Electric carmaker Tesla has said it will cut its workforce by 7% after the "most challenging" year in its history. In an email to staff on the firm's website, founder Elon Musk said that growth had been strong. But he added it was difficult to make Teslas with their new and developing technology as cheaply as conventional cars, and the firm's cars were still "too expensive for most people". Tesla employs more than 45,000 people, indicating it will cut about 3,000.

In a reversal of a deal local officials had touted as a win for Los Angeles tech, SpaceX will no longer build its Mars spaceship and rocket booster system at the Port of Los Angeles. Instead, work to develop and test the prototype will be done in south Texas. SpaceX said in a statement Wednesday that the decision was made to “streamline operations.”

There was an announcement made last year that a Chinese scientist called Dr He Jiankui had used the gene-editing technique Crispr and managed to the world’s first genetically modified babies. At the same time, Elon Musk announced the true purpose of Neuralink. Read on to find out what his vision of Neuralink holds for us.

Like many, I’ve been watching the developments in Boca Chica, Texas, with great interest. SpaceX, one of Elon Musk’s companies, is building the “Starship Hopper,” a shorter and simpler version of a spacecraft that could revolutionize space travel. Seeing images of the mostly complete test vehicle, clad in shiny stainless steel, makes me feel like a kid again. These are exciting times to be alive. We are at the beginning stages of the electric car revolution. We have access to much of the knowledge of our species at our fingertips. Rockets are being launched, and they mostly return to the ground for the next adventure.

SpaceX will lay off up to 10 percent of its work force, the company said Friday evening. The company characterized the job cuts as "a strategic realignment," designed to ensure it is positioned to succeed for the long term. They were announced to employees Friday in an e-mail from company president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell. The company has a work force of more than 6,000 employees.

Elon Musk has been making some crazy claims about the next generation Tesla Roadster, but now he is topping them off with a claim that it will actually be able to hover over the ground. When first unveiling the vehicle, Musk claimed a list of insanely impressive specs for the new Roadster, including 0-60 mph in 1.9 sec, 620-mile of range, and more. Musk has been teasing those specs as the “base specs” and other versions could be even crazier.

"Starship will look like liquid silver."

Eleven months ago—just after SpaceX astonished the world by launching and landing its titanic Falcon Heavy rocket while beaming back images of a red Tesla leaving Earth orbit—company founder Elon Musk had already begun to look beyond the moment. The Falcon Heavy was a big, capable rocket. But it wasn't large enough to fulfill his aspirations of reaching Mars. Neither did the company have a spacecraft capable of landing there.

Tesla knocked $2,000 off of the prices of its cars in the US on Wednesday to help offset a recent reduction of the federal electric vehicle tax credit. The automaker also announced initial delivery and production numbers for the fourth quarter of 2018, showing that the frenzied pace it carried through most of the year — led by the big Model 3 push — helped Tesla set new company records, even though it cooled toward the end.

SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk says a redesigned test vehicle for the company's next-generation reusable launch system could be ready for initial flights early next year. In a tweet early Dec. 24, Musk posted a photo of two parts of that initial test article, a conical section next to a cylindrical unit with landing legs. "Stainless Steel Starship," he wrote.

Elon Musk has become infamous for his extreme work schedule. When he was ramping up production of the Model 3 Tesla, he put in as many as 120 hours in a week. He slept at the factory because he had no time to go home. He called 2018 "the most difficult and painful year of my career." "[I]t was excruciating," he told The New York Times. In late October Musk finally said he was working a much more manageable schedule of 80 to 90 hours a week.

Elon Musk has revealed on Twitter that Tesla is planning a Supercharger expansion that will cover "100 percent of Europe" next year. "From Ireland to Kiev (Ukraine), from Norway to Turkey," he added, in response to a tweet that some parts of Ireland are badly in need of Superchargers. The automaker started preparing the Model 3 for European markets back in November, displaying it in showrooms in various countries across the continent

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is making some audacious promises again for the company’s network of electric fast chargers, known as Superchargers. This time, he’s aiming for 100 percent Tesla Supercharger coverage in Europe by next year. In response to a question on Twitter, Musk said Tesla’s Supercharger coverage will extend to 100 percent of Europe in 2019. “From Ireland to Kiev, from Norway to Turkey,” Musk wrote.

SpaceX’s futuristic Starship interplanetary craft may embody the golden age of sci-fi in more ways than one: in addition to (theoretically) taking passengers from planet to planet, it may sport a shiny stainless steel skin that makes it look like the pulp covers of old. Founder and CEO Elon Musk teased the possibility in a picture posted to Twitter, captioned simply “Stainless Steel Starship.” To be clear, this isn’t a full-on spacecraft, just part of a test vehicle that the company plans to use during the short “hopper” flights in 2019 to evaluate various systems.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has suggested that the company’s newly revamped Starship and Super Heavy rocket (previously known as BFR) could perform its first integrated launches – placing Starship into orbit – as few as 12-24 months from today. Musk indicated that the odds of Starship reaching orbit as early as 2020 are now as high as “60% [and] rising rapidly”, thanks in no small part to the flurry of radical changes the spacecraft and booster have both undergone over the course of 2018.

The wooden Leap-the-Dips amusement park ride in Altoona, Pennsylvania, is the oldest roller coaster still running in the United States. Built in 1902, it became a National Historic Landmark in 1996. It's known as a side-friction roller coaster, a type so outmoded that only a handful of vintage amusement parks worldwide still have one. The key to the ride is a set of wheels that roll and bounce against a vertical plane to keep the cars on their track.

Tesla’s fully-autonomous driving system is “about to accelerate significantly,” CEO Elon Musk told employees in an email circulated this week. The firm, which announced back in September that it plans to use a team of internal employees as early testers, is now looking for a few hundred more participants ahead of the launch of the in-house A.I. chip.

The commercial space business has blossomed over the past decade. Two companies, though, have grabbed the spotlight, emerging as the most ambitious of them all: Blue Origin and SpaceX. At first glance, these two companies look a lot alike. They are both led by billionaires who became wealthy from the Internet: Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin earned his fortune from Amazon.com, and Elon Musk of SpaceX got rich initially from Web-based businesses, notably PayPal.

It’s arguably unfathomable that any human being slapped with a $20 million fine for a bad tweet would ever consider returning to the platform, much less continue to fire off word salad at all hours of the day and night. In the face of any logical explanation, however, one such man seemingly continues to insist that he is not owned.

Musk talks about his "excruciating" 2018, fighting with journalists on Twitter, why Tesla won’t build an electric scooter and much more.

"We have to massively improve the technology associated with digging tunnel," the billionaire said on a Recode podcast published Friday.

Elon Musk is serious about plans for a Tesla pickup truck, and says it's going to look like something out of the sci-fi movie "Blade Runner."

Tesla has announced a new chair of its board of directors: Robyn Denholm. The move is part of the deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle claims that CEO Elon Musk misled investors. The deal prohibits Musk from serving as chairman of the company for three years. He will remain CEO of Tesla.

It's not all about speedy transit, Elon Musk also wants to build sewers. At the National League of Cities' City Summit on Thursday, the billionaire said he wants the Boring Company to "do tunneling for like water transport, sewage, electrical," according to Forbes. "We're not going to turn our noses up at sewage tunnels. We're happy to do that too."

Recently Elon Musk was asked to step down from the chairman position of Tesla. After this, the board of directors of Tesla chose a new chairman for the electric car company. Taking the position of Elon Musk will be Robyn Denholm who was holding the position of the Chief Financial Officer for the company Telstra. Telstra is a telecommunications company based in Australia.

Elon Musk has shot out some crazy, unbelievable tweets over the last year, but he wasn’t joking about the bricks. Musk has started a company called The Brick Store LLC to produce and sell bricks, according to public documents obtained by TechCrunch. The new company, which was founded in July, will be managed by Steve Davis, the ex-SpaceX engineer who is also running The Boring Company (TBC).

Elon Musk, age 47, told "Axios on HBO" that he sees a 70% chance that he'll live to ride one of his SpaceX rockets to Mars. "I know exactly what to do," he said. "I’m talking about moving there." The big picture: That prediction is dismissed as fantasy by some experts. But Musk said he can envision a flight as soon as seven years from now, with a ticket price of "around a couple hundred thousand dollars."

"Does that sound like an escape hatch for rich people?"

As Mars colonization inches ever closer to becoming a reality, some have argued that the ability to afford a ticket to the Red Planet is a luxury afforded only to the wealthiest members of society. Billionaire Elon Musk has said it’ll run potential Mars inhabitants traveling with his company SpaceX hundreds of thousands of dollars to get there. But in a new interview, he rebuffed the assertion that a one-way ticket to Mars is an easy ticket out for the rich.

Elon Musk, the inventor and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, told "Axios on HBO" that humans must merge with machines to overcome the “existential threat” of artificial intelligence. The big picture: Musk said artificial intelligence is "just digital intelligence. And as the algorithms and the hardware improve, that digital intelligence will exceed biological intelligence by a substantial margin. It's obvious." And he said we're way behind: "We're like children in a playground. ... We're not paying attention. We worry more about ... what name somebody called someone else ... than whether AI will destroy humanity. That's insane."

Elon Musk's Boring Company announced Tuesday that it has pulled the plug on a project that appeared to be nothing more than a subterranean pipe dream. The company announced Tuesday that it was withdrawing plans, unveiled in 2017, for a high-tech transportation tunnel below the 405 freeway along Los Angeles' Westside.

We'll soon learn if Elon Musk's high-speed tunnel plan is a serious effort to relieve traffic congestion or little more than a fancy theme park ride. Musk has announced a big unveiling event for December 18 that will show off not only a tunnel but also a ground-to-tunnel car elevator and an autonomous passenger pod.

Elon Musk said on Thursday that an underground tunnel developed by his privately held The Boring Company will open on Dec. 18 — an eight-day delay from the initial date.

Elon Musk wants electric vehicles to be successful — even if Tesla goes under trying. In an interview for CBS' "60 Minutes," the Tesla CEO and Silicon Valley billionaire was asked about competition from General Motors (GM), which announced last month it's laying off thousands of workers as the century-old company shifts focus to self-driving and electric vehicles.

Drawn in by Teslarati photographer Pauline Acalin’s most recent photos of Port of LA Falcon 9 recovery operations SpaceX is in the midst of, CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter on December 8th to discuss titanium grid fins and – more importantly – answer a miscellaneous handful of questions about the status of BFR’s development.