Elon musk

When I think of Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, I think of Darth Vader. It’s not that Agrawal himself reminds me of the Star Wars protagonist, grave concerns over Twitter’s handling of free speech notwithstanding. I just can't help but think of the nervous imperial commander who receives Vader as he arrives to inspect the Death Star II at the opening of Return of the Jedi. “Lord Vader, this is an unexpected pleasure. We are honored by your presence,” the commander says, with a lump in his throat. The Dark Lord of the Sith flatly replies, “You may dispense with the pleasantries, Commander. I’m here to put you back on schedule.

“Just think about it. Our whole world is sitting there on a computer. It’s in the computer, everything: your, your DMV records, your, your social security, your credit cards, your medical records. It’s all right there. Everyone is stored in there. It’s like this little electronic shadow on each and every one of us, just, just begging for someone to screw with, and you know what? They’ve done it to me, and you know what? They’re gonna do it to you.” — Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett, The Net, 1995 A few weeks ago, I called the local Domino’s. The man who answered asked whether my address is an apartment or a private residence. I live in a fairly remote Michigan community of about 8,000 people.

Jeff Bezos has built himself a space rocket and it looks like a giant...well you can judge for yourself. Which raises the question: how to go about reporting on this? Is it AP style, do you think, to say the vessel will penetrate the upper atmosphere provided there aren’t any onboard system cock-ups? We can only hope for Bezos’s sake that the rocket isn’t like a typical Amazon product in that it’s smaller in real life than it appears in the picture. Bezos himself will be onboard for the scant 11-minute flight (don’t even get me started), which has drawn the expected gallons of contempt and death wishes from Twitter.

Have you any Clubhouse invites going? I have five, if anyone wants one. Or is it six? I have to admit I’m not sure — like many people I know, I haven’t looked at the app for some weeks now. Clubhouse seems painfully aware of the fact that decreasing numbers of people do. The wild party that is — was — Clubhouse is winding down. The iOS app, that opened up a members-only world of virtual real-time audio chatrooms is now struggling against falling audiences, increased fuss over mediocre, unmoderated, unpleasant content and the fact that companies such as Twitter and Facebook have neatly purloined the audio concept at its heart and refashioned it for themselves.

I have just applied to fly around the moon. My chances of being selected are slim, but is it impossible? Hopefully the explosion of Elon Musk’s test rocket shortly after landing in Texas last week may have winnowed down the competition for a place on Yusaku Maezawa’s flight to the moon and back, scheduled for 2023. That Texas landing was in fact a success, proving it’s possible for a rocket of this size to launch and return intact: third time lucky, the first two rockets tested having exploded on impact.

It is a testament to Elon Musk’s genius that it transcends how fantastically immature he is. Musk is knocking on the door of 50 but released a song called 'RIP Harambe' that included the lyrics, 'RIP Harambe/Sippin’ on that Bombay/We thinkin’ about you/Amen, amen.' At this point, Harambe, and the Harambe meme, had been dead for almost three years. Maybe that was the point. When Musk’s contribution to the rescue of Thai schoolkids from waterlogged caves was insulted by British diver Vernon Unsworth, Musk summoned up all the wisdom of his five decades on Earth and called him 'pedo guy'. He appears to love nothing more than uploading memes involving anime characters to Twitter.

Which is madder, bitcoin at $41,500 — oops, make that $31,000 on Monday — or Tesla shares at $880 apiece? Don’t get me started on the crypto-mania in which the Financial Conduct Authority has warned gamblers ‘they should be prepared to lose all their money’. But Tesla, relatively speaking, is a real thing: a California-based carmaker which has expanded the frontiers of the electric vehicle market that’s going to become huge in the next decade and could soon make carbon--fuelled road transport extinct. Put that way, it’s not so surprising — in tech stock terms — that investors should value Tesla higher than the rest of the US auto industry combined.

Home Primary schools were allowed to reopen but many did not want to. MPs voted to return to their physical presence in parliament. The government told people they were allowed to meet in gardens or on rooftops, up to the number of six, as long as those from different households remained two metres apart. About 2.5 million vulnerable people in England and Wales, who had been advised to stay at home, were now advised that those living alone might meet another single person out of doors. Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury, resigned as a whip after she was found to have gone for a walk with her current partner at a time that he was still living with his wife. Racing resumed. The Queen rode a fell pony at Windsor Castle.