SpaceX’s first ocean spaceport is being built and will host launches next year SpaceX is already underway on building its first floating spaceport platform, and the plan is for it to start hosting launches as early as next year. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared those details on the progress of its build for Deimos, one of two converted oil rigs that SpaceX purchased earlier this year in order to transform them into floating launch and landing sites for its forthcoming Starship reusable rocket. SpaceX’s purchase of the two rigs at the beginning of this year was for the creation of Deimos and Phobos, two floating spaceports named after the moons of Mars. They’ll act as offshore staging grounds for Starship launch activities, and the name is appropriate because the eventual plan is to have Starship provide transport for both people and goods to and from the red planet. Musk and SpaceX have previously shared their vision for a future in which spaceports like Deimos are positioned within convenient reach of major hubs around the world, making it possible for SpaceX to operate a globe-spanning network of hypersonic point-to-point travel using Starships ferrying people from destinations as far flung as Beijing to New York in around 30 minutes. Before that, however, SpaceX will be looking to conduct orbital flight testing of the still in-development Starship, and its accompany booster, the Super Heavy. Musk said earlier this year that it could begin flying rockets from its offshore platforms as early as the end of 2021. This new timeline indicates that rosy estimate has been pushed, which is pretty standard for the multi-CEO. The company has recently made good progress in its Starship program, however, with a successful high-altitude launch and landing test at its Texas ‘Starbase’ development site. SpaceX is now in the process of getting ready for its first orbital flight test, which will include flying Starship atop Super Heavy for the first time, and a recovery of the Starship following the test after it splashes down off the coast of Hawaii. It’s now doing longer fire Raptor engine ground tests to get ready for that next big milestone. #wnu #africa #spacex

SpaceX reportedly raised the best part of a billion dollars to fund future missions SpaceX has reportedly raised $850 million in a round of funding, in transactions that would value shares of the company at $419.99 each. According to CNBC, this would mean the company is worth around $74 billion. It would also mean that the company has money to continue on with its future projects. As one could imagine, some of SpaceX’s projects are deeply unprofitable before they start making money — for instance, earlier this month Elon Musk said that there’s a “deep chasm of negative cash flow” between the company’s satellite-based internet service provider Starlink and profitability. The company’s plan to send enough satellites to create a global, high-speed internet network is expensive, and since the service is still in the beta and pre-order stage, it’s not going to be bringing in a ton of money. The company is also working on a spaceship with a cargo capacity that rivals the Saturn V, the rocket that took us to the Moon. A project like that requires many failed test flights, which can sometimes crash and blow up. While SpaceX aims for Starship to eventually be reusable like some of its current rockets, recent crashes suggest the company will have to build a few more before it has a product that can be profitably sent into space. With SpaceX being a private company, its financials can often be difficult to figure out, but it’s likely that investors (at least the ones who paid almost $420 a share) believe that the company will be successful, both with future endeavors and current ones like making deliveries to the International Space Station for NASA. While Musk has said Starlink alone might cost $10 billion to create, having $850 million more in the bank account certainly doesn’t hurt the company’s odds. #wnu

NASA picks SpaceX Falcon Heavy for $332M mission to launch lunar Gateway components in 2024 NASA has announced that SpaceX will take two major parts of the Gateway lunar orbiter that will function as a pit stop for future moon missions. The Power and Propulsion Element and Habitation and Logistics Outpost — which together will form the first usable lunar space station — will go up in 2024 on a Falcon Heavy, with an estimated price tag of $332 million. The Falcon Heavy, which provides a far larger lift capacity than SpaceX’s now commonly used Falcon 9, has only had two commercial launches since its successful test launch in early 2018 (with Starman and a Tesla Roadster, you may remember). Arabsat-6A launched in April of 2019, and STP-2 a few months later, but since then the Heavy hasn’t seen any action. (Several missions are planned for the next year, however.) NASA’s selection of the launch vehicle as the one that will bring these two crucial components to lunar orbit is a huge endorsement, however, and may actually snowball into more work down the line if the agency’s own Space Launch System continues to be delayed. The PPE and HALO, as the two pieces are called, provide the essentials for a self-sustaining lunar orbital habitat: essentially the pressurized cabin and the power source that keeps it operational and allows maneuvering. So you could say they’re fundamental. They’re also big, and can’t be sent up in 10 different pieces on smaller rockets. But there are precious few heavy launch vehicles available — and it looks like they decided that SpaceX’s was the best bet, having flown three successful missions already. This mission is valued at $332 million in launch and related costs, so it’s a serious investment that will require a lot of collaboration between SpaceX, NASA, Northrop Grumman (which is building the HALO) and Maxar (making the PPE). For now launch is set for no earlier than may of 2024, but that date may (and in fact is highly likely to) slip as various delays accrue. The whole Artemis program is experiencing a period of reality alignment, and while new target dates haven’t been given for all the ambitious plans made during the last four years, few of the old ones have been repeated the way they were as recently as last fall. Nevertheless even a five or six-year plan to return to the moon’s surface is still quite ambitious, considering — as has become the standard NASA refrain — “we’re going there to stay.” We’ll likely hear more about the new timeline as the agency comes to grips with it itself over the next few months. #wnu

What will Amazon founder Jeff Bezos do next? A quarter of a century after he founded Amazon in a Seattle garage, Jeff Bezos announced this week that he is preparing to loosen his grip on the $1.7tn (£1.2tn) company. The billionaire – who until he was recently overtaken by Tesla’s Elon Musk was the world’s richest person – will this summer pass the reins to top lieutenant Andy Jassy and Bezos will become executive chairman. Few employees in the sphere conservatories at Amazon’s sprawling Seattle campus headquarters reckon Bezos will relinquish much of his iron grip on the company’s day-to-day decision making. But Bezos, 57, told his 1.3 million employees (who he refers to as “fellow Amazonians”) that “as much as I still tap dance into the office, I’m excited about this transition”. “I’ve never had more energy, and this isn’t about retiring,” he said. “I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives … I’m super passionate about the impact I think these organisations can have.” Those organisations were: the Day One Fund; the Blue Origin space company; the Bezos Earth Fund; and the Washington Post newspaper. Here we look at what Bezos will do next with those interests. Day One Fund Bezos is unique among the world’s five wealthiest people as the only one not to have signed the Giving Pledge, a philanthropic initiative created by Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett to encourage the world’s richest people to commit to giving at least half their wealth to charity. In 2018 he gave $2bn, amounting to just over 1% of his wealth, to the Bezos Day One Fund to help address homelessness and improve education for children in low-income families. Bezos said his decision to use the fund to support nonprofits that focus on homeless services was inspired by Mary’s Place, a Seattle-based organisation with a simple motto: “No child sleeps outside.” However, the charity has been criticised for only slowly ramping up its donations to good causes. Earlier this year it named 42 recipients from 24 states that will receive donations totalling $106m. Blue Origin When attending high school near Miami, Bezos decided he wanted to go into space when he grew up. But, his ambition was not to be an astronaut; he wanted to colonise space. He was named valedictorian of his high school class and when he graduated in 1982, the Miami Herald asked for an interview. The 18-year-old Bezos told the paper he wanted to “build space hotels, amusement parks and colonies for 2 million or 3 million people who would be in orbit”. “The whole idea is to preserve the Earth,” he told the paper. “The goal was to be able to evacuate humans. The planet would become a park.” Now, Bezos owns Blue Origin a space company that aims to make space travel cheaper and slightly more accessible with reusable launch vehicles. The company, which uses the motto Gradatim Ferociter, Latin for “step by step, ferociously”, is testing a moon lander called Blue Moon and hopes to launch its first mission in 2024. In his race to commercialise space Bezos is competing against Musk’s SpaceX. Bezos Earth Fund Last year Bezos posted a picture of the Earth on Instagram, and announced the creation of his new project the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10bn initiative to support scientists, activists and charities working to tackle the climate crisis. “Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet,” he said. “I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share. This global initiative will fund scientists, activists, NGOs – any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world. We can save Earth. It’s going to take collective action from big companies, small companies, nation states, global organisations, and individuals. ⁣⁣Earth is the one thing we all have in common – let’s protect it, together.⁣⁣⁣” In November he announced 16 initial recipients of the fund, who will receive a collective $791m. They include The Nature Conservancy, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, World Resources Institute and the World Wildlife Fund, which will each receive $100 million. Bezos said, again on Instagram, that he had spent months learning about the grantees’ work and said they were all “working on innovative, ambitious and needle-moving solutions”. It is “just the beginning”, he added. The Washington Post Bezos bought the Washington Post, famed the world over for its Watergate investigation that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon, in 2013 for $250m. He has been credited with bringing the paper into the digital era after decades of decline and concern about its future as a going concern. The Post was given prominent position on Amazon devices such as the Kindle. Reporters and editors who might have feared that Bezos would interfere with editorial decision-making, say that the billionaire has focused on the technology side of the business and has not used it to promote his own agenda. “I didn’t know anything about the newspaper business … But I did know something about the internet,” Bezos said in an interview soon after he took over. … and still at Amazon Those 1.3 million Amazonians should not think they’ve seen the last of their boss. Amazon’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky told reporters last night that: “Jeff is really not going anywhere. It’s more of a restructuring of who’s doing what.” #wnu #wafconnect #currentnews

Elon Musk busts Clubhouse limit, fans stream to YouTube, he switches to interviewing Robinhood CEO Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and many other companies, has mastered the art of using Twitter to harness fans and promote himself and his interests across as wide an audience as possible. Using some of that momentum, last night he made a vocal debut on a newer platform — Silicon Valley’s hottest startup right now, Clubhouse, which lets people join rooms to listen in on conversations between hosts and guests. Musk, fielding a series of mostly softball questions, used the session to “talk to his base” on topics ranging from space travel, colonies on Mars, crypto, AI and Covid-19 vaccines. He managed to bust a few myths about his “alternative” positions on several subjects, and at times managed to sound far more nuanced than his meme-propelled, trolling Twitter feed. For example, in contrast to previous expositions on the viability of living on Mars, Musk didn’t paint a rose-colored vision in his conversation. Instead, he said that while Mars exploration is a worthwhile effort to keep humankind alive, life would be hard. The last quarter of the interview then veered off radically when Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood, was brought in (apparently by Musk, but there was a hint of co-ordination behind the scenes). Suddenly, Musk turned interviewer and had Tenev unpack what had happened in the last week with the Wall Street Bets debacle. Some saw the Clubhouse room as a massive PR stunt by the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz — which, in addition to being a big investor in Robinhood and Clubhouse, backs startups that work with Musk’s companies. With more than 5,000 people in the room (breaking Clubhouse’s previously maintained limits), hundreds of journalists and live streams on YouTube, we did get a little taste of how A16Z’s new media efforts — which effectively seek to disintermediate journalists in the public discourse about technology — might work. And from the looks of events like last night’s, like it or leave it, for now at least, it’s a part of the mix. Below is our semi-live blog of the session: As I type this Elon Musk has joined Clubhouse for his first-ever in-person live session and the boundaries of the app have already been tested, with the usual limit of 5,000 people for a room getting passed, and amplified further with Musk fans creating secondary listening rooms on Clubhouse, Youtube and more: live-streamed here and here for example. I am dusting off my creaky live-blogging skillz to cover the interview… and will update this post as we go (apologies for the appalling typos in the interim). Musk initially talked about going to Mars and said it was likely to be “hard” for the early pioneers, but that the endeavor ultimately would be a matter of keeping the “candle of civilization alive in the dark”. Asked if he believed in aliens, he said there wasn’t a single piece of conclusive evidence for the existence of aliens, although it’s “quite possible” there is such a thing as Alien technology, at least at a “7/11” level, and a joked that the evidence so far suggests they might be at the “500 Megapixel camera” or “at least iPhone 6 level”. He said his kids were not quite into the idea of going to Mars. Asked about memes online he quipped: “He who controls the memes controls the universe” and it’s about what “influences the zeitgeist”. Memes are a complex form of communication, he said: unlike pictures, memes are “10,000 words not 1,000 words”. They are aspirational and funny. “I love memes, they can be very insightful,” he added. Does he try to sound crazy on Twitter? “I started crazy on Twitter,” he joked. He said he doesn’t follow memes himself. Instead, he has “meme dealers,” friends who pick out and send him memes they think he would like. He talked about his company Neuralink and also added that Tesla had one of the strongest AI teams in the world. With AI, it’s about “how do we stay relevant” and at least “stay ‘along for the ride’ in the good scenario” and couple our minds with AI to harness its power. “People are already a cyborg,” he said, referring to a tertiary layer in the form of smartphones. The bit-rate of us typing into a phone is 100 bits. So it’s like trying to talk to a tree, for our smartphones. So with a direct neural interface, we increase it by a huge magnitude, and also spend longer time with a higher magnitude of processing because of this. You can decide if you want to be a robot or a person. But when you wake in the morning you wouldn’t have to be the same ‘mind’ as you were yesterday. It’s analogous to a video game, not unlike the “Altered Carbon” Netflix series. There are primitive versions of this in the Neuralink idea, with tiny wires going into your brain. He claimed Neuralink will be releasing new videos in a month or so, such as of a monkey playing videos with their mind. He didn’t appear to comment on the ethics behind this (one of the many times Musk was not challenged in what he said). The value of the early implant will be enormous and outweigh the risks, is his take. The moderators asked him about educating 5-year-olds: what should they learn these days? Musk talked about how video games engage children, but explaining “the why” was important. “We are programmed to forget the low ‘probability of things’ if they aren’t relevant,” he said. For example, taking apart an engine and putting it together. We need tools, so we understand the relevance. It’s better than taking a “course on wrenches”. He was asked “why are there not more Elon Musks”? His hard-knocks response: “If you need encouraging words, don’t do a startup.” He also gave his two bitcoins on crypto. A friend sent him a slice of cake using bitcoin in 2013. “I should have bought it 8 years ago.” he said. “At this point Bitcoin is a good thing. I am a supporter. I am late to the party, but I am a supporter.” He said it was clear Bitcoin was getting broader acceptance by the financial world. “I don’t have a strong opinion on other currencies.” Dogecoin, he said, was made as joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies, but “fate loves irony.” And it also seems to love chaos, in Musk’s vioew. “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely,” he said. The most ironic outcome would be Dogecoin becoming the currency of the future. But maybe not if some social platforms have anything to do with it. He said he made a joke about Bitcoin and his Twitter account got locked. Attention then turned to his electric car company Tesla. The target is to make 20 million cars and trucks per year. This is a wild — and again, very unchallenged — statement: recall that in 2020 it made less than 500,000 cars, and even less trucks. That a long road to travel, in other words. He also had some thoughts on self-driving. Autonomous vehicles could reach the point where you would rely on them for a significant amount of time in the a week. Autonomous cars would take over for roughly a third of the hours in a weeks, so 60 hours instead of 12, eventually, in his projection. (Again, very blue sky statements here, as there are no fully autonomous cars in free use on roads at this point.) He also had some thoughts on work in the pandemic and post-pandemic world. Working remotely on Zoom has been tricky for him, he said. “Fear is not the mind-killer, context switching the mind-killer,” he said, of having to switch between disparate subjects on calls. Would he start another company to address Covid-19 in some way? He joked that he pretty much has his hands full with Tesla, Space X, The Boring Company and others to date. He talked about the huge advances in vaccine technology, such as the MRNA tech which made the Covid-19 vaccine possible. He seemed very bullish about the vaccine. While the news today is about the the dearth of supply in vaccines, it seems like he thinks the space for Covid-19 medicines, and specifically inoculations against it, is a crowded market longer term. “There is going to be an avalanche of vaccine,” coming he said. “I guarantee you ‘it’ will be thrown away this year.” There could be an opportunity for producing these in his current enterprises, he hinted. “The Tesla machine can make a bazillion doses super fast,” he claimed. (Again, no challenge or follow up on that one, either.) All in all, he made his poison clear on vaccines: “I am not an anti-vaxxer, I am a pro-vaxxer.” Then a turn to his first years in technology. In Silicon Valley in the early days, he said, he had to ask himself: “Do I watch the internet being built in front of me or do I get involved?” Still, he recalled being “too shy” to speak to anyone in the lobby of Netscape. Then he tried to code. He wrote the first maps and directions on the internet. By hand. The Web site only worked during the night as he was using the server on the computer during the day to code. Marc Andreessen, who was also on the clubhouse session, then quipped that he would get a job the next time he hangs out in the lobby of one of his companies. Musk gave a hat-tip to ‘The Last King’ and Cobra Kai for his streaming enjoyment. The Expanse’s plot lines sometimes seem too fantastical to him, he said. He was recommended Devs, Mythic Quest and Ravens Banquet by moderators. Tenet was “pretty good” too, he said. Did he understand it? “If you think too hard about it, it’s not going to make complete sense, but it’s a good movie.” His knowledge of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, remains impressively intact. Then, a big switching of the gears, as “Vlad The Stock Impaler” was brought into the Clubhouse room to talk about the Game Stop phenomenon. “Vlad” — more specifically Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood — began with an, at times, stumbling attempt to explain what happened last week but was eventually interrogated more thoroughly by Musk. Musk at this point turned interviewer, and we’re here doing a bit more comprehensive transcribing because it’s worth keeping Tenev’s words in full. “All right, tell us what really happened. Give us the inside scoop,” Musk said “This has been a very surreal weekend and week for me,” said Vlad. Vlad said “one of the really great things is all the people “coming out of the woodwork” to offer support for the company to offer advice. He said this was his first time using Clubhouse. He then made a jokey remark about being an adherent of the “simulation hypothesis”. Musk brought him back: “The people demand an answer and they want to know the truth.” Vlad said: “So there’s an introducing broker-dealer called Robinhood Financial, and that basically is the app that you know and love, it processes trades. You’re a customer of Robinhood Financial. Then there’s a clearing broker-dealer, Robinhood Securities, that clears and settles the trades. And then we have Robinhood Crypto, which is our Crypto business… All of these are different entities that are differently operated. So, basically Wednesday of last week. We just had, you know, unprecedented volume, unprecedented load on the system. A lot of these, you know, so-called meme stocks were, you know, going viral on social media, and people were people are joining Robinhood and there was a lot of net buy activity on them.” He said Robinhood became number one on the iOS App Store and pretty close if not number one on Google Play store. “Thursday morning I’m sleeping. At 3:30am Pacific, our operations team receives a file from the NSCC, which is the National Securities Clearing Corporation. So, basically as a broker as a clearing broker. And this is where RobinHood Securities comes in. We have to put up money to the NSCC based on some factors including things like the volatility of the trading activity into certain securities. And this is is the equities business so it’s based on, stock trading and not options trading or anything else. So, they give us a file with the deposit and the request was around $3 billion, which is, you know, about an order of magnitude more than what it typically is.” Musk: This is not an unprecedented increase in demand for capital. What formula that they use to calculate that” Vlad: Just to give context, Robinhood up until that point has raised around $2 billion in total venture capital. Up until now, so it’s a big number, like $3 billion is a large number, right. So, basically, the details are, we don’t have the full details, it’s a little bit of an opaque formula, but there’s a component called the VAR of it, which is value at risk. And that’s based on kind of some fairly quantitative things although it’s not fully transparent. So, there are ways to reverse engineer it, but it’s not kind of publicly shared. And then there’s a special component, which is discretionary. So that kind of acts as a multiplier, and basically Musk: Discretionary meaning like it’s just their opinion” Vlad: There’s definitely more, more than just their opinion. Musk: Everyone wants to know, did something shady go down here? It seems weird that you get a sudden $3 billion demand, you know, at 3.30am in the morning. Just suddenly out of nowhere. Vlad: I wouldn’t impute shadiness to it or anything like that and actually you know the NSCC was reasonable. They worked with us to actually lower it. So, it wasn’t unprecedented activity. I don’t have the full context about, you know, what was going on in the NSCC make these calculations. Musk: Is anyone holding you hostage right now? Vlad: Thanks for asking. But anyways, so this was obviously nerve-racking, and I actually was asleep at this point, you know, the operations team was fielding this at three o’clock. And then, you know, we got back, we put our heads together. Our Chief Operating Officer basically said, look, let’s call up the higher-ups at the NSCC and kind of figure out what’s going on. Maybe there’s some way we can work with them. And basically, there was another call. And they lowered it to something like $1.4 billion from $3 billion…. But still a high number. Vlad said the team then proposed how to manage the risk through the day “marking these volatiles stocks that were driving the activity, positioning closing only. And then, at about an hour before the market closed market opened. So, at 5.30, or five in the morning, they [the NSCC] came back and they said okay, the deposit [should be] 700 million, which we then deposited and paid promptly. And then, everything was fine. So, that that essentially explains why we had to mark the symbols ‘position closing only’, and also why, you know, we knew this was a bad outcome for customers… Part of what’s been really difficult is Robinhood stands for, you know, democratizing access to stocks and, yes, we want, we want to give people access so we had no choice in this case, we had to conform to our regulatory capital requirements. And so the team did what they could to make sure we were available for customers. Musk: Who controls the clearinghouse? Vlad: It’s a consortium. It’s not quite a government agency. You know, I, I don’t really know the details all that. But, you know, and to be fair… there was legitimate turmoil in the markets. These are unprecedented events with these meme stocks, there was a lot of activity. So, there probably is some amount of extra risk in the system that warrants, higher requirements, so it’s not entirely unreasonable. But we did operational processes to make sure that customers that had positions could sell their open positions because obviously restricting someone…We got a lot of questions about ‘you had to restrict buying, why didn’t you also restrict selling?’ And the fact of the matter is, people get really pissed-off if they’re holding stock and they want to sell it and they can’t. So that’s categorically worse. Lots of other brokers, I think, we’re in the same situation. Robinhood who was in the news, but you just sort of heard this industry-wide, other brokers, were basically restricted in the same exact activity. Musk: So it sounds like this organization calls you up and they basically have a gun to your head. Either you put up this money or else. Basically, what people are wondering is did you sell your clients down the river? Or did you have no choice? And if you had no choice that’s understandable. But then, you know, we’ve got to find out why you have no choice. And who are the people that are saying you have no choice? Vlad: I think that’s fair. We have to comply with these requirements, financial institutions have requirements. The formula, behind these requirements… it would obviously be ideal if there was a little bit more transparency so we could plan better around that, but to be fair, we were able to open and serve our customers and 24 hours later, our team raised over a billion dollars in capital so that when we do open tomorrow morning we’ll be able to, kind of, relax the stringent position limits that we put on these securities on Friday. Musk: Will there be any limits? Vlad: Well I think there’s always going to be some theoretical limit, we don’t have infinite capital, right? And on Friday, there were limits. So, there’s always going to have to be some limit, I think the question is, will the limits be high enough to the point where they won’t impact 99.9-plus percent of customers. So if someone were to deposit $100 billion and decide to trade in one stock that wouldn’t be possible. Musk: If you had no choice then you had no choice. It’s a ‘gun to the head situation’. That’s understandable. Vlad: Yeah, these are unprecedented times, and to be fair to those guys they’ve been reasonable. So, I think the one thing that is maybe not clear to people is Robinhood is a participant in the financial system. So we have to work with all of these counter-parties, so we do get a lot of questions about, you know, ‘why do you work with market makers?’, why you work with clearinghouses. Vertically integrating… I mean it’s hard enough to build an introducing… clearing broker-dealer… not too many people have done that. But the financial system that allows customers to trade shares is sort of a complex web of multiple parties… Everyone says it could be better. It could be improved. It’s just the necessity of trading equities in the US, that you have to do all these things. Musk: To what degree are you beholden to Citadel? Vlad: There was a rumor that Citadel or other market makers kind of pressured us into doing this and that’s just false. Market makers execute our trades, they execute trades of every broker-dealer. This was a clearinghouse decision, and it was just based on the capital requirements. So, from our perspective, you know, Citadel and other market makers weren’t involved in that. Musk: But wouldn’t they have a strong say on who got put in charge of that organization, since it’s an industry consortium, not a government regulatory agency? Vlad: I don’t have any reason to believe that. I think that’s just like, you know, then you’re getting into kind of the conspiracy theories a little bit. So, I just have no reason to believe that that’s the case, you know. Musk: Okay. Well, I guess we’ll see what happens with directions. Hopefully, that was insightful or at least a little bit entertaining. “Are you not entertaining?” he said. [Apparently a reference to the movie ‘Gladiator’] The moderators then thank Musk and Vlad for coming on Clubhouse. Fun claim: Musk said he didn’t know Clubhouse existed up until a week ago. The moderators wrapped up the session and closed out by playing “Starman” by David Bowie… #wnu #wafconnect

SpaceX's first 'rideshare' mission will launch a record number of satellites It has a payload consisting of 10 Starlink satellites and 133 spacecraft from customers The SpaceX Transporter-1 mission set to launch today will put 133 commercial and government spacecraft, as well as 10 more Starlink satellites, in orbit. SpaceX says that’s “the most spacecraft ever deployed on a single mission” — the previous record holder, an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, ferried only 104 satellites to space. In addition to having a record-breaking payload, Transporter-1 is also the first dedicated launch under the SmallSat Rideshare Program SpaceX announced back in 2019. The SmallSat program offers companies and government agencies an affordable way to get their CubeSats, microsats and other small spacecraft to orbit. Its prices start at $2.5 million for payloads up to 150 kg (330 lbs). The program’s customers typically just hitch a ride on other Falcon 9 launches, and this is the first time they’re the main point of a mission. As for the Starlink satellites aboard the flight, they’ll be the first in the constellation to deploy to a polar orbit. On Twitter, SpaceX chief Elon Musk said Transporter-1 “is getting even more scrutiny than a Starlink flight” because so many companies are depending on it to go off without a hitch. SpaceX will open Transporter-1’s launch window later today, January 23rd, at 9:40AM Eastern. The mission will lift off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, and the company will livestream the event starting about 15 minutes before liftoff. #wnu #mayorjoe #wafconnect

Elon Musk said a college degree isn't required for a job at Tesla - and Apple, Google, and Netflix don't require employees to have 4-year degrees either Elon Musk said having a college degree doesn't mean you have "exceptional ability" during a fireside chat at the Satellite 2020 conference . He added that it's "not for learning" and "basically for fun." Many of the nation's most popular companies to work for don't require a college degree, and certain jobs are more likely to be filled with non-college graduates than others, LinkedIn has found. Top business executives have begun questioning whether college degrees really prepare workers for careers, while some are starting to hire more and more non-college graduates. Students assume getting a four-year degree - and taking on the thousands of dollars of student-loan debt that comes along with it - is the only way to get your foot in the door at top companies such as Tesla, Apple, and Netflix. But that isn't always true. Even the CEO of Tesla doesn't think you need it. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said colleges "are not for learning," but rather a place to have fun, during a conversation at the Satellite 2020 conference earlier this year. Musk said you can learn anything online for free , and noted that billionaire moguls like Bill Gates and Oracle's Larry Ellison dropped out of college . Ideally, he added, you would have dropped out of school "and did something." Musk joined prominent business leaders who have also questioned the need for four-year degrees, such as Apple CEO Tim Cook and Siemens USA CEO Barbara Humpton. Cook said in 2019 that about half of Apple's US employment last year included people without four-year degrees. Cook reasoned that many colleges do not teach the skills that business leaders need most in their workforce, such as coding. Read more: EXCLUSIVE: SpaceX is looking to raise another big round of funding and wants to double its valuation to up to $92 billion Humpton also dismissed the idea that a four-year degree guarantees career-readiness: "All too often, job requisitions will say they require a four-year degree, when in fact there's nothing about the job that truly requires a four-year degree - it merely helped our hiring managers sort of weed through the crowd and get a smaller qualified candidate group," Humpton said at the White House in 2019 . You don't need an Ivy League diploma to get a job at Apple or Tesla - but you would get paid more on average if you had one Now, prominent companies such as Google and Apple are hiring employees who have the skills required to get jobs done, with or without a degree. Glassdoor found firms like Google, Apple, and IBM don't require a college degree to land a job. Google recently launched a new selection of courses for Google Career Certificate, a six-month program that prepare participants for in-demand jobs. That being said, college degrees seem to pay off. Workers that hold at least a bachelor's degree earned $502 more in median weekly earnings than those with just a high school education, according to a May 2020 report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics . Additionally, the unemployment rate among those with less than a high school degree is more than double that of bachelors degree holders. Read more: Apple just launched a new camera feature for the iPhone 12 Pro that could change the way we think about smartphone photography But because degrees often require taking on student debt, many Americans cannot afford college degrees. Only 42% of high-school sophomores go on to earn a two-year or four-year degree, per the US Department of Education . Even among students who graduate from college, a significant number of new graduates are underemployed , meaning they work jobs that don't require a college degree. As many expect automation to displace a quarter of the workforce , experts and researchers are already tossing around alternatives to help prepare young employees for work. Apprenticeship programs, which mix school and on-the-job training, could better prepare the workforce of the future, Business Insider reporter Rich Feloni reported . "I don't consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability," Musk said at the Satellite conference. "Did Shakespeare even go to college? Probably not." #wnu

Elon Musk made a jab at Facebook, linking the rampage at the Capitol to the social network. It's the latest insult in a years-long feud between Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. There's no love lost between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The billionaire tech CEOs have been feuding since at least 2016, when a SpaceX rocket explosion destroyed a Facebook satellite. Since then, they've butted heads in areas such as artificial intelligence and Facebook's data-collection practices. Most recently, Musk tied Facebook to the violent insurrection in Washington, DC, describing it as a "domino effect." For over four years, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have clashed over topics as varied as artificial intelligence and rockets. The two moguls — one of whom leads Tesla and SpaceX and the other of whom leads Facebook — haven't exactly kept their rivalry a secret. When a SpaceX rocket explosion destroyed a Facebook satellite in 2016, Zuckerberg issued a heated statement saying he was "deeply disappointed" about SpaceX's failure. And when Facebook became embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk publicly deleted his companies' Facebook pages, tweeting that the company gave him "the willies." The two billionaires are among the richest people on the planet, placing them in an elite circle, even by Silicon Valley standards. Even though both dabble in artificial intelligence, and their companies have partnered in the past, it seems there's no love lost between Musk and Zuckerberg. Here's where their feud began and everything that's happened since. The Musk-Zuckerberg feud dates back to at least 2016, when a SpaceX rocket explosion destroyed a Facebook satellite. In September 2016, SpaceX was testing its Falcon 9 rocket at a launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Shortly after 9 a.m. the rocket exploded, destroying Facebook's AMOS-6 satellite, which was supposed to ride the rocket into space. The satellite was part of Facebook's Internet.org project to deliver internet connectivity to the developing world and would have been Facebook's first satellite in orbit. Zuckerberg seemed openly frustrated that the launch failed, writing on Facebook that he was "deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent." Two years later, Musk addressed the failed launch in a tweet to the reporter Kerry Flynn. "Yeah, my fault for being an idiot," Musk said. "We did give them a free launch to make up for it, and I think they had some insurance." In 2017, Zuckerberg criticized Musk's feelings about artificial intelligence, comments that seemed to get a rise out of Musk. During a Facebook Live broadcast, a viewer asked Zuckerberg for his thoughts on Musk's anxieties around AI. "I have pretty strong opinions on this," Zuckerberg said. "With AI especially, I'm really optimistic, and I think that people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios ... I don't understand it. It's really negative, and in some ways, I actually think it's pretty irresponsible." Musk, who has repeatedly called for regulation and caution when it comes to new AI technology, shot back on Twitter. "I've talked to Mark about this," he said in response to a tweet about Zuckerberg's comments. "His understanding of the subject is limited." In 2018, following Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk made a public show of deleting SpaceX and Tesla's Facebook pages. After the WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton tweeted, "It is time. #deletefacebook," Musk responded, "What's Facebook?" A fan responded to Musk's tweet asking whether he'd delete the SpaceX Facebook page, to which Musk responded, "I didn't realize there was one. Will do." After another fan pointed out that Tesla had a Facebook page too, and Musk tweeted that it "looks lame anyway." Soon after, both the SpaceX and Tesla pages disappeared from Facebook. Musk said it wasn't a "political statement" and that he just found Facebook unsettling. Musk continued his campaign against Facebook in early 2020. In response to a tweet from the actor Sacha Baron Cohen, which called for more regulation of Facebook, Musk urged people once again to delete the app. Following the riot at the US Capitol, Musk used Twitter to share memes linking the riots to Facebook. On the evening of the rampage in Washington, Musk tweeted, "This is called the domino effect," along with an image of dominoes, with the first one labeled "a website to rate women on campus," a reference to Facebook's inception at Harvard University. The last domino was about the rioters. Musk also criticized Facebook's data-sharing practices, tweeting another meme about Facebook that mentioned the company "spying" on users following the announcement by the Facebook-owned WhatsApp that it would start forcing users to share their personal data with Facebook. Musk tweeted that people should "use Signal," an encrypted messaging app. His tweet was retweeted by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, another tech executive who has sparred with Zuckerberg. #wnu

#spaceX #wnu Elon Musk reveals wild plan to catch SpaceX rocket with a launch tower The super powerful Super Heavy could launch one Starship and return to Earth to launch another one as soon as an hour later. One day in the not-too-distant future, Elon Musk envisions blasting off from Earth and sending his next-generation Starship on its way to the moon, Mars or just the other side of the world. Several minutes later, the first-stage booster used for liftoff makes its way back to the launch tower, where it's "caught" by a specially designed arm and readied for another launch in as soon as an hour. The SpaceX chief hinted at the plan in a series of tweets Wednesday. We’re going to try to catch the Super Heavy Booster with the launch tower arm, using the grid fins to take the load — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 30, 2020 "We're going to try to catch the Super Heavy Booster with the launch tower arm, using the grid fins to take the load," he wrote in response to another Twitter user. Super Heavy is the next-generation booster designed to be paired with the SpaceX Starship now under development at the company's facility in Texas. You may have seen the first successful high-altitude test flight of an early Starship prototype earlier this month, which ended with a big bang of a hard landing. Musk's vision is that Starship will eventually carry up to 100 passengers out into the solar system and on super quick transcontinental flights via space. The current SpaceX workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9 used to launch satellites and missions to the International Space Station, returns to Earth and lands using retractable landing legs. For Super Heavy, which will rival the largest and most powerful rockets ever built, Musk sees advantages in eliminating those legs. "Saves mass & cost of legs & enables immediate repositioning of booster on to launch mount -- ready to refly in under an hour," he tweeted The move redirects the stress of a landing onto the grid fins, which are located near the top of the booster and are essentially used to steer the rocket during flight, and onto some sort of apparatus on the launch tower that the grid fins will come to rest on. Musk said using legs to land Super Heavy is still an option as well. "Legs would certainly work, but best part is no part, best step is no step," he wrote. When we will see all of this in action isn't clear. SpaceX is working on Super Heavy in Texas, but expect several more test flights of solo Starship prototypes without the big booster before we see any of these possible innovations in real life.

#Angels #vc #start-ups #wnu An insight into how Lagos and US-based VC, GreenHouse Capital invests in African startups In December 2020, Nigerian fintech startup, CredPal raised $1.5 million in a fresh round of investment with GreenHouse Capital one of the investors. The Lagos and US-based firm prides itself as a fintech investment company. Since officially launching five years ago, GreenHouse Capital has consistently kept its eyes on fintech startups in Nigeria. A look at its portfolio is testament to its play in the industry. We spoke with Mary Joseph, a Senior Associate at GreenHouse Capital for some insights on why fintech is at its core and how they invest in African startups. Tell us how GreenHouse Capital came about GreenHouse Capital was founded in 2014 and was spun off from Venture Garden Group. VGG started ten years ago as a startup with five to seven employees. What they did was build fintech products in different verticals from aviation to payments and lending to education. About six years ago, the founders of VGG — Bunmi Akinyemiju and Kunmi Demuren — started an accelerator programme for ex-VGG employees interested in entrepreneurship. They ended up investing in them, and that’s how GreenHouse came about. It was a very organic formation; they did not just wake up one day and say, “let’s start a VC fund.” I think it speaks to GreenHouse Capital’s ethos that we come from a startup and that we’re entrepreneurs at heart. So, everything we do is that we see a gap in the market and go “how do we fill that?” What does VC investment mean to GreenHouse Capital? For us, we kind of think of our investment model as being cash and essential add-ons. So, we rarely make investments where we give the startup cash and walk away. Again, we tend to get involved because we have so much experience and a sister company operating in the market. So, when it comes to investments, we do a lot of business development work, facilitating partnerships and relationships with our portfolio companies. We have board seats, so we try as much as possible to make these companies grow because we believe that’s our strength as an investor. Who runs the investment firm? Our partners, Bunmi Akinyemiju and Kunmi Demuren run the firm. Also, we’ve got a team of five people that also work across board. Every VC has an eye or eyes in specific markets; tell us what market GreenHouse Capital is interested in and why? So for a long time, we were Nigerian focused. We’re Lagos-based, and our early investments were in people who had worked in our company, who also had startups that were based in Lagos. Over time, we’ve expanded beyond Lagos and Nigeria for several reasons. As we became more deeply embedded in the continent’s tech ecosystem, we began to see more opportunities outside Nigeria. Also, there’s value to be gained within our portfolio if we have startups across the continent. Today, we have 21 companies in our portfolio, and most of them have operations in Nigeria. However, many of them operate outside Nigeria as well. Part of GreenHouse Capital’s offerings to these startups outside Nigeria is an entry into the Nigerian market. Nigeria, Kenya, and SA are the three main markets where our companies are situated, but they also operate in Brazil, Germany, and Ghana, among others. How do you determine that a startup is investible? The popular response to this question might centre around market-fit or market size or growth stage. Well, I’ll say what’s important to us at GreenHouse Capital is the entrepreneur. If you look at Facebook, they’ve changed a lot over the years, but Mark Zuckerberg’s figure and his ability to see the market and pivot accordingly have remained consistent. For me, I think that’s a great example of how we look at entrepreneurs. When we’re investing in a company, we know that the company and market are bound to change. Therefore, we’re investing in our belief that the entrepreneur will weather those changes and adapt the company accordingly. So, our relationship with our entrepreneur is significant to us, and that is something that we gauge in all the investments we make. We need to make sure that the entrepreneurs are determined people who can take advice. We’ve invested in companies that failed, and the founders come back with another idea, and we reinvested. That’s testament to how we understand and support founders. By GreenHouse Capital’s standards, what shouldn’t a startup be doing? A startup in these parts shouldn’t be trying to chase a fancy consumer business unless they know what they’re doing. We intend to invest in B2B or B2B2C companies because B2C is tough and costly in terms of marketing. But I think it’s the most visible niche when you think of the most amazing startups globally as a lot of them are B2C companies. While it can be very attractive, you’d be doing so much for customer acquisition. There’s also so much customer churn. It’s a challenging model to run successfully, especially in Nigeria. So, we tend to look for businesses that are solving problems for other businesses. One of our early investments, AppZone, built core banking products for banks. Many people have probably never heard of them, but the card machine that makes your debit cards when you go to the bank is an AppZone product. It’s not the sexiest things out there, but you know what, they’re one of our most successful companies. We advise entrepreneurs to find a problem that you can really solve and scale well with your available resources. If you want to do a business requiring $100 million to launch, and you’ve never raised a cent before, you’re probably better off trying something else. It would’ve been hard for Elon Musk to raise money for SpaceX if that was his first venture. At what stage of growth do you usually invest in companies and why? We have traditionally invested in pre-seed and seed rounds. I’d say that’s where our most significant expertise is: trying to help a company launch and achieve the right product-market fit. Once it gets to Series A, it becomes a little bit out of our reach. We can do Series A, but it’s not really within our scope. What is your average ticket size? When we first started, the cheques were between $50k and $200k. But because of the way rounds and valuations have skyrocketed lately, it’s now between $150k and $250k. However, we’ve done more and less than these numbers in the startups we’ve invested in. Some of the investments we made in 2020 have passed that average just because there’ve been larger investments and valuations. How does GreenHouse Capital deal with bad investments? I’ll give an actual example for this. Tutor.ng was one of the first companies that came out of our accelerator for former VGG employees. It was a great company, and they had a terrific run. But it just wasn’t the product that the market needed and they kind of wound down. However, one of the founders, Fehintolu Olaogun, had the idea for CredPal with some new founders, they went on to Y Combinator, and we ended up investing in them. As I mentioned before, we try to anticipate things like this. It’s part of the VC model where you invest in ten companies, and only one becomes a Unicorn, five become stable companies, and four fail. It’s part of the risk and the model; we do everything we can to help companies so that doesn’t happen. But if it does, we look for silver linings, continuing with entrepreneurs to subsequent ventures. What industries are of most interest to GreenHouse Capital? Fintech is core to us because of how we started with VGG. And we have the largest fintech fund by portfolio size in sub-Saharan Africa. I’ll say that we look at fintech not necessarily as a vertical but rather as a horizontal infrastructure or platform that can work in any industry. No matter what business you’re in, you need to have money; that’s the only way any business or endeavour can work. And to get money, you need to have some way of processing that money. So, fintech can play a role in any industry; that’s why we take a non-traditional approach to investing in fintech. However, when we started, it was a traditional view of fintech but now we would invest in companies that on the surface didn’t seem like fintech but we kind of saw a fintech potential in them. For instance, Helium Health was doing just ERM for hospitals when they started, but over time, they’ve evolved to writing loans because they saw that gap where hospitals didn’t have the money they needed to run their operations. So Helium Health is a healthtech company as well as a fintech company. We’ve seen similar things in MAX.ng and Rensource that play in the transport and energy spaces on the surface but have fintech elements at play. So GreenHouse Capital still invests in non-fintech startups? Oh, absolutely. We’ve invested in non-fintech companies, all I mean is that fintech is where most of our expertise and focus has been. But if you come to us and say you can sell forks and make $1 billion and the business model is sound, then sure we’ll invest [laughs]. What opportunities has GreenHouse Capital regrettably passed on and why? I’m not going to name any names, but there’s at least one big company in the market that we passed on. At the time, we just missed the deal, and it happens because sometimes deals don’t come to your desk quickly enough and that’s part of VC. Even if we had every fantastic deal come across our desk, we wouldn’t have enough capital to invest in all of them. So we try our best to have our ears to the ground, see things, and get in as early as possible. How can founders reach you? That’s a great question. Founders can email us at [email protected].