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Elon Musk wants to expand Tesla diners to major cities worldwide

Elon Musk wants to expand Tesla diners to major cities worldwide

Independent5 days ago
Elon Musk has proposed expanding Tesla 's new 1950s-style Hollywood diner into a global network, including at Supercharger sites.
The diners would offer American comfort food and allow electric vehicle owners to charge their cars while dining.
A prototype 'Optimus' robot served popcorn at a pre-launch event for the Hollywood diner, which features 32 fast charging stations and LED screens.
Musk also announced plans for a second Tesla diner at Starbase, his SpaceX launch complex in South Texas.
The expansion idea comes as Tesla faces declining sales and profits, attributed to increased competition and political repercussions from Musk's association with Donald Trump.
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How nine families in Silicon Valley have total wealth of $638B
How nine families in Silicon Valley have total wealth of $638B

Daily Mail​

time8 minutes ago

  • Daily Mail​

How nine families in Silicon Valley have total wealth of $638B

Silicon Valley is the epicenter of America's tech hub, attracting many of the world's richest individuals and generating an estimated wealth of $638 billion. But now it has emerged that the eye-watering sum is shared between just nine families. And a new study conducted by San Jose State University concluded that the city's wealthiest households are only gaining wealth. Their collective net worth was up by a staggering $136 billion from 2024, according to the recent data. The annual report, titled the Silicon Valley Pain Index,is designed to measure 'personal and community distress' through data tracking structural inequalities in the region. Silicon Valley refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, including Santa Clara, San Mateo, the western edge of Alameda, and Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz. It represents a high concentration of wealth and can be an increasingly difficult place for working and middle-class families to make ends meet. Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg is among the ritzy residents, accounting for $253.5 billion of the area's wealth. Zuckerberg's net worth is more than 20 times the wealth of the bottom 446,505 households in the area. The Meta CEO purchased a five-house compound in the area, estimated to be worth a whopping $37million. He bought a $7 million mansion in 2011 before buying the neighboring residences to create the compound. The report also estimates that the region has $1.01 trillion of liquid wealth. Three companies based in Silicon Valley - Adobe, Alphabet (Google), and Meta comprise a combined net worth of $535 billion. Even outside of the nine wealthiest families, the annual income needed to afford just a median-priced house is $370,000, up 54 percent in the last six years, according to the report. The report also found that renters need to have an average annual income of $136,532 to afford an apartment at 30 percent of their take-home pay, representing the highest rents in the country. In San Mateo County, a household annual income of $156,650 for a family of four is considered 'low, ' compared to the state average of $94,500. Nearly 71 percent of homes sold in the area were priced around 1.92 million and were considered the 'median home price.' The median home price in Santa Clara alone was 2.171 million in May, which is a 3.4 percent increase from last year. The study doesn't explicitly state the nine families contributing to the mass concentration of wealth in addition to Zuckerberg, but listed Google's former CEO, Larry Page, as the second richest billionaire in the area. Sergey Brin , who co-founded Google with Page and served as the president of Alphabet, is the third-wealthiest billionaire in the region. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, an artificial intelligence company, comes in fourth. Page and Zuckerberg live in Palo Alto, while Brin and Huang have properties in Los Altos Hills. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is listed as the fifth-wealthiest billionaire in the region, with Dustin Moskovitz of Facebook as the sixth. Financier George Roberts was listed seventh, while Laurence Powell Jobs of Apple came in eighth. Venture capitalist John Doerr came in ninth, and Charles Schwab of Charles Schwab brokerage ranked tenth. Silicon Valley is home to major enterprises including Apple, Alphabet, Chevron, Meta, Visa, and Wells Fargo. The companies employ a significant portion of residents in the region, leading to the high concentration of wealth from executives and engineers reporting high incomes. The success of these companies has solidified Silicon Valley as a wealthy enclave and the tech capital of the world, but the region has a long history of advancement. The silicon chip, which is used in computerized machinery, was invented in the region, and electronics reporter Dan Hoefler coined the name 'Silicon Valley' in 1971. Since then, the area has grown wealthier and wealthier, and is now home to the world's richest billionaires.

Gods of Silicon Valley haven't done their history homework
Gods of Silicon Valley haven't done their history homework

Times

time36 minutes ago

  • Times

Gods of Silicon Valley haven't done their history homework

If you were in any doubt quite how much planet-destroying energy is required to fuel AI, Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that Meta was building a couple of multi-gigawatt data centres. One, being built in Louisiana, is going to be nearly the size of Manhattan and will draw on 5 gigawatts (GW) of energy; the other in Ohio, due to be operational next year, will be at least 1GW. To put that in context, on a quiet day, the entire UK can run on as little as 15GW. But it was not so much the scale of these data centres fuelling 'superintelligence' that caught my eye, but what Zuckerberg had chosen to call them. The first to come on stream is Prometheus. The sound you hear is Mary Beard and other classical scholars rolling their eyes. Zuckerberg has named it after the titan in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods to give to humanity, a heroic act that Meta's founder believes has powerful echoes for his own selfless giving to all of us the 'poke' on Facebook. But has he forgotten the second part of the tale? Prometheus was punished for this terrible deed by being tied to a rock and having his liver pecked out by an eagle — for eternity. The second data centre, the one the size of a city, is named after another titan: Hyperion. While he may not have come to such a sticky end, he did have sex with his sister in order to birth the sun, moon and dawn, a relationship possibly more problematic than that of the kiss cam couple caught at the Coldplay concert. Earlier this week my colleague James Marriott wrote about the utter weirdness of the past. It was, as usual, a wonderful column, but he accused Silicon Valley billionaires of being consumed with the present and suffering from 'historical incuriosity' in their belief they have discovered the solutions to humanity's eternal questions. I'm not sure that's true. If anything, Zuck and his fellow tech bros are overly obsessed with classical history. Growing up, Zuckerberg moved high schools specifically so he could indulge his passion for Latin; his sister is a respected classics scholar. He adores the Roman Empire so much so that he and his wife, Priscilla, have named their three children Maxima, Aurelia (after Marcus Aurelius) and August, after Augustus Caesar. Last year he unveiled a rather alarming 7ft green statue of his wife, explaining he was bringing 'back the Roman tradition of designing sculptures of people you love'. His man-crush on Augustus, he has explained, is because 'basically, through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace'. I'm not sure the Britons, Gauls or Germanic tribes would quite see it that way. As the Roman historian Tacitus said: 'They make a desert and call it peace.' Many pockets of the business world, but Silicon Valley in particular, revel in Roman and Greek history, showing their fondness for all things classical by giving their hedge funds or data centres grandiloquent names, an attempt to burnish their sometimes flaky ventures with a veneer of respectability. Nomura, the Japanese investment bank, back in 2021 launched Cassandra, 'an early warning model for financial crises', perhaps failing to realise that the fate of Cassandra was that she was never to be believed. In 2023, a defence company started in California developing 'solar powered birds', lightweight autonomous aircraft designed to fly up in the stratosphere. It has called itself Icarus. What?! Does it not know its namesake flew too close to the sun and plunged to a terrible, watery death? I have a theory — a sketchy one, admittedly — that the more desperately classical a business name is, the more likely it is to get into trouble. Nike and Oracle are clear exceptions to this rule, but it certainly holds true for Hermes, the parcel delivery company named after the messenger to the gods. It had such a terrible reputation for tardiness and losing customers' packages that it was compelled to rename itself Evri. Arcadia, Philip Green's clothing empire, ended up being not a rural idyll but a chain of empty urban shops. Any venture named after the titans is risky; not just, obviously, Titanic but also Titan, the ill-fated mini submarine that imploded in 2023. Clarium was the investment vehicle set up by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook, who delights so much in playing a Marvel super-villain he has signed up to have his body cryogenically frozen after he dies. Clarium derives from the Latin for 'clear' or 'famous', but the only thing famous about Clarium was that it lost 90 per cent of its value. Since then, Thiel's ventures have referenced The Lord of the Rings, notably Palantir, named after Tolkien's all-seeing stones. When you are selling your highly secretive surveillance technology to government agencies around the world, I'm not sure it's wise to name it after a device which — when it fell into the hands of Sauron — became a tool of control and manipulation. This casual approach to nomenclature, however, is typical of a generation of business leaders who have read the classics widely but shallowly, who believe history and literature can be crunched down to a post on LinkedIn or, in Zuckerberg's case, a T-shirt slogan. He has been spotted wearing one saying 'Carthago delenda est' — Carthage must be destroyed. Perhaps he needs to spend more time with his sister, who can point him to Oedipus Rex, where a caution is given to any man hubristic enough to defy the gods: a 'rough doom' will tear him down, repaying 'his pride, breakneck, ruinous pride!'

Vauxhall owner risks exclusion from Labour electric car scheme
Vauxhall owner risks exclusion from Labour electric car scheme

Telegraph

time38 minutes ago

  • Telegraph

Vauxhall owner risks exclusion from Labour electric car scheme

The owner of Vauxhall risks being excluded from Labour's electric vehicle (EV) grant scheme over its reliance on Polish factories. Stellantis, which owns brands including Peugeot, Citroën and Fiat, is among several car manufacturers scrambling to demonstrate their eco-credentials in a bid to qualify for new government subsidies. But it is understood some of the company's cars may miss out on £3,750 grants offered by ministers because they are made in Poland and risk falling foul of net zero rules. Under the scheme, vehicles put forward by manufacturers will be scored based on how green their production processes are. Those with the highest scores risk being excluded or only receiving a smaller payment of £1,500. Carmakers must also prove they are signed up to 'science-based targets' to cut their carbon emissions, in line with net zero targets. Ministers have already warned that Chinese-made cars are likely to be blocked from receiving grants for these reasons. China is the world's biggest carbon dioxide emitter, largely because of its huge consumption of coal for power generation. But car industry insiders have warned the scheme's rules may also create a headache for Western manufacturers with operations in Poland because of the European country's similarly high dependence on coal. Like China, roughly 60pc of Poland's electricity is generated by burning the fuel. Both countries generate about 7.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide per capita overall, according to the International Energy Agency. The Government's grant scheme will assess carmakers on where they assemble EVs as well as where their EV batteries are produced. A 30pc weighting will be given to the former and a 70pc weighting to the latter, according to a briefing seen by The Telegraph. It means some carmakers – including Stellantis – may be penalised for their dependence on Poland, which has attracted huge investment from the car industry and is also Europe's biggest supplier of batteries. Electric models made by Stellantis at its plant in Tychy, in southern Poland, include the Jeep Avenger, Fiat 600e, Alfa Romeo Junior Elettrica and the Abarth 600e. Until earlier this year, the company also made the Leapmotor T03 there through a joint venture. It is not clear where Stellantis sources batteries for the cars made in Tychy but in addition to using its own battery joint venture in France, the company is understood to rely on a supplier based in China as well. Several other major car companies also rely on China for supplies, as well as on an LG Energy Solutions plant based in Wrocław, Poland, which is Europe's biggest battery factory. Ginny Buckley, chief executive of an electric car advice service, said: 'Poland may be Europe's EV battery powerhouse – second only to China globally – but its coal-heavy energy mix could mean its batteries will be excluded from the new electric car grants, as under the Government's strict environmental criteria only EVs with low-carbon supply chains qualify. 'It's a move that risks punishing carmakers working to establish European supply chains and limiting consumer choice.' Uncertainty about whether certain cars will qualify for Britain's EV grant scheme has prompted complaints from car industry executives, who say it has made it harder to plan their marketing strategies for August and September. Mike Hawes, chief executive of the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders, warned this week that manufacturers had been left trying to peer through 'a fog'. Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturers such as BYD have already started slashing their UK car prices, in a defensive measure to compensate for their exclusion. Dan Caesar, chief executive of campaign group Electric Vehicles UK, said: 'Some [carmakers] know that they're unlikely to be eligible and are proactively discounting ahead of time, while those that are applying will not be able to act as immediately.' A Whitehall source acknowledged the grant scheme rules could block some cars made by Western manufacturers but cautioned that officials could not say for certain until manufacturers applied to join the scheme. 'We want as many models as possible to qualify for these grants, but the scheme has been intentionally designed to incentivise the greenest possible manufacturing,' they said. 'There will be ways that companies that manufacture in different places, and through different means, can work with us to ensure they are still included.' A Stellantis spokesman said: 'Stellantis welcomes the Government's support to increase the sales of more affordable electric vehicles. 'This is something that we have been asking for. We are making the necessary grant applications for customers of our electric vehicles and are confident that a wide range of these, manufactured in our plants in the UK and Western Europe, will be eligible.'

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