Lifeboat Foundation

AUSTIN (Austin Business Journal) — Tesla Inc.’s growing footprint in the Austin area now includes a sizable facility in Hutto. But what it’s for remains unclear.

The Austin Business Journal visited the 36,000-square-foot site at 200 County Road 199 in the fast-growing industrial hub northeast of Austin in late December. The parking lot was full and a nondescript warehouse-style building was bustling with employees in construction vests and helmets, but there were no signs listing any companies and no clear indications of who was occupying it. The only traces it could be Tesla were a handful of the company’s electric vehicle charging stations out front.

But Elon Musk’s EV manufacturing and clean energy company is linked to the site in state filings, and it has been confirmed by Hutto officials. Tesla’s expansion to Hutto underscores the company’s wide-reaching plans for the region — as far south as San Antonio and, now, as far north as Hutto — as it continues buildout of its multibillion-dollar operation in eastern Travis County. The Hutto site is about 30 miles directly north of its gigafactory, which serves as the company’s headquarters, along State Highway 130.

Starlink will test its Direct to Cell service in the U.S.

A man spent 100 days building a fully functioning Cybertruck using just wood to get Elon Musk’s attention, and it worked.

Industrial mishaps are not rare but caution is prime. Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has lashed out at the media for sensationalizing an old injury caused by a robot at his Giga Texas factory in Austin, Texas. He claimed that the media was trying to link the incident to his futuristic Optimus robots, which he said would usher in a new era of abundance.

The incident, which happened two years ago, involved a software engineer who was programming software for robots that cut car parts from freshly cast aluminum. While he was working, he was unaware that one of the robots was still active while the other two were disabled for maintenance. The active robot then attacked the engineer, pinning him down and clawing at his back and arm. The attack left a trail of blood on the factory floor, as well as an open wound on the engineer’s left hand.

Tesla recorded $500M+ in gross profit from its Energy and Services (Supercharging) segments in Q3 2023. Elon Musk noted how strong energy gross margins were on the call, and insinuated strength in these businesses will continue. I think this is a super exciting development for Tesla investors as the company can smooth out cyclicality in it’s automotive business with consistent profits from its Energy and Services.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, is following in the footsteps of rivals OpenAI and Anthropic in opting for an unusual corporate structure.

XAI has been organized in Nevada as a for-profit benefit corporation, a structure that allows the company to prioritize having a positive impact on society over its obligations to shareholders, according to a late November filing with Nevada. Musk, who launched the secretive startup earlier this year, has long expressed concern over the impact AI could have on society.

The specifics of the funding round are yet to be finalized.

In the early stages of this process, discussions have taken place with potential investors, as per a report by Bloomberg. However, specific details such as the terms, valuation, and timing of the funding round are still being worked out and may undergo changes.

OpenAI in talks to raise fresh funding

Continue reading “OpenAI eyes to be $100 billion firm, tailing Elon Musk’s SpaceX closely” »

The Blue Origin founder told podcaster Lex Fridman that he didn’t know Elon Musk well but that he must be a very capable leader.

Nvidia stock has more than tripled this year as investors bet the graphics-chip specialist will power the artificial-intelligence revolution. Elon Musk is among those who can’t get enough of its semiconductors, Oracle’s Larry Ellison said on Monday.

Musk has opted to use Oracle’s servers to run his xAI company’s recently launched chatbot, Grok. The cloud-infrastructure giant managed to provide enough Nvidia chips to power the first version of Grok, but fell short of Musk’s demands, Ellison said during Oracle’s latest earnings call, according to a transcript provided by AlphaSense/Sentieo.

“Boy, did they want a lot more GPUs than we gave them,” Oracle’s billionaire cofounder and tech chief said. “We gave them quite a few but they wanted more, and we are in the process of getting them more.”