Indian-origin Tesla VP reveals what it is like to work with Elon Musk: ‘He works 80-90 hours per week'
Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt shared a snippet of the interview on X and wrote, 'Tesla's VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy on what it's like to work with Elon Musk: 'I meet with him every week. He is really smart in the sense that he can predict the future very early; He works really hard. Easily 80-90 hours per week. I feel fortunate to work for him. He is not afraid of taking risks. He is very funny. You can see it in person'."
'I love to hear this; thanks for sharing,' posted one individual. Another remarked, 'Elon Musk's unmatched vision, relentless drive, fearless risks, and witty charm make him an inspiring example, leading his team with hands-on brilliance.'
A third commented, 'Working 80-90 hours a week shows his commitment, though that's an intense schedule!' A fourth wrote, 'Elon Musk certainly has amazing talent and charisma to people around him. I have two personal friends working for Tesla and Xai, each thinking they're working for the best team and Elon Musk cares about them more than anything else.'
According to his LinkedIn bio, Elluswamy joined Tesla in 2014 as a software engineer. In the following years, he worked in different roles within the organisation. He was promoted as the Vice President of Tesla AI software in 2024 and has held the position ever since. He has a total of over 11 years of experience of working with the company.
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Business Standard
an hour ago
- Business Standard
Can Elon Musk be trusted as two cases threaten Tesla, his car company
In Miami, a Tesla driver who has admitted he was wrong to reach for a dropped cell phone moments before a deadly accident, spoke of the danger of putting too much faith in Musk's technology AP Miami Elon Musk fought court cases on opposite coasts Monday, raising a question about the billionaire that could either speed his plan to put self-driving Teslas on US roads or throw up a major roadblock: Can this wildly successful man who tends to exaggerate really be trusted? In Miami, a Tesla driver who has admitted he was wrong to reach for a dropped cell phone moments before a deadly accident, spoke of the danger of putting too much faith in Musk's technology in this case his Autopilot programme. I trusted the technology too much, said George McGee, who ran off the road and killed a woman out stargazing with her boyfriend. I believed that if the car saw something in front of it, it would provide a warning and apply the brakes. In unusual coincidence, regulators arguing an Oakland, California, case tried to pin exaggerated talk about the same Tesla technology at the centre of a request to suspend the carmaker from being able to sell vehicles in the state. Musk's tendency to talk big whether its his cars, his rockets or his government costing-cutting efforts have landed him in trouble with investors, regulators and courts before, but rarely at such a delicate moment. After his social media spat with President Donald Trump, Musk can no longer count on a light regulatory touch from Washington. Meanwhile, sales of his electric cars have plunged and so a hit to his safety reputation could threaten his next big project: rolling out driverless robotaxis hundreds of thousands of them in several US cities by the end of next year. The Miami case holds other dangers, too. Lawyers for the family of the dead woman, Naibel Benavides Leon, recently convinced the judge overseeing the jury trial to allow them to argue for punitive damages. A car crash lawyer not involved in the case, but closely following it, said that could cost Tesla tens of millions of dollars, or possibly more. I've seen punitive damages go to the hundreds of millions, so that is the floor, said Miguel Custodio of Los Angeles-based Custodio & Dubey. It is also a signal to other plaintiffs that they can also ask for punitive damages, and then the payments could start compounding. Tesla did not reply for a request for comment. That Tesla has allowed the Miami case to proceed to trial is surprising. It has settled at least four deadly accidents involving Autopilot, including payments just last week to a Florida family of a Tesla driver. That said, Tesla was victorious in two other jury cases, both in California, that also sought to lay blame on its technology for crashes. Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Miami case argue that Tesla's driver-assistance feature, called Autopilot, should have warned the driver and braked when his Model S sedan blew through flashing lights, a stop sign and a T-intersection at 62 miles-an-hour in an April 2019 crash. Tesla said that drivers are warned not to rely on Autopilot, or its more advanced Full Self-Driving system. It say the fault entirely lies with the "distracted driver" just like so many other accidents since cellphones were invented. Driver McGee settled a separate suit brought by the family of Benavides and her severely injured boyfriend, Dillon Angulo. McGee was clearly shaken when shown a dashcam video Monday of his car jumping a Key West, Florida, road and hitting a parked Chevrolet Tahoe which then slammed into Benavides and sent her 75 feet through the air to her death. Asked if he had seen those images before, McGee pinched his lips, shook his head, then squeaked out a response, No. Tesla's attorney sought to show that McGee was fully to blame, asking if he had ever contacted Tesla for additional instructions about how Autopilot or any other safety features worked. McGee said he had not, though he was heavy user of the features. He said he had driven the same road home from work 30 or 40 times. Under questioning he also acknowledged he alone was responsible for watching the road and hitting the brakes. But lawyers for the Benavides family had another chance to parry that line of argument and asked McGee if he would have taken his eyes off the road and reached for his phone had he been driving any car other than a Tesla on Autopilot. McGee responded, I don't believe so. The case is expected to continue for two more weeks. In the California case, the state's Department of Motor Vehicles is arguing before an administrative judge that Tesla has misled drivers by exaggerating the capabilities of its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features. A court filing claims even those feature names are misleading because they offer just partial self-driving Musk has been warned by federal regulators to stop making public comments suggesting Full Self-Driving allows his cars to drive themselves because it could lead to overreliance on the system, resulting in possible crashes and deaths. He also has run into trouble with regulators for Autopilot. In 2023, the company had to recall 2.3 million vehicles for problems with the technology and is now under investigation for saying it fixed the issue though it's unclear it has, according to regulatory documents. The California case is expected to last another four days. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
Tesla Driver Testifies Autopilot Failed to Prevent Fatal Crash
The driver of a Tesla car that killed a woman in 2019 testified Monday in federal court that the company's Autopilot driver-assistance system failed to warn him of an impending accident or engage the brakes. The driver, George Brian McGee, was driving his new Tesla Model S on a dark, two-lane road in South Florida when his phone fell to the floor and he bent to find it. That's when he failed to see that the road was ending in a T-intersection and that an SUV was parked on the other side, with two people standing next to that car. Neither he nor Autopilot hit the brakes, and the Tesla crashed into the SUV at 62 mph, killing a 22-year old woman and gravely injuring her boyfriend. In a civil case in federal court in Miami, McGee said on the witness stand that he was responsible for keeping his eyes on the road even with Autopilot engaged. But he also said he had been relying on Tesla's semi-automated driving system to serve as his co-pilot, and thought it had the ability to avoid such a crash. "I thought it would assist me if I made a mistake," said McGee, 48, a partner in a Florida private equity firm. "It didn't warn me of the car and the individuals and hit the brakes." The case, in the U.S. District Court for Southern Florida, was filed by the family of the woman killed in the crash, Naibel Benavides, and her companion, Dillon Angulo. The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified damages from Tesla and aim to convince the jury that Tesla was partly responsible for the crash. The case represents a considerable risk to Tesla. The automaker and its CEO, Elon Musk, have built Tesla's brand on the idea that its cars are nearly capable of driving themselves. In court, Tesla lawyers have argued that McGee was solely responsible for the crash. In 2023, Tesla issued a recall of all Autopilot-equipped vehicles to make its driver monitoring system safer. An earlier civil suit filed by the plaintiffs against McGee was settled. The parties have not disclosed the terms of that deal.
Mint
3 hours ago
- Mint
Battery makers in slumping EV business find lifeline elsewhere
Big U.S. EV battery makers are stepping back from the market that got them started and betting on a new set of customers in an entirely different business. Instead of carmakers, these companies have started making batteries for utilities, wind- and solar-power developers, and massive data centers that train artificial intelligence. Selling large, stationary batteries for 'energy storage systems," or ESS, used to be a niche market that wasn't worth much attention, said Jaehong Park, an executive at the battery arm of South Korean conglomerate LG. 'ESS was the ugly duckling for a long time within our organization," Park said. Five years ago, automakers and battery companies raced to build multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle battery plants across the U.S. South and Midwest, based on EV forecasts that proved too optimistic. Now, many of these plants are underused, delayed or stuck in limbo. Energy storage has emerged as an alternative, helping to compensate for the slowdown in electric vehicles. Tesla generates billions of sales from batteries for energy storage. Revenue from the storage segment, which also includes solar panels, grew 67% last year to $4 billion, partially offsetting a $6 billion fall in revenue from EV sales. Some of Tesla's biggest customers for its Megapack battery systems are utility-scale energy providers such as Intersect, as well as Tesla chief Elon Musk's separate artificial-intelligence company, xAI. xAI purchased $191 million of Tesla Megapack products in 2024, according to financial disclosures. Tesla didn't respond to a request for comment. On Wednesday, General Motors said it is exploring an arrangement to supply energy-storage batteries to Redwood Materials, a startup company focused on battery recycling. Under the proposed deal, GM would supply Redwood with a mix of new and used GM batteries for large battery-storage systems. 'Right now, there is a hunger for more energy from every source," Redwood founder J.B. Straubel said. Other battery makers are also pivoting. A Chinese-owned battery manufacturer that had planned to supply Mercedes-Benz is now considering energy storage to help get a stalled factory in Kentucky back on track. This shift is in response to a turn in U.S. electricity demand, which is growing again after about 15 years of stagnating. Several factors driving that growth are artificial-intelligence data centers, manufacturing and broader electrification. Energy storage systems can help offset power outages and manage this extra demand on the power grid. Installations of energy-storage batteries more than tripled in the U.S. from 2021 to 2024 and are projected to grow 34% in 2025, according to energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. 'If you have an outage of a massive data center or a giant gas plant, batteries can plug that hole," said Stephanie Smith, chief operating officer of Eolian, a battery and renewable-energy company owned by asset manager BlackRock. 'They can react in microseconds, and so you're able to address so many different problems on the entire grid." China has dominated the energy-storage battery market. Chinese manufacturers have spent decades honing the low-cost chemistry that works best for stationary batteries, said Sam Adham, a battery expert at CRU, a market-research firm. Even with the Trump administration's ratcheting of tariffs on Chinese imports, China is still often the lowest-cost option for storage batteries, he said. Now battery companies in the U.S. are trying to take on their Chinese battery unit, which co-owns EV battery factories with GM, Honda and Hyundai, became serious about diversifying its U.S. business in late 2023. The EV market was showing signs of softening, while the energy-storage business was heating up. At that time, the company was building out multiple battery plants around the U.S., and last year it decided to shift things around, in what one executive likened to playing Tetris with its footprint. A $1.4 billion expansion of its Holland, Mich., plant—originally planned for EV battery production—instead became LG's first U.S. facility dedicated to stationary storage batteries. It is using the same low-cost chemistry that Chinese companies have honed to dominate the business. 'We saw there is a rapid and urgently growing demand in the U.S. Here's an opportunity for us to address it more quickly," said Tristan Doherty, the company's chief product officer for storage batteries. The pivot put LG into the U.S. energy-storage business a year earlier than planned, he said. Even with the moves, the company's results were hit by the pullback in EVs, with sales shrinking 24% last year. It expects EV demand in the U.S. to fall 10% this year, and aims to slash its capital spending by as much as 30%. 'Rather than building new capacity on new sites, we do want to try to maximize and fully utilize the existing sites that we have as much as possible," Chief Financial Officer Chang Sil Lee said in January. Excelsior Energy Capital has signed an agreement to buy batteries from LG's new Michigan plant for its portfolio companies such as Lydian Energy, a utility-scale solar and battery developer. U.S.-made batteries ensure projects aren't thrown off course, said Anne Marie Denman, co-founder of Excelsior. 'We can look our buyers of power straight in the eye and say, 'This is a domestically sourced supply chain and we can commit to these timelines,' " she said. 'It isn't subject to geopolitical winds."
