Steve LeVine
@stevelevine
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I run The Electric; author The Powerhouse. Signal 650.804.5563 …
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The century of the Black Death began with a mini ice age and torrential rain, ruining crops and spreading hunger among tens of millions of feudal age serfs. Then came the Plague, killing at least half the continent. 1/7
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2/7 But the Plague also utterly changed everything: The wages of ordinary farmers and craftsmen doubled and tripled, and nobles were knocked down a notch in social status. The church’s hold on society was damaged, and Western Europe’s feudal system was on its way out.
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The distress in the White House and on Wall Street is this: On Covid-19's current trajectory, we appear to be looking at a depression, not a recession 1/4
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A US battery developer told me that if $56/kWh LFP ever reaches the US, American stationary battery makers “will be toast—everyone.” We report today that the price in China is now $47/kWh. The Electric.
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GOP Rep. Charlie Dent: Trump "browbeat" Sessions into firing McCabe. Retributive optics on the eve of his 50th birthday, 26 hours before his retirement.
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Bars and restaurants have been devastated by the lockdown of cities. But the longer this goes on, the far greater hit will be to a hidden, trillion-dollar economy linked to a much under-appreciated economic actor—the white-collar office worker. 1/5
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There already are signs of a nationwide "Parkland effect": some 50 new laws including in 14 states with GOP governors, and intense youth voter registration.
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Scoop: Elon Musk emailed executives tonight to say two of his most senior executives—Rebecca Tinucci, head of the Supercharger network; and Daniel Ho, head of new vehicles—will be leaving the company, and their teams dissolved. The Electric. 1/2
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Four decades after Reagan and Thatcher crushed miners and air traffic controllers, Covid-19 has brought back the era of raucous labor, along with worker chutzpah and some tragedy. 1/6
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3/7 Survivors from the countryside moved to the city, attracted by the newly unoccupied houses of the rich, which peasants now moved into. For these peasants, there was a new living standard and social standing that no one could have expected.
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World nickel and lithium production will be enough for 3.8 million EVs this year—fewer than half the 7.7m that automakers say they want to make. By 2030, metals will be enough for 15.6m EVs. But stated EV production is over 40m. 1/2 The Electric.
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The last four years have been an unceasing drumbeat of dystopian pessimism about the U.S. and the world. Now, though, in a whiplash-inducing spiritual flip-flop, we are hearing a new zeitgeist: That we are entering a New Roaring Twenties. 1/8
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Between volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis and disease, Indonesia has been the world’s vortex of death and destruction. Now it’s the messenger of a massive new disruption—the coming forced move of our coastal cities and up to 1 billion people inland. 1/4
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After France's Reign of Terror, young people had a cathartic frolic—for about four years, until Napoleon took power. After WW I and the Spanish Flu, the Roaring ’20s carried London and New York into a new age of hilarity. But then came the Depression. 1/6
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QuantumScape says it has solved one of the battery world's longest-held puzzles, and is going IPO. But battery breakthroughs are often exaggerated, and outside scientists wonder why the company won't show the goods.
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The office worker keeps airlines in the air, hotels buzzing, Xerox pumping out cartridges, 3M making Scotch tape, and apparel shops fitting business suits. They keep dry cleaners going, barbers cutting, and office cleaners cleaning. All of this has been deflated or cut. 3/5
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With JPMorgan, Twitter, REI, Pinterest and more postponing a return and scrapping their offices entirely, they have transformed once-teeming city business districts into ghost towns with essentially vacant skyscrapers. 2/5
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Tesla stock is up 16% the last two days, and a huge reason is anticipation ahead of a live webcast event in two weeks—Battery Day. Elon Musk is likely to announce that new Teslas will reach a big milestone—cost parity with conventional cars. 1/5
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But coastal cities around the world—Houston, Miami, Bangkok, Dhaka, New Orleans—face the same fate. The culprit isn’t climate change, though that’s a problem, too, but that they have been emptying their coastal underground aquifers, leaving the ground above to collapse. 3/4
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Covid-19 has seriously messed with Starbucks, vaporizing its breakfast traffic of millions of American office workers lining up for java starting at 5 a.m. at its thousands of locations. As a result, we may have witnessed Peak Starbucks. 1/4
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Missed this: BYD, Tesla's primary global competition, has concluded that full self driving is "basically impossible" when you consider "human psychological safety needs, ethics, regulation, technology and application in the industry."
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There is a chasm of misunderstanding what happened on
@ElonMusk
's Battery Day, stemming from a misunderstanding of the battery: Though he'll be typically late, Musk set a transformationally higher bar for the industry—the age of mass market electrics. 1/3
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A big worry is that, after spending trillions just getting by and buried in debt, Congress will resist a multiyear future of heavy aid for the cities. It’s a bad omen that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been resisting at this stage — in the midst of the pandemic. 6/6
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John Goodenough, the most important battery inventor of the modern era, has died at 100. In 2019, Goodenough won the Nobel in chemistry for his invention of the lithium cobalt oxide cathode, the central advance igniting the portable electronic and EV revolutions 1/7.
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The trigger is the sinking of Jakarta—soon to be the world’s largest city—into the sea. As a solution, Indonesia’s president is moving the capital and 7 million people—a quarter of the population—1,250 miles away from the sea and the country’s usual seismic mayhem. 2/4
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China is fast doing to batteries what it did previously to solar cells, aluminum and steel--vastly over-producing ahead of dumping cheap product on the global market. The FT reports on this today. We did the story at The Electric last week.
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Cities have always survived and they will this time, too. Urban housing will be cheaper, allowing folks who couldn’t afford it to finally live there. But the transition to something else could be long, with pain for perhaps a generation of merchants and workers. 5/5
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Once the pandemic wanes, they almost certainly are for a couple of years: People everywhere are likely to bolt into a bacchanalia of dining, drinking and other revelry. Travel businesses are already seeing bookings that would carry this pent-up partying into 2023. 3/8
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6/7 A taller China: the post-coronavirus world seems likely to feature a China convinced of its superior resilience. Behind it is likely to be Europe, resentfully let down by a go-it-alone U.S. that, unlike in prior global crises, has pulled in and not led the world response.
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7/7 All agree to be surveilled: Just as people have come to expect cameras recording their movements on the street since 9/11, Americans in the post-Covid-19 world see nothing unusual about more intimate measures like public monitoring of their temperature and blood pressure.
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For context, Starbucks is like the iPhone, Tesla and Amazon delivery—a rare product that sweeps in and changes society utterly. Before WeWork, it invented the co-working space. It also created now-ubiquitous phrases like, “Double tall origin vanilla soy latte, please.” 2/4
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Scoop: In a surprise, Hieu Duong, Tesla's head of dry electrode and inventor of the cost-cutting technology, has left the company for a small developer with no revenue called AM Batteries. The Electric. 1/2.
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5/7 Decoupling on steroids: The post-virus U.S. seems likely to shun ambivalence, move steadfastly away from everyone, and favor self-reliant production located within reach. “We start breaking back into little pieces.”
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Unlike recessions, depressions have no precise definition. But it means prolonged double-digit joblessness, an unprecedented economic contraction, and widespread bankruptcy. 2/4
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On Monday, we reported that the going rate for iron-based LFP batteries in China was a dirt-cheap $56 a kilowatt hour, severely challenging Western battery makers. We were wrong: They are $47/kWh—16% cheaper. The China Playbook, at The Electric.
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AI, robots, Amazonization, jobs, and the anti-elite uprising. Subscribe to the
@Axios
Future of Work newsletter.
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4/7 That’s the sort of change we are looking at with Covid-19, a new inflection point. It’s by far too early to be certain what’s coming, but here are some of the changes:
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AI pioneer: "The future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious of everything I have said."
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@Redistrict
@MonmouthPoll
@Gallup
Carter's popularity rose 30 points after the hostages were taken. George HW Bush's was 87% after 1st Gulf War. Reagan's was 73% after he was shot.
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NYT editor Dean Baquet on Trump: "We have decided to be more direct in calling [out] lies."
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Some top takeaways from just-released clarification on the $7500 IRA credit for EVs: 1. There will be a free-for-all period through end-'24 in which eligible EVs will be assessed on battery size and not origin of minerals or where they were processed. 1/4.
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The main reason for all the fallout, oddly enough, is the very $6 trillion that the Fed and Congress have thrown at the virus—failing to attack the actual enemy, which is the virus. 3/4
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A federal judge in Nevada largely today rejected an effort to stop Lithium Americas' development of Thacker Pass, the biggest US lithium mine. The ruling suggests that mining can proceed as long as it's figured out where the waste goes.
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@realDonaldTrump
This is a shift. Until now, Trump claimed he did not even know who Serge Kovaleski was.
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Personal news: I'm launching a new publication with The Information on the massively under-covered science and business of batteries and electric vehicles. It will be called The Electric. Here's the story this morning by
@sarafischer
. 1/4
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It's one thing knowing there's unlikely to be enough lithium and nickel for all the EVs that automakers want to build this decade. It's another seeing the shortfall in full color. A chart from The Electric.
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In back-to-back multi-billion-dollar battery investments this week from Honda and Panasonic, the U.S. gets fast initial signs that the new Climate Law is working to attract a battery supply chain to the country.
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Eric Trump went to Uruguay to promote the family business. The taxpayers' bill for secret service was $97,380.
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But it’s also risky. People go to Starbucks with the memory of their larger, more generous and reflective self. How long before we forget all that and view Starbucks as just a drive-thru lane, and once that happens, doesn’t it risk just blending in with everyone else? 4/4
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Missed this: Chile, with twice the known lithium reserves of any other country, will nationalize its lithium industry. Lithium is increasingly following the state-led historical arc of oil, which led to the formation of OPEC.
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This new attitude of shimmering positivism is coming from our mainstream economic touchstones: The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and even the famous curmudgeon Paul Krugman. But is their outlook valid? 2/8
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After selling just 99,000 models, VW reports it can build no more EVs this year, a sign of the industry's spartan circumstances amid the raw materials crisis. 1/2
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Scaramucci sounds like he intends to act as White House Chief of Staff, and not Communications Chief, via
@axios
. ?
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@washingtonpost
@liamstack
Why is a person with zero background in Russia or intelligence regarded as a quotable source on this topic?
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@christogrozev
of
@bellingcat
, one of the most important journalists in the world, especially cracking Putin's assassination industry, gets the founders award from ICFJ.
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In the email, Musk is upset that his lieutenants are not moving faster to thin out the company's staff. 2/2
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A colossal claimed breakthrough in electric car batteries: VW-backed QuantumScape says it has solved the decades-long problems preventing the use of volatile, pure lithium metal. 1/3
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Former DOJ spokesman
@MatthewAMiller
: Comey has chronically violated disclosure rules in Clinton email case.
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I went to Indonesia to take a look—two weeks touring Jakarta and the country’s new, still-unnamed capital on the island of Borneo. Including the magnificent work of
@iantehphotography
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China finally wields its battery dominance as a geopolitical weapon: responds to chips crackdown with an export curb on battery graphite.
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The trickier question is what happens after the merry-making dies down. Is there enough underlying economic zip to sustain a boom for the rest of the decade? 4/8
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28 years ago, in the first case of its kind, a bystander shot a video that captured the brutal police beating of Rodney King. Corporate America swooped in with vows to rebuild South Central LA. But within a year or so, the companies lost interest. 1/9
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The hope is that Covid-19 and the economic downturn will end with another delirious release — a rash of buying by exultant consumers, a new economic boom, and a return to work. They might. There will be parties galore and, pent up for so long, people will rush to the shops. 2/6
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In last week's launch of his Tesla Semi big rig, Elon Musk disclosed very little detail. But here's some: the battery is 850-1,000kWh and alone will cost $180,000-$200,000, the price Musk, in 2017, foresaw for the entire truck. The Electric. 1/2
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Scoop: Three months ago, Putin offered to pair a deal in which the U.S. and Iran would both withdraw from Syria. Now Trump has given the concession for no quid-pro-quo. ?
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It’s hard to imagine any company building deep wells of anticipation around batteries, but Elon Musk has done it. For months, Tesla skeptics and fans have been talking about Musk’s coming Battery Day. 1/5
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At once, batteries are under the glaring lights: Tesla's Battery Day is tomorrow; the founder of GM-backed Nikola has resigned amid an SEC probe, and experts want to know why QuantumScape won't divulge data backing up its claim to a breakthrough.
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Now, though, the drivethru lane and grab-and-go pickup are all the rage, and Starbucks thinks it has to join the parade if it wants its pre-pandemic revenue back. It is installing them everywhere, which is understandable when you look at last quarter’s 40% drop in sales. 3/4
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That is, Tesla buyers will no longer pay a large premium over mass-market, gasoline-driven models with more or less the same features. This prospect is rattling legacy automakers, which are about to release electrics of their own. 2/5
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News tonight from Elon included: 1. the 4680 will go into production later this year, and volume production next year. That means he expects the tabless design to be fully ready next year, which if true would be very important. 1/3
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Amid the bloodletting in batteries and EVs, two US startups--Sila Nano and Group14--seem on the verge of a commercial breakout, getting their high-range, fast-charge silicon anodes into the EVs of about seven carmakers. The Electric.
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For now, powerful CEOs are nervous. With notable exceptions, few companies seem prepared to risk riling their employees, especially given broad popular support for workers at their grocery stores, nurses at their hospitals, and drivers who are keeping supply arteries open. 4/6
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1/2 Personal news: I am excited to start this morning as editor at large at
@Medium
. I'll write across three magazines on the big crashup of tech, economics and demographics with society, politics and geopolitics.
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If Trump had a better reputation for paying his lawyers, he might find it easier to hire one now.
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Scoop: An announcement seems to be imminent from Treasury on how it will assess Chinese content in US materials and battery plants to qualify for Inflation Reduction Act credits. There will be a pre-announcement today, and the details later this week. The Electric.
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On our current course, we are likely to see stark austerity, with empty coffers for the very services and qualities that make for an appealing urban life— well-paying jobs, robust public transport, concerts, good schools, varied restaurants, boutiques and well-swept streets. 4/6
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Silicon Valley is on the verge of losing its essence — the serendipitous encounter, the victim of the shift to remote work.
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But alongside the joy, and for years after, American cities and towns seem likely to see untold scars of both the pandemic and the depression-like recession. 3/6
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Elon Musk could—and should—pre-emptively offer to partially or fully refund some $2.3 billion Tesla has earned for full-self-driving over the years, thus assuming responsibility for its five years of tardiness. The new edition of The Electric. 1/4
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What the other automakers fear is being overtaken by an iPhone moment—a runaway Tesla sales craze that leaves everyone else a wannabe. 5/5
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@Evan_McMullin
@greggjonesbooks
Optionally, Trump could have said: I invite John Lewis to sit next to me during the inauguration.
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The implosion is visible in cities, which are losing their centrality. Apartment-dwellers are fleeing New York and San Francisco, which are suddenly replete with vacancies. City revenues are plunging. 4/5
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To win a war, your supply lines are key. So it is with batteries and electric cars: To beat China, Biden will focus on the US's raw, manufacturing and charging infrastructure. Lobbyists and the war angle will sell it. The new edition of The Mobilist.
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One battery expert told me, “We are at the point where [legacy] carmakers are just about catching up to where Tesla is now. And now Tesla will move ahead again, and they will need another three to five years to catch up.” 4/5
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For three decades, the world's major automakers have failed to conquer India. Now Indian entrepreneurs are succeeding—by selling them what they really want, which is electric scooters. Is this beneath major automakers? The new edition of The Electric.
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What calendar are we looking at? The U.S. is a can-do nation, but don’t be surprised if we are still having this conversation late next year and even in 2022 and are observing a very different urban look and tone then and beyond. 5/6
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The China Playbook: How Chinese companies utterly changed the economics of solar panels, steel, leather, cement, shipbuilding, tires and more--and now electric vehicles and batteries. The Electric.
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Edison railed that battery inventors were "liars"—none could really enable the electric car he wanted to build. But today, after 140 years of false starts, we really do seem to be finally in a new age of superbatteries. The latest at The Mobilist.
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@LimitingThe
In addition, it's less a Tesla problem than a sector one: Lucid, Rivian and BYD are also substantially down YTD (-18%, -27%, -12% respectively).
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There is still time,
@ElonMusk
, to back out of Twitter, pay the penalty, even if multiples of $1b, and instead buy your way into a few good lithium properties, the way BYD and CATL have done.
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Perhaps the most conflicted in this new age: Amazon. Just as it seemed poised to transcend its barbarian image, it is at the core of the economy and finds itself at turns mollifying workers with higher wages, and firing them if it deems them disloyal. 5/6
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Musk: nickel-based batteries only for long-range electric planes, ships and extremely long-range EVs and trucks. Everything else will be iron-based. Message: forget the consensus that LFP is only for cheap and short-range EVs and energy storage.
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Four years ago, Elon Musk unveiled a new battery--the 4680--that he said was crucial to making a $25,000 Tesla. In February, he killed the cheap car. Now sources say the clock is ticking on the 4680 as Musk described it, at least as a Tesla-made product.
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“Touchless” is the new, new thing, a rebranding of tech into Covid-19 safety systems. Among those using it are surveillance tech firms, using iris and face scans and touchless elevators to whisk us along our way.
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