gigafactory

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Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

Musk says Tesla will make its first Powerpacks and Powerwalls at its factory in Fremont, but will ramp up production when it moves into the Gigafactory. Then comes a surprise: Tesla is planning to build multiple gigafactories. “There’s going to need to be many other companies building sort of Gigafactory-class operations of their own, and we hope they do,” he says. Tesla will make its Gigafactory patents available to use free of charge, just as it does with its vehicles. The crowd applauds. He describes the Gigafactory as a “giant machine” and asks people to think of it as a product. It just happens to be a product that’s stuck in the ground.

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In 2013, the Hyperloop was just one man’s science project, sketched out through rough calculations in a white paper that he had written in an all-nighter. In the same month, the Gigafactory was just an uttered thought, when Musk wondered aloud about the prospect of building a “gargantuan factory of mind-boggling size.” For now, at least the Gigafactory part of Musk’s new story is a reality. While Tesla decided to build the factory because it was essential to meet the production needs of the Model 3, it has since said that as much as half of its output will be dedicated to energy storage. It is thus the bedrock of two potentially giant businesses—or could be. Even in its advanced state of progress, the first Gigafactory project is so complex, enormous, and expensive that it embodies daring and danger in equal proportions.

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Even with a $1.6 billion contribution from Panasonic, Tesla has had to raise billions for its construction through bond sales, share sales, and lines of credit. And there’s no guarantee the costs won’t inflate before the Gigafactory’s planned completion in 2020. Any setbacks that delay its completion wouldn’t be limited to the facility itself. If the Gigafactory falters, Tesla’s overall business will falter. It’s not just the Model 3 but also the energy storage business. It’s the future of the Tesla pickup, the heavy-duty Tesla Semi, the automated fleet. Musk’s full-stack vision is nothing without the Gigafactory at its base. But this time around, Tesla’s potential competitors are not waiting to see how the crazy bet works out.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

The $23 million purchase gave him stunning views of the San Francisco Bay and a place to hold parties and private dinners. Though investors showed new enthusiasm, inside Tesla there was cause for concern. Both the Fremont factory and Gigafactory were behind schedule. As Musk looked for reasons why, some were laying the blame—fairly or unfairly—on Panasonic. Almost from the beginning, the Tesla team had been pushing aggressive timelines. Accelerating production plans didn’t make things easier. Just as the Model S had been worked out as production began, the Gigafactory was still being designed as Tesla approached Model 3 production. Fearing what the delays could turn into, Dan Dees at Goldman Sachs, Musk’s longtime banker, urged him to raise money in case things didn’t work out smoothly.

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At one point, a Tesla executive stood among crates and crates of cells ready to be assembled. He estimated there were 100 million cells just waiting to be put into battery packs. Hundreds of millions of dollars of inventory just sitting around, eating away cash. Gigafactory’s problems drove Musk into a rage. He began flying to the Gigafactory more often to personally address the matter. He’d always been quick to fire people, but it had historically been through managers, not in person. Now, it might be whomever he came across on the factory floor. There was no reasoning with him; he blamed everyone but himself—even when they tried to explain that robots were malfunctioning because of his demands.

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Minutes later, as Musk headed to the airport to fly to the Gigafactory in Nevada, he typed out a fateful message on Twitter: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” It was the kind of half-cocked, uncensored messaging that Musk was known for—precisely what made his Twitter account a must-read for tens of millions of people, fans and detractors alike. Musk wasn’t remotely prepared for the onslaught that these nine words would bring. The reaction on Wall Street was instantaneous. Shares, which had already been rising, soared. Musk arrived at the Gigafactory almost giddy, asking managers if they knew what 420 stood for?

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

“Musk plunges Tesla into Nevada’s housing crisis.” Reno Gazette Journal, October 12, 2018. https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2018/10/12/elon-musk-tesla-gigafactory-nevada-housing-crisis/1619609002/ 184were already pointing the way to the trouble ahead: Jeff Cobb. “Model 3 ‘Bottleneck’ Blamed on Chaos and Incompetence at Tesla Gigafactory.” HybridCars.com, October 31, 2017. https://www.hybridcars.com/model-3-bottleneck-blamed-on-chaos-and-incompetence-at-tesla-gigafactory/ 186one of its trademark extravaganza events at the Fremont factory: Model 3 Owners Club. “Model 3 Delivery event live stream.” YouTube video, July 28, 2017. https://youtu.be/NO9q0Rq44uc 186he had recently broken up with the actress Amber Heard: Neil Strauss.

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Reuters, November 29, 2017. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-quality-insight/build-fast-fix-later-speed-hurts-quality-at-tesla-some-workers-say-idUSKBN1DT0N3 189reports published at BusinessInsider, CNBC, and Bloomberg, alleging . . . problems at the sprawling Nevada plant: Linette Lopez. “Tesla employees describe what it’s like to work in the gigantic Gigafactory.” Business Insider, September 4, 2018. https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-workers-describe-working-in-gigafactory-2018-8; Linette Lopez. “Insiders describe a world of chaos and waste at Panasonic’s massive battery-making operation for Tesla.” Business Insider, April 16, 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/panasonic-battery-cell-operations-tesla-gigafactory-chaotic-2019-4; Lora Kolodny. “Tesla employees say to expect more Model 3 delays, citing inexperienced workers, manual assembly of batteries.”

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Reuters, January 7, 2010. https://www.reuters.com/article/tesla-panasonic/tesla-panasonic-partner-on-electric-car-batteries-idUSN0721766720100107 77culminating in a 2014 commitment to build a massive joint plant: Tesla Motors Press Release. “Panasonic and Tesla Sign Agreement for the Gigafactory.” July 31, 2014. https://ir.teslamotors.com/news-releases/news-release-details/panasonic-and-tesla-sign-agreement-gigafactory 78Musk would repeatedly blame Eberhard. “In the Beginning.” Tesla Motors Blog (since deleted, accessed via web.archive.org). https://web.archive.org/web/20090624221445/http://www.teslamotors.com/blog2/?p=73; Claire Cain Miller, “Musk Unplugged: Tesla C.E.O.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

plummeting 90 percent between 1990 and 2010: Naam, author interview. eleven-fold increase in capacity: Ibid. Enter the Gigafactory: See Gigafactory 1’s website here: https://www.tesla.com/gigafactory. See also: Matthew Wald, “Nevada a Winner in Tesla’s Battery Contest,”New York Times, September 4, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/05/business/energy-environment/nevada-a-winner-in-teslas-battery-contest.html. A second Gigafactory has been built in Buffalo: See Gigafactory 2’s website here: https://www.tesla.com/gigafactory2. a third in Shanghai: Simon Alvarez, “China Formally Adds Tesla Gigafactory 3 Area to Shanghai’s Free-Trade Zone,” Teslarati, August 6, 2019.

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a third in Shanghai: Simon Alvarez, “China Formally Adds Tesla Gigafactory 3 Area to Shanghai’s Free-Trade Zone,” Teslarati, August 6, 2019. See: https://www.teslarati.com/china-adds-tesla-gigafactory-3-shanghai-free-trade-zone/. European location: At the time that we are publishing this book, Tesla is still in the planning phase for Gigafactory 4. For more info, see this article: Simon Alvarez, “Tesla Closing In on Lower Saxony, Germany as Final Europe Gigafactory Location: Report,” Teslarati, August 22, 2019, https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-europe-gigafactory-4-location-lower-saxony-germany/. one hundred Gigafactories: Leonardo DiCaprio, Before the Flood (documentary), National Geographic, October 21, 2016. You can watch a relevant clip on Nat Geo’s YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/iZm_NohNm6I.

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But producing enough of them to meet demand has been an ongoing problem. Enter the Gigafactory—Tesla’s attempt to double global lithium-ion battery production. Located outside of Reno, the Gigafactory churns out twenty gigawatts of energy storage per year, marking the first time we’ve seen lithium-ion batteries produced at scale. A second Gigafactory has been built in Buffalo, a third in Shanghai, and a European location is under consideration. While it remains to be seen, Elon Musk has calculated that one hundred Gigafactories could manufacture enough storage for our planet’s needs. Tesla has also shown their batteries work at scale.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

The Brussels-based NGO Resource Matters estimated that Gertler received an average of more than $200,000 a day in royalties throughout 2018 on sales of cobalt and copper. That cobalt was now making its way to some of the largest car companies in the world, as well as into our smartphones. Two years later Tesla’s Elon Musk opened the company’s new Gigafactory on the outskirts of Shanghai, which had been built in just ten months. Sitting in the audience were two young men from Glencore. Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory was a watershed for the car company, as it opened up the largest electric car market and also turned Tesla into a global company. Tesla deepened its relationships with key Chinese suppliers such as battery maker CATL and lithium producer Ganfeng.

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At Tesla, Straubel designed its first batteries, led development of the Gigafactory in Nevada and served as chief technology officer for fifteen years. So, when the soft-spoken engineer left in 2019, he could have raised money to do anything in Silicon Valley. He decided to move permanently to Carson City, a town in the middle of Nevada. Once described by former resident Mark Twain as ‘a desert, walled in by barren, snow-clad mountains’, Carson City was home to fewer than 60,000 residents.2 Straubel had bought a 300-acre ranch there to be near Tesla’s Gigafactory. He still drove an original bright yellow Roadster, one of the early prototypes of Tesla’s first electric car.

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There are over one billion cars globally on the roads. We will also need to replace buses and trucks with electric versions, as well as ships, ferries and even planes. All this will require batteries on a scale unimaginable a few years ago. Tesla’s South African-born founder Elon Musk had built a vast battery ‘Gigafactory’ in the desert of Nevada to supply his electric cars as well as the batteries to store renewable sources of energy. But he was not alone: across China a new factory was being built every week in 2020. Through my work as a Financial Times journalist, I had covered the raw materials electric cars needed: the lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper, as well as aluminium and steel.

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World by Anna Crowley Redding

Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Burning Man, California high-speed rail, Colonization of Mars, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, energy security, Ford Model T, gigafactory, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, Large Hadron Collider, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Wayback Machine

Elon loved paying back that loan. It proved his naysayers dead wrong. What Do You Do When You Are Out of Batteries? Tesla Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada. (Photo by Tesla Motors Inc.) Tesla’s demand for lithium-ion batteries quickly outran the world’s supply. Not having the batteries on time delayed car production. In 2014, Elon found himself back in the desert, looking for the right spot to build a factory—where Tesla could make its own batteries. Meet the Gigafactory, located in, um … Sparks, Nevada, on Electric Avenue. The $5 billion factory is designed to be built in phases, but once complete, the total size will be 5.8 million square feet.

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How big is that? Big enough to fit more than two hundred White Houses inside. In a TED Talk, Elon was asked how many Gigafactories it would take to get us to a future where we don’t need to feel guilty about energy use. That means enough lithium-ion batteries to run everything that’s currently powered by fossil fuels in the world. Without flinching, Elon said, “It’s about a hundred roughly. It’s not ten or a thousand. Most likely a hundred.”129 As of 2018, there are plans to build Gigafactories in China and Europe. CHAPTER 9 OF COURSE I STILL LOVE YOU In the summer of 2013, Elon dressed up in a medieval costume to get ready for his third wedding.

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“Solar Has Overtaken Gas and Wind as Biggest Source of New U.S. Power.” Bloomberg, 12 June 2018. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-12/solar-surpasses-gas-and-wind-as-biggest-source-of-new-u-s-power. Matousek, Mark. “Elon Musk Reveals New Details About Tesla’s Plans to Build Gigafactories Around the World.” Business Insider, 6 June 2018. www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-details-teslas-gigafactory-plans-in-us-china-europe-2018-6. McGivern, Mark. “St Trinians Star Talulah Riley Marries Internet Millionaire in Fairytale Highland Wedding.” Daily Record (Glasgow, Scotland), 28 Sept. 2010. www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/celebrity/st-trinians-star-talulah-riley-1071170.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Tesla already consumes a huge portion of the world’s lithium ion battery supply and will need far more batteries to produce the Model 3. This is why, in 2014, Musk announced plans to build what he dubbed the Gigafactory, or the world’s largest lithium ion manufacturing facility. Each Gigafactory will employ about 6,500 people and help Tesla meet a variety of goals. It should first allow Tesla to keep up with the battery demand created by its cars and the storage units sold by SolarCity. Tesla also expects to be able to lower the costs of its batteries while improving their energy density. It will build the Gigafactory in conjunction with longtime battery partner Panasonic, but it will be Tesla that is running the factory and fine-tuning its operations.

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That one might be even bigger since SpaceX has like ten buildings now. It would probably be really expensive, but I like the idea of it.” What’s fascinating is that Musk remains willing to lose it all. He doesn’t want to build just one Gigafactory but several. And he needs these facilities to be built quickly and flawlessly, so that they’re cranking out massive quantities of batteries right as the Model 3 arrives. If need be, Musk will build a second Gigafactory to compete with the Nevada site and place his own employees in competition with each other in a race to make the batteries first. “We’re not really trying to sort of yank anyone’s chain here,” Musk said.

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It will build the Gigafactory in conjunction with longtime battery partner Panasonic, but it will be Tesla that is running the factory and fine-tuning its operations. According to Straubel, the battery packs coming out of the Gigafactory should be dramatically cheaper and better than the ones built today, allowing Tesla not only to hit the $35,000 price target for the Model 3 but also to pave the way for electric vehicles with 500-plus miles of range. If Tesla actually can deliver an affordable car with 500 miles of range, it will have built what many people in the auto industry insisted for years was impossible. To do that while also constructing a worldwide network of free charging stations, revamping the way cars are sold, and revolutionizing automotive technology would be an exceptional feat in the history of capitalism.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

When Afshar, with all due respect to Tulsa, gave the answer Musk expected, he texted back, “Okay, great. We’ll do it in Austin and you should run it.” A similar process led to the choice of Berlin for a European Gigafactory. It and Austin would get built in less than two years and join Fremont and Shanghai as the pillars of Tesla’s car production. By July 2021, a year after construction began, the basic structure of the Austin Gigafactory was complete. Musk and Afshar stood in front of a wall in a temporary construction office and studied photos of the site at various stages. “We’re building twice as fast as Shanghai per square foot, despite the regulations we face,” Afshar said.

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“I would tell him, Michael, you can’t tell people they have to get their shit together, and then when they don’t get their shit together nothing happens to them.” A difference in strategy also emerged. Marks decided that Tesla should partner with an experienced automaker to handle the assembly of the Roadster. That flew in the face of Musk’s fundamental instincts. He aspired to build Gigafactories where raw materials would go in one end and cars would come out the other. During their debates over Marks’s proposal to outsource assembly of the Tesla, Musk became increasingly angry, and he had no natural filter to restrain his responses. “That’s just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said at a couple of meetings.

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But it’s also as smoothly effortless as a Rolls-Royce, can carry almost as much stuff as a Chevy Equinox, and is more efficient than a Toyota Prius. Oh, and it’ll sashay up to the valet at a luxury hotel like a supermodel working a Paris catwalk.” The article ended by mentioning “the astonishing inflection point the Model S represents”: it was the first time that the award had gone to an electric vehicle. The Nevada battery Gigafactory The idea that Musk proposed in 2013 was audacious: build a gigantic battery factory in the U.S., with an output greater than all other battery factories in the world combined. “It was a completely wacky idea,” says JB Straubel, the battery wiz who was one of Tesla’s cofounders. “It seemed like science fiction crazy.”

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

History,” Washington Post, November 12, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/12/washington-just-awarded-the-largest-state-tax-subsidy-in-u-s-history/ (January 25, 2021). Nevada had offered Tesla: Jason Hidalgo, “Art of the Tesla Deal: How Nevada Won a Gigafactory,” Reno Gazette Journal, September 16, 2014, https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2014/09/13/art-tesla-deal-nv-won-gigafactory/15593371/ (January 25, 2021). $1 billion in annual tax incentives: Shayndi Raice and Dana Mattioli, “Amazon Sought $1 Billion in Incentives on Top of Lures for HQ2,” Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-sought-1-billion-in-incentives-on-top-of-lures-for-hq2-11579179601 (January 25, 2021).

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Amazon.cn executives from that time said that Bezos was totally uninterested in understanding the inner machinations of the Chinese government, cultivating ties with Chinese leaders, or using his budding fame to help Amazon’s cause in the country, as Elon Musk would do years later to set up a Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai. Without a closer relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, Amazon ended up losing even more ground. In an analysis of the struggling China business they delivered to the S-team in 2014, the international team estimated the company had lost a billion dollars in the decade since the Joyo acquisition.

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Amazon’s new air hub was going to create around two thousand new jobs. In contrast, electric automobile maker Tesla—run by Elon Musk, Bezos’s chief rival in the private space industry as well as for public adulation—had secured $1.3 billion in tax breaks a few years before for a battery plant in Nevada, dubbed the Gigafactory. Tesla was projecting it would create 6,500 jobs. It had earned about thirteen times more in tax incentives, per job, than Amazon. Bezos, of course, had spotted the difference. Three employees independently recalled his response to the news of the Kentucky deal and considered it a fateful harbinger of the belabored public process, nearly two years later, that would go by the infamous name HQ2.

The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All by Chris Goodall

3D printing, additive manufacturing, carbon tax, clean tech, decarbonisation, demand response, Easter island, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, gigafactory, Haber-Bosch Process, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Ken Thompson, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Negawatt, off grid, Peter Thiel, rewilding, Russell Ohl, smart meter, standardized shipping container, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons

Electric transportation has pushed batteries down the experience curve further and faster than laptops and mobile phones could have achieved on their own. The single most important figure in the battery industry today is Elon Musk, the head of Tesla. Working with battery manufacturer Panasonic, Tesla is building a vast ‘Gigafactory’ in Nevada that will produce battery packs for Tesla cars and also for the company’s new residential and grid storage systems. By building a factory of this size Tesla is expected to reduce the cost per watt of storage to about half the level of just a couple of years ago. This will accelerate electric car sales and the use of lithium ion batteries in static storage as well.

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Other car manufacturers will be desperate to achieve similar levels and my bet is that the rapidly growing Chinese electric bus and car manufacturer BYD, a core holding of US investor Warren Buffett, will be producing millions of inexpensive and low-specification battery-driven autos by that date, further increasing the volumes of cells that are required and pushing the cost down to levels nobody has dreamt of, even now. How Tesla’s new Gigafactory in Nevada will look. It will deliver as many lithium ion cells in a year as the whole world produced in 2013. A standard 2020 car will probably travel about four miles on each kilowatt hour of stored electricity, meaning that a 200-mile range will need a battery pack holding 50 kilowatt hours.

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The company promises sub-$100/kWh batteries by 2020, a target that even Tesla will struggle to beat. As importantly, it will be possible to set up factories that are very much smaller and less expensive. Chiang talks of manufacturing plants that cost as little as $11 million, a minuscule fraction of the billions Tesla will spend on its Gigafactory. For that an owner might get a factory that makes about 80 megawatt hours of storage a year. The market may not be electric vehicle manufacturers but rather businesses seeking to deliver static storage to the electricity grid for overnight use. Domestic electricity storage From the mainstream media, not yet interested in 24M’s remarkable claims, Tesla gets all the attention, partly because of the glamour of its fabulous cars.

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, clean tech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, gigafactory, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar

For an estimated $1.3 billion in tax incentives, it had purchased the 50 gigawatt facility. Governor Brian Sandoval proclaimed the investment would “change Nevada forever” and estimated that over its twenty year life span, the Gigafactory would bring $100 billion in economic benefits to the state. To put that number in context, Nevada’s 2013 GDP was less than $125 billion. The Gigafactory was a potential game changer—not just for Nevada, but for the world. So Tesla was the example of what Washington could do right. While Fisker, A123, and a number of other battery and EV investments crashed, Washington had helped Silicon Valley give birth to a new American car company—and one of the greatest cars the world had ever known.

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By 2014 Tesla was trading in the $250 range with a market capitalization around $30 billion and it was exporting its flagship Model S to Europe, Japan, and China. Starting in early 2013, rumors began to circulate that Tesla would take the plunge and start manufacturing lithium-ion batteries in-house. In cooperation with its Japanese partner Panasonic, it planned to build a $5 billion “Gigafactory” that by 2020 would pump out enough battery packs for 500,000 long-range EVs every year. That volume represented more than the entire global production of lithium-ion batteries in 2013 and was projected to reduce battery costs by about 30 percent in time for the launch of Tesla’s low-cost third generation vehicle.

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See also mass production foreign companies, and Chinese auto industry, 228, 233–35 Fortune magazine, 173 Foton, 206, 228 Fox News, 182 “Freedom Agenda,” 109–11 Freedom Car, 109–10, 117, 169 frequency balancing, 259 Fu Chengyu, 217–18 fuel cell vehicles Anegawa’s views about, 127 auto industry focus on, 124 Bush administration and, 111 California and, 92, 124, 255, 256–57 and cars in the future, 255–56 cost of, 127 criticisms of, 257 and “death” of EVs, 93 internal combustion engine compared with, 256 Japanese auto industry and, 117, 124, 126, 127, 255 Wan Gang and, 115, 207 fuel economy/efficiency CARB mandate and, 108, 172 and cars in the future, 255, 256 and competitors in Great Race, 6 and EPA-auto industry relations, 37 EPA mandate about, 256 funding for, 11 goals for, 172 Honda and, 118 and Japanese industrial policy, 103 lawsuits about regulation of, 142 and life span of autos, 264 and lobbying by U.S. auto industry, 161 of Mitsubishi cars, 130, 131 Obama administration and, 172, 183 societal impact of, 255 Toyota and, 118, 130 for trucks, 142 U.S. government loans for, 161 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant (Japan), 120, 185–93, 194, 195, 247, 248 gasoline Bush administration and, 111 and California’s prelude to the Great Race, 33, 37 and CARB LEV rule, 86 and cars in the future, 257–58 electrical dependence of, 258 and history of the global auto industry, 22 and Honda’s emission research, 61, 62–64 in Japan, 134 and methanol-powered cars, 72–73 and oil crisis of 2008, 163 price of, 134, 258 “reformulated,” 73 and U.S. auto industry, 153 See also shale gas production Geely auto company, 250 General Motors (GM) batteries and, 262 Biden’s comment about, 183 BYD and, 231 CARB and, 30, 39, 40, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79–80, 81, 89, 94, 108–9, 128, 142, 244 and characteristics of future cars, 255 China and, 216, 228, 234–35, 273 Chinese as employees at, 223, 227 emission standards at, 39 financial crisis/bankruptcy at, 166, 168, 169, 180 financing of operations at, 159 future of cars at, 274 and government help for auto industry, 160, 161–62, 166, 168–69, 171–72 and history of the global auto industry, 22 Honda and, 63, 68, 86 Hughes Aircraft acquisition by, 68, 69 and importing of foreign technology, 215 and internal combustion engine, 245 Japan and, 43, 44, 45, 249n “knock-down kits” of, 43 lawsuit against CARB by, 108–9 as losing technology race, 149 mass production at, 22 media and, 163, 165 Nissan and, 47 publicity about, 239 “reinvention” of, 78 reputation/image of, 68, 152 SAIC as partner of, 17, 20, 21, 251, 255, 273 “Sloanism” at, 22 Toyota and, 46, 151–52, 162 and U.S. economy in 2008, 158, 159 and U.S. occupation of Japan, 52 vision of future cars at, 17 Wilson’s saying about, 39 World Expo (Shanghai) and, 17, 20, 21, 251, 255 See also General Motors (GM)—cars of General Motors (GM)—cars of EV1, 79, 80, 84, 89–90, 91, 94, 109, 152, 163, 164, 227 EVs, 71, 72, 78, 79–80, 84, 85, 89–90, 91, 94, 152, 162–65, 180, 238–39, 245 hybrids, 124 Impact, 30, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79–80, 84, 90, 94, 152 Saab, 228, 250 solar-powered, 68–71 Sunraycer, 70–71, 73, 83, 84, 109, 146, 180, 265–66 Volt (Chevrolet), 20, 150, 161–63, 164–65, 166, 180, 215, 234–35, 239, 244, 245, 260, 261 Germany, 2, 7, 16, 23, 55, 95, 96, 99–101. See also Audi Ghosn, Carlos, 135–36, 139, 194 Gibson, Mel, 91 Gigafactory, Tesla’s, 243 Gingrich, Newt, 239 global economy auto industry impact on, 2, 6, 212 California’s influence on, 246 and characteristics needed to win the Great Race, 27 impact of EVs and driverless vehicles on, 21 impact of Great Race on, 3 and importance of auto industry, 2 nuclear power and, 248 in 2008, 157, 158, 165, 166 and winning the Great Race, 254 global warming.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

Musk believes that he can re-create the dramatic cost declines achieved in solar by similarly scaling up the production of lithium-ion batteries. So out in the Nevada desert, Tesla has built its first Gigafactory, which aims to produce more lithium-ion batteries in 2018 than the entire world had produced just five years earlier. Word of the facility’s size has sparked a lithium-ion arms race, as rivals from China (BYD) and South Korea (LG Chem and Samsung) have ratcheted up battery production in anticipation of the Gigafactory. All this activity assured that Musk’s prediction of falling battery costs would be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, in 2016, the cost of a battery pack plunged, going from more than $400 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of storage capacity to less than $200/kWh (figure 9.1).6 Figure 9.1 Comparison of lithium-ion battery and solar PV panel costs.

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Thomas Heath, “Tesla’s ‘Crazy’ Climb to America's Most Valuable Car Company,” The Washington Post, April 10, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/teslas-crazy-climb-to-americas-most-valuable-car-company/2017/04/10/de05b9ae-1dfd-11e7-be2a-3a1fb24d4671_story.html. 6.  Peter Fairley, “2017 Is the Make-or-Break Year for Tesla’s Gigafactory,” IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, December 30, 2016, http://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/advanced-cars/2017-is-the-makeorbreak-year-for-teslas-gigafactory. 7.  Jesse D. Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom, “Deep Decarbonization of the Electric Power Sector: Insights from Recent Literature,” Energy Innovation Reform Project (EIRP), March 2017, http://innovationreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/EIRP-Deep-Decarb-Lit-Review-Jenkins-Thernstrom-March-2017.pdf. 8.  

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

David Crane, 5th Annual ARPA-E Energy Summit, February 2014 Keep in mind that these comments are not coming from a solar energy company, but from inside one of the current market leaders in provision of retail electricity across the United States! If, however, we take homes, offices and factories off the grid, then storage of electricity becomes a critical element in the success of a distributed system. Recently, Tesla Motors, an automotive and energy storage company, announced that its new US$5-billion Gigafactory in Nevada will not only produce batteries for Tesla vehicles but will also sell batteries—called Powerwalls—for homes. These batteries are designed to capture excess solar capacity throughout the day so that homes can continue to operate independent of the grid in the dark and in cloudy weather when solar capture is reduced.

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Based on a ±2 per cent confidence interval, this basically is a statistical certainty. 9 “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs,” Pew Research Center, 6 August 2014. 10 http://cleantechnica.com/2014/04/24/us-energy-capacity-grew-an-astounding-418-from-2010-2014/ 11 http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/report/2014/05/29/90551/rooftop-solar-adoption-in-emerging-residential-markets/ 12 A prosumer is both a producer and consumer. 13 Google Green 14 See GreenTechMedia.com analysis, http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Utility-Scale-Solar-Reaches-Cost-Parity-With-Natural-Gas-Throughout-America. 15 Alissa Walker, “Tesla’s Gigafactory isn’t Big Enough to Make Its Preordered Batteries,” Gizmodo, 8 May 2015. 16 NBAD, University of Cambridge and PwC, “Financing the Future of Energy,” PV Magazine, 2 March 2015. 17 “Enter the entrepreneurs,” Mintel, 19 November 2014. 18 Cornerstone OnDemand Survey, November 2014. 19 “Generation Y and the Gigging Economy,” Elance, January 2014. 20 Check out https://workfrom.co/. 21 For more on work patterns throughout history, go to https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/. 22 “Solving the Mystery of Gen Y Job Hoppers,” Business News Daily, 22 August 2014. 23 Pew Research 2014 24 For more on Jordan Greenhall, go to http://reinventors.net/content/jordan-greenhall/. 25 Statistics taken from http://blog.autismspeaks.org/2010/10/22/got-questions-answers-to-your-questions-from-the-autism-speaks%E2%80%99-science-staff-2/. 26 See www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2013/01/average_age_of_members_of_u_s_congress_are_our_senators_and_representatives.html. 27 “The 113th congress is historically good at not passing bills,” Washington Post, 9 July 2014.

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A number of technical solutions are being worked on to solve this issue, including electrochemical storage (using electric power to generate and store NH3, or ammonia, which can later be burned as fuel, with no CO2 emissions), battery storage, etc. Tesla is heavily investing in this effort in the United States with its Gigafactory in Nevada, but it is also tracking multiple battery developments globally. “Right now, we track about 60 different efforts around the world to develop improved batteries and some of them hold some long-term promise. We rate all of them from one to five, where five is we should be doing business with them and one is complete BS.”

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Even though Tesla pitches itself as an automaker that is setting out to save the world by replacing every vehicle on the road with an electric one—already a dubious environmental proposition—its recent actions provide reason to question those environmental commitments. As it shifts production to China with its planned Shanghai Gigafactory, the company’s emissions have been rising. But that increase is not simply because it is expanding and producing more vehicles; the production emissions of each individual vehicle are also rising, which means they will need to last even longer to ensure their lifecycle emissions—the total amount they emit from manufacture to when they are retired—are lower than a conventional vehicle.21 Tesla’s Nevada factory was supposed to derive power from solar panels covering its roof, but the company never finished building the solar array.

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See bicycles Seattle, WA, ride-hailing services in, 99 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 138 Sedran, Thomas, 129–30 self-checkout, 194–5 self-driving cars accidents with, 132–5 Autonomous Land Vehicle project, 119 Brin on, 114–5 challenges of, 126, 129–30 environmental dilemmas and, 131–2 Google, 6 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (1991), 119 Kalanick on, 116 Navlab autonomous vehicles, 119–20 Ng on, 126 pedestrians and, 127 pricing of, 127–8 pulp science fiction and, 118 Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and, 118 software for, 122–3 speed and, 123–4 Tesla’s Autopilot system, 137–8 Tsukuba Mechanical, 119 VaMoRs, 119 Sepulveda Pass, 141 Shanghai Gigafactory (Tesla), 83 Sheffield, UK, docked bikeshare system in, 170–1 Sheller, Mimi, 158, 207 Shell Oil City of Tomorrow, 2 Shill, Gregory, 30 shipping industry, 49 shut-in economy, 196–7 Sidewalk Labs, 228–30 Silicon Valley, 37–8, 44–5 skates (platforms), 146–7 Skyports, 154–5 Small Business Investment Company, 55 smart homes, 60–1 smartphone apps, 55, 181, 194–5 Smiley, Lauren, 196 Social Bicycles (SoBi), 167–8 Socialist Left Party, 209 social media, 61–2 SolarCity, 55, 143, 188 solar panels, Musk on, 188–9 Southern State Parkway, 26 Soviet Union, 39 space program, 48 SpaceX, 55, 144, 148, 150–1 speed limiter referendum, 19–20 speed limits, 18–20 Sputnik I satellite, 39, 45 standardized containers, increasing use of, 49 Standard Oil of California, 21 Stanford Industrial Park, 40 Stanford Research Institute, 54–5 Stanford University, 39–40, 55, 120 Stark, Tony, 70 Starley, John Kemp, 160, 162 Starship Technologies, 172, 173–5, 176–7 Stop de Kindermoord, 205 streetcars, 12–3, 15, 21, 92, 160 “subscriber city,” 197 suburbanization, 23 suburbs, 12–3 superhighway plan (Detroit), 22 supply chains, 50 Surface Transportation Policy Project, 141 surge pricing, for ride-hailing services, 100 Swisher, Kara, 116–7 Taft-Hartley (1947), 112 taxi medallions, 104–5 taxi services about, 95–6, 101–2, 104–5 industry regulation and, 107, 110–1, 185 Taylor, Isaac, 122 TCP/IP protocol, 50 TechGirls Canada, 228–9 tech industry development of, 9–10 growth of, 4, 180–5 speed of technological innovation, 48 technological solutionism, 59 Tesla, 5–6, 55, 63–4, 70, 72, 73, 82–4, 85–6, 116, 137–8, 143, 147, 158–9, 188, 189, 190 Tesla, Nikola, 70 Texas, Interstate Highway System in, 140 Thacker Pass, NV, 79, 226 Thiel, Peter, 46–7 Thrun, Sebastian, 121 Toronto, Canada, 228–30 Toyota, 116, 121, 122 train system in France, 220 in North America, 218–9 transportation bus system, 21, 215, 219 computerized planning systems for, 130 flying cars, 151–2, 159 history of, 7 jitneys, 89–91, 92, 108–9 Navlab autonomous vehicles, 119–20 present-day dominance of, 34–5 taxi services, 95–6, 101–2, 104–5, 107, 110–1, 185 three-dimensional vs. two-dimensional, 145 train system, 218–9, 220 tunnels for, 144–51, 154–5, 158–9, 189 vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (VTOL/eVTOL), 152–5, 157, 158 walking as primary means of, 12 Trudeau, Justin, 79–80, 228 Trump, Donald, 78 Tsukuba Mechanical, 119 tunnels, for transportation, 144–51, 154–5, 158–9, 189 Turner, Fred, 41, 43, 52 Turner, Matthew, 141–2 Uber about, 115 acquisition of Jump, 166–8 Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), 133, 134–5 benefits of, 94 campaigns for, 103 changed from Ford Fusion to Volvo XC90 SUVs, 134–5 compared with taxi services, 95–6 core business of, 93 costs for, 107–8 Covid-19 and, 108 customer base for, 100–1 divisions of, 153–4, 184 driver pay for, 103–4, 107 effect on traffic of, 100 employee classification for, 111–2 founding of, 181 Greyball and, 110 growth of, 97, 105–6 industry regulation and, 101–2, 107, 110–1, 112–3, 156, 174, 185 loss of money by, 106–7, 184–5 marketing by, 158–9 media representation of, 94–5 micromobility services of, 166–9 model of, 102–3 in New York City, 98–9 origins of, 92–3, 109 pricing for, 184 promises made by, 186 pulls out of China, 152 refocus on ride-hailing and food delivery services, 184–5 safety record of, 134, 135–6 in San Francisco, 97–8 walking vs., 191 Uber Air, 153–4, 155, 157, 159 Uber Copter, 155–6 Uber Eats, 184–5 Uber Elevate, 152, 154, 159 unemployment rate, 95–6 unions, for taxi drivers, 101–2 United Kingdom (UK) docked bikeshare system in, 170–1 ecommerce in, 193 University of Technology Sydney, 75 University Paris-East, 169–70 Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 27–8 Untokening collective, 218 Urban Challenge, 120 urban renewal strategy, 26 Urry, John, 32–3, 143 US Air Force, 50 US Department of Defense, 50 US-Japan Semiconductor Trade Agreement (1986), 45 US National Labor Relations Act, 102 VaMoRs, 119 Vansintjan, Aaron, 222 Vasquez, Rafaela, 132, 135 Vélib’ bikeshare system, 210 venture capitalists, 186–7, 199 vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (VTOL/eVTOL), 152–5, 157, 158 Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (Le Guin), 202 Vietnam War, 39, 40, 43, 49 VoiceOver, 175 Volkswagen, 77, 78, 129–30 Volocopter, 152 Volvo XC90 SUVs, 134–5 Walker, Jarrett, 59, 142–3, 181–2 walking, as means of transportation, 12, 191 Washington, DC, ride-hailing services in, 99 Waterfront Toronto, 228–9, 230, 231 Waymo, 133, 138, 186 web 2.0, 57 WeWork, 181, 182–3 white people, mortgages and, 29 Who Killed the Electric Car?

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere by Christian Wolmar

Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, BRICs, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, deskilling, Diane Coyle, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, gigafactory, high net worth, independent contractor, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, technological determinism, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

While sales of electric vehicles are clearly set to grow, there are major logistical and practical problems to overcome before they can become the car of choice for most people. 35 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere The key issue is whether enough batteries can be produced. Tesla is constructing what will become the biggest building in the world (in terms of its footprint) in Nevada to manufacture lithium-ion batteries, and it is eventually expected to produce enough batteries for 1.5 million cars per year. Elon Musk is planning several more such ‘gigafactories’ but there is clearly, at the moment, huge undercapacity of battery manufacturing in relation to the demand that would be created if even 10 or 20 per cent of cars, let alone a majority, were electric powered. While this is not an insuperable problem, there are also questions about the availability of sufficient lithium to produce these batteries.

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, Citizen Lab, clean tech, clean water, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, geopolitical risk, gigafactory, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, planned obsolescence, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Jon Sonneborn, telephone interview by David Abraham, April 4, 2014. 32. Merrill Lynch analyst John Lovallo states that the company believes a range of $100–$150/kWh is needed to create a competitive advantage over internal combustion end vehicles. Chris Ciaccia, “Tesla Unveils Gigafactory: What Wall Street’s Saying,” Thestreet, February 27, 2014, http://www.thestreet.com/story/12459694/1/tesla-unveils-gigafactory-what-wall-streets-saying.html; Sebastian Anthony, “Tesla’s Model S Now Has a Titanium Underbody Shield to Reduce Risk of Battery Fires to ‘Virtually Zero,’ ” Extremetech, March 28, 2014, http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/179422-teslas-model-s-now-has-a-titanium-underbody-shield-to-reduce-risk-of-battery-fires-to-virtually-zero. 33.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

“The board doesn’t touch the water. It’s like an airplane wing.”1 Anyway, these tech masters would laugh, and not politely, at the thought of trying to resurrect an eighteenth-century technology like coal. They’re all about the future: Tesla is installing the world’s largest rooftop solar array on the top of its Gigafactory, which produces more lithium-ion batteries than any facility on Earth. Google spelled out its corporate logo in mirrors at the giant solar station in the Mojave Desert on the day it announced that it would power every last watt of its global business with renewable energy; it’s the world’s biggest corporate purchaser of green power.2 But there is exactly one human being who bridges that cultural gulf between these different species of plutocrat.

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“At that pace, it would take four hundred and five years, which is kind of too long.”9 So, Solomon did the math to figure out how many factories it would take to produce 6,448 gigawatts of clean energy in the next thirty-five years. He started by looking at Tesla’s big new solar panel factory in Buffalo. “They’re calling it the gigafactory,” Solomon says, “because the panels it builds will produce one gigawatt worth of solar power every year.” Using that plant as a rough yardstick, Solomon calculates that America needs 295 solar factories of a similar size to defeat climate change (roughly six per state), plus a similar effort for wind turbines.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

As of 2015, they made up a thirty-billion-dollar annual market. And the trend is expected to continue, abetted by electric and hybrid vehicles. That massive, rapid-fire doubling of the market that occurred between 2015 and 2016 was primarily due to one major announcement: the opening of Tesla’s Gigafactory, which is slated to become the world’s largest lithium-ion-battery factory. According to Transparency Market Research, the global lithium-ion-battery market is expected to more than double to $77 billion by 2024. It’s time to hit the pool. Pools, I mean. Of lithium. My chat with Goodenough went longer than expected, and the crew is waiting to take us to the lithium ponds that form the core of the mining operation.

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Plants harvest sunlight but are needed for food. Photovoltaic cells and windmills can provide electricity without polluting the air, but this electric power must be stored, and batteries are the most convenient storage depot for electric power.” Which is exactly why entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are investing heavily in them. His Gigafactory, which will soon churn out lithium-ion batteries at a scale never before seen, is the clearest signal yet that the automotive and electronics industry have chosen their horse for the twenty-first century. The lithium-ion battery—conceived in an Exxon lab, built into a game-changer by an industry lifer, turned into a mainstream commercial product by a Japanese camera maker, and manufactured with ingredients dredged up in the driest, hottest place on Earth—is the unheralded engine driving our future machines.

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Electric vehicles will soon cost substantially less to operate, from cradle to grave, than gasoline-fueled ones. And the same technology that is used for car batteries can be used for homes and businesses to store solar energy. Tesla is taking the lead in developing battery technologies. In July 2016, it opened its $5 billion Gigafactory, which will produce 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of battery storage a year—exceeding the capacity of all the lithium-ion batteries produced world wide in 2013. At its launch, Elon Musk said that he’s confident the batteries will reach a price of $100 per kWh by 2020 (the average price was $1,200/kWh in 2010).

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

Dow Jones & Company, October 25, 2018. https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-netflix-radical-transparency-and-blunt-firings-unsettle-the-ranks-1540497174?mod=hp_lead_pos4. Ideas at Tesla come from the top: Duhigg, Charles. “Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla’s Production Hell.” Wired. Condé Nast, December 13, 2008. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory. Uber’s culture is famously troubled: Isaac, Mike. Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. CHAPTER 1: INSIDE JEFF BEZOS’S CULTURE OF INVENTION Bezos drives Amazon’s inventive culture through fourteen leadership principles: “Leadership Principles.” Amazon.jobs.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

And this is the dilemma, from the point of view of anyone who is eager to see public companies making more long-term investments in intangible investments. On the one hand, investors with more concentrated stakes are a good thing, but on the other, so are diversified investors. Without concentrated investors, companies are less likely to invest in tamoxifens and Gigafactories; without diversified investors, they are less likely to invest in the CT scanner or in Bell Labs. An alternative strategy arises if, as it seems, certain types of intangible investment tend to be systematically undervalued. This suggests there are opportunities for investors who can identify good intangible investments and back companies that make them over the medium term.

Climate Change by Joseph Romm

biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Climatic Research Unit, data science, decarbonisation, demand response, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, gigafactory, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge worker, mass immigration, ocean acidification, performance metric, renewable energy transition, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, the scientific method

The 2015 study projects that costs will fall to some $230 per kWh in the 2017 to 2018 timeframe. Tesla Motors and Panasonic have started building a massive $5 billion plant that can produce half a million battery packs each year (plus extra batteries for stationary applications). It is expected to be completed in 2017. Tesla and Panasonic estimate this 6500-employee “Gigafactory” will lead to a 30% reduction in cost, which the 2015 study said is “a trajectory close to the trends projected in this paper.” It may well be that $150 per kWh can be achieved by 2020 without a major battery breakthrough but simply with continuing improvements in manufacturing, economies of scale, and general learning by industry.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The leading sources of renewable energy, wind and solar, are both intermittent, which leads to mismatches between supply and demand. More efficient rechargeable electrical storage batteries could provide an answer. Tesla, most famous for its electric vehicles, is currently building a so-called gigafactory in Nevada that is expected to manufacture a new generation of powerful batteries that are capable of supplying energy to a home for up to two days. Sister company SolarCity—run by a cousin of Tesla chairman Elon Musk—which already controls 39 percent of the residential solar market, has announced that, within a decade, all of its power units will come complete with battery storage.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

Countries can’t function safely and efficiently without buffer stocks of commodities. According to energy and tech expert Mark Mills, at any given time, country-level supply chains of critical commodities typically have three months’ worth of annual demand in storage. The annual output of Elon Musk’s planned $5 billion “gigafactory” in Nevada, slated to produce more than all the world’s existing lithium batteries combined, could store about five minutes of annual U.S. electricity demand. “Storing electricity in expensive short-lived batteries is not a little more expensive but tens of thousands of times more expensive than storing gas in tanks or coal in piles adjacent to idle but readily available long-lived power plants,” Mills explains.51 Lack of storability makes the operating and economic dynamics of electricity generation and distribution entirely different from other forms of energy such as oil and gas, and from all other commodities: Supply must respond almost instantaneously to changes in demand; not enough, and there is a danger of degraded quality and power cuts; too much, and the transmission system can be damaged, wires deformed or even melted.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

It’s an important point that, despite our more sophisticated tech, is just as true today as it was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution—there’s simply no such thing as fully automated production. The writer Astra Taylor calls it “fauxtomation” when executives use the promise of automation as an excuse not to eliminate labor, but to hide and degrade it. Whether at a cutting-edge electric car company gigafactory or an eighteenth-century textile mill, workers still very much need to be on hand to ensure the machinery keeps running. Just as Regency-era entrepreneurs pushing for greater efficiencies, profit margins, and control paved the way for the industrial factory system, a move that transformed how humans live and work, a new thrust now threatens to do the same, all over again.

Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

It has a reputation for being a 'poor man's Vegas,' but while in some ways that cap fits, we're here to set the record straight: Reno is oh, so much more. Beyond the garish downtown, with its photoworthy mid-century modern architecture, neon signs and alpine-fed Truckee River, sprawls a city of parks and pretty houses inhabited by a friendly bunch eager to welcome you. Stealing a piece of California's tech-pie, the gargantuan Tesla Gigafactory will open its doors here in 2020, bringing plenty of cashed-up youngsters to town, and Reno is ready: the transformation of the formerly gritty Midtown District continues, injecting a dose of funky new bars, top-notch restaurants and vibrant arts spaces into Reno's already unique and eclectic mix.