To realise his dream of satellite-powered internet, tech billionaire, Elon Musk, needs to install antennas around the world. In northern France, a village hopes he’ll decide to keep those antennas far away. Saint-Senier-de-Beuvron, population 350, is none too thrilled to have been picked as a ground station for Musk’s Starlink project for broadband from space. “This project is totally new. We don’t have any idea of the impact of these signals,” said Noemie Brault, a 34-year-old deputy mayor of the village just 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the majestic Mont Saint-Michel abbey on the English Channel. “As a precaution, the municipal council said no,” she explained. Musk, founder of SpaceX and electric carmaker Tesla, plans to deploy thousands of satellites to provide fast internet for remote...
From self-driving to generating wet fart noises in “fart mode,” Teslas really can do it all. They can even be used to produce music. Diplo shared a video today in which he makes a beat from scratch—with his Tesla. Using nothing but his car’s dashboard, he recreated the beat of “New Love,” his new Silk City single with Mark Ronson and Ellie Goulding. What is this sorcery, you ask? It looks like Diplo used a program called TRAX, a digital audio workstation (DAW) offered by Tesla in one of the company’s recent vehicular software updates. The in-car music studio had been available to owners in late 2019, but it has now been enhanced with expanded capabilities. While TRAX is much more limited than industry-standard DAWs like Ableton a...
Because of stock market valuations that strike some as utterly divorced from reality, Elon Musk has overtaken Jeff Bezos as the richest person in the world. Via Bloomberg, his net worth is currently estimated to be $190 billion, while Bezos’ currently sits at $187 billion. Bezos had been the globe’s wealthiest man since October of 2017, when his stake in Amazon helped his fortune grow bigger than that of Bill Gates. Whatever you may think of Bezos morally, Amazon’s rising stock prices made sense. In the three years prior, the company introduced Amazon Pantry, Amazon Music, Amazon Prime Day, and drastically expanded its markets for same-day delivery. At the time it was only the world’s fourth-largest retailer, but there was every reason to think it would continue to grow. Musk’s ascension h...
It’s hard to think of a performer who has aged more gracefully than Kyle MacLachlan. At 61, he’s still got that matinee-idol chin, full, robust head of hair, and the good-natured warmth to go along with it. Yet beneath the leading-man looks beats the heart of a considered, compelling character actor, a sensibility he’s brought to decades of beautifully idiosyncratic work in successes and flops alike. Even when he’s villainous, it’s impossible not to love him. (Except when he’s Mr. C in Twin Peaks: The Return, of course.) That kind of cerebral deadpan is key to his career-long collaboration with fellow Northwestern boy David Lynch, who plucked him from obscurity to star in his sprawling adaptation of Dune, whose disastrous reception nonetheless prepared him to become Lynch’s muse for Blue V...
This review originally ran as part of our Sundance 2020 coverage. The Pitch: By now, we all know the story of Nikola Tesla, spurned early 20th-century inventor and rival of Thomas Edison who invented alternating current, only to die penniless, his name largely lost to history until Christopher Nolan, Elon Musk, and the Fuck Yeah Science! corners of the Internet rehabilitated his unconventional genius. (Best not to mention the fact he was also a eugenicist, but that’s neither here nor there.) Now, one of America’s most under-appreciated minds has a full-throated biopic, with Ethan Hawke in the title role, charting his rags-to-riches-to-rags story. Of course, this being a Michael Almereyda joint, things get deeply weird. Welcome to Your Life: Make no mistake: Tesla ain’t your ...
On May 11th, Elon Musk defied local health care officials and reopened his Tesla factory in Fremont, California. Now, via Washington Post and Vox, “several cases” of the novel coronavirus have been confirmed among his unfortunate workers. Musk initially closed his Tesla factories back in March, after coming into conflict with the Fremont police and Alameda County sheriff. Two months later, California state guidelines suggested that companies like Tesla could reopen, although the guidelines were non-binding and deferential to local health care officials. The Alameda County Public Health Department tried to block Tesla’s re-opening, but Musk did it anyway, while also suing the county. A few days later, the issue was resolved when Musk agreed to stricter safety measures. T...