Elon Musk

Flights to offer drinks, snacks and now Starlink • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Commerce, Elon Musk, Hardware, Space, SpaceX, starlink, Starlink AviationNo Comments

Having barely expanded Starlink onto the seas and looking at the Ukraine war as a business opportunity, Elon Musk has expanded Starlink through a commercial- and private jet-focused sub-brand, Starlink Aviation. The idea of having Wi-Fi up in the sky isn’t new, but your service is typically limited. On a commercial flight, one is charged fees to access, at best, mediocre service. Most in-flight services use air-to-ground services which top out at around 10 Mbps. Because the speeds offered are per plane, what you actually get is dependent on how many individuals are using it. For the most part, Starlink Aviation is tackling the speed issue, claiming to provide services that’ll let users game, stream, make video calls and so on “at any altitude”. The service will offer 350 Mbps (the same offered on Starlink Maritime) on each plane and with “latency as low as 20 ms.”. “Passengers can engage in activities previously not functional in flight, including video calls, online gaming, virtual private networks and other high data rate activities,” Starlink claims on its website. “As the world’s largest satellite constellation with coverage over land, the oceans and polar regions, Starlink is positioned to connect passengers wherever your flight routes evolve.” However, with monthly fees ranging from $12,500-$25,000 and a one-time hardware installation cost of $150,000 the question of accessibility has been thrown out the door. The kits will include the Aero Terminal (an “electronically steered phased array antenna” that sits flush to the plane’s surface) 2 wireless access points. The service noted there are no long-term contracts and any hardware is covered by warranty for as long as the buyer subscribes. Starlink has already secured a deal with Hawaiian Airlines to provide their Wi-Fi service to passengers, according to a report from CNBC. The report further detailed the airline will provide the service to passengers for free across their Boeing 787s and 717s. SpaceX has also secured a contract with charter carrier JSK. It’s a direct challenge to Gogo, the leading inflight connectivity provider. Buyers can begin accessing Starlink Aviation at the start of 2023.

SpaceX no longer seeking Pentagon funding for Starlink in Ukraine, Musk says • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in Elon Musk, Space, SpaceX, starlink, ukraineNo Comments

SpaceX has withdrawn its request to the Pentagon that it fund the ongoing use of Starlink internet terminals in Ukraine, CEO Elon Musk said Monday. His statement (made on Twitter – where else?) comes just hours after it was reported that the Pentagon was considering footing the bill using a fund that finances contracts for weapons and equipment for the Ukrainian military. Out of the 25,300 terminals that were sent to Ukraine, around 10,630 were paying for the satellite internet service, Musk added. This marks the latest chapter in the ongoing saga over the fate of Starlink in Ukraine – a service that Ukranian officials say has become critical to the war effort, allowing troops and civilians to stay connected despite widespread destruction of conventional communications infrastructure, like cellphone towers. As late as July, a top Ukranian military official sent a direct request to Musk for almost 8,000 additional terminals, CNN reported. CNN also reported that SpaceX had sent a letter to the Pentagon requesting it pick up funding for the Starlink service in Ukraine, news that generated major waves of controversy. Musk said the ongoing operation of the donated Starlink terminals has cost $80 million and will exceed $100 million by year’s end; meanwhile, in a letter SpaceX told the Pentagon, “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time.” But despite today’s news that SpaceX has withdrawn its request for funding, the long-term future of Starlink in Ukraine is by no means settled. Two days ago, Musk said “the hell with it […] we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free,” but as ZebethMedia’s Devin Coldewey noted, this is by no means a long-term solution. Earlier today, Politico reported that U.S. officials were considering funding the service through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, the financing fund mentioned earlier in this story. European Union foreign ministers also discussed the Starlink issue at a meeting today, Politico said. But whether the Pentagon – which has sent billions to support the war effort in Ukraine, funds which have gone to everything from ammunition to armored vehicles – will persist in picking up the tab now that SpaceX is no longer seeking financing is unclear.

Wharton’s Mori Taheripour on how to negotiate the right way • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in Commerce, Elon Musk, M&A, Media & Entertainment, negotiation, TwitterNo Comments

Mori Taheripour teaches negotiations at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught undergraduates, MBA students and executive MBA students how to have better business conversations. Taheripour has also coached corporate clients, including on behalf of Goldman Sachs and Major League Baseball, about how to feel more confident and comfortable in negotiating, a skill that everyone uses daily but which tends to be seen as a kind of dark art. Amid the backdrop of one of the highest-profile negotiations in recent memory, centered on Elon Musk’s ongoing stop-and-go plans to buy Twitter, and aware that many readers are negotiating on their own behalf right now — for more time, more funding, a better exit package, fewer investor protections — we talked with Taheripour earlier this week to ask where negotiations tend to falter and how to help them succeed. Excerpts from that chat follow edited for length and clarity. TC: You’ve been an expert in dispute resolution and negotiation for more than a decade. You also published a book on the topic during the pandemic that’s been well-received. For people who haven’t yet read it, is the ability to negotiate well somewhat intuitive or entirely learned? It’s something you learn, and I actually think most people are better negotiators than they think they are because we do it so much. It’s only when we see negotiations through the lens of things that are really transactional and maybe conflict ridden that people put negotiations in a category of things people don’t really enjoy or they’re really afraid of or that are really uncomfortable, and they want to put it off. But any parent, anybody who’s in a relationship, anybody who has employees, anybody who has a pet . . . is probably really good at negotiations. What are some of the most common missteps people make when they’re in a business-related negotiation process? At the heart of all negotiations is human connection. That’s where the magic happens. Most negotiations are not transactional. The best negotiations are either fostering relationships that we already have, or creating new ones. And once you look at it that way, then negotiations become a conversation. Some conversations are harder than others. But they shouldn’t be if we open our minds to them with a sense of empathy and wanting to be creative and wanting to not focus on any one solution. Your book is about how to “negotiate fearlessly,” yet there’s a fine line between fearless and overconfident. Any pointers for readers who might be wondering how to straddle that line? A lot of this goes back to negative self talk and self sabotage. You’re not going to be an excellent negotiator just because you’re smarter and have a higher IQ. Being an excellent negotiator really starts with you getting out of your own way. Great negotiators are great storytellers who can see themselves from a place of value and fearlessly self advocate. If you don’t believe in yourself, if you don’t fearlessly understand your own self value, then the goals that you set for yourself are diminished. They become safe. They may even become mediocre. And once your goals are watered down and safe, then what you ask for is going to be reflective of those goals, and you’re not going to get enough. The minute you give up your power – you either back off in order to make the other [party] happy or to avoid conflict – then you can’t stay in the conversation. You have to have the self-confidence that you two are part of this conversation and your space is as important as theirs. It doesn’t mean those two things are mutually exclusive; it means that you seek solutions that are mutually inclusive. For people in an M&A type situation right now, what do you make adages to never take the first offer, to push for 20% more? Are any of these truly relevant? The way I teach is not at all prescriptive. I don’t believe in always, and I don’t believe in never. The older we get, our gut instinct becomes stronger and our intuition and emotional intelligence become stronger. We should be using these to navigate conversations, as opposed to trying to remember what a professor said in class. When you’re boxed in like that, it creates a lot of anxiety, especially because no negotiation is the same, and the person sitting across from you, that audience, is always different. Elon Musk has seemingly been trying to negotiate with Twitter, on Twitter, to either knock down the price or get out of the deal or buy himself some time, who knows. Either way, making the conversation — or part of it — so public is obviously by design and I wonder if this will become a kind of case study for future negotiations. He’s playing by completely different rules. Five or 10 years ago, this would probably be a nightmare for shareholders and companies because you want to hold on to what’s happening until it’s all done and then go public with it. But what’s quite traditional is that he’s controlling his own story and the messaging that comes out is his, no matter how confusing. If you think about it, he has been testing the water for far longer than the six months since he proposed buying Twitter. Every time he says anything about Tesla stock, prices change; people react immediately. So I think he saw the power that he had in literally changing markets [by using Twitter]. Do you think there is a master plan here? Do you see any logic in this chaos? Truth be told, I was incredibly surprised when the deal fell apart — and there was the threat of litigation and things got messy and he tried to step away. I thought that for sure if the deal was to happen [after that], the stock price or deal valuation would be a lot lower at least. When [the

Elon Musk’s X app for ‘everything’ might be a non-starter in the US • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 9, 2022Posted in Elon Musk, Social, Transportation, Twitter, WeChatNo Comments

As Elon Musk again nears a deal to buy Twitter, speculation is resurfacing around how the billionaire plans to transform the social network. Musk’s tweet this week offered a clue: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” While Musk didn’t elaborate on what X would look like, many reckon he’s aspiring to replicate the success of WeChat, which over the past decade has virtually become the everything app in China. People use it to read the news, hail rides, book doctor’s appointments, pay taxes and carry out a myriad of other daily activities. That perhaps is indeed Musk’s idea given he’s full of praise for the Tencent-owned messager. In his first town hall with Twitter staff in June, the Tesla founder talked up WeChat as a possible vision for the American social network. And, you know, if I think of, like, WeChat in China, which is actually a great, great app, but there’s no WeChat movement outside of China. And I think that there’s a real opportunity to create that. You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so useful and so helpful to your daily life. And I think if we could achieve that, or even close to that with Twitter, it would be an immense success. WeChat has long been celebrated in the West as one of the greatest inventions that came out of the Chinese internet. And Tencent’s investment in Tesla has probably given Musk an insight into the Chinese internet giant. But is the WeChat model really a desirable product for the U.S.? The exact WeChat features that impress Musk are also the source of criticisms of the app. The all-in-one messenger has in effect erected a walled garden, critics say, where e-commerce transactions only take place over its payments app and information consumed by users is either published within WeChat’s infrastructure or third-party services backed by Tencent. Links from Tencent’s nemeses, like Alibaba and Douyin (TikTok’s sister in China), were inaccessible on WeChat until Beijing’s recent anti-monopoly movement began to tear down the thick walls. A super app might bring convenience to users as they hardly need to leave the platform — which in turn helps drive revenues for the company — but the model can stifle competition and rule out user choices. Putting these concerns aside, could Musk replicate WeChat’s success in the U.S. after all? Unlikely, at least not WeChat in its current state. The messaging app thrived under conditions unique to China, for better or worse. Before diving into what WeChat has done right, let’s not forget that its core as a social messaging app makes it fundamentally different from Twitter, which is a social media platform. The fact that it is a chat app means it’s highly sticky. With over 1.3 billion users, WeChat is the ubiquitous messenger in China, while people go on Twitter mostly to consume information rather than talk to people they know in real life. WeChat’s unfair advantages WeChat didn’t start from scratch. Tencent was already the social networking king of China with QQ, a messenger akin to ICQ that took off in the PC age. Not long after WeChat launched in 2011, Tencent opened up QQ’s enormous social graph to WeChat, giving people the option to add QQ friends on WeChat. If Musk built X from scratch, he could play around funneling users from Twitter to the new platform. But, sticking with the WeChat analogy, it would be competing in a market crowded with WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram and others. WeChat is many apps folded into one, and messaging is a gateway through which people come to discover the plethora of features it’s been adding over the years. One of its early killer features is a content publishing feature called Public Accounts. When Public Accounts launched in 2012, Weibo and blogging platforms were the two places for China’s netizens to share their voices. The former had a 140-character limit like Twitter, while blogs were popular mostly among Chinese elites. Built off an everyday chat app, Public Accounts soon attracted everyone from economists to small business owners who wanted to propagate ideas. By the beginning of 2021, 360 million users were reading articles through Public Accounts. Any organization that needs to produce content is on WeChat, from state media to fashion brands. The online media landscape in the U.S. is a lot more diverse. People read news on news apps, seek thought leadership on LinkedIn and encounter brands’ stories through blogs. The majority of businesses in China might not have a website, but they probably maintain a WeChat Public Account. Over time, Public Accounts has morphed into a digital infrastructure for businesses that’s not unlike Shopify. That was made possible with the launch of WeChat Pay in 2013. While America spent the past decade improving magnetic card-enabled transactions, China never had widespread credit card adoption and went straight from paying with cash to mobile payments using QR codes. WeChat Pay quickly attracted users in droves by becoming the default payment option for a few popular apps, including ride-hailing upstart Didi and food delivery platform Meituan — which are both backed by Tencent, one of the most prolific corporate investors in the world. Were Musk to start a new payments solution that follows WeChat Pay’s playbook, he’d have to form alliances with other internet giants to drive adoption. WeChat’s role as the backbone for e-commerce has only become more omnipotent over time. In 2017, it began letting developers build lite apps that run inside WeChat. Businesses that used to hawk products through static Public Account pages could now run WeChat-based stores that have all the basic functions of an e-commerce app. Pinduoduo, the social commerce startup that grew to rival Alibaba in half a century, took off as a mini app thanks to its seamless integration with WeChat’s social features. Imagine you could browse Amazon on WhatsApp, share product pages with your contacts and make a purchase without ever leaving the messenger. After

Elon Musk buying Twitter after all, the ‘next Mark Zuckerberg’ and fare thee well, Stadia • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 9, 2022Posted in Elon Musk, Startups, Twitter, Week in ReviewNo Comments

Hi all! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly sum up some of the most read ZebethMedia stories from the past seven days. The goal? Even when you’re swamped, a quick skim of WiR on Saturday morning should give you a pretty good understanding of what happened in tech this week. Want it in your inbox? Get it here. most read Stadia’s death: Devin opined on the recent Stadia shutdown, saying the shocking demise of the gaming service was the fault of one entity alone: Google. He writes: “No one trusts Google. It has exhibited such poor understanding of what people want, need and will pay for that at this point, people are wary of investing in even its more popular products.” This Week in Elon Musk: First he stepped in it when he waded into the Russia-Ukraine war with his version of a peace plan that Connie characterized as not very well-received. And then he finally said he’d buy Twitter after all. Twitter told us that the “Musk parties” sent them a letter expressing the billionaire’s intention to go through with the purchase, provided the trial between the two, which was scheduled to start October 17, did not take place. As Taylor and Harri said in their story, however, “given Musk’s chaotic nature, it’s possible that another wrench could be thrown into the works.” Fizz to the “next Mark Zuckerberg”: An app created by former Stanford students to limit social isolation across college campuses received a $4.5 million round this week. The founder, a Stanford dropout, “set out to build an app by college students, for college students, seeking to help his fellow classmates feel less lonely and form meaningful connections on campus.” Google on your Lock Screen: iOS 16 users aren’t limited only to Apple widgets on their new Lock Screens. Google made good on its promise to make its apps available as widgets for quick access. Gmail, Google News, Drive and Chrome are now available, with Search and Apps coming. Search in fashion: South Korean search company Naver said it plans to purchase apparel marketplace Poshmark for $1.2 billion in cash. Edu breach: In what appears to be the largest education breach in a while, hackers released a cache of data stolen during a cyberattack against the Los Angeles Unified School District. audio roundup Didn’t have time to tune in to all of ZebethMedia’s podcasts this week? Here’s what you might’ve missed: For Found this week, we rereleased an episode on delivering remote abortion care with Kiki Freedman from Hey Jane. She also tells us about how her experience at Uber informed her founder mentality and how the startup hopes to change the healthcare industry. Chain Reaction connected with Edward Saatchi, an expert in the web3 space and the founder of The Culture DAO and Fable who discussed how emerging technologies can enable new forms of storytelling and how sectors like crypto and AI are changing what the metaverse might look like. Amanda joined Alex this week on the Wednesday episode of Equity to chat about the creator economy. On The TC Podcast, Haje Jan Kamps, stepping in for Darrell Etherington, talks with Dominic-Madori Davis about how conservative VCs are shaping the startup landscape and, by extension, the world. He also talked with Taylor Hatmaker about all things Elon. And check out the ZebethMedia Live podcast, which is the audio version of our weekly ZebethMedia Live show. This week, hear how Mammoth Biosciences Trevor Martin attracted the best partners to form the company, including Mayfield partner Ursheet Parikh, who wrote an early funding check. Step one? It starts with the vision and mission. techcrunch+ What hides behind the ZebethMedia+ paywall? Lots of really great stuff! It’s where we get to step away from the unrelenting news cycle and go a bit deeper on the stuff you tell us you like most. The most-read TC+ stuff this week? Five key IP considerations for AI startups: Early-stage startups are creating new AI-based solutions but might not know whether the tech can be protected and the best way to do it. In this post, Eric L. Sophir, IP partner at law firm Foley & Lardner LLP, and Matthew Horton, senior counsel and IP lawyer at law firm Foley & Lardner LLP, provide guidance for young companies. Vori’s pitch deck: Haje brings you another pitch deck teardown, this time from Vori, which raised to a $10 million Series A. Want your pitch deck featured on TC+? Here’s more information. Also, check out all our Pitch Deck Teardowns and other pitching advice, all collected in one handy place for you! In on this?