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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