Musk Watch: Elon’s rare W as Tesla passes 3M mark, breaks sales records
For anyone living in Austin, it may appear that Tesla has taken over the world. Whether you’re getting tailgated on South Congress or driving by the always-jammed Tesla charging station near The Linc in North Austin, it seems like Elon Musk’s electric car company has replaced every car in the city save for the odd BMW (turn signal broken), Ford F-150 (parked in two spaces), or Subaru Outback (unused kayak strapped to roof).
The notion makes sense. Giga Texas, the company’s expansive flagship production facility, is right on Tesla Road (lol) in southeast Austin. And a report from late July says that Musk and Co. are making more than 150 cars per day right here in city limits. That’s almost enough for every new resident! In just the second quarter of 2022, Tesla produced 254,695 cars, a 26.5% jump over 2021. That’s pretty good for what Musk called his “gigantic money furnaces” just two months ago.
And on Sunday, August 14, Giga Shanghai pushed Tesla over the three million mark, noted in a tweet from the company’s founder. It appears that our South African overlord has taken over the car industry. That’s a lot of cars, right? Well, kinda.
Toyota, the industry leader in manufacturing, made more than 9.5 million cars just last year. Scrolling down the list, automakers like Stellantis and Geely and Maruti Suzuki outpace Tesla, which produced fewer than one million cars in 2021. But looking at year-to-date numbers for 2022, Tesla is poised to pass many of its competitors in sales, including Suburu, VW, and Mazda, plus luxury brands like BMW and Mercedes. The company reportedly sold 145,000 cars in Q2, a 99% increase over 2021. It’s the only company on the list with an arrow pointing upward in YTD sales.
Am I prepared to buy a Model Y — which I am forced to admit gave me the most comfortable Lyft ride of my life just a month ago? Is it Real Cybertruck Hours in the O’Connell household? I take no pleasure in reporting that I don’t know! Watch this space.
You Just Got Hacked
This column couldn’t end on that note, though. As a palate cleanser, I have to report that a man hacked into Starlink, a satellite internet concern of SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace company with a presence in South Texas, using a $25 device he made at home.
At the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas last week, a Belgian man named Lennert Wouters accessed something called the Starlink User Terminal, which proved that the network could be breached. I don’t possess the type of brain that can completely make sense out of this — I work at computers but only to type nouns and adjectives — but it sounds bad.
“Our attack results in an unfixable compromise of the Starlink UT and allows us to execute arbitrary code. The ability to obtain root access on the Starlink UT is a prerequisite to freely explore the Starlink network,” Wouters said.
SpaceX’s self-professed “Cyber Janitor” — OK — Christopher Stanley tweeted his congratulations to Wouters instead of not responding or being mad, which is what everyone (the haters) wanted.
Welp, maybe not that bad after all. Sounds like no one at SpaceX is getting fired for this one, unless they wrote a letter.
