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Some of the problems Tesla is facing including first-quarter profits that are down 9 percent from last year, stressful months for shareholders and layoffs of about a tenth of its work force are the result of factors affecting the electric vehicle industry as a whole. But many of Teslas troubles are unique to Tesla and the fact that its chief executive and co-founder, Elon Musk, is unique to the auto industry. Hes a Silicon Valley creature in a Detroit ecosystem who values innovation for its own sake, even at times when he could be more focused on safety and quality. His ethos and approach to running Tesla are embodied by his pet project, the Cybertruck.

Though it fits the technical definition of a truck (it has a bed), the vehicle looks more like an origami version of an El Camino. Mr. Musk suggested its stainless steel exterior might be bulletproof; some owners say it rusts.

Its not unusual for new car and truck models to have some flaws, but the Cybertruck, which has sold only about 4,000 units, was recalled recently because the accelerator had a sticking problem, which is sort of like a parachute having a gaping-hole-in-the-canopy problem. Some owners have reportedly gotten an alert that the vehicle may suddenly lose electrical power, steering and propulsion. And you may want to watch your fingers with the frunk (front trunk) and doors; they dont have industry standard sensors that can keep doors from snipping off someones digits. (The Cybertrucks lead engineer said the steel doesnt rust, and the company is working on the frunk issue.)

Tesla delayed the Cybertrucks release a few times in order, the company said, to fix design and manufacturing flaws, but Mr. Musks primary focus often appears to be the aesthetics of science fiction and the desire to be seen as edgy (perhaps literally so in the case of the Cybertruck, which is surprisingly devoid of curves for a machine that needs to be aerodynamic). This is a man who named his child X A-12, who rebranded Twitter as X and who endlessly engages in the performative subversion of posting antagonistic memes. Conventional automakers produce daring-looking concept cars, too, but theyre not made for mass production, and unlike the retro-futuristic Cybertruck, they are crafted with an eye toward what transport will look like in the future, not what the future looked like in the past.

Musks approach to innovation is in keeping with much of Silicon Valleys. The tech industry puts a cultural premium on shipping products to market quickly and worrying about the consequences of any unfinished work, harmful features or deficiencies after consumers complain or the company gets sued. Move fast and break things is intended as a battle cry against sclerotic institutions and norms, but sometimes things get broken that should have been protected, like consumer privacy and safety. Democracy, even.

The consequences may be negligible if the product is an entertainment app, but with cars and rockets, the stakes are terrifyingly high. Tesla gives the impression that it accepts certain risks as the price of innovation.

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Opinion | The Tesla Cybertruck Embodies All of Elon Musks Flaws - The New York Times

Antisemitic Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes has been allowed back onto Twitter/X after his account was suspended following a barrage of conspiratorial and anti-Jewish posts.

Anti-racism watchdog, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which describes Fuentes as a white supremacist leader who has united disparate groups within what was until recently known as the alt right, said on Friday morning: We are concerned that white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes may be officially welcomed back on X.

Musk replied to that post, saying the ADL is still fighting yesterdays battles, to which Fuentes argued: ADL lost, Patriots won.

X boss Elon Musk said on Thursday that Fuentess account will be reinstated, provided he does not violate the law, and let him be crushed by the comments and Community Notes. It is better to have anti whatever out in the open to be rebutted than grow simmering in the darkness.

Musk added, I cannot claim to be a defender of free speech, but then permanently ban someone who hasnt violated the law, no matter how much I disagree with what they say.

This will probably cause us to lose a lot of advertisers and makes me sad, but a principle is a principle, he said on the social media platform he bought in 2022 and renamed from Twitter.

When Fuentess account was reinstated on Saturday he tweeted, I look forward to reintroducing myself in my own words!

A notorious far-right commentator, Fuentes has advocated for the genocide of perfidious Jews and said in 2023, "they need to be given the death penalty, straight up."

The antisemite praised Hitler in 2023 as really f*cking cool. He added that this guys awesome, this guys cool.

He said, All I want is revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory. During a 2022 white nationalist conference, he favourably compared President Vladimir Putin to the Nazi leader: Now, [the media is] going and saying, Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler, as if that isnt a good thing.

Along with his antisemitism, Fuentes has said rape is not a big deal,

He gained further prominence when he joined the presidential campaign of antisemitic rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and had dinner with Ye and former President Donald Trump in 2022.

Fuentes was first banned from Twitter in 2021 for repeated violationsof the platforms policies on hateful content. Reddit, Spotify, TikTok and YouTube also banned him, and Fuentes blasted a concerted effort by leftists, conservative inc gatekeepers and silicon valley censors to silence him.

He was briefly returned to the platform by Musk in January 2023. The far-right commentator flooded his feed with antisemitic posts and was suspended again from X within the day.

Hate speech watchdogs have warned against extremists on social media and have advocated for deplatforming.

Speaking out against antisemitism on a recent trip to Auschwitz, Musk has repeatedly said he is committed to absolute free speech.

Fuentes thanked the X chief, tweeting, Thank you @elonmusk for reinstating my account and upholding your commitment to free speech.

The same day Musk said he would restore Fuentes he proposed a poll vote on deporting people who remove the American flag to fly another in its place. He has also previously threatened to sue the ADL, who have since praised him for saying he would ban two phrases common to pro-Palestinian protests decolonization, and from the river to the sea.

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Elon Musk welcomes antisemite Nick Fuentes back to Twitter - The Jewish Chronicle

Elon Musk has a message for Americas business leaderseither prepare yourself for the AI revolution or start writing your corporate obituary.

At a juncture in time when Teslas CEO is cutting back on investments into new vehicle capacity, he is spending $10 billion this year alone to bulk up on AI training and inference, and position Tesla at the forefront of the industry for real-life applications outside of generative AI.

Any company not spending at this level, and doing so efficiently, cannot compete, he posted on X Sunday.

Spending on AI inference would primarily be targeted at his range of cars, a possible indication that he is preparing the ground for the next generation of his custom-designed Full Self-Driving (FSD) computer known as HW5.

The distinction between training and inference is important since close observers will know Musk is currently working on another major AI project, his humanoid robot dubbed Optimus after the 1980s cartoon vehicle that transformed into a sentient robot.

This bold and risky pivot toward AIand by implication away from his previous focus on a tenfold increase in car sales to 20 million EVs annuallydefinitively answers theperennial questionwhether Tesla is an automaker or a tech company in favor of the latter.

Any typical auto executive would have long since invested in rejuvenating one of the oldest product ranges in the auto industry. For example, Teslas EV archrival, BYD, is pumping out one new model after another across its portfolio of brands with the help of its small army of90,000 vehicle engineers.

Musk however seems to view his cars more as an iPhone on wheels, a premium device for delivering high-margin software, that can be sold at lower profit since revenue will be recouped by offering services around the vehicle.

For the moment, that approach has not worked. Tesla has found itself forced torepeatedly cut pricesto stimulate enough demandto keep his factories humming. Musk even recently resorted to slashing the price of his FSD softwareby a third.

Only 18 months ago, the idea of Tesla struggling to find customers seemed ludicrous, to borrow a favorite adjective of Musk. Yet Chinas new generation of EV rivals are in aclass of their ownwhen it comes to value for money, and his own personal brand has beentarnished.

Musks latest answer has been to pivot away from a direct match-up car for car, and instead attempt to be the first global company to carve out a stake of the future market for autonomous ride-hailing networks.

While it is true the Tesla CEO predicted year after year that his cars would be able to drive entirely on their own without supervision, only to fail each and every time, his new FSD software v12 is apotential game changer. Unlike all his previous attempts, it runs entirely on AI without resorting to hard-coded commands, and initial customer feedback has been positive.

Emboldened by the success, Musk has quickly snatched up every AI chip he can find.

In the first quarter alone, Tesla spent $1 billion more than doubling its compute capacity to the equivalent of 35,000 Nvidia H200 chips, the benchmark for AI processing. Last week Musk promised this figure would hit 85,000 by theend of the year.

Musk hopes none of his direct competitors will take him up on his advice and Tesla will be able to be the first to solve unsupervised self-driving at scale and beat out Waymo to the lucrative business of licensing out his autonomous technology to rivals.

A key step in that direction is proving v12 is just as capable abroad as it is in the United States, where its software was trained.

On Monday he managed toclinch a dealthat could see FSD finally gain approval in China. To placate demands from Beijing, Musk partnered with local internet search giant Baidu, itself a major contender in self-driving cars, to license the latters mapping and navigation software.

Musk winning FSD approval in the key China market is a watershed moment for the Tesla story in our view, wrote Wedbush senior tech analyst Dan Ives on Monday. Shares in Tesla are expected to surge over 9% when trading begins.

In the meantime, the Tesla community increasingly suspects Tesla has cancelled its$25,000 low-cost EVinall but name, and could instead launch ahatchback versionof its Model 3 sedan that can be manufactured using existing production lines. That means Musk doesnt have to splash out even more cash to build new capacity.

Investors likebillionaire Ron Baronhave hailed the decision, since Tesla is alreadly saddled with too many factories and could easily close one. Musks company can currently build 3 million cars this year across its four vehicle manufacturing plants, according to Baron, but in all likelihood will not sell more than 2 million this year.

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Elon Musk says any company that isn't spending $10 billion on AI this year like Tesla won't be able to compete - Fortune

Tesla has concluded a series of arrangements with regulators and a Chinese artificial intelligence company during a quick trip to Beijing on Sunday and Monday by Elon Musk, the carmakers chief executive, potentially clearing the way for the company to offer its most advanced self-driving software on cars in China.

Tesla had faced a couple of hurdles to offering the latest level of autonomous driving, which it calls supervised Full Self-Driving. It has needed approval from Chinese regulators, who questioned whether the company took adequate precautions to protect data. And it has needed access to extremely high-resolution maps across the country.

The timing of Mr. Musks trip was significant. He arrived in China days after he identified self-driving technology and artificial intelligence as critical to Teslas future. Tesla is not just a car company, Mr. Musk told investors last week, saying, We should be thought of as an A.I. robotics company.

Approval of the technology in China would give Mr. Musk a much-needed win after regulators in the United States issued a harsh assessment of the systems safety and performance in a report released on Friday.

Mr. Musk flew on his private jet to Beijing on Sunday morning and met almost immediately with Premier Li Qiang, Chinas No. 2 official after Xi Jinping. Mr. Li is a longtime ally of Mr. Musk who, when he served as Communist Party secretary in Shanghai, helped clear the way for Teslas construction there of what is now the companys largest car assembly plant.

The government-linked China Association of Automobile Manufacturers later announced that Tesla and five Chinese automakers had obtained approval from authorities and the association for their data security precautions on dozens of car models. The rules bar automakers in China from using software that would identify the face of anyone outside his or her vehicle, and include many other restrictions. Self-driving systems use cameras to guide vehicles.

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Elon Musk Reaches Deals in China on Self-Driving Teslas - The New York Times

Just days after Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Beijing and warned China about unfair trade practices, Elon Musk landed in the Chinese capital. The Tesla bosss meeting with Chinas No. 2 official may have paid off: Musk reportedly cleared two obstacles to introducing a fully autonomous driving system in the worlds biggest car market.

The split screen again reveals the gap between Western diplomacy and corporate imperatives. Tesla has to stay committed to China even as it faces big headwinds a conundrum that other multinationals also face, and one that Beijing is eager to exploit.

Musk is betting big on self-driving, and China is key. Tesla last week reported its worst quarter in two years as a price war hurts profit. Tesla shares have plummeted (though theyve rebounded in recent days, and are up more than 8 percent in premarket trading) amid plans for big layoffs.

Musk has tried to reassure the market by pushing ahead with a low-cost model. Fully autonomous driving is also crucial. Musk told analysts last week that if investors dont believe Tesla would solve the technological challenge that is autonomous driving, I think they should not be an investor in the company.

The carmaker faces challenges in its second biggest market. Heavily subsidized Chinese rivals are eating into sales, led by the Warren Buffett-backed BYD, which is vying with Tesla for the crown of worlds biggest E.V. maker.

Teslas are banned from many Chinese government sites because of concern about what data the American company collects. President Bidens move to declare Chinese E.V.s a security threat probably wont have made it any easier for Tesla in China.

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Why Beijing Stands to Gain from Elon Musks Visit - The New York Times