Elon Musk Gets Some New Twitter Rules
Also Bayer, Schwab, personal finance and seasteading.
Last Tuesday, Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., announced on Twitter that “Tesla is going to develop a quiet, electric leafblower.” “Will be sentient, of course,” he added two days later. Is this true? Look, I don’t know. I am certainly open to the possibility that this, like Musk’s April 2018 announcement that “Tesla has gone completely and totally bankrupt,” was a joke. On the other hand, who doesn’t hate noisy leaf blowers? Musk has a pretty solid record of actually building the random whimsical things — spaceships, submarines, tunnels, flamethrowers — that he seems to be joking about. Sentience is a difficult philosophical question but with modern advances in artificial intelligence it seems possible to build a leaf blower that can make small talk about the weather and play grandmaster-level chess. If Tesla actually builds and markets a sentient-ish leaf blower, I will be surprised, but mildly surprised. It won’t be the strangest thing Tesla does that day, probably.
On the other hand, there has been no press release, Securities and Exchange Commission filing or other corporate announcement — beyond Musk’s tweets — of the leaf-blower project. Last Monday Tesla hosted an “Autonomy Investor Day” about its plans to develop and deploy self-driving cars. You might think that leaf-blower sentience would have potential applications to self-driving cars, but the leaf blowers didn’t come up at Autonomy Day. Last Wednesday, Tesla announced its first-quarter earnings, and there was no discussion of the leaf blowers in the earnings release, or on the investor Q&A, or in the quarterly report on Form 10-Q that Tesla filed today.