Free Republic

NEW YORK - The investment firm founded and chaired by billionaire George Soros took a stake in Tesla Inc bonds during the first three months of the year, giving the electric carmaker run by Elon Musk a prominent supporter. Soros Fund Management LLC took a $35 million stake in the convertible bonds of Tesla, which are due in March 2019, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. At the end of March, the Tesla bonds came under severe selling pressure as the luxury automaker faced concerns about its ability to produce its cheaper Model 3 sedan. A...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a rare thing in the car business: a celebrity and a leader. His celebrity has definitely helped fuel Tesla's rise. But of late it has begun to reveal some disadvantages. Maybe you haven't been paying attention to all things Tesla for the past two weeks. Here's an update: Tesla reported first-quarter earnings and lost over $700 million in three months. CEO Elon Musk, who is supposed to be sleeping on the floor of his factory in California, flipped out on an earnings call, silencing two analysts and taking 20 minutes of questions from a YouTuber...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk attacked sell-side analysts from Bernstein and RBC apparently because they supported short sellers of Tesla stock. Tesla is at a critical point in its 15-year history, losing vast amounts of money while still riding a high stock price.Musk hasn't endured this serious a threat to his vision since Tesla's early days, and the strain is showing. If you were the CEO of a company that had been around for 15 years, never posted an annual profit, but had seen a nearly 1,000% appreciation in your stock and were considered — by some — to be the...

Photo: Nikola Motor Company _____________________________________________________________________________________ Nikola Motor Company has filed a lawsuit in Arizona alleging that Tesla’s all-electric Semi infringes on the hydrogen truck startup’s patents. The lawsuit claims Tesla willfully copied these patents in creating its electric truck, and Nikola is seeking $2 billion in damages in return. “It’s patently obvious there is no merit to this lawsuit,” a spokesperson for Tesla told The Verge. A representative for Nikola Motors said in a statement to The Verge that “[w]e are not commenting because it is in the courts. The lawsuit speaks for itself.” Nikola was founded in 2014,...

Tesla owner who turned on car's autopilot then sat in passenger seat while travelling on the M1 banned from drivingA man who switched on his car's autopilot before moving to the passenger seat while travelling along a motorway has been banned from driving for 18 months. Bhavesh Patel, aged 39, of Alfreton Road, Nottingham, pleaded guilty to dangerous driving at St Albans Crown Court on Friday, April 20. The court heard that at 7.40pm on May 21, 2017, Patel was driving his white Tesla S 60 along the northbound carriageway of the M1, between junctions 8 and 9 near Hemel...

Ford's plan to reduce its passenger car lineup to just two models, and GM's difficulty selling passenger cars in the U.S. show how much tastes are drifting toward trucks, SUVs and crossovers. Ford will only update the Focus Active crossover and Mustang for the U.S. market, while GM called out a challenging passenger car environment. ====================================================================================================== So is it really the end of the American car on its home turf? From the way Detroit's major executives are talking, it would seem so. Ford said Wednesday it will only offer two new cars in North America over the coming years —...

Jim Chanos says "stunning" executive turnover at Tesla is a bad sign for the company. Elon Musk "may be misleading investors," Chanos.. "I think Elon Musk has crossed the Rubicon in terms of making statements to investors that he might rue later," ... Short-seller Jim Chanos is blasting Elon Musk's leadership at Tesla. ... Musk's announcements about future products. "He said the Roadster will be available in 2020 and Semi [truck] will be entering production next year," Chanos said. "I don't think either of those are going to happen." He believes recent management turnover at the electric car maker is...

Imagine your least-favorite world leader. (Take as much time as you need.) Now, imagine if that person wasn't a human, but a network of millions of computers around the world. This digi-dictator has instant access to every scrap of recorded information about every person who's ever lived. It can make millions of calculations in a fraction of a second, controls the world's economy and weapons systems with godlike autonomy and — scariest of all — can never, ever die. This unkillable digital dictator, according to Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, is one of the darker scenarios awaiting humankind's future if...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly losing support amongst his peers in Silicon Valley following Facebook’s latest user data scandal. Bloomberg reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been left with few defenders in Silicon Valley following his company’s latest user data scandal. Amongst Zuckerberg’s biggest critics in the tech industry is Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, while many other Silicon Valley firms have fallen silent in the wake of the Facebook user data scandal, a stark contrast to how tech firms usually react when one of their own is attacked. When other major...

Even long cons can only run for so long. Elon Musk’s electric car con may be on the verge – finally – of coming unglued. This week, he’ll be forced to reveal actual production numbers for the first quarter of the year which are expected to fall well short of what he promised investors – and buyers, who ponied up deposits based on those promises. Last year, Musk breezily assured both groups that an improbable 5,000 Model 3s – Tesla’s first “mass-produced” electric car – would be rolling off the production line in Fremont, CA each week. He’s come as...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Tesla Inc shares fell sharply again Wednesday, reeling from a credit downgrade by Moody's Investors Service, federal probes of a fatal crash and concerns about Model 3 production. On Tuesday, Tesla tumbled 8.2 percent to its lowest close in almost a year after the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board opened an investigation into a fatal crash and vehicle fire in California on March 23. On Wednesday, a second federal regulator, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), said it was sending a team to California to investigate the crash. On Tuesday, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Tesla’s...

Just a few days ago, shareholders of Tesla approved an almost comical pay package for their cult leader CEO Elon Musk that could potentially put $50 BILLION in his pocket over the next decade. Let’s put this figure in perspective: at $5 billion per year, Musk would make more than every single CEO in the S&P 500. COMBINED. In other words, if you add up the salaries of all the CEOs of the 500 largest companies in America, it would still be less than the $5 billion per year that Mr. Musk stands to earn. That’s pretty astounding given that...

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is the latest to jump on the #DeleteFacebook bandwagon. In response to a question from a Twitter user about deleting SpaceX's Facebook page, Musk replied on Friday: "I didn't realize there was one. Will do." He then deleted the SpaceX page, as well as the Tesla page.

'He was such a terrible human being, you have no idea,' he told an interviewer for the American magazine Rolling Stone with tears running down his face. 'My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil. He will plan evil. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done. It's so terrible, you can't believe it.'

Tesla employees say the company is manufacturing a high ratio of flawed parts and vehicles that need rework and repairs. The electrical vehicle maker has had to ship some flawed parts to remanufacturing facilities to avoid scrapping them, rather than fixing them in-line, according to sources; Tesla denies this. CEO Elon Musk is under pressure to ramp up production of the Model 3 sedan, Tesla's first mass-market electric vehicle. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Luxury automaker Tesla is manufacturing a surprisingly high ratio of flawed parts and vehicles, according to several current and former employees, leading to more rework and repairs than can be...

In a surprising turn of events, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken to social media to make a case for President Trumps recently proposed tariffs. President Trump published a tweet yesterday stating that China was asked to develop a yearly plan for the One Billion Dollar reduction in their trade deficit with the United States. President Trump was well received during his visit to China earlier this year and notes this by saying that U.S. relations with China are very good and that he looked forward to seeing what ideas they came up with. But, President Trump urged that the...

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wants to grab Mars like President Donald Trump reportedly grabbed — well, you know. That’s according to Marcie Bianco, editorial and communications manager at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

What does a midlife crisis look like in the 21st century? Frittering away your life savings on a red sports car is so last century. Instead, today’s man who is grappling with the limitations of his mortality spends $90 million on a rocket to launch a $100,000 electric car, helmed by a robot by the name of “Starman,” into space. “We want a new space race,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk said in a press conference shortly after the launch of his company’s Falcon Heavy rocket — and his Tesla Roadster — into space earlier in February. Like a child, he...

Even Elon Musk thinks his space-cruising midnight-cherry Tesla Roadster looks weird. "It looks so ridiculous and impossible," the SpaceX CEO told reporters after the Falcon Heavy megarocket launched the car into space yesterday (Feb. 6). "You can tell it's real because it looks so fake, honestly." ... Think of it this way: Light can travel through different mediums — including air, water and the vacuum of space — each of which has a different refractive index, he said. That is, these mediums bend light differently, which explains why colored light doesn't look the same in one medium as it does...

<p>Electric cars have a lot of perks: zero emissions, a quiet ride and instant acceleration. But can they save you money? Probably not.</p> <p>Electric car prices are falling, but they still cost more than equivalent gas models because of their expensive batteries. A $7,500 federal tax credit—which survived the recent tax overhaul—helps erase that gap, but not entirely.</p>