As far as the Model 3 goes, Musk relayed that Tesla’s electric car for the masses will be formally unveiled in March of 2016, whereupon the company will begin taking pre-orders. And if pre-orders for the Model S and Model X are any indication, it’s a safe bet that the Tesla Model 3 — sized at about 80% of the Model S — is poised to be a runaway hit. The only looming question is whether or not Tesla’s Model 3 design resonates with consumers.

Price-wise, Musk reiterated a price point he’s trotted out before, namely that the base price on the Model 3 will check in at $35,000. As far as a release date is concerned, Musk said that production will begin in two years time. Musk explained that Tesla first has to wait until the Gigafactory is fully operational before kicking off Model 3 production.  Read more

The comment seems to have been made at least partly in jest, but Elon Musk has been very clear in the past that the dangers posed by artificial intelligence are no laughing matter.

So why not killer robots?

“And people wonder why I’m worried about the robocalypse…” Musk wrote in this Instagram post over the weekend. As you can see by the caption, he’s talking about a Tesla TSLA, +0.23%  production line comprised of 542 robots, with 15 operating at the same time.  Read more

The Hyperloop sounds like science fiction, Elon Musk’s pipe dream: leapfrog high speed rail and go right to packing us into capsules that fling us across the country in hours using what are, essentially, pneumatic tubes. It sounds crazy, when you think about it.

It’s starting to look a little less crazy.  Read more

Recently, Elon Musk, Canadian-American business magnate, tried to make us think about the causes of things. He is explaining his theory by giving two examples: weights on a scale and causal chains.  Read More

In 1989, an 18-year-old South African named Elon Musk approached a girl at a party in Canada, where he was attending college, and said, “I think a lot about electric cars. Do you think about electric cars?”

That anecdote, one of scores that make up Ashlee Vance’s biography of the 44-year-old entrepreneur, is telling. Long before Musk parlayed the $US165 million he made for his part in developing the internet-banking giant PayPal into the more than $US11 billion that underwrite Musk Industries today, he was thinking ahead, envisioning a world that merged science with science fiction, a real world that he, the hero of this story, would bring to fruition.

Read more

As technology visionary Ray Kurzweil put it, “maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high school student in another universe.” (Given how things are going, he jokes, she may not get a good grade.)

Read more

Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk said Friday the company is “almost ready” to make its cars go driverless on highways and parallel-park themselves

The much-awaited software update that would make Tesla TSLA, -0.24%  vehicles able to steer themselves safely down the road has one more thing to sort out, Musk said in a tweet.  Read more

Advances in the field of artificial intelligence are invariably greeted with concern about an imminent robot uprising. Similarly, when we hear about developments in the field of brain-to-brain communication, we imagine any number of outlandish scenarios: perhaps a government marching us unquestioningly into battle via a process of insidious mind control, or an erotic thought we had about a work colleague being unwittingly transmitted to our partner.

When Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced this week during one of his regular Q&A sessions that Facebook is working in the field of thought transmission, we found ourselves momentarily transported to a horrific telepathic future. “You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too,” he said, as people thought to themselves “under no circumstances do I want anyone to know the dark, unsettling images that flash through my mind on an hourly basis”. We are troubled by that vision. But it’s only a vision.  Read more

Elon Musk wants to use his commercial SpaceX rockets to put satellites into orbit that will bring broadband to the next billion, but one of SpaceX’s own customers has thrown a wrench into the works.

Musk’s plan involves encircling the globe with a few thousand high-capacity, low-latency satellites that the Tesla Motors boss says should be able to deliver broadband internet at speeds comparable to optical fibre.   Read more

The explosion of a SpaceX rocket during a space station resupply mission last month jolted the company awake in some ways, CEO and founder Elon Musk said.

Prior to the June 28 Falcon 9 rocket explosion — which ended the company’s seventh robotic cargo mission to the International Space Station less than 3 minutes after it blasted off — SpaceX had enjoyed a string of 20 straight successful launches over a seven-year stretch.  Read more