Slippage

For somebody who's supposed to be one of the smart guys, Elon Musk has been behaving very stupidly.

First off - for the record:

• He didn't start payPal
• He didn't start Tesla
• He didn't start SpaceX

He's been pretty astute at spotting promising companies &/or concepts and exploiting their potential - I'll absolutely give him that much - but he's no Leo da Vinci.

Elmo is a rich legacy puke, born into wealth, who loves the idea that he's gifted and capable beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. He's not, and it seems we're seeing the latest example of the My Pillow Effect, where some self-styled titan of industry - who's actually just gotten crazy stupid lucky - starts thinking he's bulletproof and decides his superior intellect is needed to "straighten out the government", only to be shown he's not the super genius he desperately needs us to think he he is.

Would-be Tesla buyers snub company as Musk's reputation dips

SAN FRANCISCO/LONDON, April 1 (Reuters) - The ranks of would-be Tesla buyers in the United States are shrinking, according to a survey by market intelligence firm Caliber, which attributed the drop in part to CEO Elon Musk's polarizing persona.

While Tesla continued to post strong sales growth last year, helped by aggressive price cuts, the electric-vehicle maker is expected to report weak quarterly sales, opens new tab as early as Tuesday.

Caliber's "consideration score" for Tesla, provided exclusively to Reuters, fell to 31% in February, less than half its high of 70% in November 2021 when it started tracking consumer interest in the brand.

Tesla's consideration score fell 8 percentage points from January alone even as Caliber's scores for Mercedes (MBGn.DE), opens new tab, BMW (BMWG.DE), opens new tab and Audi, which produce gas as well as EV models, inched up during that same period, reaching 44-47%.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. Musk in the past has blamed high-interest rates for curbing consumer demand for big ticket items like cars.

Caliber cited strong associations between Tesla's reputation and that of Musk for the scores.
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"It's very likely that Musk himself is contributing to the reputational downfall," Caliber CEO Shahar Silbershatz told Reuters, saying his company's survey shows 83% of Americans connect Musk with Tesla.

Reuters spoke to five marketing, polling and car experts who said controversies surrounding Musk's increasingly right-wing politics and public statements are weighing on Tesla's brand and demand.

"It is hard enough to win sales without getting into politics," said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

Economic fears, the lack of affordable new models and rising competition from cheaper rivals like China's BYD have also been cited by Wall Street analysts as putting pressure on Tesla.
Overall electric vehicle sales in the U.S. are forecast to increase 15% in the first quarter of this year, according to estimates by researcher Cox Automotive. Tesla sales are projected to increase by 3%.

"The EV slowdown is shaping up to be a Tesla slowdown," Cox analyst Stephanie Valdez Streaty said during a conference call Thursday.

New car registrations for Teslas in California- their biggest market in the U.S. - posted their first drop in over three years in the fourth quarter of 2023 even as EV sales rose overall.
At least five analysts cut Tesla's target price last month, saying the automaker could post disappointing first-quarter delivery results. Tesla shares are down nearly 30% year to date.
Musk's outsized personality benefited Tesla as he promoted tackling climate change by reimagining cars as stylish, electric computers on wheels that could beat gasoline guzzlers in looks, performance and handling.

Tesla achieved breakneck annual sales growth for more than a decade.

COURTED CONTROVERSY

In recent years, the billionaire courted controversy with comments and actions including his embrace of the Republican party and endorsement of anti-semitic comments on X. Musk has denied being anti-semitic.

When asked by an investor during a January 2023 conference call if his political comments were hurting Tesla's brand and sales, Musk said he was "reasonably popular," referring to his then 127 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter.

"Whether you hate me, like me or are indifferent, do you want the best car, or do you not want the best car?" Musk said at another event in November.

Brand valuation consultancy Brand Finance found Tesla's reputation fell in 2023, in the United States, the Netherlands, France, United Kingdom, and Australia. Tesla's reputation did not suffer in China, where access to news on the company and its CEO may have been limited, and Germany.

In the U.S., a survey by consumer analytics firm CivicScience, shown exclusively to Reuters found that 42% of respondents had an unfavorable view of Musk in February, up from 34% in April 2022 when Musk disclosed his stake in Twitter.

"A modest but growing number of EV shoppers are increasingly put off by Elon Musk's behavior and politics and are now finding viable alternatives to Tesla in the marketplace," Ed Kim, president of California-based consultancy AutoPacific said.

That group includes Jonny Page, a London-based consultant who works with climate-focused startups and will purchase an EV this summer. It will not be a Tesla.

Page, 36, said his decision is partly because of concerns over Tesla safety but mostly about Musk's "unhinged" behavior. "I don't want to put a single penny in that man's pockets," Page said.

"I CAN'T GO BACK TO GAS"

Tesla's reputation is still sterling with many.

Market researcher S&P Mobility shows Tesla has the highest loyalty among major car brands, with 68% of owners choosing another Tesla when they bought a new car last year.

Christian Cook, a Tesla Model 3 owner in Texas who identified as leaning right, said Musk's actions made no difference and that he was "becoming numb to the shenanigans."

Kat Beyer, a climate activist in Wisconsin, said she wanted to avoid Tesla because of Musk's support for Republicans, but wound up buying a Model Y last year because of a lack of EVs with reliable charging infrastructure.

"It's hard to drive the car associated with him," Beyer said. "But I can't go back to gas."

Yay Elmo 🤨

Twixter has lost a shit load of value since Elmo bought it.

If you remember, he paid $44B for a company valued at about $20B, and since then, the valuation has dropped by as much as $15B according to some, while others are (IMO) a little over-anxious to boost the company, thinking (again, IMO) it might be ripe for a big comeback.

Elon Musk's X is gaining value, Fidelity says

NOTE: Fidelity helped put Elmo's financing together so he could buy the thing last fall.

Gee, I wonder if that has anything to do with their decision to pimp it up a little.

But the main problem being reported is that ad revenues continue to lag badly - because companies want to avoid the potential for brand damage due to their names appearing next to some seriously slimy posts on a platform becoming quite well-known for slime, and dis-infobots, and racism, and Nazis, and hosts of other monsters of the id.

Case in point:

We can't continue with an overarching policy of Profit Over Principle, and expect a nice happy ending. It's never worked out like that. Ever.

• People, then Policy
• Labor, then Capital
• Principle, then Profit

Call it a Business School version of Popper's Paradox: Allowing an anything-goes fully-laissez-faire management philosophy because "Profit Is King" can lead to the extinction of profit.

I think maybe Elmo is illustrating that for us now.

The Worst Of Them

If you're making your state more Business Friendly, but more People Hostile - you might be a Republican.

The bottom 10

Beau Of The Fifth Column

The Banks

It should be obvious that an economy dependent on Consumer Spending can't be sustained for long if too many people are unable to spend the money needed to keep that economy going.

And when enough people are left with nothing more to lose, there will be a reckoning.

Despite tenuous times for the banking industry, some of the largest U.S. lenders reported banner first-quarter earnings on Friday that easily exceeded investor expectations.

JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, reported revenue that rose virtually across the board, helping it pull in $12.6 billion in profit, a 52 percent jump from the same quarter a year earlier. That’s a reflection both that higher interest rates, which are generally considered good news for the industry, and the fallout from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank last month appear to have strengthened the biggest banks.

JPMorgan’s customer deposits rose slightly in the first quarter from the previous quarter, compared with some smaller competitors who have seen depositors pull cash en masse.

“The banking situation is distinct from 2008 as it has involved far fewer financial players and fewer issues that need to be resolved, but financial conditions will likely tighten as lenders become more conservative, and we do not know if this will slow consumer spending,” Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan chief executive who has taken a leading role in bailing out smaller lenders, said in a statement.

Wells Fargo also surpassed analysts’ expectations, reporting a profit of nearly $5 billion in the first quarter, a 32 percent increase from a year ago. Rising interest rates lifted the bank’s earnings as its loan portfolio grew, led by gains in personal lending and higher credit-card balances.

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Meanwhile, almost 12% of us - 38 million Americans - are living in poverty.

And it might be even worse than that.

• There are 37.9 million Americans living in poverty, accounting for 11.6% of the total population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.The number reported by the Census Bureau is based on the official poverty measure, which has remained virtually unchanged since the mid-1960s
• As a response, the Census Bureau developed the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011 as an improvement over the existing measure.
• But some experts say that even the SPM falls short of accurately measuring poverty in the U.S.

As of January 2021, 37.9 million Americans lived in poverty, accounting for 11.6% of the total population, according to the latest report from the United States Census Bureau. That’s despite the fact that America ranks first as the richest nation in the world in terms of GDP.

“Poverty and economic insecurity are widely common, very commonly experienced,” said Shailly Gupta Barnes, policy director at the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice. “They are as much a part of the American story as successes to the American dream.”

But the number reported by the Census Bureau is based on the official poverty measure, which has remained virtually unchanged since the mid-1960s. It’s calculated by comparing pretax income against a threshold set at three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963.

“The researcher whose work became the basis of that measure never intended it to be used in the way that it currently is,” said Barnes.

Grace Bonilla, president of United Way of New York City, said the official poverty measure doesn’t take very obvious indicators into consideration. To start, it looks at pretax income instead of actual take-home pay. It also doesn’t consider factors such as family composition or the cost of child care.

“It has not kept up with the way life has changed for most Americans,” said Bonilla.

As a response, the Census Bureau developed the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011 as an improvement over the existing measure. It incorporates into the measurement both the cost of basic needs like food, clothing and utilities, but also government transfers and programs. It also takes into account geographical differences and household size. The SPM rate for 2021 sat at 7.8%, compared with the official poverty measure rate of 11.6%, mainly due to government relief during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But some experts say that even the SPM falls short.

“It’s a step in the right direction but it falls so short of actually giving us an accurate count of poverty in the United States,” said Bonilla. “If you have a universal brush for the whole country, you’re going to miss a number of people that are either at risk of falling into poverty or are already technically living in poverty but are not counted by the measure.”

The Census Bureau told CNBC that both the official poverty measure and the supplemental poverty measure provide a consistent data of poverty measurement and that the Bureau continually strives to innovate and improve the design and measurement of their well-being statistics.

Gearing Up

We can expect the usual chorus of "conservative" voices telling us not to conserve anything, and what the world really needs is real Americans who eat whatever they want to eat, and shit wherever they want to shit.

I guess we can only hope we raised our kids right - that they're beginning to see that nothing good happens if good people don't step up, get involved in whatever big or small way, stay involved, and insist on better.

E.P.A. Lays Out Rules to Turbocharge Sales of Electric Cars and Trucks

The Biden administration is proposing rules to ensure that two-thirds of new cars and a quarter of new heavy trucks sold in the U.S. by 2032 are all-electric.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Wednesday will propose the nation’s most ambitious climate regulations to date, two plans designed to ensure two-thirds of new passenger cars and a quarter of new heavy trucks sold in the United States are all-electric by 2032.

If the two rules are enacted as proposed, they would put the world’s largest economy on track to slash its planet-warming emissions at the pace that scientists say is required of all nations in order to avert the most devastating impacts of climate change.

The new rules would require nothing short of a revolution in the U.S. auto industry. Last year, all-electric vehicles were just 5.8 percent of new car sales in the United States and fewer than 2 percent of new heavy trucks sold.

“By proposing the most ambitious pollution standards ever for cars and trucks, we are delivering on the Biden-Harris administration’s promise to protect people and the planet, securing critical reductions in dangerous air and climate pollution and ensuring significant economic benefits like lower fuel and maintenance costs for families,” the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Michael S. Regan, said in a statement.

The E.P.A. cannot mandate that carmakers sell a certain number of electric vehicles. But under the Clean Air Act, the agency can limit the pollution generated by the total number of cars each manufacturer sells. And the agency can set that limit so tightly that the only way manufacturers can comply is to sell a certain percentage of zero emissions vehicles.

The proposed tailpipe pollution limits for cars, first reported by The New York Times on Saturday, are designed to ensure that 67 percent of sales of new light-duty passenger vehicles, from sedans to pickup trucks, will be all-electric by 2032. Additionally, 46 percent of sales of new medium-duty trucks, such as delivery vans, will be all-electric or of some other form of zero-emissions technology by the same year, according to the plan.

The E.P.A. also proposed a companion rule governing heavy-duty vehicles, designed so that half of new buses and 25 percent of new heavy trucks sold would be all-electric by 2032.

Combined, the two rules would eliminate the equivalent of carbon dioxide emissions generated over two years by all sectors of the economy in the United States, the second biggest polluting country on the planet after China.

But some autoworkers and manufacturers fear that the transition to all-electric vehicles envisioned by the Biden administration goes too far, too fast and could result in job losses and lower profits.

Major automakers have for the most part invested heavily in electrification. Nonetheless, several are apprehensive about customer demand for the pricier all-electric models; the supply of batteries; and the speed with which a national network of charging stations can be created.

Automakers and union workers have been expressing those fears directly to the president since 2021, when Mr. Biden announced an executive order directing government policies to ensure that 50 percent of all new passenger vehicle sales be all-electric by 2030.

As word began to spread last week that his new regulations were designed to go still further, some automakers pushed back.

John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents large U.S. and foreign automakers, questioned how the E.P.A. could justify “exceeding the carefully considered and data-driven goal announced by the administration in the executive order.”

“Yes, America’s transition to an electric and low-carbon transportation future is well underway,” Mr. Bozzella said in a statement. “E.V. and battery manufacturing is ramping up across the country because automakers have self-financed billions to expand vehicle electrification. It’s also true that E.P.A.’s proposed emissions plan is aggressive by any measure.”

“Remember this: A lot has to go right for this massive — and unprecedented — change in our automotive market and industrial base to succeed,” Mr. Bozzella said.

Engineers and scientists at the E.P.A. have been working over the past year to determine how much electric vehicle technology is likely to advance in the next decade in order to set the strongest, achievable tailpipe emissions limits.

Tensions between the auto industry and the Biden administration played out over the past week, as the administration was forced to rearrange its rollout of the proposal, according to three people familiar with what happened.

Officials had originally planned for Mr. Regan to announce the policies in Detroit, surrounded by American-made all-electric vehicles.

But as auto executives and the United Auto Workers learned the details of the proposed regulations, some grew uneasy about publicly supporting it, according to the people familiar with their thinking. The setting was moved from Detroit to the E.P.A. headquarters in Washington, where Mr. Regan is scheduled to make remarks Wednesday at 11 a.m.

In an interview, Mr. Regan acknowledged that some auto executives and leaders of the United Auto Workers had expressed anxiety over the proposals — adding that they could be amended to assuage those fears.

“We’re very mindful that this is a proposal, and we want to give as much flexibility possible,” he said. The agency will accept public comments on the proposed rules before they are finalized next year. The rules would take effect starting with model year 2027.

Environmentalists praised Mr. Biden for delivering on a promise he made during his first days in office, when he called climate change a “moral imperative, an economic imperative” that would be central to all his decision-making.

A 2021 report by the International Energy Agency found that nations would have to stop sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035 to keep average global temperatures from increasing 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Beyond that point, scientists say, the effects of catastrophic heat waves, flooding, drought, crop failures and species extinction would become significantly harder for humanity to handle. The planet has already warmed by an average of about 1.1 degrees Celsius.

Mr. Biden has pledged to cut the country’s emissions in half by 2030 and to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2050. He took a major step toward meeting that target last summer, when he signed the Inflation Reduction Act. It includes $370 billion in spending over the next decade to fight climate change, including tax incentives up to $7,500 for the purchase of American-made electric vehicles.

That law is projected to help the United States cut its emissions by 40 percent by 2030 — not quite enough to meet Mr. Biden’s pledge. Experts said the new E.P.A. regulations, if enacted as proposed, are needed to reach Mr. Biden’s goal.

“The EPA standards are a huge step forward in addressing the largest source of climate pollution: transportation,” said Luke Tonachel, senior director of the clean vehicles and buildings program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group.

A sharp rise in electric vehicles in the United States could mean wider availability and sales of electric vehicles outside its borders, Mr. Tonachel said. “This can be a world-leading standard that puts the world on a much-needed pathway for curbing global pollution from transportation,” he said.

Laurence Tubiana, the CEO of the European Climate Foundation who helped broker the 2015 Paris climate accord, welcomed the E.P.A.’s action.

“This is confirmation to the world of the seriousness of the engagement of Joe Biden on climate change and keeps the U.S. as a front-runner on climate,” Ms. Tubiana said. “It’s resonating very well in Europe and the world.”

Still, others see the proposed regulations as government overreach and say they will surely face legal challenges.

“They are using this established longstanding statute for an entirely new purpose, to force an entirely new goal — the transformation of the industry to electric vehicles,” said Steven G. Bradbury, who served as the chief legal counsel for the Transportation Department during the Trump administration. “This is clearly driven by the president’s directive to achieve these results. I don’t think you can do this. Congress never contemplated the use of statutes in this way.”

Key Phrase:

"I don't think you can do this"

Translated:

• We don't want to do this because it threatens the status quo that makes us a very comfortable living, and keeps a few of us in power at the expense of everybody else
• We'll burn this joint to the ground fighting to keep from having to make the changes necessary to ensure a planet suitable for human habitation

Traditional conservative doctrine

has transformed the GOP

into a full-blown death cult.

EV Is Booming

1. Demand for electric vehicles is way out ahead of Supply
2. In spite of propaganda to the contrary, there're plenty of the mineral resources needed to create batteries, etc
3. The Inflation Reduction Act requires domestic production of some of the EV stuff
4. Wyoming is behaving about as stupidly as we'd expect a Dirty Fuels plutocracy to behave (The Hill - Wyoming Proposes Ban On EVs By 2035)

Electric Vehicles Keep Defying Almost Everyone’s Predictions

You’re reading the David Wallace-Wells newsletter, for Times subscribers only. The best-selling science writer and essayist explores climate change, technology, the future of the planet and how we live on it. Get it in your inbox.
It is striking that in the same year that Tesla’s stock price dropped by about two-thirds, destroying more than $700 billion in market value, the global market for electric vehicles — which for so long the company seemed almost to embody — actually boomed.

Boom may not even adequately communicate what happened. Around the world, E.V. sales were projected to have grown 60 percent in 2022, according to a BloombergNEF report prepared ahead of the 2022 U.N. climate conference COP27, bringing total sales over 10 million. There are now almost 30 million electric vehicles on the road in total, up from just 10 million at the end of 2020. E.V. market share has also tripled since 2020.

The pandemic years can feel a bit like a vacuum, but there are almost three times as many E.V.s on the world’s roads now as there were when Covid vaccines were first approved, and what looked not that long ago like a climate pipe dream is now undeniably underway: a genuine transition away from fossil-fueled transportation. This week, the Biden administration released a blueprint toward a net zero transportation sector by 2050. It’s an ambitious goal, especially for such a car-intoxicated culture as ours. But it’s also one that, thanks to trends elsewhere in the world, is beginning to seem more and more plausible, at least on the E.V. front.

In Norway, electric vehicles now represent four out of every five new cars sold; the figure was just one in five as recently as 2016. In Germany, more than 55 percent of new cars registered in December were electric or hybrid. In China, where more electric vehicles are sold than everywhere else in the world combined, the rise is perhaps even more dramatic: from 3.5 percent of the market at the beginning of 2020 to 20.3 percent at the beginning of 2022. And growing, of course: Nearly twice as many electric vehicles were sold last year in China as in the year before. The country also exported $3.2 billion worth of E.V.s last November alone, more than double the exports of the previous November. Its largest single manufacturer, BYD, has surpassed Tesla for global market share — so perhaps it should not be so surprising that Tesla’s stock is dimming while the global outlook is so sunny.

This is not just eye-popping growth; it is also dramatically faster than most analysts were projecting just a few years ago. In 2020, the International Energy Agency projected that the global share of electric vehicle sales would not top 10 percent before 2030. It appears we’ve already crossed that bar eight years early, and BloombergNEF now projects that the market share of E.V.s will approach 40 percent by the end of the decade. (The I.E.A. is less bullish but has still roughly doubled its 2030 projection in just two years.) The underlying production capacity is perhaps even more encouraging. In the United States, investments in battery manufacturing reached a record $73 billion last year — three times as much as the previous record, set the year before. Globally, battery manufacturing capacity grew almost 40 percent last year, and is projected to grow fivefold by just 2025. By that year, lithium mining is expected to be triple what it was in 2021.

We’ve seen this phenomenon before, with many other areas of the green transition experiencing similarly shocking exponential or quasi-exponential growth: renewable energy investments in the United States quadrupling in a decade, global investments in clean tech growing more than 30-fold over the same period, a solar supply chain already big enough to facilitate a total transition. It’s enough to make many optimistic observers giddy with anticipation of what’s to come.

What is to come?

It is tempting to believe that designing a future is as simple as drawing the right trajectory on a whiteboard. But as with everything else when it comes to climate, the challenge is bigger than that — indeed, the fact that trend lines are beginning to point in the right direction can be a kind of false comfort, since technologies like these don’t just descend from the cloud onto the world’s phones. And the scientist Vaclav Smil’s gloomy comparisons to previous energy transitions aside, the world hasn’t undertaken a breakneck allover revolution like this ever before in its history. Do the familiar, S-shaped learning curves of technological adaptation mean that it should be very easy, and indeed remunerative, for the world to get on track to limit warming below two degrees Celsius, or even 1.5 degrees, as a much talked about paper produced by Oxford’s Institute for New Economic Thinking has suggested? Or, as the scholar Jessica Jewell has argued in the journal Nature Energy and elsewhere, do the limitations of practical obstacles and political economy mean that, even assuming those encouraging learning curves, much more would have to be done to ensure technological adoption at that speed?

Here the E.V. revolution is an illuminating case study. To stabilize global temperatures, we have to get emissions basically all the way down to zero, not just reduce them — an interesting November paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests it might be better to aim for “approximately” net zero emissions, since it may be the case that global temperatures could stabilize even if emissions aren’t entirely eliminated. To do that, we need to stop burning fossil fuels in cars, not just supplement the existing fleet with slightly more green alternatives. A rapid growth in market share isn’t itself sufficient, in other words, because — like carbon itself, which hangs in the air for centuries at least — dirty cars stay on the road for a very long time, emitting all the while.

Economists call this a problem of stocks rather than flows. In this case, while the “flows” are indeed impressive, the “stock” of E.V.s on the road is probably only 2 percent of the global fleet, which still isn’t close to 100 percent at all.

Rapid growth also opens up a new landscape of challenges. We used to worry whether there would be sufficient demand for electric vehicles, particularly given their cost and range limitations. But demand already outstrips supply, which, in addition to driving up the cost of E.V.s and creating manufacturing and delivery delays, has given rise to anxiety over the next roadblock: the empire of mineral extraction, refinement and production that has to be built to meet that. That obstacle may be in some ways smaller than it appears, as Hannah Ritchie, among others, has emphasized: We are not yet mining enough lithium to meet demand, but it’s not exactly a scarce resource, and even Ritchie’s relatively conservative estimates suggest there is more than enough for a battery vehicle revolution.

Those taking a broader view of the ecological costs of this project, like the activist Thea Riofrancos, worry over a different set of unresolved questions: Is it possible to design a system for extracting and producing these materials in anything close to a responsible way? One possible approach, flagged by the Volts newsletter writer David Roberts, among others: actually recycling batteries, treating lithium as a “renewable” rather than endlessly extracted resource.

Behind that challenge lies another: Will production of electric vehicles be interrupted by potential deglobalization in green industries or by America’s Inflation Reduction Act, which requires that a portion of E.V. batteries’ parts be sourced or manufactured domestically or by certain trading partners to qualify for tax credits? At the moment, China produces about 75 percent of all E.V. battery cells, manufactures roughly the same share of those cell components and does more refining of many of the biggest raw inputs than the rest of the world combined.

There are also problems of what the civil engineer Emily Grubert has memorably called the “mid-transition”: “this period in between kind of a stable fossil fuel dominated energy system and a future stable, clean energy dominated system.” It is easy enough to imagine the other side of any transition, particularly when so many forces are moving in the right direction. But you have to get to that other side, and that is not just a matter of building out the new system but also, crucially, of maintaining some of the old one too, and in proper balance.

If E.V.s and gas cars share the roads for a decade or two, how do you ensure or design the right mix of charging stations and gas pumps, and how do you map their locations? At what point do gas stations become unprofitable, and what happens then? These may seem like relatively technical questions, but the problems of the mid-transition extend to the matter of employment structures and pensions, the need for skilled labor to manage site cleanup and safety and the decline of funding from gas taxes for maintenance and infrastructure as gas consumption declines (if not all that rapidly to zero).

The vast majority of electric vehicles are now sold in the world’s richer economies, and mid-transition challenges like building out new charging infrastructure are potentially much larger in lower income countries. But there, at least for now, the electric vehicle revolution is taking a very different shape — often with two or three wheels rather than four. Globally, there are 10 times as many electric scooters, mopeds and motorcycles on the road as true electric cars, accounting already for almost half of all sales of those vehicles and responsible already for eliminating more carbon emissions than all the world’s four-wheel E.V.s. It’s been something of a secret revolution here, too: In 2020, Americans bought twice as many e-bikes as they did E.V.s. As with everything else on climate, it’s not one story unfolding but many, and all at once.

Motor Trend - Project X

And the gearheads and gadget freaks shall lead them to the promised land.

Today's Calming Influence

Scott Galloway, NYU Sterns School of Business:

As societies become wealthier and more educated, the reliance on a super being, and church attendance goes down, but they still look for idols.

Into that void have stepped technology leaders because technology is the closest thing we have to magic.

Our new Jesus was Steve Jobs, and now Elon Musk has taken on that mantle. And, every ridiculously mean, non-sensical, irrational move he makes is somehow seen as chess, not checkers - we're just not privy to his genius yet.

Christiane Amanpour

Tweeter Teeters

I don't know if Elon Musk is a captain of industry or just another silver-spoon schmuck.

I really don't know, but at this point, I have to say he looks a whole lot like a guy who's convinced himself he's a genius, refusing to see that everybody else in his life are the ones doing all the work - all the things he's showing us pretty clearly he isn't able to do.

He tried to buy Twitter, and then he tried to bail on it, but they threatened a massive lawsuit, so he went through with it, paying 2 or 3 or 4 times what the company's worth.

Twitter has been showing some pretty good signs that it's getting its shit together, having cut it's losses by billions over the last couple of years, but it's still losing money - lots of money.

Is Twitter Profitable?

As of 2022, Twitter is not profitable. In fact, in 2021, on $5 billion in revenues, Twitter generated over $220 million in net losses.

So maybe Elon did the smart thing, buying a company on the rise. But so far, he's a fucking disaster. Twitter stock is floating along on the breeze, and Tesla is down $80/share in the last 3 months.

The rich man asked me, "You're smart, why ain't you rich?"

And I asked him back, "You're rich, why ain't you smart?" 

Twitter may have lost more than a million users since Elon Musk took over

Estimates from Bot Sentinel suggest that more than 875,000 users deactivated their accounts between October 27 and November 1, while half a million more were suspended.

In the days after Elon Musk’s October 27 purchase of Twitter was confirmed by his tweet saying “the bird is freed,” many Twitter users have threatened to leave, unhappy about the new ownership.

People always threaten to leave Twitter and then often fail to follow through—but new data suggests that a significant number of users really are abandoning the platform this time.


The firm Bot Sentinel, which tracks inauthentic behavior on Twitter by analyzing more than 3.1 million accounts and their activity daily, believes that around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and a further 497,000 were suspended between October 27 and November 1. That’s more than double the usual number.

“We have observed an uptick in people deactivating their accounts and also Twitter suspending accounts,” says Christopher Bouzy, Bot Sentinel’s founder.

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(pay wall)

Elon Musk, Under Financial Pressure, Pushes to Make Money From Twitter

The billionaire and his advisers have discussed adding paid direct messages, fees to watch videos and other features to the service.

Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, is throwing everything against the wall to make more money at the social media company.

Since closing his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter last week, Mr. Musk and his advisers have discussed adding paid direct messages — which would let users send private messages to high-profile users — to the service, according to two people with knowledge of the matter and internal documents viewed by The New York Times.

They have also talked about adding “paywalled” videos, which would mean that certain videos could not be viewed unless users paid a fee, these people said. And they have discussed reviving Vine, a onetime short-form video platform, which could attract a younger audience coveted by advertisers.

This week, Mr. Musk moved to make money from Twitter’s “blue check” verification program, a method of making sure users are who they say they are. The billionaire announced that the program, which is currently free, will be rolled into the “Twitter Blue” subscription service, which will offer enhanced features for a monthly $8 fee.

The frenzy of product development underlines the pressure that Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, is under to deliver immediate results — and returns — on the technology industry’s largest-ever leveraged buyout. To finance his Twitter deal, he loaded the company with $13 billion in debt, putting it on the hook to pay more than $1 billion annually in interest alone.

But last year Twitter had less than $1 billion in cash flow, partly because of a one-time charge, meaning it generated less money than what it now owes its lenders annually. The company was also unprofitable for eight of the last 10 years. So, to make ends meet, Mr. Musk must boost Twitter’s revenue or cut costs — or do both.

Mr. Musk has already ordered job cuts across Twitter. On Wednesday, a Twitter employee posted a link to a “severance calculations” document in a company Slack channel, noting that there was a “master list” that included the number 3,738, according to a copy of the message seen by The Times.

A blockbuster deal. In April, Elon Musk made an unsolicited bid worth $44 billion for the social media platform, saying he wanted to turn Twitter into a private company and allow people to speak more freely on the service. Here’s how the monthslong battle that followed played out:

The response. Twitter’s board countered Mr. Musk’s offer with a defense mechanism known as a “poison pill.” This well-worn corporate tactic makes a company less palatable to a potential acquirer by making it more expensive to buy shares above a certain threshold.

Securing financing. Though his original offer had scant details and was received skeptically by Wall Street, Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, moved swiftly to secure commitments to finance his bid, putting pressure on Twitter’s board to take his advances seriously.

Striking a deal. With the financing in place, Twitter’s board met with Mr. Musk in April to discuss his offer. The two sides soon reached a deal, with the company agreeing to sell itself for $54.20 a share — roughly $44 billion in total.

Tensions arise. Not long after Mr. Musk and Twitter reached their agreement, problems began. Mr. Musk threatened to pull out of the deal if Twitter did not provide more information on how it calculates the number of fake accounts. In June, the company announced that it planned to give him access to a large swath of its data.

Musk backs out. In July, Mr. Musk announced that he was terminating the deal, citing the continuing disagreement over the number of spam accounts. Twitter then sued the billionaire to force him to go through with the deal. But Mr. Musk fired back in a legal filing, arguing that the company concealed the true number of fake accounts on its platform, accusing Twitter of fraud.

Preparing for trial. Lawyers for both sides have issued more than 100 subpoenas ahead of a trial that was expected to start in October, mostly targeting tech VIPs. In September, a judge ruled that Mr. Musk could amend his suit to include accusations from a former Twitter security chief who claimed that the company misled the public about its security practices.

A surprise move. On Oct. 4, Mr. Musk proposed a deal to acquire Twitter for $44 billion, the price he agreed to pay for the company in April. On Oct. 27, the purchase was completed. Mr. Musk quickly began cleaning house, with at least four top Twitter executives — including the chief executive and chief financial officer — getting fired.

If that figure refers to people who could be laid off, and if the number holds, it will amount to about 50 percent of Twitter’s 7,500-person work force. Interns were excluded from the list, according to the copy of the message. Some of Mr. Musk’s advisers held a conference call on Wednesday evening to try to finalize the number of cuts, according to internal memos and calendar entries viewed by The Times.

Mr. Musk is also trying to minimize Twitter’s infrastructure costs. In meetings with engineers, his advisers have proposed saving from $1 million to $3 million in infrastructure costs a day, said three people familiar with the talks. Lieutenants are also looking to make deep cuts to Twitter’s “Redbird” organization, which consists of platform and infrastructure teams, the people said.

Twitter faces difficulties earning advertising revenue under Mr. Musk, who has said he may loosen content rules on the service. On Thursday, General Mills and Audi’s U.S. division said they had paused advertising on Twitter because of concerns about content moderation on the platform.

Mr. Musk and representatives for Twitter did not respond to requests for comment. Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Axios and Jane Wong, an independent researcher, reported some details of the company’s plans earlier.

In an onstage interview at the TED Conference in April, Mr. Musk said owning Twitter “is not a way to make money” and added, “I don’t care about the economics at all.”

Since then, however, the global economy has tipped toward recession, inflation and interest rates have soared and the digital advertising market — which Twitter relies on for revenue — has pulled back. Mr. Musk’s own fortune is tied up largely in shares of his electric automaker, Tesla, whose stock has plummeted.

In an attempt to spin up new lines of business at Twitter, over the past week Mr. Musk and his advisers have dispatched product teams to brainstorm any and all ideas that could quickly bring in money, according to 10 current and former employees and internal documents discussing the matter. Three people who have met with Mr. Musk or his lieutenants said the focus was largely on how to increase revenue.

One product team is working on paid direct messaging, which appears to be focused on Very Important Tweeters, or V.I.T.s, on the network, said the two people with knowledge of the work and according to the internal documents. According to the product mock-ups seen by The Times, users would be able to send private messages to their favorite celebrities for a nominal fee. A fee structure, which had not been set in stone, could be as little as a few dollars per direct message.

In early prototypes, a Twitter user was depicted asking the musician Post Malone about his favorite records. Such paid messages could appear in a special area of the direct message inbox, and the celebrities would have to choose to receive them. Twitter would most likely take a cut of the fees, according to the documents.

Understand Elon Musk’s Twitter TakeoverA Familiar Playbook: In his first days at Twitter, Elon Musk has been emulating some of the actions of Mark Zuckerberg, who leads Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

The plans for paid direct messaging remain fluid, and there is no guarantee that the product will launch, the people with knowledge of the matter said.

Product teams are also working on “paywalled” videos, an idea similar to offerings from platforms like OnlyFans, which hosts content for creators in the adult content industry. Under this plan, Twitter might ask users to pay a fee to watch a video, splitting the revenue with the creators who post the content, two people familiar with the project said.

Mr. Musk has also shown interest in Vine, the looping video app that was popular among young creators before Twitter shut it down in 2016. He ran a Twitter poll on Sunday asking his followers whether or not he should bring it back, and he has commanded internal teams to examine the code to see if reviving it is possible, two people familiar with the conversations said.

Mr. Musk’s new Twitter Blue subscription service, which will give subscribers the check mark next to their username, is aiming to begin on Nov. 7 in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, according to internal documents seen by The Times. Subscribers would not need their identities authenticated to get the check mark, the documents suggested.

The documents also noted that there would be “an interim period where the check would be on both Blue subscribers accounts and previously verified users.” Eventually, verified accounts that do not pay for Twitter Blue will lose the check marks. There are more than 423,000 verified accounts on Twitter.

The documents also outlined plans for “government accounts to keep their Verified badge without paying for Blue.” Some features for the subscription service already announced by Mr. Musk, including higher rankings for subscribers’ replies and the ability to upload longer videos, would not begin on Nov. 7, according to the documents. A European rollout was also planned, with the Twitter Blue team having worked to align the product with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation privacy law.

The Blue team was told to get the product ready for introduction by next week or face being fired. Esther Crawford, one of the product managers, shared a photo of herself on Wednesday in a sleeping bag and wearing an eye mask on the floor of Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco.

“When your team is pushing round the clock

to make deadlines, sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork."

Today In The Twitter Saga

Advertisers plan to boycott Twitter if Elon Musk lets Donald Trump start tweeting again, report says

Elon Musk's takeover means Donald Trump could now return to Twitter.

• Some advertisers plan to pause their spending if that happens, The Wall Street Journal reported.
• Trump was banned after using Twitter to help fuel the January 6 Capitol riots last year.
• Advertisers plan to boycott Twitter if Elon Musk allows Donald Trump back on the platform after he took control on Thursday night, The Wall Street Journal reported.
• After paying $44 billion to close the deal he tried to walk away from, Musk swiftly fired four top executives including CEO Parag Agrawal and finance chief Ned Segal.

Advertisers are now weighing in as concerns over former President Donald Trump being reinstated grow.

Kieley Taylor, the global head of partnerships at advertising agency GroupM, told The Journal that letting Trump tweet again would be a red line for some major brands.

About a dozen of the agency's clients had asked to pause their ads on Twitter if the former president did make a return, and Taylor expected more to be in contact if his permanent ban was lifted, the newspaper reported.

"That doesn't mean that we won't be entertaining lots of emails and phone calls as soon as a transaction goes through," Taylor told the Journal. "I anticipate we'll be busy."

Musk has called Twitter's Trump ban a "morally bad decision" and "foolish in the extreme." He said in May the ban was "a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice."

Trump used the platform to help fuel the January 6 Capitol riots last year after he lost the 2020 presidential election.

Twitter said on January 8 it had permanently suspended Trump's account "due to the risk of further incitement of violence."

GroupM, Twitter, and Trump did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Social Media

The era of Expecting Corporations To Behave Like Responsible Citizens is long dead.

It's possible I was naive enough - or immersed enough in it - to think there was a time when big business was something other than sharks and hyenas dressed up to look like good church-goin' community-minded folks, but if there was, it's been over-n-done-with for at least 40 years.

Ari Melber - The Beat

Today's Bizarro Stuff

I don't know why this struck me as odd. I guess maybe because I have this image of a porn website in my head that's basically a bunch of sweaty pervs with a makeshift server farm set up in some abandoned warehouse with a leaky roof and a non-functioning shitter.

When I stop to think about it, I know there's huge money in it, but somehow it just doesn't register that PornHub would have a corporate structure and an org chart that looks a whole lot like any other profitable enterprise.

But what really sticks in my brain is the thought of a porn company trying to do more to be socially conscientious and to keep itself morally fit than way too many banks or oil companies or governments.

To be clear: I'm all for anything that goes on between consenting adults, and makes you feel good. Fake lord knows porn is a mighty fine "self care" tool for when the pressures of surviving here in USAmerica Inc get a little overburdensome.

 

And you can monetize the shit out of it as long as participation is voluntary and as non-exploitative as is possible when we're talking about transactions between people as we struggle with the paradox of wanting anonymity and privacy in a world that runs on interconnectivity and the exchange of information.

And also too: PornHub lost me when they went "a little too corporate" a few years ago, and started removing all the spontaneous homemade stuff in favor of content that's over-staged and poorly produced, even though it has a "better" look to it.

But anyway...

WaPo: (pay wall - because the pimps at Washington Post aren't that much different than the pimps at PornHub?)

Top executives quit Pornhub’s parent company amid more controversy

Two top executives at MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub, have resigned amid allegations that the site does not immediately or sufficiently remove content involving nonconsensual and underage sex.

MindGeek confirmed the departures of CEO Feras Antoon and COO David Tassillo in a statement Tuesday.

“Antoon and Tassillo leave MindGeek’s day-to-day operations after more than a decade in leadership positions with the company,” the company told The Washington Post. “MindGeek’s executive leadership team will run day-to-day operations on an interim basis, with a search underway for replacements.”

News of the departures come about a week after a New Yorker article detailed people’s attempts to get Porhhub to remove sexually explicit content that involved underage and nonconsensual participants. Announcement of the departures is not related to the piece, MindGeek told The Post.

The company said in a statement that it had enacted the most extensive safeguards “in the history of the internet” and that data proves its policies have been effective. The statement cited a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children report showing that Pornhub had few instances of child sexual abuse and that it removed cases of such material “in the shortest amount of time after being notified among all major platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more.”

“The New Yorker had the opportunity to seriously evaluate what works in fighting illegal material on the internet by looking at the facts, comparing the policies of platforms, and studying the results,” MindGeek’s statement said. “Instead, they chose to ignore the fact that MindGeek has more comprehensive and effective policies than any other major platform on the internet, and decided to peddle the same gross mischaracterizations that anti-porn extremists have spewed for decades.”

Alana Evans, president of the Adult Performance Artists Guild, a union for adult performers, said entertainers are stunned by the news of the departures because such resignations typically come as a result of bad press or a scandal.

“The timing is kind of out of the blue,” Evans told The Post, but added that she didn’t think the resignations were tied to the New Yorker piece. MindGeek has fought lawsuits and negative articles in the past, she said.

In December 2020, Mastercard, Visa and Discover blocked customers from using their credit cards on Pornhub’s website after the New York Times published an opinion piece accusing Pornhub of being rife with nonconsensual and child abuse material.

The New Yorker piece, which Evans called “a hit job,” quotes multiple organizations, such as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and Exodus Cry, that have been at the forefront of pushing legislation and corporate decisions that make it hard for sex workers to earn a living.

Sex workers fear OnlyFans decision to ban explicit content will push them further into the shadows

Evans said she is stunned by the exits of the top executives, but noted that their resignations probably will not affect the day-to-day life of performers because people in those positions are already so far removed from the routine of the average performer.

“MindGeek is corporate porn,” she said, naming smaller outlets. “Other owners and CEOs are far more involved in porn and the product.”

What’s mainly on the mind of people in the industry is what is next for MindGeek, especially for Pornhub. Evans noted that the company has an opportunity to place a woman in charge.

MindGeek said it is at the beginning of investing in its “creator-first offerings and additional opportunities for content monetization, with a plan to use resources to make headway in this burgeoning business as the company continues to be a force in digital video and tube sites.”

Moving to models where it can compete with subscriber-based and creator-driven platforms such as Patreon and OnlyFans makes good business sense, according to Evans.

“That’s what’s hot. That’s what people want,” she said, adding that limiting free content is always good for performers because most platforms make money from advertising. “The more free content that is pulled, the more money that we make.”

Up Closer

Like love and all things natural, when seen from a distance, business - and particularly business investment - looks plush and serene and beautiful. While up close, it can be brutal and cruel and bloody.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion by Helaine Olen: A speculative frenzy in meme stocks and crypto is coming to an end — but you’ve probably got nothing to worry about

I’ve learned a few things in more than two decades of writing about personal finance and investment culture. Most takeaways are fairly simple, the sorts of things that can be put on an index card. Here’s one rule that never fails: If you hear someone saying “this time is different,” pause. Take a deep breath. And then remember: This time is never different.

Unfortunately, many people don’t do that. Which goes a long way toward explaining what’s been happening in the markets, especially in tech stocks and cryptocurrencies.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index fell Wednesday, after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell reiterated plans to raise interest rates to combat resurgent inflation. At the end of a very topsy-turvy week, the S&P is down slightly more than 7 percent since the beginning of the year. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is in full correction territory.

But others have fared worse — in some cases much, much worse. Now that many people are #DoneWithCovid, pandemic favorite Peloton has fallen more than 80 percent from its high point since late 2020. Stonks — aka meme stocks — are also collapsing; GameStop and AMC have fallen by more than 50 percent since late November. Cryptos are in bad shape, too, with the overall market for digital currencies having shed $1.3 trillion — again, almost half their value — in the same period of time.

Here’s the good news: If, like half of all individual investors, you simply placed money in an index fund that replicates the broader stock market, you shouldn’t feel shaky. That’s because the S&P 500, for all the recent declines, was, at the close of the market Friday, still as high as it was in mid-October. If you felt satisfied with your portfolio then — and chances are pretty good you did — you should be happy now.

But others were led astray, in part by self-appointed TikTok and YouTube investor consiglieres, many of whom were infants when the dotcom bubble blew. Some of them fell hard for gamified stock market apps such as Robinhood, which lured them in with free trades and then quickly encouraged its often less than financially literate traders to invest in complicated options.

These newbie traders who congregated on Reddit boards let themselves be convinced that they could harness new technology to trade the stocks of fading retailers such as GameStop and take part in a heroic investor revolution, striking a blow against the 1 percent.

Au contraire. They were minnows who got sold on the idea they were sharks. As the Wall Street Journal’s Spencer Jakab recounts in the excellent new book “The Revolution That Wasn’t: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors,” many meme stock traders lost money.

The same was true for minnows who invested in special-purpose acquisition companies, known as SPACs. Those are companies that go public to raise money in order to acquire a yet-to-be-determined business. This permits the latter business to go public without the broad scrutiny an IPO normally gets.

People were sold on the idea that SPACs would let them invest like multimillionaires. Instead, they are discovering that if a company doesn’t want to fully expose its financials — like it would if it did an initial public offering — that’s often a warning sign of a less-than-promising business model, not a diamond in the financial rough.

And then there are cryptocurrencies, the much-heralded digital money. Does it have its uses? Absolutely. But beyond allowing celebrities (Kim Kardashian, Matt Damon) to make a quick paycheck promoting the stuff, it’s difficult to name a legitimate one that most of us here in the United States can’t do another way, easier and quicker. But should Dogecoin — a cryptocurrency started as a joke — really have increased more than 12,000 percent in value? Probably not, since it has subsequently given back more than three-quarters of that gain. Bitcoin, down a mere 45 percent, seems like a savvy buy in comparison.

Here’s the core truth in all this: The combination of pandemic-era low interest rates and a flood of government stimulus did more than rescue the Americans left jobless, and even homeless, by shutdowns. A lot of that money flowed to Wall Street — some in the form of money meant to prop up small businesses that instead went to much larger firms, some via stimulus checks that investors put in the market. Now that money is going away.

As a result, a lot of people are learning an expensive lesson. They convinced themselves that their ability to pick winning stocks or speculate successfully in crypto was due to their skills and smarts, not the temporary circumstance of speculating in markets where almost everything was going up at a rapid clip. Next time, most of those investors should check out an index fund instead. As wise heads have known for a long time, they’ll almost certainly do better in the long run.

Always remember that most of these investment guys are trained to be predatory scavengers, and as such, they have no regard for what happens if the thing they're selling you craters and goes straight down the shitter. They're simply there to take a few pennies off the top as they siphon money out of your pocket and funnel it into their boss's secret account in Panama.