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Twitter and Tesla, here are Musk’s plans and troubles

1 year ago babelfish

Twitter and Tesla, here are Musk's plans and troubles

Musk moves to China while at home he has to deal with various lawsuits affecting Tesla and beyond. One may have revealed important details about the future of Twitter

It has long been known that the US Tesla, which has always been hostile to trade unions , had chosen China as its main factory. Last summer, as soon as the latest lockdowns ended (which lasted throughout 2022 in the Asian country, giving rise to the well-known protests), Elon Musk was able to follow up on his projects and upgrade the Shanghai plant. Result? To build a Model Y, from the first operation to the end of the assembly, it now takes just 150 minutes : nothing if you think that rivals take between 35 and 40 hours to assemble a car and the manufacturers that have reduced the times however, they never managed to go beyond 15 hours. Now in the Asian country the US brand will give new acceleration, even if cars have nothing to do with it.

THE EXPANSION OF MUSK IN CHINA WITH TESLA

Tesla will also build a Megafactory in Shanghai with the aim of making the so-called Megapacks, integrating the production that already takes place in California. These are massive infrastructures capable of storing up to 3MWh of energy and providing stability to the electricity grid in case of eventuality. Each unit is capable of storing over 3 MWh of energy, enough to power an average of 3,600 homes for one hour.

With a similar tool, society would thus solve the problem of an energy supply that is not always continuous, but suffers from intermittence, especially when it relies on renewable sources. At the moment, as CNBC recalls, Tesla has a Magafactory in the United States, in Lathrop, capable of producing 10,000 Megapacks a year. Megapack is designed for electricity distributors and large commercial projects.

A few days ago the hypothesis was circulated of a probable trip by the CEO to China, where he should meet premier Li Qiang and discuss upcoming investments. The opening of construction sites to build the Shanghai Megafactory is set for the third quarter of 2023 and the first productions should arrive as early as 2024.

MUSK HAS NEW PROBLEMS AT HOME WITH TESLA

In short, beyond the ocean things are going great. A little less in the "home", where Elon Musk has to deal with rather heavy accusations about a distorted use of the cameras mounted on his Teslas. In fact, it turned out that between 2019 and 2022, footage taken from the cameras inside and outside the electric cars arrived in company chats.

In various situations, the screens and frames immortalized road accidents, such as that of a child on a bicycle hit by a car: the video, according to Reuters – which was the first to talk about this scandal – went viral inside the headquarters of Tesla in San Mateo California. In other stolen images, a completely naked person would be seen. The sources heard by the newspaper certify that the faces filmed are recognizable, as well as the private garages in which the cars are parked. Bouncing from chat to chat, some sequences have even been graphically rendered as "memes", i.e. humorous cartoons, although the question elicits very few laughs.

Mr. Henry Yeh, owner of a Model Y, wasted no time in filing a class action lawsuit against the company, in hopes that other users would join him. Given that it is clear that employees had access to images "not for the purpose of improving the driving systems of Tesla vehicles – as the plaintiff claims – but "for pure entertainment" and that those "Tesla customer recordings" portrayed them " in private and embarrassing situations”, it will be difficult for the Group to prevail and quite easy to try to reach an out-of-court settlement.

PROBLEMS ALSO FOR THE BLUE BIRD

And it won't be the only big million dollar lawsuit for Musk's companies. Some former Twitter executives have filed a class action lawsuit against the platform. These are the high-ranking victims of the cleanup wanted by the tycoon: Parag Agrawal , the former head of the social network, Vijaya Gadde , the former legal director and Ned Segal , the former chief financial officer. All of them are asking for over a million dollars from the social network.

That's because all of them were fired by Elon Musk on October 27, 2022, the same day Tesla and SpaceX's #1 bought the platform. The plaintiffs say they sought reimbursement of their expenses from Twitter more than two months ago, to no avail.

Since Musk acquired the social network for 44 billion dollars, there has been no shortage of causes. The noisiest had been the one brought by the Crown Estate, which manages the properties of King Charles III, denouncing the non-payment of the rent of the English offices since October 2022, the same month in which Musk bought the platform for 44 billion dollars, a early 2023.

HAS TWITTER BEEN EATEN?

And it is precisely a process that has brought out another interesting fact taken up by some US newspapers: the Twitter company would have merged with X Corp, a fintech company also owned by billionaire Elon Musk , part of X Holdings Corp.

The clue, as anticipated, would have come out of the papers of an ongoing trial between the company and Laura Loomer , an exponent of the American right. In one of its recent court filings, Twitter disclosed that "Twitter, Inc. has been merged into X Corp. and no longer exists" and that henceforth "X Corp. is the defendant in Loomer's lawsuit."

According to the US media that highlight the merger, the move that took place on the sly is motivated by the fact that Twitter has now taken the path of the super app, on the model of the Chinese WeChat, thus combining a number of features that go beyond the social platform alone.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/twitter-e-tesla-ecco-piani-e-grane-di-musk/ on Tue, 11 Apr 2023 10:48:32 +0000.