Musk belittles Gates over EV choice

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has taken a swipe at fellow billionaire Bill Gates on Twitter after Gates praised Tesla in a YouTube interview with Marques Brownlee but said he had chosen a Porsche Taycan as his first electric car.

Musk later branded Microsoft founder Gates as “underwhelming” in his own conversations with him, responding to a Tesla fan surprised at Gates’s vehicle choice because he was said to be “really smart”.

Musk is renowned for his Twitter outbursts, bagging Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s understanding of artificial intelligence, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ ideas about living in space, and was cleared of defamation in December by a Los Angeles jury after calling a British cave diver who helped rescue 13 people in Thailand a “pedo guy” on Twitter after he rejected Musk’s offer to help with the rescue.

He got Tesla in trouble in 2018 with another tweet about planning to make Tesla a private company, saying he had secured funding to do so, and later blasting the US financial regulator the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC).

As part of an agreement with the SEC Musk was warned not to share information about Tesla in any form without approval, and resigned as its chairman but stayed on as chief executive.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s Berlin Gigafactory could be delayed as a result of a German court ordering Tesla to stop clearing about 90 hectares of planted forest for it after a complaint was lodged by environmental group the Green League of Brandenburg, Teslarati reports.

Support for the Gigafactory has come from Germany’s economic minister, the Federal Association of German Industry (BDI) and others who have warned against delaying the project.

Germany’s environment ministry allowed Tesla to start work at its own risk while the final construction permit is pending.

Tesla aims to start building by mid-March and start production by July 2021, initially producing about 150,000 EVs annually.