Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk is hinting at Tesla Cybertruck being virtually amphibious, and it’s not clear if he’s actually kidding.

Sometimes, Musk makes comments about future Tesla products and features that can be hard to judge.

For example, it was hard to tell if he was kidding when he said that the next Tesla Roadster would be equipped with a cold air thruster, but that’s apparently happening.

Mars — YES or NOT?

Multi-billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk said he believes there is a 70% chance of him getting to Mars on one of his spacecraft. The Independent reports:

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The ambitious rocket, designed to send the first humans to Mars and establish a city, is taking shape.

Former astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman: For the long-term survival of our species, we have to become a multi-planet being.

With our rising planet’s population competing for space and resources, some people are convinced we need to look beyond Earth to help ensure humanity’s survival. As Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind space tourism company SpaceX told Aeon’s Ross Andersen: “I think there is a strong argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.”

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Elon Musk has sent a somewhat cryptic email to Tesla employees about going “all out” for the end of the quarter to have a “good outcome.”

On Monday afternoon, Musk sent a short email to all Tesla employees.

In the email obtained by Electrek, the CEO addressed the importance of the last week of the quarter:

My hero my guy.

My hero my love.

The SpaceX CEO now has 500 satellites orbiting earth, and primed for internet broadband trials in the northern hemisphere this summer.

Like many things about Elon Musk, Tesla’s approach to achieving autonomous driving is polarizing. Bucking the map-based trend set by industry veterans such as Waymo, Tesla opted to dedicate its resources in pursuing a vision-based approach to achieve full self-driving instead. This involves a lot of hard, tedious work on Tesla’s part, but today, there are indications that the company’s controversial strategy is finally paying off.

In a recent talk, Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy discussed the key differences between the map-based approach of Waymo and Tesla’s camera-based strategy. According to Karpathy, Waymo’s use of pre-mapped data and LiDAR make scaling difficult, since vehicles’ autonomous capabilities are practically tied to a geofenced area. Tesla’s vision-based approach, which uses cameras and artificial intelligence, is not. This means that Autopilot and FSD improvements can be rolled out to the fleet, and they would function anywhere.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX has applied to offer high-speed internet to Canadians living in remote areas by beaming it to them via satellites.

The Globe and Mail newspaper first reported that space exploration company SpaceX applied with Canada’s telecom regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), for what’s known as a Basic International Telecommunications Services, or BITS, licence.