Tesla

Elon Musk has decided it's too much work for him to be the chief executive of Twitter, a fraying social network, in addition to running Tesla and SpaceX and a potpourri of other startups. He recently named Linda Yaccarino, an NBC ad executive, as the new CEO so that she could focus on business operations and he could focus on product design and new technologies. As an employee of Musk's, Yaccarino has an impossible mission — to stem the bleeding, appease the advertisers, and, of course, keep her new boss happy. Good luck to her, I say, for Twitter's current fortunes are going in only one direction — south. When Musk acquired Twitter, he paid $44 billion for a company that no one else wanted nearly as much. Since then, its value has fallen to almost $20 billion.

“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.

I was worried that going to the autonomous vehicle exhibition in Stuttgart would be tantamount to an atheist walking into St Peter’s while the Pope was conducting a mass. There is something religious about the fervour with which adherents to the driverless credo practise their faith and promise us a new kingdom. Their proselytising has indeed convinced many. Politicians are making outlandish statements, such as Jesse Norman’s two weeks ago, that ‘Our entire use of roads is to be revolutionised by autonomous vehicles’, and pouring large sums — a promised £180 million so far — into bizarre research projects such as the development of strange robot cars slower than a Reliant Robin and allowed only on pavements in Milton Keynes.