink implanted a chip into the human. The previous update was also made on X, the Musk-owned social network formerly named Twitter.
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
Lax content moderation on X (aka Twitter) has disrupted coordinated efforts between social media companies and law enforcement to tamp down on "propaganda accounts controlled by foreign entities aiming to influence US politics," The Washington Post reported.
Now propaganda is "flourishing" on X, The Post said, while other social media companies are stuck in endless cycles, watching some of the propaganda that they block proliferate on X, then inevitably spread back to their platforms.
Meta, Google, and then-Twitter began coordinating takedown efforts with law enforcement and disinformation researchers after Russian-backed influence campaigns manipulated their platforms in hopes of swaying the 2016 US presidential election.
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
An open source project that let people view tweets without going to Twitter.com has shut down, as Elon Musk's changes seem to have closed off all possible ways to access the Twitter network without a user account.
Nitter provided an alternative front-end to Twitter but has been struggling for months. Nitter.net, the official Nitter instance, went down a few weeks ago.
NoLog, a Czech group that ran another Nitter instance, announced its demise today. NoLog operated one of the largest Nitter instances but is a different group than the one that created Nitter itself.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )
A watchdog group's investigation found that terrorist group Hezbollah and other US-sanctioned entities have accounts with paid checkmarks on X, the Elon Musk-owned social network that still resides at the twitter.com domain.
The Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a nonprofit that is critical of Big Tech companies, said in a report today that "X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is providing premium, paid services to accounts for two leaders of a US-designated terrorist group and several other organizations sanctioned by the US government."
After buying Twitter for $44 billion, Musk started charging users for checkmarks that were previously intended to verify that an account was notable and authentic. "Along with the checkmarks, which are intended to confer legitimacy, X promises various perks for premium accounts, including the ability to post longer text and videos and greater visibility for some posts," the Tech Transparency Project report noted.
Enlarge / Elon Musk leaves court in San Francisco, California Jan. 24, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)
A federal court ordered Elon Musk to comply with a subpoena issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission, rejecting Musk's claims that the SEC is "harassing" him and exceeding its authority to investigate.
In an order issued Saturday, US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler wrote that "the SEC has broad authority to issue subpoenas." The information it seeks from Musk is relevant to the agency's investigation into "possible violations of the federal securities laws in connection with the respondent's 2022 purchases of Twitter stock and his 2022 statements and SEC filings relating to Twitter," Beeler wrote.
Musk testified twice in July 2022, but the SEC said it has obtained thousands of new documents since then and wants him to testify a third time. Beeler's order granted the SEC's application to enforce the subpoena and ordered the SEC and Musk to "confer within one week and settle on a date and location for the testimony. If they cannot agree, then they may submit a joint letter brief with their respective positions, and the court will decide the dispute for them."
Enlarge / Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence unit made its claim following multiple reports in recent days that Russian forces are using Starlink’s distinctive square-shaped terminals. (credit: Pierre Crom/Getty Images)
Russian forces are using Starlink terminals on the front line in Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian military, which said the adoption of Elon Musk’s satellite Internet service by Moscow’s troops was becoming “systemic.”
Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence unit said on Telegram on Sunday that radio intercepts confirmed the use of Starlink terminals by Russian units operating in the occupied Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
“Yes, there have been recorded cases of the Russian occupiers using these devices,” Andriy Yusov, a GUR officer, told RBC-Ukraine. “This is starting to take on a systemic nature.”
Enlarge (credit: Darrell Gulin | The Image Bank)
After more than a year as an exclusive invite-only social media platform, Bluesky is now open to the public, so anyone can join without needing a once-coveted invite code.
In a blog, Bluesky said that requiring invite codes helped Bluesky "manage growth" while building features that allow users to control what content they see on the social platform.
When Bluesky debuted, many viewed it as a potential Twitter killer, but limited access to Bluesky may have weakened momentum. As of January 2024, Bluesky has more than 3 million users. That's significantly less than X (formerly Twitter), which estimates suggest currently boasts more than 400 million global users.
Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks at Tesla's "Cyber Rodeo" on April 7, 2022, in Austin, Texas. (credit: Getty Images | AFP/Suzanne Cordeiro)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has had enough of Delaware after a state court ruling voided his $55.8 billion pay package. Musk said last night that Tesla will hold a shareholder vote on transferring the electric carmaker's state of incorporation to Texas.
Musk had posted a poll on X (formerly Twitter) asking whether Tesla should "change its state of incorporation to Texas, home of its physical headquarters." After over 87 percent of people voted yes, Musk wrote, "The public vote is unequivocally in favor of Texas! Tesla will move immediately to hold a shareholder vote to transfer state of incorporation to Texas."
Tesla was incorporated in 2003 before Musk joined the company. Its founders chose Delaware, a common destination because of the state's low corporate taxes and business-friendly legal framework. The Delaware government says that over 68 percent of Fortune 500 companies are registered in the state, and 79 percent of US-based initial public offerings in 2022 were registered in Delaware.
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Duncan Hull / Getty)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk's $55.8 billion pay package was unfair to the electric carmaker's shareholders and must be rescinded, Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled yesterday. Most of the board members were beholden to Musk or had compromising conflicts, she wrote.
"Swept up by the rhetoric of 'all upside,' or perhaps starry-eyed by Musk's superstar appeal, the board never asked the $55.8 billion question: Was the plan even necessary for Tesla to retain Musk and achieve its goals?" McCormick's ruling said.
The post-trial ruling found in favor of lead plaintiff and shareholder Richard Tornetta, concluding "that the compensation plan is subject to review under the entire fairness standard, the defendants bore the burden of proving that the compensation plan was fair, and they failed to meet their burden."
Enlarge / An on-stage demo of the surgical robot. That could be you. (credit: Neuralink)
Billionaire Elon Musk posted on social media late Monday that his brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, implanted an experimental device into the brain of a human for the first time Sunday.
According to Musk's posts, which appeared on the platform formerly known as Twitter, the recipient is "recovering well," and the results in the first 24 hours show "promising neuron spike detection." Neuralink implanted the person with a device called Telepathy, which is intended to allow users to control devices, such as phones and computers, only by thinking.
The implantation comes around eight months after the company announced that the Food and Drug Administration had finally granted a long-sought approval to begin its first human trial. Recruitment for the trial began in September. Musk had claimed to be nearing trials starting as early as 2020, but the FDA reportedly denied approval in 2022, citing a list of dozens of "deficiencies" and safety concerns that Neuralink had yet to address.
Enlarge (credit: Gilbert Flores/Golden Globes 2024 / Contributor | Getty Images North America)
After explicit, fake AI images of Taylor Swift began spreading on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter has attempted to block all searches for the pop star.
"This is a temporary action and done with an abundance of caution as we prioritize safety on this issue," Joe Benarroch, X's head of business operations, said in a statement to Reuters.
However, even this drastic step does not seem to be an effective solution, as "Swift" was trending Monday morning on X. The temporary block also does nothing to stop searches using misspellings of the singer's name.
Enlarge (credit: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin / Contributor | FilmMagic)
Fake AI images sexualizing Taylor Swift spread to X, formerly known as Twitter, from a Telegram group dedicated to sharing "abusive images of women," 404 Media reported.
These images began circulating online this week, quickly sparking mass outrage that may finally force a mainstream reckoning with harms caused by the spread of non-consensual deepfake pornography.
At least one member of the Telegram group claimed to be the source of some of the Swift images, posting in the channel that they didn't know if they "should feel flattered or upset that some of these Twitter stolen pics are my gen."
Enlarge / An H-IIA rocket lifts off with the IGS Optical-8 spy satellite. (credit: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries)
Welcome to Edition 6.27 of the Rocket Report! This week, we discuss an intriguing new report looking at Starship. Most fascinating, the report covers SpaceX's costs to build a Starship and how these costs will come down as the company ramps up its build and launch cadence. At the other end of the spectrum, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has a plan to get astronauts back to the Moon that would wholly ignore the opportunities afforded by Starship.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
The problem at America's military spaceports. The Biden administration is requesting $1.3 billion over the next five years to revamp infrastructure at the Space Force's ranges in Florida and California, Ars reports. This will help address things like roads, bridges, utilities, and airfields that, in many cases, haven't seen an update in decades. But it's not enough, according to the Space Force. Last year, Cape Canaveral was the departure point for 72 orbital rocket launches, and officials anticipate more than 100 this year. The infrastructure and workforce at the Florida spaceport could support about 150 launches in a year without any major changes, but launch activity is likely to exceed that number within a few years.
Enlarge (credit: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images/Aurich Lawson)
Elon Musk says his ambitions to make Tesla more than just an automaker depend on him gaining far more control over the company. The controversial CEO took to his social media platform X to say that unless he is awarded another 12 percent of the company, which would give him ownership of 25 percent of Tesla, he would be "uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics."
Failing that, Musk said he would "prefer to build products outside of Tesla," then questioned why large institutional investors in Tesla like Fidelity "don't show up to work," seemingly confused by the difference between an individual with a job and a company that owns assets.
For 2022—the last year for which full financial results are available—95 percent of Tesla's revenues came from its automotive activities.
Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan / Staff | Getty Images North America)
On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to review an appeal from X (formerly Twitter), alleging that the US government's censorship of X transparency reports served as a prior restraint on the platform's speech and was unconstitutional.
This free speech battle predates Elon Musk's ownership of the platform. Since 2014, the social media company has "sought to accurately inform the public about the extent to which the US government is surveilling its users," X's petition said, while the government has spent years effectively blocking precise information from becoming public knowledge.
Current law requires that platforms instead only share generalized statistics regarding government information requests—using government-approved reporting bands such as "between 0 and 99 times"—so that people posing as national security threats can never gauge exactly how active the feds are on any given platform.
Enlarge (credit: ALAIN JOCARD / Contributor | AFP)
There's currently a surge in cryptocurrency and phishing scams proliferating on X (formerly Twitter)—hiding under the guise of gold and gray checkmarks intended to mark "Verified Organizations," reports have warned this week.
These scams seem to mostly commandeer dormant X accounts purchased online through dark web marketplaces, according to a whitepaper released by the digital threat monitoring platform CloudSEK. But the scams have also targeted high-profile X users who claim that they had enhanced security measures in place to protect against these hacks.
This suggests that X scammers are growing more sophisticated at a time when X has launched an effort to sell even more gold checks at lower prices through a basic tier announced this week.
Enlarge / Elon Musk at an AI event with Britain Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London on Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | WPA Pool )
After being charged with illegally firing workers who criticized Elon Musk, SpaceX yesterday sued the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in a lawsuit that claims the US labor agency's structure is unconstitutional.
On Wednesday, an NLRB regional director filed a complaint against SpaceX alleging that it illegally fired eight employees who drafted and distributed an open letter about Musk in 2022. If SpaceX doesn't settle the charges, the company is scheduled to face a hearing with an NLRB administrative law judge (ALJ) starting on March 5.
SpaceX filed its lawsuit against the NLRB in US District Court for the Southern District of Texas, claiming that the NLRB structure violates US law because the administrative law judge cannot be removed by the president of the United States. SpaceX made a virtually identically argument recently when it sued the US attorney general and two other Department of Justice officials in an attempt to stop a separate hiring-discrimination case.
Enlarge / Ship 28, the Starship for SpaceX's next full-scale test flight, fires up one of its engines on December 29 in Texas. (credit: SpaceX)
It's no secret that Elon Musk has big ambitions for SpaceX's Starship mega-rocket. This is the vehicle that, with plenty of permutations and upgrades, Musk says will ferry cargo and people across the Solar System to build a settlement on Mars, making humanity a multi-planetary species and achieving the billionaire's long-standing dream.
Of course, that is a long way off. SpaceX is still working on getting Starship into orbit or close to it, an achievement that appears to be possible this year. Then, the company will start launching Starlink satellites on Starship missions while testing in-space refueling technology needed to turn Starship into a human-rated Moon lander for NASA.
SpaceX's South Texas team is progressing toward the third full-scale Starship test flight. On December 20, the Starship's upper stage slated for the next test flight completed a test-firing of its Raptor engines at the Starbase launch site on the Texas Gulf Coast. Nine days later, the 33-engine Super Heavy booster fired up on the launch pad for its own static fire test. On the same day, SpaceX hot-fired the Starship upper stage once again on a test stand next to the launch pad.
Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks with members of the media at the AI Safety Summit on November 1, 2023 in Bletchley, England. (credit: Getty Images | Leon Neal )
SpaceX illegally fired eight employees who criticized CEO Elon Musk in an open letter, a National Labor Relations Board regional director alleged in a complaint filed against the company today.
"Today, the NLRB Regional Director in Region 31 (Los Angeles) issued a consolidated complaint against SpaceX in Hawthorne, CA, covering eight unfair practice charges," the NLRB said in a statement provided to Ars. "The complaint alleges that the employer unlawfully discharged eight employees who drafted and distributed an open letter detailing workplace concerns."
A complaint is not a board decision, the statement noted. It means the regional office investigated the charges and found merit in them. The complaint and notice of hearing is confirmed on the NLRB website, and you can read the complaint here.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | DNY59)
Fidelity's latest valuation of its stake in X implies that Elon Musk's social network is worth about 71.5 percent less than when Musk bought the company in October 2022.
Fidelity's Blue Chip Growth Fund has a relatively small stake in X. A monthly update for the fund listed the value of its "X Holdings Corp." stake at $5.6 million as of November 30, 2023. The fund's share of X was originally worth $19.7 million but lost about two-thirds of its value by April 2023 and has dropped more modestly since then.
Fidelity cut its valuation of X by 10.7 percent in November, according to Axios. One question is whether Fidelity sold any of its stake during November, but the latest drop in value isn't surprising given the recent Musk-related controversies that drove advertisers away from the platform.
Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks at the Atreju political convention organized by Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) on December 15, 2023 in Rome, Italy. (credit: Getty Images | Antonio Masiello )
Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter, now called X, began with a lawsuit. When Musk tried to break a $44 billion merger agreement, Twitter filed a lawsuit that gave Musk no choice but to complete the deal.
In the year-plus since Musk bought the company, he's been the defendant and plaintiff in many more lawsuits involving Twitter and X Corp. As 2023 comes to a close, this article rounds up a selection of notable lawsuits involving the Musk-led social network and provides updates on the status of the cases.
Musk seemingly held a grudge against the law firm that helped Twitter force Musk to complete the merger. In July, X Corp. sued Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in an attempt to claw back the $90 million that Twitter paid the firm before Musk completed the acquisition.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chris Delmas)
The European Union has opened a formal investigation into whether Elon Musk's X platform (formerly Twitter) violated the Digital Services Act (DSA), which could result in fines of up to 6 percent of global revenue. A European Commission announcement today said the agency "opened formal proceedings to assess whether X may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers."
This is the commission's first formal investigation under the Digital Services Act, which applies to large online platforms and has requirements on content moderation and transparency. The step has been in the works since at least October, when a formal request for information was sent amid reports of widespread Israel/Hamas disinformation.
The European Commission today said it "decided to open formal infringement proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act" after reviewing X's replies to the request for information on topics including "the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel." The commission said the investigation will focus on dissemination of illegal content, the effectiveness of measures taken to combat information manipulation on X, transparency, and "a suspected deceptive design of the user interface."
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Bet_Noire)
Elon Musk can't avoid testifying in an investigation into whether he violated federal securities laws, a magistrate judge said during a court hearing yesterday.
The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk in October to force him to testify for a third time in a probe related to purchases of Twitter stock he made before he bought the company. Musk responded in November by asking the court to block the SEC's subpoena, claiming the agency is "harassing" him, exceeding its authority to investigate, and making "overly burdensome" demands for "irrelevant evidence."
Musk's arguments were rejected during a hearing yesterday in US District Court for the Northern District of California. No formal ruling has been issued yet, but a magistrate judge made it clear she will rule in the SEC's favor if Musk doesn't appear for testimony.
Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Elon Musk privately told some of the bankers who lent him $13 billion to fund his leveraged buyout of Twitter that they would not lose any money on the deal, according to five people familiar with the matter.
The verbal guarantees were made by Musk to banks as a way to reassure the lenders as the value of the social media site, now rebranded as X, fell sharply after he completed the acquisition last year.
Despite the assurances, the seven banks that lent money to the billionaire for his buyout—Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, MUFG, BNP Paribas, Mizuho and Société Générale—are facing serious losses on the debt if and when they eventually sell it.
It's hard to know exactly how dire the financial situation is at Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter). However, insider sources recently revealed to Bloomberg that the social media platform expects to end 2023 with "roughly" $2.5 billion in advertising revenue.
That's "a significant slump from prior years," sources said. It's also about half a billion short of the $3 billion that X executives expected to make in ad sales in 2023, one source said.
Last year, Twitter raked in more than $1 billion in ad revenue per quarter, sources said. But in each of the first three quarters of 2023, X only managed to generate "a little more than $600 million" in ad revenue. Now, the most recent advertiser fallout over antisemitic content on X—estimated in November as triggering a sudden $75 million loss—is still casting a shadow on what could become an even more dismal fourth quarter.
Enlarge / The Tesla Optimus Gen 2 robot. (credit: Tesla | Benj Edwards)
On Tuesday, Tesla released a demo video showing the latest version of its prototype humanoid robot, Optimus Gen 2. Over one year after Tesla's first public Optimus robot demonstration, which showcased shaky robots that waved and slumped over, things have apparently progressed quite a bit, assuming that the video accurately reflects the technology.
"Everything in this video is real, no CGI. All real time, nothing sped up. Incredible hardware improvements from the team," wrote Tesla Senior Staff Software Engineer Julian Ibarz on X.
After a recent episode where Google fudged an AI demonstration for the sake of marketing hype, it's best to take Tesla's claims with a grain of salt until they are independently verified in practical, real-world demonstrations. With that dose of skepticism in mind, let's take a look at what Tesla is promising in this non-production prototype robot.
Enlarge / Cars parked at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, on February 10, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Josh Edelson)
Tesla is trying to use a free speech argument to defeat a complaint that it falsely advertised "Autopilot" as an autonomous vehicle system. In response to the California Department of Motor Vehicles allegation about Autopilot, Tesla claims the state laws cited by the DMV violate the US Constitution's First Amendment.
The DMV's July 2022 complaint alleges that Tesla falsely advertises its Autopilot-enabled cars as operating autonomously and seeks a suspension or revocation of Tesla's manufacturer license.
Tesla's response, which was filed last week and published yesterday in a story by The Register, says that several California statutes and regulations cited by the DMV "are unconstitutional under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 2, of the California Constitution, as they impermissibly restrict Tesla's truthful and nonmisleading speech about its vehicles and their features."
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Grok, the AI language model created by Elon Musk's xAI, went into wide release last week, and people have begun spotting glitches. On Friday, security tester Jax Winterbourne tweeted a screenshot of Grok denying a query with the statement, "I'm afraid I cannot fulfill that request, as it goes against OpenAI's use case policy." That made ears perk up online since Grok isn't made by OpenAI—the company responsible for ChatGPT, which Grok is positioned to compete with.
Interestingly, xAI representatives did not deny that this behavior occurs with its AI model. In reply, xAI employee Igor Babuschkin wrote, "The issue here is that the web is full of ChatGPT outputs, so we accidentally picked up some of them when we trained Grok on a large amount of web data. This was a huge surprise to us when we first noticed it. For what it’s worth, the issue is very rare and now that we’re aware of it we’ll make sure that future versions of Grok don’t have this problem. Don’t worry, no OpenAI code was used to make Grok."
In reply to Babuschkin, Winterbourne wrote, "Thanks for the response. I will say it's not very rare, and occurs quite frequently when involving code creation. Nonetheless, I'll let people who specialize in LLM and AI weigh in on this further. I'm merely an observer."
Enlarge / Infowars-founder Alex Jones speaks to the media outside Waterbury Superior Court on September 21, 2022 during one of his Sandy Hook defamation trials. (credit: Getty Images | Joe Buglewicz)
Elon Musk has allowed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones back on the social network formerly named Twitter, despite saying that he "vehemently" disagrees with Jones' claims that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.
Musk restored the @RealAlexJones account after polling X users. With almost 2 million votes, about 70 percent of users supported reinstating Jones, who was banned by Twitter in 2018.
"I vehemently disagree with what he said about Sandy Hook, but are we a platform that believes in freedom of speech or are we not? That is what it comes down to in the end. If the people vote him back on, this will be bad for X financially, but principles matter more than money," Musk wrote on Saturday. Musk also spoke with Jones about his Sandy Hook comments in a live interview on X.
Enlarge / Elon Musk at an AI event with Britain Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London on Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | WPA Pool )
Elon Musk yesterday appealed to the Supreme Court in a last-ditch effort to terminate his settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk has claimed he was coerced into the deal with the SEC and that it violates his free speech rights, but the settlement has been upheld by every court that's reviewed it so far.
In his petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, Musk said the SEC settlement forced him to "waive his First Amendment rights to speak on matters ranging far beyond the charged violations."
The SEC case began after Musk's August 2018 tweets stating, "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured" and "Investor support is confirmed. Only reason why this is not certain is that it's contingent on a shareholder vote." The SEC sued Musk and Tesla, saying the tweets were false and "led to significant market disruption."
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )
A former Twitter security executive sued Elon Musk and X Corp. yesterday, alleging that he was unlawfully fired for objecting to steep budget cuts implemented shortly after Musk bought the social network.
Alan Rosa, who was fired on December 6, 2022, "was Head of Global Information Technology and Information Security and worked remotely for Twitter performing the majority of his job duties from his home in New Jersey," said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the District of New Jersey. He also sometimes worked in Twitter's New York and California offices.
Rosa was required to resolve his claims through arbitration and says that he filed a demand for arbitration in April 2023 and paid his arbitration filing fee. Rosa alleges that "Twitter has refused to pay its portion of the arbitration fees despite being ordered by JAMS [Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services] to do so."
Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi) 
