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Why is Elon Musk’s surprise trip this week to China so important?

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The Chinese official news agency Xinhua posted a photograph on Tuesday night of Tesla CEO Elon Musk in formal conversation with Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang. The previously unannounced meeting, which took place in Beijing, is an important milestone for Tesla, as it signals a turn in the economic relationship of the all-electric car company and the biggest automotive market in the world.

Vice Premier Wang is one of China’s foremost economic decision-makers. He has not ever previously met alone with an automotive CEO like Musk, generally preferring group dynamics, according Li Anding, Xinhua’s former automotive reporter and current China industry analyst, as reported by Forbes.

The Musk-Wang consultation could be groundbreaking in several ways.

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The meeting between Musk and Wang took place concurrent with the Shanghai Auto Show, where many automakers chose to unveil their newest electric cars. By early 2018, automakers in China are required to offer at least 8 percent electric vehicles out of their total manufactured vehicles. The beginning of Q1 in China saw vehicle imports rise 376% as compared to the same period in 2016, according to JL Warren Capital.

Chinese consumers bought 24 million passenger cars last year. With 1 million electric vehicles in 2016, China experienced an 87 percent increase over the previous year. Tesla has revealed that its 2016 China sales tripled to $1 billion+ at a time when its 2016 U.S. sales were around $4.2 billion.

China is a formidable market for Tesla to tap. If Tesla could produce cars locally as part of a joint venture, which is required in China, the stiff 25% tariffs on Tesla’s imported cars could be alleviated and would reduce the cost of buying a Tesla in China. That would open up entirely new consumer audiences for Tesla there. Electric vehicles in China start at about $6,000 and have a cost range of up to $200,000— the luxurious Tesla.

Tesla has proven already to China that it is able to adopt its production to be be consistent with China’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020), in which energy goals include movement toward a larger percentage of electric vehicles (EVs) on China’s roads. Yet, many of that country’s new electric car companies are experiencing startup woes of long charging times and an overall poor driver experience, Li acknowledged.

If, as has been rumored, Tesla has been having discussions with several interested partners from various Chinese cities, the automaker might be close to making a deal. And, as Vice Premier Wang is a former leader of the Guangdong province, that region might be high on the Tesla sights for one of its first regional facilities.

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Musk’s visit coincides with a voluntary recall this week in China of 6,634 Tesla Model S and Model X due to a potential defect in its electric parking brake. Tesla Auto Sales (Beijing) Co. contacted the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) to apprise the state of the situation. Tesla has agreed to replace defective brake calipers at no cost.

Carolyn Fortuna is a writer and researcher with a Ph.D. in education from the University of Rhode Island. She brings a social justice perspective to environmental issues. Please follow me on Twitter and Facebook and Google+

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Elon Musk’s X goes down as users report major outage Friday morning

Error messages and stalled loading screens quickly spread across the service, while outage trackers recorded a sharp spike in user reports.

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Credit: Linda Yaccarino/X

Elon Musk’s X experienced an outage Friday morning, leaving large numbers of users unable to access the social media platform.

Error messages and stalled loading screens quickly spread across the service, while outage trackers recorded a sharp spike in user reports.

Downdetector reports

Users attempting to open X were met with messages such as “Something went wrong. Try reloading,” often followed by an endless spinning icon that prevented access, according to a report from Variety. Downdetector data showed that reports of problems surged rapidly throughout the morning.

As of 10:52 a.m. ET, more than 100,000 users had reported issues with X. The data indicated that 56% of complaints were tied to the mobile app, while 33% were related to the website and roughly 10% cited server connection problems. The disruption appeared to begin around 10:10 a.m. ET, briefly eased around 10:35 a.m., and then returned minutes later.

Credit: Downdetector

Previous disruptions

Friday’s outage was not an isolated incident. X has experienced multiple high-profile service interruptions over the past two years. In November, tens of thousands of users reported widespread errors, including “Internal server error / Error code 500” messages. Cloudflare-related error messages were also reported.

In March 2025, the platform endured several brief outages spanning roughly 45 minutes, with more than 21,000 reports in the U.S. and 10,800 in the U.K., according to Downdetector. Earlier disruptions included an outage in August 2024 and impairments to key platform features in July 2023.

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Tesla wins top loyalty and conquest honors in S&P Global Mobility 2025 awards

The electric vehicle maker secured this year’s “Overall Loyalty to Make,” “Highest Conquest Percentage,” and “Ethnic Loyalty to Make” awards.

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Credit: Tesla Malaysia/X

Tesla emerged as one of the standout winners in the 2025 S&P Global Mobility Automotive Loyalty Awards, capturing top honors for customer retention and market conquest.

The electric vehicle maker secured this year’s “Overall Loyalty to Make,” “Highest Conquest Percentage,” and “Ethnic Loyalty to Make” awards.

Tesla claims loyalty crown

According to S&P Global Mobility, Tesla secured its 2025 “Overall Loyalty to Make” award following a late-year shift in consumer buying patterns. This marked the fourth consecutive year Tesla has received the honor. S&P Global Mobility’s annual analysis reviewed 13.6 million new retail vehicle registrations in the U.S. from October 2024 through September 2025, as noted in a press release.

In addition to overall loyalty, Tesla also earned the “Highest Conquest Percentage” award for the sixth consecutive year, highlighting the company’s continued ability to attract customers away from competing brands. This achievement is particularly notable given Tesla’s relatively small vehicle lineup, which is largely dominated by just two models: the Model 3 and Model Y.

Ethnic market strength and conquest

Tesla also captured top honors for “Ethnic Market Loyalty to Make,” a category that highlighted especially strong retention among Asian and Hispanic households. According to the analysis, Tesla achieved loyalty rates of 63.6% among Asian households and 61.9% among Hispanic households. These figures exceeded national averages.

S&P Global Mobility executives noted that loyalty margins across categories were exceptionally narrow in 2025, underscoring the significance of Tesla’s wins in an increasingly competitive market. Joe LaFeir, President of Mobility Business Solutions at S&P Global Mobility, shared his perspective on this year’s results.

“For 30 years, this analysis has provided a fact-based measure of brand health, and this year’s results are particularly telling. The data shows the market is not rewarding just one type of strategy. Instead, we see sustained, high-level performance from manufacturers with broad portfolios. In the current market, retaining customers remains a critical performance indicator for the industry,” LaFeir said.

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Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft is heading to jury trial

The ruling keeps alive claims that OpenAI misled the Tesla CEO about its charitable purpose while accepting billions of dollars in funding.

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Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft will face a jury trial this spring after a federal judge rejected their efforts to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit, which accuses the artificial intelligence startup of abandoning its original nonprofit mission. The ruling keeps alive claims that OpenAI misled the Tesla CEO about its charitable purpose while accepting billions of dollars in funding.

As noted in a report from Bloomberg News, a federal judge in Oakland, California, ruled that OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft failed to show that Musk’s claims should be dismissed. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers stated that while the evidence remains unclear, Musk has maintained that OpenAI “had a specific charitable purpose and that he attached two fundamental terms to it: that OpenAI be open source and that it would remain a nonprofit — purposes consistent with OpenAI’s charter and mission.”

Judge Gonzalez Rogers also rejected an argument by OpenAI suggesting that Musk’s use of an intermediary to donate $38 million in seed money to the company stripped him of legal standing. “Holding otherwise would significantly reduce the enforcement of a large swath of charitable trusts, contrary to the modern trend,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers wrote.

The judge also declined to dismiss Musk’s fraud allegations, citing internal OpenAI communications from 2017 involving co-founder Greg Brockman. In an email cited by the judge, fellow OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis informed Musk that Brockman would “like to continue with the non-profit structure.”

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Just two months later, however, Brockman wrote in a private note that he “cannot say that we are committed to the non-profit. don’t want to say that we’re committed. if three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie.”

Marc Toberoff, a member of Musk’s legal team, said Judge Gonzalez Rogers’s ruling confirms that “there is substantial evidence that OpenAI’s leadership made knowingly false assurances to Mr. Musk about its charitable mission that they never honored in favor of their personal self-enrichment.”

OpenAI, for its part, maintained that Musk’s legal efforts are baseless. In a statement, the AI startup said it is looking forward to the upcoming trial. “Mr. Musk’s lawsuit continues to be baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment, and we look forward to demonstrating this at trial. We remain focused on empowering the OpenAI Foundation, which is already one of the best-resourced nonprofits ever,” OpenAI stated.

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