Elon Musk on Tuesday dismissed speculation that he might step down as Tesla's CEO and told the company’s annual shareholders meeting that the electric car and solar panel company would start doing some advertising.
“Say it ain’t so,” one shareholder asked Musk about stepping down as Tesla's leader. “It ain’t so,” he replied without further discussion.
When another shareholder suggested that Tesla try advertising, Musk said he is open to it.
“This has some merit,” he said to the shareholder at the meeting at Tesla's factory site near Austin, Texas. “We'll try a little advertising and see how it goes.”
Tesla famously has avoided paying for advertising like its competitors, relying a lot on Musk's ability to generate free publicity — he has 140 million followers on Twitter, the social media company bought for $44 billion last fall.
Musk told shareholders that the company's “Full Self-Driving” software is getting close to where it's safer than human driving. He previously has said the system should be ready this year, a pledge he has made for several years.
Tesla says on its website that the cars can't drive themselves and humans must be ready to intervene at all times. The company also has been forced by U.S. safety regulators to recall the software because it didn't obey traffic laws in some cases. The problems noted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are to be fixed with an online software update.
During Tuesday's meeting, Musk cautioned that the next 12 months could be challenging for the Austin-based company, largely because rising interest rates have increased the cost of buying a car.
“Tesla is not immune to the global economic environment," he said, predicting that the company will get through the period and do well, even when a lot of companies will go bankrupt.
He told the gathering that sometimes the pain of working has been “quite excruciating." He called his time as CEO of Twitter a “short term distraction” and said the company needed open heart surgery to ensure its survival.
It's now in a stable place, and he's happy to have Linda Yaccarino, whom he hired away from NBCUniversal, to run Twitter. Musk said the amount of time he'll devote to Twitter will be “relatively small” compared with the last six months since he bought the social media platform.
Before Musk's talk, shareholders voted to place Tesla co-founder and former chief technology officer JB Straubel on the company's board for the next three years. Straubel left Tesla in 2019 to start a battery materials recycling company.
Shareholders also re-elected Musk and Chairwoman Robyn Denholm to the board.
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
