Tesla on Way to a Trillion Dollar Valuation
Electric carmaker Tesla closed trading on Wednesday with a market value topping $700 billion for the first time.
The latest surge means the company is worth more than General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Fiat Chrysler and Volkswagen combined.
Tesla's share price ended with a gain of 2.8 percent to $755.98 for a total value of whopping $717 billion. That came after the stock saw a more than 700 percent ascendance in 2020 -- a gain some analysts viewed as inflated.
The auto industry disruptor led by Elon Musk wowed Wall Street yet again over the weekend, reporting annual car deliveries of 499,550, just shy of its 2020 target of half a million, but well above analyst estimates.
The disclosure capped a year that saw Tesla report a series of profitable quarters and join the S & P 500, establishing the company as one of the world's most valuable businesses and elevating Musk to the second-wealthiest person behind Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
While industry analysts do not expect another massive surge in value this year, they remain optimistic about the company's sales prospects, even if the cars remain out of reach for many buyers.
The optimism comes as construction continues on new Tesla factories in Texas and Germany, which will join existing plants in California and Shanghai that are ramping up production.
Musk has expressed determination to cut the price for Tesla's electric cars, which currently start at $37,990 in the US market.
The Tesla chief is developing battery design, material and production innovations that combine to cut the cost per kilowatt hour by 56 percent.
That should enable Tesla to field a $25,000 model in "three years-ish," Musk said in September, adding, "it is absolutely critical that we make cars that people can actually afford."
And US sales could be helped by President-elect Joe Biden's commitment to green technology to combat climate change.
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
AI is the Neat Handwriting of the Illiterate
A model in the hands of someone who has read the filing and walked the plant is a clerk. The same model, speaking for someone who has done neither, is a disguise. On AI slop, phantom citations and factslop, why finish stopped being evidence of work, and the containment layer KXCO built so a machine cannot speak as the institution until a source is attached.
Worthship: Do Not Conform to the Age
Worthship is the older English word for worship, and it means to ascribe worth. Bishop Robert Barron preached Romans 12 on 30 August. This essay follows the text into the prison letters, and puts two questions to a graph: do the four readings of that Sunday agree, and was Paul free or in chains when he wrote about despair?
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