Tag: Elon Musk

Bill Gates Funneled Hundreds of Millions to Organizations Attacking Elon Musk

Virginia Star Staff

New research reveals that Microsoft founder Bill Gates, formerly the world’s wealthiest man, has been donating hundreds of millions of dollars to dark money groups that have been publicly attacking Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the current wealthiest man in the world.

As reported by Breitbart, Gates’ foundation donated to 11 of the 26 organizations that signed onto an open letter last month demanding a boycott of Twitter by its advertisers over Musk’s recent purchase of the company. The report comes from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), which traced the money from the signatories of the letter back to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Commentary: The Left’s Misery Continues to ‘Elongate’

Admin

A few weeks ago, Exxon announced that it was banning the display of Pride and BLM flags at its headquarters in Houston. There was a ripple of unhappiness, but nothing was burned down, the media attention was muted, and the world went about its business as before.

Across the country, school board elections are tossing out woke ideologues and partisans of critical race theory and replacing what amounts to gay pornography in the curriculum with more wholesome fare. The Biden Administration keeps running into roadblocks, most recently a judicial order halting its efforts to rescind Title 42, a Trump-era emergency order that turned away would-be immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. A few days ago, Biden’s absurd Disinformation Governance Board was shuttered and its pathetic director, Nina Jankowicz, sucked back into the memory hole whence she came.

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Twitter Lead Client Partner Caught on Tape Slamming Free Speech and Describing Elon Musk as a ‘Looney Tune’ with ‘Special Needs’

Virginia Star Staff

Twitter is not in business to make a profit or to give people free speech, but to do “something that’s good for the planet,” a company employee can be heard saying in a secretly recorded video.

The new undercover footage from Project Veritas features Lead Client Partner Alex Martinez discussing the company’s authoritarian views on speech, and denigrating Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a “loony toon” with “special needs.”

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Commentary: Employer-Based Microschooling Could Be the Newest Workplace Perk

Virginia Star Staff

When Elon Musk created a small school for his children and some of his SpaceX employees on the company’s California campus, he created a spark that could just now be catching on in other workplaces across the country. 

In a 2015 interview about the school, the billionaire inventor said: “The regular schools weren’t doing the things that I thought should be done. So I thought, well, let’s see what we can do.” A year earlier he had pulled his boys out of an elite private school in Los Angeles and launched Ad Astra, a project-based school with no grade levels, no mandatory classes, and an emergent curriculum.

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Two Top Twitter Managers Fired Ahead of Musk Purchase

Virginia Star Staff

Two top officials at Twitter were fired on Thursday, signaling ongoing internal chaos at the tech giant as Elon Musk prepares to take over the company.

According to ABC News, one of Twitter’s general managers, Kayvon Beykpour, was fired after working at Twitter for seven years. The same day, revenue and product lead Bruce Falck announced his firing in a tweet that has since been deleted. Beykpour described his situation in several tweets, claiming that CEO Parag Agrawal “asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a different direction.” Falck’s Twitter bio now simply reads “unemployed.”

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Commentary: Trump’s Truth Social Platform Could Help Propel GOP to Majorities in the 2022 Midterms and Beyond

Virginia Star Staff

No risk, no reward.

That’s the lesson official Washington, D.C. should now be learning from former President Donald Trump’s foray into running a social media company, TruthSocial.com, which is currently running a successful public beta that Apple customers can download in the App Store.

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Commentary: Tearing Down the Silicon Valley Wall

Virginia Star Staff

Elon Musk has finally managed to buy Twitter. And the moment he did, the enraged Left flipped out. 

Abruptly leftists began trashing their favorite electronic communications platform as the domain of the nation’s elite, professional classes. Had they just discovered that they had been racists and privileged users all this time? 

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Commentary: Reaction to Musk Offer Suggests Content Moderation More About Control Than Safety

RealClearWire

The reaction among the press and tech communities to Elon Musk’s efforts to purchase Twitter has been nothing short of apocalyptic. A common theme has been that democracy itself would be under threat if unelected billionaire oligarchs controlled what was allowed online. Yet this is precisely how social media works today. The Musk controversy, like the Cambridge Analytica story before it, highlights the real issue: the fight over content moderation is less about online safety and more about who controls the digital public square.

Only a year ago, the media cheered the unilateral decisions by a handful of billionaires to effectively banish then-President Donald Trump from the digital public square. Lawmakers and media outlets alike proclaimed the societal benefits of private companies controlling the digital public square beyond the reach of government. In contrast, the possibility of a libertarian-leaning billionaire like Musk wielding that same power has been presented as nothing short of an attack on democracy itself.

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Commentary: Twitter Is Not a Business, It’s a Political Operation

Virginia Star Staff
Person holding phone up with Twitter sign up page on smart phone.

Here’s your first clue Twitter is not really a business with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value – when Elon Musk made a public offer to buy the company for $54.20 a share (roughly $40 billion) the company’s management not only turned down the offer, but began to work on a poison pill defense aimed solely at Mr. Musk, who is already Twitter’s largest shareholder.

According to reporting by the New York Times, some investors and Wall Street analysts said that Mr. Musk’s offer of $54.20 a share was too low, and that he would need to go to at least $60 a share to appeal to shareholders. That would be 25 percent higher than the share price when Mr. Musk announced this month that he had acquired a 9 percent stake in Twitter.

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Elon Musk Named to Twitter Board of Directors

Peter D'Abrosca

In a move that has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk, who became Twitter’s largest shareholder Monday, will now be a member of the company’s board of directors.

“I’m excited to share that we’re appointing [Musk] to our board! Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board,” Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said Tuesday. 

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Musk Takes 9 Percent Stake in Twitter amid Speculation Buy Will Lead to ‘Active Stake,’ Stocks Soar

Virginia Star Staff
Elon Musk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has questioned Twitter’s commitment to free speech, has taken a 9% stake in the social media platform, making him its largest shareholder.

Musk bought 73.5 million shares worth $2.9 billion, based on the closing price Friday, the Associated Press reported Monday.

However, what Musk intends to do as a result of the purchase remains unclear.

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Pelosi’s Husband Buys $2 Million in Tesla Shares as Democrats Push Green Energy Handouts

Virginia Star Staff

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband purchased 2,500 shares of Tesla stock amid Democrats’ push for increased green energy spending.

Paul Pelosi, the Democratic House leader’s millionaire husband, purchased the tranche of Tesla stock on Thursday, when the company’s share price reached about $872 per share by the end of day, according to congressional filings published Monday. Pelosi bought the shares, worth roughly $2.18 million at the time, at a strike price of $500 per share.

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Top Ten Wealthiest Men in the World Doubled Their Wealth During the Pandemic

Virginia Star Staff

A recent report claims that the world’s top 10 richest men all saw their wealth double over the course of the Coronavirus pandemic, while 99 percent of global income dropped dramatically during the same period.

As reported by ABC News, a study published on Monday by the group Oxfam showed that the collective wealth of the top 10 doubled from approximately $700 billion to over $1.5 trillion between March of 2020 and November of 2021. During that same time, over 160 million people fell into poverty as incomes plummeted. The increase for the top 10 in less than two years represented a greater increase for their wealth than their growth over the previous 14 years combined.

The 10 men who were the focus of Oxfam’s study were: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer and Warren Buffett. The data for the study was gathered from the World Bank.

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JP Morgan Sues Tesla, Says Company Owes It $162 Million

Virginia Star Staff

Investment bank JP Morgan filed a complaint against Tesla late Monday alleging the electric car company owes the firm over $162 million.

The complaint centers on stock warrants, financial instruments allowing a buyer to purchase shares at a set price within a certain length of time, that JP Morgan bought from Tesla in 2014. The two firms agreed to a “strike price” at the time of purchase, and they agreed that if Tesla’s share price exceeded the strike price within the agreed-upon length of time, the electric car company would have to give JP Morgan stock or cash equivalent to the difference in prices, JP Morgan said in the complaint.

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Elon Musk’s Tesla to Move Headquarters from California to Texas

Virginia Star Staff

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on Thursday that the company will be moving its headquarters out of California and into Texas, according to CNN.

“I’m excited to announce that we’re moving our headquarters to Austin, Texas,” Musk announced to a shareholders’ meeting on Thursday. The company, which specializes in electric vehicles, had been based out of California since its foundation in San Carlos, with its first factory built in Fremont and its current headquarters located in Palo Alto.

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Employees Criticize Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin for Being ‘Mostly Male and Overwhelmingly White’

Virginia Star Staff
Jeff Bezos

A letter written by current and former employees of Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin took aim at the company’s workplace culture.

The letter, posted on website Lioness and written by former Head of Blue Origin Employee Communications Alexandra Abrams along with 20 unnamed current and former employees, criticized the company’s culture and work environment as “stuck in a toxic past.”

“One-hundred percent of the senior technical and program leaders are men,” the employees wrote, bashing the Blue Origin workforce for being “mostly male and overwhelmingly white.”

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The Billionaire Space Race: A Competition Between the World’s Richest Men Is Resurrecting an Industry

Virginia Star Staff

Jeff Bezos became the second billionaire to successfully reach outer space this month when his Blue Origin New Shepard spacecraft exited the atmosphere Tuesday, the latest development in the ongoing space race between Bezos, SpaceX’s Elon Musk, and Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson.

Branson was the first billionaire in space last week when he and several crew members aboard his VSS Unity spaceplane successfully flew to an altitude of 53.5 miles. His company Virgin Galactic, founded in 2004, is developing commercial spacecraft to be used in suborbital flights for those seeking a trip to outer space. Musk’s SpaceX, founded in 2002, has been at the forefront of the private space industry for over a decade, with Musk planning a mission to Mars as early as 2024.

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West Virginia Site Chosen for High-Speed Hyperloop Travel Facility

The Associated Press

Virgin Hyperloop One will build a certification center in West Virginia for the high-speed transportation concept that uses enclosed pods to zip passengers underground at over 600 mph (960 km/h).

The company had received bids from more than a dozen states in the past year to build a 6-mile (9.7-kilometer) testing track and other safety facilities over hundreds of acres for the electromagnetic levitation transportation technology.

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Elon Musk Takes the Deal – Agrees To Step Down From Tesla As Chairman In SEC Settlement

Admin
Elon Musk

by Chris White   Billionaire tech guru Elon Musk agreed to step down as the chairman of Tesla after the Securities and Exchange Commission sued the electric vehicle company for fraud, according to court documents published Saturday. Musk, who owns roughly 20 percent of the company, also agreed to pay…

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