Even by Elon Musk’s standards, this is turning out to be an extraordinary week for news about the notorious headline hound.
Tomorrow, of course, is the day when Tesla’s shareholders will have their say on Musk’s absurdly girthy pay package, which would be worth somewhere north of $50 billion (the value fluctuates, as it’s composed of Tesla shares). Plenty has already been said about that, so let’s just wait for the result, but in the meantime do read my colleague Peter Vanham’s article on Tesla’s invocation of “stockholder democracy” in defense of the package.
Whatever the outcome of tomorrow, Tesla and its shareholders have another issue on their hands: The European Union just announced new, provisional tariffs of up to 38.1% on imports of Chinese electric vehicles, to counter what the European Commission calls “unfair subsidization” by Beijing.
This is a problem for Tesla because, while the company has a gigafactory just outside Berlin that churns out its Model Y cars for the European market, the Model 3s that it sells in Europe are made in Shanghai. So, as of July 4, shipments of Tesla’s cheapest model to Europe will become subject to a new tariff of 21%, on top of the 10% levy that is already applied to imported EVs—though it won’t have to actually pay up until November when the Commission finalizes the tariffs (Tesla has requested and may receive “an individually calculated duty rate” at this point, the Commission said).
Whatever Tesla ends up having to pay, this will make it harder to compete against the likes of Volkswagen in the European market.
It’s not hard to see why Musk has recently taken to railing against the idea of Western tariffs on Chinese EVs. As recently as January, he was calling for trade barriers against such cars, but last month he declared that “things that inhibit freedom of exchange or distort the market are not good.” (The context there was the Biden administration’s decision to levy 100% import duties on China-made EVs, which didn’t have much of a direct effect on Tesla as the company makes its U.S. cars in the U.S.)
Moving away from Tesla, the Wall Street Journal has an explosive and deeply reported piece out about Musk’s conduct at SpaceX, where multiple female employees have said that Musk “showed them an unusual amount of attention or pursued them.”
One case had already been publicly reported—that of a SpaceX flight attendant who alleged that Musk exposed himself to her and made an indecent proposal. However, the Journal now reports that another employee said, while leaving the company in 2013, that Musk had asked her to bear his children. (Musk has also had twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his Neuralink brain-implant company.)
The report also states that he had sexual relationships with two women at SpaceX: an engineering intern, and a direct report. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told the Journal that its article contained “untruths, mischaracterizations, and revisionist history,” but unnamed former SpaceX executives said Musk was able to act with impunity within the company.
Far less seriously, but still somewhat embarrassingly, Musk has abruptly dropped his lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in which he accused them of abandoning OpenAI’s founding agreement and charter by no longer publishing details of its models, nor making them open-source. While these were valid criticisms—the company, which Musk cofounded alongside Altman, was named OpenAI for a reason—that didn’t mean Musk had much of a legal case. The Guardian reports that his lawyers gave no reason for dropping the suit.
And speaking of transparency, Musk has also decided that X users will by default no longer show the world which posts they’ve liked. “Important to allow people to like posts without getting attacked for doing so!” the poly-CEO, who has taken flak for repeatedly liking the posts of far-right extremists, tweeted.
More news below.
David Meyer
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NEWSWORTHY
MediaTek eyes Windows. Reuters reports that the Taiwanese chip giant MediaTek is preparing to move into the Windows PC space now that Microsoft is embracing Arm’s architecture for its Copilot+ laptop push—Arm has long been the go-to architecture in mobile, where MediaTek commands about 40% of the chipset market.
Oracle surge. Oracle may have disappointed analysts with its latest quarterly results yesterday, but it also announced new deals with Google and OpenAI, with the result that its share price popped by as much as 11% in extended trading. As CNBC reports, Oracle’s flagship database will be made available on Google’s cloud, and a three-way deal with OpenAI and Microsoft will see OpenAI use Microsoft’s Azure AI platform on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, when it needs additional computing capacity.
Amazon homes. Amazon has committed a further $1.4 billion to its Housing Equity Fund, which aims to counter regional house shortages in places where it has big offices that contribute to the problem. As Bloomberg reports, this latest tranche will be used to build 14,000 affordable homes in Seattle, Nashville, and Washington, D.C., metro areas.
SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
€500 million ($538 million)
—The sum that French mobile app company Voodoo just paid for BeReal, the social network that aims for authenticity by, at a random time each day, prompting users to post what they’re doing. Business Insider reports that BeReal’s reclusive cofounder and CEO Alexis Barreyat will leave after a transition period.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
OpenAI’s Mira Murati fires back at Elon Musk for describing her company’s new partnership with Apple as ‘creepy spyware’, by Verne Kopytoff
Apple finally makes its AI strategy clear. It’s all very Apple—and very risky, by Jeremy Kahn
Researchers alarmed to find AI models illegally training on real children, including for explicit materials, by Eva Roytburg
Americans are flocking to Temu, but they trust Amazon so much more, by Jason Del Rey
15,000 Amazon drivers accuse the e-commerce giant of shorting them on pay and incurring ‘huge expenses’, by the Associated Press
Snap U.K. election sends crypto industry scrambling to court Labour allies, by Bloomberg
BEFORE YOU GO
Surprise! You’ve been sherlocked. TechCrunch has an interesting piece on the various apps that Apple has “sherlocked” in its big announcements earlier this week (the term refers to a late-90s Apple search app called Sherlock that made a competing Mac app redundant). That new password manager for Apple’s various platforms? Bad news for 1Password, LastPass, and others. Call recording and transcription? Better think fast, TapeACall. And so on.
