A US federal court ruled on Friday that social media company Twitter, now branded X, violated contracts by failing to pay annual performance bonuses it orally promised its workers.
04.12.2023 - 04:47 / tech.hindustantimes.com / Elon Musk / Narendra Modi / Morgan Stanley
Elon Musk may be close to winning a long-running battle of wills with the Indian government led by PM Narendra Modi. Policy makers in New Delhi have been hoping to entice Tesla Inc. to produce electric vehicles in India. Musk, meanwhile, wants to sell his cars here without paying the exorbitant import tariffs that India charges.
According to Bloomberg News, the two sides may now be close to an agreement that would slash tariffs on Tesla imports from 2024, as long as the company sets up a factory in India within the next two years. Tesla may invest $2 billion in the plant and commit to buying as much as $15 billion worth of inputs from domestic automotive component producers.
Elon Musk could certainly count such a deal as a win. Indian consumers, too, might not complain if they can buy top-of-the-line electric vehicles at tariff rates of only 15%, compared to the 100% they currently pay on imported autos.
If the Indian government believes this is how to build an EV-manufacturing ecosystem, however, it ought to think again.
No good is likely to come of concessions tailored for a single company, no matter how successful or high-profile. True, when this policy is eventually written, it will likely apply universally. Every EV maker willing to meet the requirements should be able to take advantage — excluding, probably, the Chinese companies that now account for over half of global EV sales.
At the same time, if the policy is designed specifically to suit Tesla's needs — say, by agreeing to the company's preferred timeline and tariff structure, or subsidizing “superchargers” rather than battery swapping — it may not help competitors much.
New Delhi might point out that other policies designed with particular companies in mind have succeeded. In 2020, the government tweaked the rules around manufacturing and selling mobile phones in India in a bid to attract Apple Inc. The US technology giant has since produced $7 billion worth of products in India, with a promise to scale up to $40 billion within the next few years.
But Tesla is not Apple. For one, no policy maker anywhere should assume that a figure as impulsive as Musk will follow through on a promise of this sort.
Apple also has a genuine business case for manufacturing in India. The domestic market for iPhones is growing solidly. Morgan Stanley predicts that India will account for a fifth of Apple's user growth over the next five years and generate $40 billion of revenue over the next decade. Half of the $9 billion that mobile handset exports earn India comes from iPhones.
Tesla is unlikely to see the same kind of growth in India's extremely price-sensitive auto market. Many other foreign manufacturers have failed to crack India's car code. In 2021, Ford Motor
A US federal court ruled on Friday that social media company Twitter, now branded X, violated contracts by failing to pay annual performance bonuses it orally promised its workers.
The European Union took the first formal steps against Elon Musk's X over allegedly breaking rules on how it handled illegal content and disinformation, in the first such probe of a major online platform since the bloc's Digital Services Act came into force this year.
India aims to reform its century-old telecommunications law by introducing a new bill as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks to make the sector investor friendly. The government is exploring abolishing the concept of licensing with “authorization,” said a person familiar with the matter, who requested not to be identified as the bill is before lawmakers. This is expected to give the government flexibility to cope with advances made in technology.
For a harrowing hour or two after Amazon.com Inc. launched its first satellites, it appeared the company might have lost one of them. The two prototypes had entered orbit over the Atlantic Ocean at 2:24 p.m. Eastern on Oct. 6. An Amazon antenna on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius made contact with both, but during a subsequent handoff to another station, only one vehicle checked in. Amazon scanned the sky behind the first satellite for a signal from the second one but heard silence.
Since the advent of AI, there has been a divide between those who think this tech is a boon and those who feel that it will bring doom to humanity. While the risks of artificial intelligence are being debated across the world at all levels, some famous industry leaders have different views. Renowned investor Vinod Khosla, a key figure in the early backing of OpenAI, has stirred debate by emphasizing that the real threat to the world is China, not artificial intelligence. Khosla, who invested a substantial $50 million in OpenAI through his venture capital firm Khosla Ventures in 2019, shared his insights at Fortune's Brainstorm AI conference. Another top OpenAI investor who subsequently moved out was Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Check here to know what Khosla said.
Today, December 12, is a major date for artificial intelligence aficionados in India as the nation hosts the fourth Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) Summit in New Delhi. The event started today and will conclude on December 14. Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke on the opening day and highlighted the danger of the darker aspects of AI. Pointing out the need for safeguards in AI, PM Modi said we need to “bridge the gap between theory and practice on AI”. In other news, OpenAI announced at the GPAI Summit that the company will hold a developer gathering in Bengaluru in January. This and more in today's AI roundup. Let us take a closer look.
Conglomerate Tata Group plans to build one of India's biggest iPhone assembly plants, tapping Apple Inc.'s ambitions to increase manufacturing in the South Asian country.
For months, X (formerly Twitter) users have seen hilarious screenshots of Grok AI patiently, waiting for their turn to come. The generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot with humor and sarcasm is a product of xAI, an AI firm owned by Elon Musk. So far, it was in beta testing and only a select few verified X Premium Plus users, the highest tier of the subscription, had access. But now, Musk has announced the wider roll-out of the chatbot in the US to all X Premium Plus users, bringing the funny and “spicy” AI tool to the general public. With the launch announced, here are 10 things about Grok AI that you should know.
Elon Musk's verbal assault on advertisers who have shunned X (formerly Twitter) threatens to sink the social network further, with the tycoon warning of the platform's demise, just one year after taking control.
Walmart Inc. has stopped advertising on the social media platform X, the latest major company to do so.
India and the United States are set to embark on a groundbreaking collaboration in space exploration, marking a significant milestone in their space partnership. The announcement came after NASA Chief Bill Nelson met with Union Minister Jitendra Singh in New Delhi. The recent NASA and ISRO collaboration involves the launch of a remote sensing satellite named NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) in the first quarter of the upcoming year. Apart from this, there are various other projects on which ISRO and NASA will work together.
On Wednesday, S Somanath, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), emphasised that while the organisation is actively pursuing various targets, the immediate and primary focus remains on Gaganyaan mission- the nation's inaugural human space flight program. Speaking on the sidelines of the 2023 Global Energy Parliament in Kolkata, Somanath stated, "There are many [targets]. It is not one target. But our primary target is Gaganyaan now. Send an Indian to space and bring them back safely. This is our immediate big-ticket target."