Saturday, November 25, 2017

Musk beats deadline for biggest battery; Bezos' fortune hits $100bn; When all cars drive themselves

1 Musk beats deadline for biggest battery (Gulf News) Entrepreneur Elon Musk has won a $50 million bet by beating a 100-day deadline for building a giant battery to help South Australia avoid energy blackouts, officials said.

State Premier Jay Weatherill said testing of the massive lithium ion battery would begin within days, ahead of the December 1 deadline Musk set for himself when he signed off on the project earlier this year.

Musk had pledged to build the battery in the South Australian outback for free if it was not completed within the 100 days. He estimated that would cost at least $50 million — local authorities will now pick up the tab.

The entrepreneur behind electric carmaker Tesla made the pledge in response to power woes in South Australia, which was last year hit by a state-wide blackout after severe winds from an “unprecedented” storm tore transmission towers from the ground.

Musk’s Tesla Powerpack is connected to a wind farm operated by French energy firm Neoen and is expected to hold enough power for thousands of homes during periods of excess demand that could result in blackouts. South Africa-born Musk was a founder of payments company PayPal, electric carmaker Tesla Motors and SpaceX, maker and launcher of rockets and spacecraft.


2 Bezos’ fortune hits $100bn (Straits Times) Jeff Bezos is the world's newest $100 billion mogul. The Amazon.com founder's fortune is up to $100.3 billion as the online retailer's shares jumped more than 2 per cent on optimism for Black Friday sales.

Online purchases for the day are up 18.4 per cent over last year, according to data from Adobe Analytics, and investors are betting the company will take an outsized share of online spending over the gifting season.

The $100 billion milestone makes Bezos, 53, the first billionaire to build a 12-figure net worth since 1999, when Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates hit the mark. As Bezos' wealth flirts with new heights, there are likely to be more questions about what he intends to do with it.

Unlike Gates, who was the world's richest person until Bezos passed him in October, or US investor Warren Buffett, the world's third-richest person with $78.9 billion, Bezos has given relatively little of his fortune to charity. Bezos is only just starting to focus on philanthropy, and in June tweeted a request for ideas on how to help people.

Gates, 62, who has a net worth of $86.8 billion according to the Bloomberg index, would be worth more than $150 billion if he hadn't given away almost 700 million Microsoft shares and $2.9 billion of cash and other assets to charity, according to an analysis of his publicly disclosed giving since 1996.


3 When all cars drive themselves (Gwyn Topham in The Guardian/The Observer) The chancellor may have been keen to talk about the autonomous future in his budget, but the money that talked loudest last week came from Uber’s billion-pound deal with Swedish carmaker Volvo.

The scale of the order suggests driverless cars could indeed be just around the corner: 24,000 Volvos are to be kitted out with the ride-hailing company’s self-driving technology between 2019 and 2021. Assuming a robot driver can do three times as many shifts as a human, those cars alone could replace, for example, every non-Uber taxi or minicab in London.

The race has been led by Google’s self-driving division, now spun off as Waymo, which has just started trials of a driverless taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona. Even before its first lift has been hailed by a member of the public – and without having made a car of its own, as it currently buys in Chrysler minivans – Waymo has been valued at $70bn by Morgan Stanley.

Mobileye, an Israeli maker of chips and cameras for self-driving vehicles with revenues of only $300m a year, was bought by Intel for $15.3bn in March. Uber is rushing to develop its own robo-taxi tech to scale up profits on its enormous global customer base.

Many expect the number of vehicles in private household ownership to fall. Car manufacturers have been hiring directors from software and tech firms as the market has tilted – witness Tesla’s valuation surpassing Ford and GM’s this year.

Around a million people in the UK who drive for a living could have to retrain, the chancellor said, acknowledging that “for some people, this will be very challenging”. The £46bn that the UK government claims to have forsaken by freezing fuel duty may be only a warm-up for the gaping hole that an all-electric fleet would mean. Tens of millions in revenue for traffic offences could also be jeopardised by law-abiding robots.


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