Elon Musk Laid Off Supercharger Team After Taking $17 Million in Federal Charging Grants

lautan@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.world – 864 points – Elon Musk Laid Off Supercharger Team After Taking $17 Million in Federal Charging Grants
gizmodo.com

Despite its CEO railing against Biden, Tesla was more than happy to take the administration's money.

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Incredibly speculative, but this could also be Elon’s Saudi investors’ plan to blow up the EV market in America. If the charging infrastructure becomes unreliable, it kills the entire market.

The “Boring Company” killed light rail in several cities with empty promises. The Saudis bailed out his purchase of Twitter once.

Again speculative, but Elon and the Saudis working together checks a lot of boxes.

I doubt it actually. My guess is they got the tesla charger adopted for all US electric cars, so now they can just be greedy and have others build infrastructure instead of them. They can invest nothing and still get chargers made for them now. Why would we expect Tesla to continue spending money now?

Chargers earn reliable income? They even selll subscriptions. I have no idea whether they are profitable or not but there’s no reason this couldn’t be a nice steady income indefinitely

This means they'll gradually lose de facto control over the charging standards to other car companies, though.

This just means other companies can hire people that already know the standards better than whoever Tesla ends up with.

It might give Elon a month or two of added delay before other companies start using the Tesla chargers.

But it is absolutely more of Elon turning this chapter of his life into a sequel of Brewster's Millions, and like all sequels - it sucks.

The big oil corporations have been busy buying up all the competing charging networks, so that much tracks.

This explains so much and feels like an anti trust monitor should be assigned.

He's not working for the Saudis. Bonesaw showed up and told him what to do. Or else.

The wrestler guy from the Tobey Maguire version of Spiderman?