All - Stop Elon From Failing Again

September 20, 2021September 20, 2021 stopelon All, Elon's Empire, Tesla

Sorry, But Tesla’s Cool Electric Cars Can’t Compete As Long As Fracking Exists

If you were among the brave few who bought a Tesla Roadster in 2008, you purchased your government-subsidized $100,000-plus electric car when a barrel of oil cost as much as $162 in today’s dollars. “Peak oil” was an article of faith — as crude supplies ran out, ever-higher oil prices would destroy demand for the internal combustion engine and other fossil-fuel monstrosities. But now, if you’re one of the 500,000 wannabe Tesla owners who, according to CEO Elon Musk, has put down a $1,000 deposit on a $35,000 Model 3, the company’s new mass-market electric sedan, you’re probably just as familiar with a fashionable new green conceit. Now the article of faith is “peak demand” for oil, the idea that electric cars will soon make oil obsolete.

You can read the full article here.

September 19, 2021September 19, 2021 stopelon All, SpaceX

You must watch this Elon Musk video of rocket fails

Any time Elon Musk makes a mistake, it does not come cheap.

That could not be more true when it comes to SpaceX, the aeronautics company he runs. On Thursday, Musk shared a video highlighting what happens when you fail to land an orbital rocket booster.

And it is spectacular.

“Long road to reusability of Falcon 9 primary boost stage…When upper stage & fairing also reusable, costs will drop by a factor >100,” wrote Musk.

The video consists of a lowlight reel of SpaceX, featuring a lot of rockets blowing up with captions like “Rocket is fine? It’s just a scratch.”

Read the full article here

February 22, 2021 stopelon All, Elon's Empire, Tesla

Tesla Reports Losses

The electric-car maker lost $0.69 per share on an adjusted basis. This was the first earnings release since shareholders approved the electric-car maker’s acquisition of SolarCity — a $2.6 billion deal that merged the two companies CEO Elon Musk oversaw.

As Tesla continues to burn through cash and tackle competition, analysts are parsing the earnings release and call for information on how the company plans to manage its capital.

Yes, Elon Musk Is Actually Really Boring

Musk is a serious person, but he can also be something of a loose cannon, making outlandish statements designed to troll the press or simply amuse himself. In a 2015 interview with Stephen Colbert he semi-seriously endorsed dropping nuclear weapons on Mars; last year he implied on Twitter that he’s developing an Iron Man-style flying suit for the Pentagon. Most reporters assumed that the tunnel thing was another one of his jokes.

Musk wouldn’t seem to be in a particularly good ideological position to benefit from Trump’s infrastructure largesse. He’s a climate change hawk who was so closely identified with the Obama administration that Mitt Romney attacked Tesla during the 2012 debates. (Tesla had received a government-guaranteed loan in 2010.) In the next presidential election, Musk supported Hillary Clinton for president, describing Trump, in an interview with CNBC, as a man who “doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States.”

January 30, 2021 stopelon All, Elon's Empire

Elon Musk pushed for a carbon tax at meeting with Trump

Elon Musk is reportedly using his access to President Donald Trump to push for a carbon tax.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said the Trump administration should consider a carbon tax at a White House meeting he attended Monday morning, a senior official at the White House told Bloomberg. The official said the proposal got little to no support from the other executives in attendance.

Tesla declined to comment for this article.

January 23, 2021 stopelon All, Tesla

Tesla Aims to Cut Crashes (And Misses)

Musk was expanding on a report published last week by the U.S. National Highway Safety Administration that not only exonerated AutoPilot of having a role in a fatal crash in Florida last summer but added that airbag deployments indicated that the crash rate had fallen nearly 40 percent, to 0.8 per million miles driven, down from 1.3 per million miles before the original version of AutoPilot was installed.

The fatal crash had cast a pall over Tesla’s system, prompting some critics to say that the company had overpromised simply by choosing the name AutoPilot. Tesla acknowledges that AutoPilot is not—yet—a truly autonomous system but rather a package of driver-assistance features, such as emergency collision avoidance, lane keeping, and active cruise control.

On Saturday Musk warned customers who were about to have access to the newly downloaded software package that there might be a need to adjust the hardware—specifically the angle of the cameras.

SpaceX lost a quarter of a billion dollars after one of its rockets blew up

“The company lost $260 million in 2015 when one of its Falcon 9 rockets, carrying two tons of cargo to the international space station, exploded shortly after liftoff,” writers Rolfe Winkler and Andy Pasztor reported for The Journal.

The financial hit was so hard because of launch delays. SpaceX did an internal investigationand made changes to its rocket fleet and operations. It wouldn’t launch again until December 2015 — when it landed its first Falcon 9 booster on a launch pad — missing out on six of 12 planned launches.

A Falcon 9 launch costs third-parties about $62 million, which means SpaceX missed on its projected launch revenue by roughly $370 million.

January 6, 2021 stopelon All

When Energy Efficiency Rules Hurt the Public and the Environment

Over the years, its life cycle cost analysis has become absurdly complex and thus ripe for manipulation. We have seen the use of unjustifiable assumptions to obtain particular results to hide the true consumer costs of the proposed regulation.

Most importantly, the Department of Energy is ignoring the fact that natural gas is the most energy efficient and environmentally sound manner for the vast majority of Americans to heat their homes.

Technological advances are making natural gas residential furnaces more efficient, and the public is snapping them up when they save money. This is proof that the market is working.

The Elon Musk Myth Looks To Contaminate Texas

One of Musk’s fake companies getting billions in real government money is Tesla Motors. Tesla produces massively-subsidized electric cars which – even with the federal coin – cost way too much and aren’t purchased by anyone outside of uber-wealthy preening elites:

“(Tesla’s) first model, the Roadster, costing over $100,000 per vehicle, sold only 2,400 actual cars in 31 countries from 2006 until production ended in 2012, despite extensive federal subsidies for electric car purchases. Its new model, a full-size luxury sedan named the Model S, is doing better, costing about half as much as the Roadster. Tesla sold about 25,000 of these worldwide in 2013….The products are heavily subsidized, by both federal and state tax credits of up to $20,000+ to consumers, and zero emissions credits totaling tens of millions of dollars to the company.”

So much government coin – for so little in sales. And now the Musk contagion is looking to infest Texas. Musk wants to insert his Tesla Faux-Motors into the Lone Star State’s retail dealership market. And is demanding even more cronyism to do it.