Rep. Thomas Massie drove 450 miles to pick up a Tesla car battery...and is now using it to power his entire home!
The Republican Congressman from Kentucky told Cheddar about his trek to find the battery.
“First I started looking for a wrecked Tesla,” he said, “and I ended up in this seedy underworld of totaled cars and auction houses. I even bid on a wrecked Tesla, but I got outbid by somebody from the Ukraine.”
Massie, who’s lived off the power grid for years, said he’s been “dreaming” about running his house with a Tesla car battery. He ultimately found a man in Georgia willing to sell him one for $15,000 and picked it up on New Year’s Day. He said he didn’t even know the seller’s last name until he wired him the money.
The 47-year-old lawmaker’s interest in technology is nothing new. He graduated from MIT where he studied robotics, and he has patents for virtual reality and other tools.
Politically, Massie describes himself as a “trans-partisan”, saying, “Some days it’s hard to identify with any of the parties.” But in the negotiations for the Tesla battery, he kept his congressional affiliation under wraps as long as he could.
“Usually the price goes up on everything if you [tell],” he said. “But eventually they find out, and I think they’re a little more dubious that the whole thing’s going to work. Because how many things do we get to work in Congress?”
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/rep-thomas-massie-r-ky-powers-his-home-with-a-tesla-car-battery).
A company that specializes in early wildfire detection has developed a new, AI-based drone.
The trend highlighted ethical concerns about artificial intelligence tools trained on copyrighted creative works.
The charismatic founder of a startup company that claimed to be revolutionizing the way college students apply for financial aid, was convicted on Friday.
A federal judge has ruled that The New York Times and other newspapers can proceed with a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.
A magazine journalist’s account of being added to a group chat of U.S. national security officials has raised questions about the Signal app.
The next time you get a call about an upcoming medical appointment you may not be talking to a human. Hospitals are increasingly using AI assistants.
Schools are turning to AI-powered surveillance technology to monitor students on school-issued devices like laptops and tablets. But there are risks.
Hours after a series of outages that left X unavailable to thousands of users, Elon Musk is claiming that the social media platform is being targeted in a “massive cyberattack." Musk said on a post Monday that the attacker is either a large, coordinated group or a country. Complaints about outages spiked Monday at 6 a.m. Eastern and again at 10 a.m, with more than 40,000 users reporting no access to the platform, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com. A sustained outage appeared to begin just after noon Eastern.
The World Video Game Hall of Fame has revealed its 12 finalists for 2025. Members of the public have a week to vote for their favorites online.
An insider account being billed as an “explosive” memoir about “seven critical years” at Facebook/Meta will be published next week.
