Friday, August 05, 2022

Elon Musk says Tesla would continue to do very well even if he was kidnapped by aliens or 'went back to my home planet'
Stephen Jones
Fri, August 5, 2022 

Elon Musk said that Tesla would continue to do well even if he was kidnapped by aliens.

However, he intends to stay as long as he can be useful, he said at Tesla's 2022 Cyber Roundup.

Musk was responding to a question from a stock owner regarding the company's succession plans.


Elon Musk has no plans of leaving Tesla but thinks that the company would continue to perform well without him.

"We have a very talented team here. So I think Tesla, you know, would continue to do very well even if I was kidnapped by aliens, or went back to my home planet," the Tesla CEO said at the firm's 2022 Cyber roundup meeting of stock owners.

He was responding to a question from stockholder Gary Black, a managing partner of the Future Fund, concerning how Tesla's board would potentially handle his succession.

Musk is embroiled in an ongoing legal battle following his decision to pull out of a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, Black wanted to know how he would split his time should a judge rule that he has to take over the social media giant.

Musk said Tesla is gathering a lot of momentum and has a "very exciting" product roadmap that will last a long time.

"I intend to stay with Tesla as long as I can be useful," Musk said, adding that he thought that he could be most useful with product design and manufacturing parts of the business.

During the more than two-hour-long presentation, Musk revealed the firm had manufactured its three millionth car and suggested that the firm could eventually build between 10 and 12 Gigafactories as it expands.

He said that thanks to the hard work of the Tesla team, the company had reached a production run rate of 1.5 million vehicles already this year, and was on track for 2 million by the close of 2022. Musk has ambitions to build 20 million cars a year by 2030.

"I'm very excited about the future of the company and I think it's got a very bright future, even without me," Musk said. "I'm not leaving, to be clear."

The world's richest man, who was born in South Africa, has previously joked that Mars is his home planet. He's regularly talked about his ambition for humanity to eventually be a multiplanetary species. He hopes that SpaceX, the rocket company he founded, can play an important part in that.

Despite Tesla's continued growth, Musk has been involved in multiple controversies. Tesla is facing multiple lawsuits brought by African-American former and current employees regarding accusations of racial harassment in its factories.

Documents obtained by Insider's Julia Black, recently revealed that Musk secretly fathered twins with a senior executive at Neuralink.





Elon Musk said he and the 'whole of SpaceX' had to be drug tested for a year after he smoked weed on Joe Rogan's podcast

Grace Dean,Huileng Tan
Fri, August 5, 2022 at 6:17 a.m.·3 min read




"I don't even know how to smoke a joint," Elon Musk told the hosts of the Full Send podcast
.Theo Wargo/WireImage

Elon Musk said he had to take drug tests for a year after smoking weed on Joe Rogan's podcast in 2018.

Both him and the "whole of SpaceX" were subjected to random drugs tests by the government, he said.


"I don't even know how to smoke a joint," the tech billionaire told the Full Send podcast Thursday.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the federal government required that he was drug tested for a year after he smoked weed on Joe Rogan's podcast in 2018, adding that the "whole of SpaceX" was impacted.

Speaking about the incident during an appearance on the Full Send podcast, released Thursday night, Musk said that he got "a lot of backlash," including from SpaceX competitors, because weed isn't legalized on a federal level and because SpaceX has federal government contracts.

"The consequences for me and for SpaceX were actually not good," the tech billionaire said, adding that he hadn't expected so much criticism. The interview — which went viral at the time — took place in California, where marijuana is legal for both medical and recreational use.

"I had to have like random drug tests and stuff after that, to prove that I'm not like a drug addict," Musk said, adding that the tests were required by the federal government. "They drug tested me for everything, and randomly. It wasn't like 'pick a day.' I had like a whole year of random drug tests."

"Unfortunately it wasn't just me but the whole company, the whole of SpaceX, had to have random drug tests," Musk continued. It's unclear exactly how many workers this affected, but SpaceX had around 6,000 employees in early 2019.

Under the Drug-free Workplace Act of 1988, workers at any companies that receive a federal contract of $100,000 or more are prohibited from using or distributing drugs in the workplace and the firm must have a drug-free workplace policy.

During the interview with Full Send, Musk also discussed attitudes towards drugs, including President Joe Biden's efforts to release basketball player Brittney Griner from custody in Russia after officials said they discovered vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage.

"If there are people in jail in America for the same stuff, shouldn't we free them too?" Musk said. "My opinion is that people should not be in jail for nonviolent drug crimes." Musk has previously criticized how the US persecutes weed-related crimes.

"Some people are still pretty uptight about these things," he added.

Musk didn't comment on how often he smokes weed, but said he has little skill at it.

"I don't even know how to smoke a joint, obviously, I mean look at me, I have no joint-smoking skills," he said.

Musk reiterated previous comments he made that weed is "not that good for productivity," but said that psychedelics can be helpful for some mental-health conditions.

During the three-hour interview with Full Send, Elon Musk also confirmed that he had nine children, dismissed theories that aliens could exist, and said that he'd moved to a $45,000 property in South Texas.

News reports: Musk countersuit accuses Twitter of fraud


Fri, August 5, 2022 

Elon Musk accused Twitter of fraud in a countersuit over his aborted $44 billion deal for the social media company, which he said held back necessary information and misled his team about its true user base, according to media reports.

According to The Washington Post, the countersuit filed by the billionaire and Tesla CEO filed Thursday alleges that Twitter committed fraud, breach of contract and violation of the Texas Securities Act.

Musk's counterclaims were filed confidentially last week and unsealed in a filing late Thursday at the Delaware Chancery Court, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Musk had offered to buy the company earlier this year, then tried to back out of the deal by claiming the social platform was infested with much larger numbers of “spam bots” and fake accounts than Twitter had disclosed.

Twitter sued to force him to complete the acquisition. Musk responded by filing his countersuit.

Musk's attorneys argued that Twitter’s own disclosures revealed that it has 65 million fewer “monetizable daily active users,” who can be shown digital ads, than the 238 million that Twitter claims, the Post and the Journal reported.

The filing also said most of Twitter's ads are shown only to a sliver of the company's user base, the Post said.

In an unexpected twist, Twitter filed its response denying Musk's accusations before Musk’s own counterclaims surfaced.

Twitter called Musk’s reasoning “a story, imagined in an effort to escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive.”

The case is scheduled to go to trial on October 17.

Associated Press, The Associated Press

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