Elon Musk
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Elon Musk says Tesla will be profitable in Q3 and Q4
Tesla is one of the more interesting companies for Wall Street that had an interesting couple of months this year — and it seems even tweets from Elon Musk, who said that the company will be profitable in the back half of the year, may be enough to swing its stock.
The Tesla and SpaceX founder sent a tweet very early this morning that the company would be profitable and cash-flow positive in the third and fourth quarter this year. Tesla is known for setting ambitious targets and forecasts, especially as it looks to ramp up Model 3 production to around 2,500 vehicles per week. Musk said he took direct control of Model 3 production earlier this month in a note to employees, also sent out at around 3 a.m. pacific time. Tesla’s shares were up slightly, gaining around 2% in trading today.
The Economist used to be boring, but smart with a wicked dry wit. Now it’s just boring (sigh). Tesla will be profitable & cash flow+ in Q3 & Q4, so obv no need to raise money.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 13, 2018
Tesla saw a small bump in its stock throughout the day. While it could be for a variety of reasons, Musk’s data point may have offered a small amount of clarity (and optimism) around whether the company will be able to eventually turn a profit. The tweet was fired off as a response to a story by The Economist that said the company may have to raise additional capital at some point, according to banking firm Jeffries. (It was also quite snarky.)
On Tesla’s last call to discuss the company’s quarterly results with Wall Street analysts, Musk said that the company would begin generating “positive quarterly operating income on a sustained basis,” and said he was “cautiously optimistic” that the company would be GAAP profitable. Musk said the company wanted to hit a production target of 5,000 Model 3 vehicles per week at some point in 2018, though did not give a specific time frame. The tweet, while fired off as a response to a story by The Economist, appears to offer another small data point as to when it might happen.
Earlier this month, Tesla fell back behind Ford in terms of its market cap as some pressure has hit the stock. Tesla has had to address a fatal crash involving its autopilot, in addition to a voluntary recall of 123,000 Model S vehicles. There is some skepticism around whether Tesla will hit its production targets from Wall Street (making cars is hard, it seems).
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SpaceX has authorized new shares that could value it at $24B
SpaceX has authorized a new Series I round for 3 million shares in a new round that will be worth up to $507 million, according to a certificate of incorporation document filed in Delaware.
If all shares in this round are issued, the new round would value SpaceX at around $23.7 billion, according to the new filing provided by Lagniappe Labs, creator of the Prime Unicorn Index. We’ve previously reported that SpaceX was planning to raise around $500 million in a financing round led by Fidelity, helping provide a lot of liquidity for the company as it begins to ramp up its plans to grow its ambitious launch schedule. While the filing does not confirm that it has raised the full $500 million, it serves as another data point to support that the company has picked up an additional huge influx of cash. The 3 million shares are priced at $169, in the range that we previously reported mid March.
The FCC in March gave SpaceX the green light to launch a network of thousands of satellites to blanket the globe with broadband access. Each additional flight offers SpaceX an opportunity to not only prove out its efficiency as a launching company, but also that it can provide a wide array of companies with a potentially cheaper option to get equipment into orbit for purposes like providing broadband. SpaceX already runs plenty of missions to the International Space Station. SpaceX also won a $290 million contract with the U.S. Air Force to launch three GPS satellites.
SpaceX isn’t the only company that may end up providing a new generation of orbital launches, like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. Virgin Galactic also successfully tested its rocket-powered spacecraft for the first time since 2014 earlier this week, and while the details on that launch are still very slim it shows that there’s a wide variety of companies that see potential in figuring out a lower-cost way to get equipment into orbit.
We also previously reported that there could be a secondary offering that could also total up to $500 million in shares. That would run through special purpose vehicles, according to what we’re hearing, which would give investors an opportunity to get some liquidity in the company as it looks to remain private a little longer with the new financing.
We reached out to SpaceX for a comment and will update the story when we get back.
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Aurora hires SpaceX’s Jinnah Hosein, opens SF and Pittsburgh offices
Self-driving technology company Aurora has made some key moves on its leadership team and overall company growth: It’s bringing on SpaceX’s now former head of software engineering, Jinnah Hosein, to lead its own software engineering team in a VP role. The autonomous software provider is also opening up two new offices, including one in San Francisco, and another in Pittsburgh, in addition to its existing HQ in Palo Alto.
Bringing on Hosein is a huge move for Aurora, which will now have some additional senior leadership taken to help direct and organize its growing engineering team, according to Aurora co-founder Chris Urmson . Hosein’s background includes his time as VP of Software Engineering at SpaceX, where he spent the past four years and oversaw projects including the recent successful Falcon Heavy launch. Before that, he was Director of Software Engineering at Google working on Google Cloud, site reliability and other software projects.
“It’s a pretty incredible set of experiences he has,” Urmson said. “We’re just excited about him bringing that leadership capability, that experience in building both cloud and incredibly reliable software to our team and working with the rest of the folks here.”
Hosein also worked for a brief time overseeing Tesla’s software operations as well as SpaceX’s when he served as acting VP of Tesla’s Autopilot Software prior to Tesla hiring Apple’s Chris Lattner for the role. Urmson says that Hosein’s proven track record launching rockets, and organizing software projects on that level of complexity is more important to Aurora than any brief time he may have spent on Autopilot, however.
Aurora is also opening two new physical offices and testing locations, as mentioned, including the San Francisco one that Urmson says will be a welcome relief to some of their employees currently commuting south to Palo Alto, as well as a way to attract more talent looking to work in the city proper. The Pittsburgh office gives them a new testbed, where they can prove their tech in inclement driving conditions and adverse winter weather, and it also puts them in close proximity to Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh’s robotics talent pool.
“When you combine that, between the offices we have in the South Bay, the San Francisco test areas that we’ll now have more access to and the Pittsburgh test areas, we have a pretty exciting diversity of test environments and places to operate,” Urmson added.
Aurora has already announced partnerships with Volkswagen, Hyundai, Byton and more, and recently added LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi to its board.
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Tesla’s new navigation system will roll out this weekend
Owning a Tesla comes with plenty of perks, but there is still one major pain point for most Tesla owners: navigation.
Even though these cars feel like they’re from the future, the navigation systems on board look like any old navigation system you might have seen in a car or on a smartphone, with some of the information in desperate need of an update.
But after promising a navigation update last year, Elon Musk seems to be prepping for its release. Early this morning the Tesla CEO tweeted:
New nav starts rolling out this weekend. Should be considered a mature beta at first, so won’t be perfect, but will improve rapidly. With the old system, we were stuck with legacy 3rd party black box code and stale data. No way to improve.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2018
Back in December, Musk said that the new system will be “light-years ahead of current system.”
Musk’s comments on the new nav system suggest that this will go beyond map updates and will instead rethink navigation from top to bottom within Tesla vehicles.
Tesla Maps, as the nav system is called, will roll out this upcoming weekend.
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BrainQ aims to cure stroke and spinal cord injuries through mind-reader tech
Israel-based BrainQ is a new neurotech startup hoping to take on brain-computer interface (BCI) companies Kernel and Neuralink. But it’s early days in this industry, including for BrainQ, which plans to use a non-surgically embedded EEG machine to gather data and help improve outcomes for stroke and spinal cord patients. Read More
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Elon Musk’s Boring Company gets preliminary permit for NYC-DC Hyperloop
A 29-minute trip from D.C. to New York may seem too good to be true. And it very well may be. But that isn’t stopping Elon Musk from pushing forward with plans to build a Hyperloop along the eastern corridor. Tesla looks to take solar mainstream with Home Depot partnership
While Elon Musk is preparing for this week’s launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket, his other company is also preparing for a launch. Tesla has made a deal with Home Depot to sell both the PowerWall and Tesla’s solar panels at 800 Home Depot locations. The retail spaces will be Tesla branded and Tesla employees will be on hand to assist with service and sales. Bloomberg first reported… Read More
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Ferrari is planning an all-electric supercar
Ferrari is going to going to build an EV that will aim to have no peer – including from the likes of Tesla. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said that its planning to both build its first electric supercar, and debut its first ever SUV, with the latter arriving sometime in either 2019 or 2020, per Bloomberg. Marchionne gave Tesla and Elon Musk kudos for doing what it’s managed… Read More
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Putting the “AI” in ThAInksgiving
Welcome to Thanksgiving table talk circa 2017. It’s true that AI and machine learning are changing the world, and in a few years, it will be embedded in all of the technology in our lives. So maybe it makes sense to help folks at home better understand machine learning. After all, without deep knowledge of current tech, autonomous vehicles seem dangerous, Skynet is coming, and the… Read More
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Tesla makes quick work of Puerto Rico hospital solar power relief project
Tesla CEO Elon Musk noted on Twitter that Tesla’s solar team could indeed outfit Puerto Rico with power facilities that could be used to generate and store power reserves when the existing grid isn’t available, as it has been after the U.S. territory faced the devastation of hurricane Maria. Now, Tesla is showing that it’s making good on its promise of help, with… Read More
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