Musk's U-turn to prevent Tesla from sinking in crisis
Breaking away from Trump's tariff strategy, following the punishment the manufacturer has suffered due to Musk's foray into politics: sales have dropped by 13% in 2025, and the company has lost over 600,000 billion in the stock market since January 20th.
Last Saturday, Elon Musk expressed hope that the US and the EU will eventually establish a tariff-free trade zone. The break from President Trump's strategy - whom he helped reach the White House and who recently organized an act of reparation for him - came a day after Tesla's stock value dropped to $716 billion.
It is still more than triple the value of Toyota, the world's leading manufacturer, but 53% less than the peak on Christmas Eve 2024. Compared to January 20th, when Trump took office (and Musk with him), $602.655 billion have vanished, 44% of the total. This represents the largest loss among the Magnificent Seven: Tesla, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft.
The South African billionaire has felt the blow in his pocket, with his fortune decreasing by over $126 billion.
Tesla will be minimally affected by tariffs: almost everything it sells in the US is locally manufactured. The same goes for China. However, the new tariffs have been the last straw. In 2024, its global sales declined for the first time in years, with 1.79 million cars sold (-1.2%) and a significant 12% drop in California, considered its sancta sanctorum, where it still held over 50% of the electric car market last year.
The situation has worsened even more this year. According to the company's own accounts, between January and March, it sold 337,000 vehicles, 13 percentage points less than the same period in 2024; and 32 points less compared to the last quarter of 2024, which traditionally is the strongest for the brand. In fact, one would have to go back to the first half of 2022 to find such low results.
"We knew a tough first quarter was coming, but it has been even worse than expected and is a clear example of the damage Musk is causing to Tesla," stated analysts at Wedbush Securities, urging the entrepreneur to "overcome this brand crisis and pull the company out of the dark moment it is going through."
Despite Wedbush Securities believing that the manufacturer will still outperform the Nasdaq, they have reduced their target stock value forecast by 43%, from $550 to $315, due to brand image issues and low demand.
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Yanis Varoufakis, 2023)
"Half an hour or so earlier, the people of Britain had woken up to the news that the pandemic had caused the worst recession in history.
Apparently, the UK’s national income had fallen by a whopping 20.4 per cent, far worse than any comparable figures in America or continental Europe.
Wretched news it certainly was, though not of the sort that undermines one’s world view.
It was what followed fifteen minutes later, just before you woke up, that changed the way I saw the world.
Instead of plummeting in response to the data, the London Stock Exchange jumped up by 2.3 per cent! (…)
Share markets do rise in response to bad news, but only when the news, however awful, turns out at least somewhat better than anticipated.
Had stockbrokers predicted, say, a 22 per cent fall in the UK’s national income, markets would have had good cause to rise if the actual fall on the day was ‘only’ 20.4 per cent.
Except that, on that Wednesday, the markets were expecting a drop of no more than 15 per cent.
That’s what made 12 August 2020 so bizarre: news far worse than anticipated had caused the share market to rise.
Nothing like it had happened before.
So, what had happened?
The news, it turns out, was so bad that traders in the City of London had the following realisation:
‘When things are this dismal, the Bank of England panics. And what have panicky central banks been doing since the crash of 2008? They print money and give it to us.
And what do we do with all the freshly minted dough from the central bank? We buy shares, sending their price up.
And if prices are destined to go up, only a fool would miss out on the action. A wall of printed money is surely on its way to us. Time to buy!’
And buy they did, causing the City of London to defy the gravitational laws of capitalism. (…)
Naturally you will take the free billion but as we’ve established you would be mad to invest it in new production lines.
So what are you going to do with the free cash? You could buy real estate or art or, better still, shares in your own company.
That way, the shares in your company appreciate in value and, if you are the CEO running it, your stature and share-linked bonuses rise too.
No new investment, in other words, but a lot more power in the hands of the powerful."
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism - Yanis Varoufakis
This is the future my friends. And it ain't good.. It's class warfare on steroids.. They want to make everyone pay rent for everything. We need collective action now!
In his new book, the maverick Greek economist says we are witnessing an epochal shift. At his island home, he argues it’s now the ‘fiefdoms’
THE DEATH OF CAPITALISM.
THE BIRTH OF???
Technofeudalism
- Yanis Varoufakis
An interesting idea for Socialists/Communists to think about as traditional Left/Right distinctions seem to be becoming more irrelevant and meaningless than ever before.
Part of this may be due to what Yanis Varoufakis is calling the "death of Capitalism" and the birth of "Technofeudalism."
Varoufakis, in his new book of the same name, argues that the rise today's tech giants came at a time of a complete lack of regulation and coupled with a corporate culture of greed and complete disregard for human life, encouraged and financed by cheap government capital flowing into a deregulated banking sector that funneled the money straight into the pockets of the same investors of Big Tech, Big Media, Big Pharma and the like. Essentially, these fiefdoms are warping the very modes of production and changing the power dynamics of the previous global capitalist world order.
Combined with a political system sold to the highest bidder, this has resulted in modern tech fiefdoms popping up throughout the world and global economy that are more powerful than the governments they control, that in theory at least, are supposed to control them.
So... we're slipping back into feudalism, and now a famous self-proclaimed Marxist Economist and academic leader has wrote an entire book dedicated to something I've been saying for two years now. And I'm an ordinary worker and two-time college drop out.
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Yanis Varoufakis, 2023)
"What we need, then, is a new story that explains not what we wish would happen but what is actually happening, and that is the story of how rent – the defining economic trait of feudalism – staged its remarkable comeback.
Under feudalism, rent was easy enough to grasp.
Courtesy of some accident of birth, or royal decree, the feudal lord obtained the deeds to a plot of land which empowered him to extract part of the harvest produced by the peasants who had been born and raised on that land.
Under capitalism, grasping the meaning of rent, and distinguishing it from profit, is much harder – a difficulty I witnessed first-hand when as a university teacher I would struggle to help my students spot the difference between the two.
Arithmetically, there is no difference: both rent and profit amount to money left over once costs are paid for.
The difference is subtler, qualitative, almost abstract: profit is vulnerable to market competition, rent is not.
The reason is their different origins.
Rent flows from privileged access to things in fixed supply, like fertile soil or land containing fossil fuels; you cannot produce more of these resources, however much money you might invest in them.
Profit, in contrast, flows into the pockets of entrepreneurial people who have invested in things that would not have otherwise existed – things like Edison’s light bulb or Jobs’s iPhone.
It is this fact – that these commodities were invented and created and so can be invented and created again but better by someone else – that renders profit vulnerable to competition. (…)
Capitalism prevailed when profit overwhelmed rent, a historic triumph coinciding with the transformation of productive work and property rights into commodities to be sold via labour and share markets respectively.
It was not just an economic victory.
Whereas rent reeked of vulgar exploitation, profit claimed moral superiority as a just reward to brave entrepreneurs risking everything to navigate the treacherous currents of stormy markets. (…)
Why didn’t Nokia, Sony or Blackberry build their own store?
Because it was too late: with so many people signed up to Apple, the thousands of third-party developers were not going to spend their time and effort developing apps for other platforms.
To be competitive, Apple’s unwaged third-party developers, mainly partnerships or small capitalist firms, had no choice but to operate via the Apple Store.
The price? A 30 per cent ground rent, paid to Apple on all their revenues.
Thus a vassal capitalist class grew from the fertile soil of the first cloud fief: the Apple Store."
MUSK KHUYÊN CÁC SINH VIÊN HỌC CÀNG NHIỀU MÔN CÀNG NHIỀU MÔN CÀNG TỐT…
8 SÀI GÒN
April 4 at 7:18 AM ·
MUSK KHUYÊN CÁC SINH VIÊN HỌC CÀNG NHIỀU MÔN CÀNG NHIỀU MÔN CÀNG TỐT…
“Đừng nhầm lẫn việc đến trường với giáo dục. Tôi không vào Harvard, nhưng tất cả những người làm việc cho tôi đều là sinh viên tốt nghiệp Harvard”.
Musk từng nói: “Tôi không nghĩ vào đại học có thể chứng minh rằng bạn có năng lực phi thường, nhưng bạn phải có bằng chứng cho thấy bạn có khả năng phi thường”.
Chúng ta có thể hiểu câu nói này rằng bằng cấp không có nghĩa là năng lực, nhưng đối với hầu hết mọi người, trước khi bước chân ra xã hội, điều duy nhất có thể chứng minh năng lực của họ chính là học vấn.
Musk từng có những lời khuyên dành cho các sinh viên đại học rằng hãy học càng nhiều môn học càng tốt. Nhiều phát minh sáng tạo là kết quả của nghiên cứu liên ngành. Nền tảng kiến thức của chúng ta đang ngày càng lớn hơn, vì vậy chúng ta phải có khả năng tích hợp chúng.
Nếu bạn có thể kết hợp kiến thức từ các lĩnh vực khác nhau, bạn sẽ có cơ hội tạo ra kết quả phi thường, và có cơ hội đổi mới rất lớn.
Musk đặc biệt khuyến nghị rằng nếu bạn quan tâm, bạn có thể tìm hiểu kiến thức cơ bản của từng lĩnh vực, sau đó suy nghĩ về cách tích hợp kiến thức trong các lĩnh vực khác nhau.
Only in America will a private company give or promise to give another private company $40 billion: 'OpenAI has closed a record-breaking $40 billion funding round, the "most ever raised by a private technology company," reports CNBC. Led by SoftBank Group, the round boosts the ChatGPT maker's valuation to $300 billion.’ Good People, that is the Nigerian annual budget there
This world is unbalanced, and I am flummoxed (allow me use big grammar), and cannot figure out how Africa will catch up if one company is so confident that it can do this wire!
Yes, to build nations, you need three things as I explain here: “Three things are required to build a nation or a company, and they are People, Processes and Tools. You can have the people but without the processes and tools, you will still fail. Nigeria as a country has the people but the other two are missing at scale. Processes are the rule of law which governs an ecosystem. …” https://www.tekedia.com/how-to-make-nigeria-great-by.../
Capital falls under Tools and needs a peaceful abode. Yes, Nigeria must do whatever must be done to give global capital the confidence to choose Nigeria, just as America has made this capital from Japan to come to it.
Forbes has been tracking billionaires worldwide since 1987, initially identifying 140 in that first year. It took two decades for their numbers to surpass 1,000, and by 2017, there were 2,000.
Now, eight years later, the number has reached 3,028 entrepreneurs, investors, and heirs, marking an increase of 247 from the previous year.
Not only is the number growing, but the wealth of these individuals is also higher than ever, with a total net worth of $16.1 trillion—nearly $2 trillion more than in 2024. The U.S. leads with a record 902 billionaires, followed by China (516, including Hong Kong) and India (205).
SpaceX Stunner: Elon Musk Sends a Circus to Jupiter!
In a move that has left the world astounded, Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX has successfully sent a circus to Jupiter! Musk shared this jaw-dropping news during a recent press conference, explaining that the circus, consisting of astronauts, performers, and specially trained animals, was launched as part of SpaceX’s latest mission to promote space tourism and entertainment. According to Musk, the circus will travel to Jupiter’s moon Europa, where it will perform for astronauts, scientists, and anyone lucky enough to be part of the mission. The project, he claims, is an effort to make space exploration more engaging and accessible to the public.
What to Expect: This ambitious and fun-filled venture could mark a new era in space tourism, blending entertainment with scientific exploration in a way that has never been done before.
Mark Zuckerberg he co-founder of Facebook (now Meta), is happily married to Priscilla Chan a pediatrician and philanthropist. They met at Harvard and tied the knot in 2012 Together, they have three daughters: Maxima (Max)
The elite group worth more than $100 billion includes Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates.
The 16 members have grown almost $900 billion richer this year and are jointly worth $2.8 trillion.
Walmart heirs Jim, Rob, and Alice Walton joined the club for the first time in September.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are among the handful of people on the planet with a net worth above $100 billion.
Members of this elite group have amassed 12-digit fortunes by owning huge amounts of stock in some of the world's most valuable companies. Most are founders and either current or former CEOs, and some, such as Warren Buffett, would be much richer if they didn't give billions to charity.
The 16 people in this very exclusive club have a combined wealth of about $2.8 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. They're worth more than Amazon or Google owner Alphabet, which command market values of around $2.4 trillion each.
All but one of them have grown richer this year, adding a net $890 billion to their collective fortunes. Walmart ($762 billion), Eli Lilly ($740 billion), and JPMorgan ($675 billion) are all worth significantly less than that.
Walmart heirs Jim, Rob, and Alice Walton joined the exclusive group in September, thanks to their net worths surging by upward of $43 billion this year.
Here's the list of individuals worth at least $100 billion, showing Bloomberg's estimate on December 16, how much it's changed this calendar year, and the source of their wealth.
Microsoft celebrates 50 years with major Copilot announcements and new features
Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and the company is having some fun with it. The iconic Windows 95 logo was resurfaced, there is a themed version of Solitaire available, and Bill Gates even posted the source code for the company’s first operating system, Altair Basic. Microsoft’s Copilot is even getting some love.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say that Microsoft has been showing Copilot a lot of love over the last few days. Announcements have been flying left and right, culminating in a livestream from Microsoft's global headquarters in Redmond, Washington, with even more information about current and upcoming Copilot features.
It wasn’t all procedure and rigamarole. Microsoft also had Copilot interview three Microsoft CEOs. They got roasted, and it was hilarious.
With all of the excitement, it became a little difficult to keep track of everything, so we went ahead and did just that. Below is every announcement for Microsoft Copilot that we could find, including the ones from the livestream.
If you want to watch the livestream for yourself, you can find it on Microsoft Copilot’s YouTube channel.
The Copilot app goes native
The Microsoft Copilot app on Windows has always been more of a website than an actual app. One of the announcements was that Copilot was becoming a native Windows app, integrated directly into the UI. The app was already rolled out to Windows Insiders, but Microsoft began rolling out the update on April 3 to all Windows users. Related video: Microsoft Copilot Gets New Voices Birch & Rain After OpenAI’s ChatGPT Gets Monday Voice! (Solution Tales - Video)
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Mustafa Suleiman announced on X that the number one thing
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Microsoft Copilot Gets New Voices Birch & Rain After OpenAI’s ChatGPT Gets Monday Voice!
According to PCWorld, users are already reporting a massive increase in performance, saying that it’s now even faster than the ChatGPT app on Windows. You can download the app from the Microsoft Store as long as you’re on the latest Windows update.
Copilot Search - The AI search engine
Microsoft and Bing are bringing a new fight to Google with the release of Copilot Search. It works as you would expect. Once you go to the website, you can ask Copilot a question. It’ll then scour the Internet on your behalf and return a search result.
Copilot gets better on AMD and Intel PCs
Microsoft announced a host of new AI-powered features like Live Captions, Cocreator, Restyle Image, and Image Creator in an effort Redmond calls Copilot + PC. In addition, Microsoft doubled down on its commitment to better supporting AI on PCs running AMD, Intel, and Snapdragon CPUs. Snapdragon-powered Windows devices are also getting Voice Access capabilities.
The new features and optimizations will be rolled out over the next year. Also, yes, Live Captions will work similarly to how they do on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.
New agent mode for VS Code users
This feature is rolling out to VS Code Stable soon. It’s been available for Insiders since February.
Microsoft 365 Copilot gets a Researcher and an Analyst
During the livestream, Microsoft’s AI head honcho Mustafa Suleyman talked briefly about Researcher and Analyst, two new tools for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Researcher aims to help users with “complex, multi-step research at work,” per Microsoft’s blog post. Microsoft says that Researcher can integrate data from third-party sources such as Salesforce, Confluence, and more.
Analyst takes the data you already have and analyses it. Microsoft says it’s built on OpenAI’s o9-mini reasoning model. Once it analyzes your data, it can answer questions, deliver insights, and double-check the data on your behalf. It can also turn the data into forecasts and organize it in ways that may be useful to you.
Copilot may change shape someday
Microsoft is working on giving Copilot a face, sort of. During the livestream, Suleyman brought Copilot to the stage to show off its ability to give itself an avatar that speaks with you. There were several examples shown, from a totally unique design to existing things like Spyro the Dragon or, for the nostalgic among us, Microsoft’s former helper, Clippy.
There was no word on when that feature would come out, but Suleyman stated that Microsoft was remaining curious about the possibilities of how users engage with Copilot, and ideas like avatars are where the company wants to explore what it can do.
If you enjoyed this story, be sure to follow Mashable on MSN.
Elon Musk’s Starlink Donates Internet Service to White House, Approved by Ethics Counsel
Elon Musk’s Starlink has donated its satellite internet to the White House, marking a rare donated technology upgrade for the government.
The White House Receives Starlink
White House officials said Starlink had “donated” the service to the campus and that it had been vetted by the government lawyer overseeing ethical issues, the New York Times reported.
Starlink terminals are usually placed on physical structures and receive signals from SpaceX satellites operating in low-Earth orbit.
However, the White House setup is being routed through a White House data center miles away from the campus, connected through existing fiber cables.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Starlink donation will “improve Wi-Fi connectivity on the complex.”
Some officials told the New York Times that some areas of the White House could not get cellular service.
DOGE and Starlink
Elon Musk’s unpaid advisory role at the White House, where he holds the title of “special government employee,” has come under scrutiny due to potential conflicts between his business ventures and government responsibilities.
Starlink was recently deployed within the General Services Administration, an agency central to his vision of downsizing government operations with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), according to the New York Times.
Starlink is typically used for emergency response and remote connectivity.
Former chief information officer Clare Martorana told the publication that people usually cannot donate technology to the government.
Martorana claimed that all technology would usually have to be signed off by the White House’s chief information officer and the chief information officer at the General Services Administration to ensure its proper security.
Conflict of Interest Claims
On March 2, Rolling Stone reported that officials at the Federal Aviation Administration had verbally instructed staff to start finding money for a Starlink deal.
In February, SpaceX engineer Ted Malaska reportedly instructed employees at the FFA headquarters to “immediately start work on a program to deploy thousands of the company’s Starlink satellite terminals to support the national airspace system.”
According to Bloomberg, the engineer warned FAA workers that they risked losing their jobs if they did anything to block the work.
This has prompted three top Democratic senators to demand a criminal conflict-of-interest investigation into Musk’s involvement with a potential FAA and Starlink deal.
A letter, viewed by The Guardian and signed by Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, and Chris Van Hollenaccording, calls for an investigation to determine whether Musk “has participated in any particular matter in which he has a financial interest, which would violate the criminal conflict-of-interest statute.”
“We ask that the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General and the Department of Justice investigate the scope of Mr Musk’s activities at the FAA,” the letter reads.
Elon Musk’s X Faces $1B EU Fine Over Disinformation — Apple and Meta Also Under Fire for DMA Breaches
Key Takeaways
The EU is preparing to issue its first fines under the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
X could receive the first DSA fine of over a billion dollars.
Meanwhile, more modest DMA penalties are expected to be levied against Apple and Meta.
In 2022, the EU passed the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in a two-pronged legislative attack directly targeting Big Tech.
Jeff Bezos' Amazon quietly launches plan to take down Elon Musk
Jeff Bezos is one of the best-known names in the world, thanks to the 27 years he put in to transform Amazon from an internet bookseller into the retail behemoth it is today.
Bezos has since stepped down from his CEO post and turned his attention to the stars. He now owns Blue Origin, a space technology company that's been bubbling in the news as of late after announcing that the crew of its New Shepard rocketship's 31st mission would be all-female, including high-profile people such as Katy Perry, Lauren Sánchez, Gayle King, Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, and Kerianne Flynn.
Even though Bezos has turned his attention to his newer business, that doesn't mean that Amazon doesn't have spaceflight plans of its own. The company made a recent announcement that reveals big plans that could majorly impact Elon Musk's SpaceX and, more specifically, his Starlink network.
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