AllThingsD » Elon Musk

Billionaire Families Join Pledge on Giving

Geoffrey A. Fowler — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 01:05:58 +0000

The billionaire founders of PayPal and Broadcom Corp. are among a dozen wealthy families that have agreed to give the majority of their wealth to charity, following in the footsteps of technology entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

The 12 families on Thursday joined the “Giving Pledge,” following 81 other billionaire families that have committed publicly to give away their wealth under the pledge, which was established in June 2010 by Microsoft Corp.’s founder, Gates, and Warren Buffett, chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.

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Microsoft Co-Founder to Build Massive Jet for Space Launches

Andy Pasztor and Dionne Searcey — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:07:23 +0000

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen says he will use his wealth to build the world’s largest airplane as a mobile platform for launching satellites at low cost, which he believes could transform the space industry.

Announced Tuesday, the novel, high-risk project conceived by renowned aerospace designer Burt Rutan seeks to combine engines, landing gears and other parts removed from old Boeing 747 jets with a newly created composite craft from Mr. Rutan and a powerful rocket to be built by a company run by Internet billionaire and commercial-space pioneer Elon Musk.

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Tesla IPO Firing on All Cylinders Batteries [UPDATED]

John Paczkowski — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:12:34 +0000

Tesla Motors went public today in the first initial public offering from an American car company since Ford’s (F) in 1956. And already, its stock appears to have attracted a cult following.

Floated with an initial offering price of $17, shares in the company opened at $19 and closed at $23.89–up $6.89, or 40.5 percent. Not a surprise, really, since Tesla (TSLA) raised the size of the IPO to 13.3 million shares from 11.1 million shares yesterday, presumably because of strong interest in the offering from investors.

That Tesla hasn’t earned a dime since it was founded in 2003 and doesn’t expect to post a quarterly profit until at least 2012 doesn’t seem to have fazed investors, who are evidently quite impressed with the company’s $109,000 all-electric Roadster and the fact that it has managed to sell 1,063 of the vehicles in less than two years.

“A lot of people were puzzled about why we were going public without profits,” CEO Elon Musk said today. “The reason we are not profitable today is because we are in the midst of expanding with the Model S.”

The bet here, then, seems to be the promise of the S, the $50,000 electric sedan the company plans to bring to market in 2013. And that appears to be working out quite well for Tesla.

Three Tesla Employees Killed in Plane Crash

Stu Woo — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:55:29 +0000

Three employees of electric-car maker Tesla Motors Inc. died Wednesday when their small plane crashed in a residential neighborhood in California’s Silicon Valley, causing a major power outage in the city of Palo Alto but injuring no one on the ground.

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk wasn’t on board the plane. In a statement released by the company, Mr. Musk confirmed the deaths and said Tesla is withholding the names of the three as they contact their families. “Tesla is a small, tightly-knit company, and this is a tragic day for us,” Mr. Musk said.

Tesla, which is based in the San Francisco suburb of San Carlos, has around 500 employees. The company said in a securities filing last month that it is planning an initial public offering.

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Who Shot Valleywag? Gossip Bloggers Thomas (Outgoing) and Tate (Incoming) Speak!

Kara Swisher — Sat, 02 May 2009 04:20:43 +0000

Was it Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in Fraiche Yogurt with a Macbook Air? Or Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk on the streets of San Francisco with a Model S? Or, most likely of all, Marissa Mayer of Google in the penthouse with a Manolo Blahnik spiked heel?

For all the invective this trio has taken from him, all would certainly be prime suspects if some nefarious fate befell always controversial Valleywag gossip blogger Owen Thomas.

Actually, the truth is a little more mundane: The self-described “scourge of [Silicon] Valley” is moving onto another digital job as head of GE (GE) unit NBC Universal’s new Bay Area Web site, whose motto is “Locals Only.”

There, the 37-year-old Thomas will run a site that focuses on news from around the San Francisco region, with a mix of national stories. But, sources said, he is still going to continue to drill down on tech too, so those burned before by him should not relax too much.

Thomas has been running Valleywag since mid-2007. Its staff got pretty large for a while, until it was recently downsized and its content stuffed into Gawker, the flagship site of Gawker Media. The Valleywag site remains, though, and will continue to.

And it will now be the domain of deceptively fresh-faced Ryan Tate, Thomas’s replacement. The Berkeley resident, 32, has been the night editor for Gawker since early last year.

Interestingly, Tate was an intern for The Wall Street Journal’s California edition and also worked for tech-oriented publications like Business 2.0, Upside and the San Francisco Business Times.

Thomas is reportedly staying on at Valleywag through the middle of the month and then it will be Tate’s turn to make mischief with tech’s more puffed-up mandarins.

In an effort to scare Tate into steering clear of BoomTown, I invited the pair to All Things Digital HQ this rainy afternoon for a little sit-down to discuss where the controversial site has been and where it is going.

Here’s the video (and below it, a video interview I did with Thomas and then-Valleywag writer Megan McCarthy, when he got the job):

[ See post to watch video ]

Tesla Foiled

John Paczkowski — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 11:42:04 +0000

While $25 billion in low-cost federal loans keeps General Motors (GM), Ford (F) and Chrysler churning out SUVs through the econalypse, the wheels are coming off cleantech car company Tesla Motors. Without access to the same sorts of loans given its Detroit colleagues, the country’s leading electric car maker is delaying production of its Model S sedan, sacking an unspecified number of employees and shuttering two offices. “These are extraordinary times,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote in post to the company blog. “The global financial system has gone through the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and the effects are only beginning to wind their way through every facet of the economy. It’s not an understatement to say that nearly every business will be impacted by what has unfolded in the past weeks, and this is true for Silicon Valley as well.”

Tesla CEO in Love With His Car, Got a Feel for His Automobile

John Paczkowski — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 08:06:08 +0000

I would say it’s great. According to one of the car magazines, either Car & Driver or AutoWeek, it’s apparently the best kind of mid-speed acceleration of any car they ever tested. So that’s perfect for when you’re driving on the highway and you want to make a lane change or something like that. It’s incredibly responsive, so it’s a very, very fun car to drive.”

–Tesla Motors chairman Elon Musk sings his creation’s praises.

Now that Tesla Motors has finally managed to roll its first zero-emission Roadster out of the garage, the company is looking at markets other than the luxury one for which the $98,000 car was intended. The company plans to build an electric four-door, five-passenger sports sedan that will sell for about half the price of the Roadster.

To do that, Tesla figures it needs another $250 million in the bank and so it’s mulling an IPO. Said Tesla’s chairman Elon Musk, “I would say within [the] end of this year or next year there is a good chance we would go public.”

(Crash test photo courtesy Tesla Motors)

Tesla Roadster Produces Co-Founder Emission

John Paczkowski — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:13:54 +0000

When Tesla Motors co-founder Martin Eberhard stepped down from the CEO spot earlier this year to concentrate on technology and development, it was apparently his first step toward the door he was just shown. Seems Eberhard’s been ousted from the company, or as Tesla euphemistically puts it: “transitioned from the board of directors and executive management of the company to the advisory board.”

Why? Tesla won’t quite say. “I’m sorry that it came to this and wish it were not so,” Tesla Chairman Elon Musk said in an email to the San Jose Mercury News. “It was not a question of personality differences, as the decision to have Martin transition to an advisory role was unanimous among the board. Tesla has operational problems that need to be solved, and if the board thought there was any way that Martin could be part of the solution, then he would still be an employee of the company.”

Eberhard, however, has a different take on the situation. “Yes, it is true–I am no longer with Tesla Motors–neither on its board of directors nor an employee of any sort,” he wrote in a post to the Tesla Motors Club blog. “I have also signed a nondisparagement agreement with Tesla, so I must, by contract, be a bit careful about how I word things. But I am also not going to lie about it. I am not at all happy with the way I was treated, and I do not think this was the very best way to handle a transition–not the best for Tesla Motors, not the best for Tesla’s customers (to whom I still feel a strong sense of responsibility), and not for Tesla’s investors.”

Bang, Zoom–To the Moon, Sergey! To the Moon!

John Paczkowski — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 07:01:15 +0000

Google’s current engineering facilities in the United States, India and Switzerland are all leaders in search technology development. However, by locating a research and technology center on the moon, Google engineers will be able to experiment with an entirely different set of parameters. For example, imagine tapping unlimited solar energy to drive megawatt data centers and power innumerable arrays of massively parallel lava lamps, with ample no-cost cooling available to regulate the temperature of server farms sprawling over acres of land unblighted by sentient lifeforms or restrictive zoning ordinances.”

–Excerpt from “Google Copernicus Center Is Hiring,” the company’s 2004 April Fool’s Day hoax

With the establishment of the Google Lunar X Prize, Google’s 2004 Copernicus Center announcement seems less April Fool’s Day hoax, more company aspiration. At Wired NextFest in Los Angeles yesterday, Google said it will award up to $30 million in prize money to anyone able to land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon.

To win the purse, the lunar craft must travel the lunar surface to a distance of at least 1,640 feet and relay video, images and data back to Earth. And it must do so by the end of 2012.

“We are confident that teams from around the world will help develop new robotic and virtual-presence technology, which will dramatically reduce the cost of space exploration,” said Peter Diamandis, head of the X Prize Foundation–the nonprofit institute working with Google on this effort. “Moon 2.0, the second era of lunar exploration, will not be a quest for ‘flags and footprints.’ This time we will go to the moon to stay. The moon is a stepping stone to the rest of the solar system and a source of solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on Earth–energy independence and climate change.”

That seems a noble goal. Question is: is it an attainable one? There are plenty of skeptics who claim it’s not. “It’s hard to imagine this project costing less than a few hundred million dollars; PayPal billionaire Elon Musk, so far the most accomplished of the ‘new space’ entrepreneurs, has pumped an estimated $100 million into his Falcon 1 launch vehicle [and] still hasn’t reached orbit,” says Popular Mechanics air and space correspondent David Noland. “Against that kind of financial investment, $20 million is a drop in the bucket. A prize-winner would have to come up with millions upon millions on his own. Anyone who can come up with that kind of money would probably want to make up his own rules, not follow Google’s.”