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Leading US Bank calls for renewed fossil fuel support as Tesla shifts industry to sustainables

(Credit: Exxon Mobil/YouTube)

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The Annual World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland took place recently. The Forum is a great opportunity for the world’s leaders to combine their knowledge and ideas in a way that will make our world more efficient. At a time when sustainable solutions are emerging at an accelerated rate thanks to companies like Tesla, it was a chance for leaders across numerous industries to establish their stance on the climate debate.

A few big names were among the guests who were in attendance of the Davos meeting. U.S. President Donald Trump, Billionaire George Soros, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Environmentalist Greta Thunberg are few notable names who were present.

During the event, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan suggested that oil companies need support now more than ever as the world begins its transition to more sustainable and environmentally-conscious forms of energy. “We should lend to those companies to help them make progress faster, rather than divest from them which won’t help them at all,” he said in an interview with Andy Serwer.

Moynihan’s comments were a response to Thunburg’s claims that no progress has been made toward reducing the emissions of environmentally-damaging carbon gases. He believes that plenty of progress has been made, but he also believes that it could be expedited if more steps were taken.

He’s right, more companies should do more to assist the cause. But there are not enough companies taking the global crisis of climate change seriously enough. While companies continue to make pledges toward reducing carbon emissions by a certain amount before a certain year, what is funding oil companies going to do toward making the world a more environmentally-friendly place?

Moynihan was on a panel with Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good at the Davos Forum. Duke has pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by the year 2030.

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“Think about that. That’s a power company. If they’re moving with that kind of pace, and we are saying we need more alternative energy to meet our goals, that business system will get more progress,” he said. “And so yes, we’ve got to make more progress. We’ve got to make it faster. But we’ve got to do it in an aligned way.”

But there are other companies that have the mindset to take two steps forward and one step back.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the head of one of the biggest companies in the world. The e-commerce giant made huge strides toward environmental sustainability when it became an investor in electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian, whose zero-emissions R1T is set to compete with Tesla’s brutalist Cybertruck. Amazon also purchased 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian in an attempt to reduce the amount of carbon emissions from its vehicles.

A few weeks later, a press release from one of the world’s biggest oilfield service companies stated Amazon was one of the main contributors to the U.S. Oil and Gas Industry’s “Production 4.0” forum that would help accelerate and improve oil production. Amazon’s employees pushed Bezos to make changes that would help the Earth. While he promised electric vans and more conscious packaging, Bezos was directly contributing to an industry that continues to harm the Earth in many ways.

As the head of a large bank like Bank of America or one of the biggest companies in the world like Amazon, the responsibility is huge. The environmental impact of these companies is huge and requires extra attention from large corporations. The power these companies hold is the possible key to environmental longevity, and it starts with the halting of oil funding. If the Bank of America CEO’s statements are any indication though, the transition to sustainability may end up being a bit longer than expected.

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Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Tesla snags Semi supply deal with major logistics firm

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla has snagged a deal with IMC Logistics to supply the company with 50 Semi units for its logistics operations.

IMC handles drayage and landside logistics and has over 2,700 asset trucks in its fleet. In its over forty years of service, it has established more than 50 locations across the United States and spans operations from coast to coast.

Jim Gillis of IMC said that the addition of the Tesla Semi will help IMC move toward a “zero-emission service for long-haul lanes.”

The move is one that has become more common over the past few years, as more and more companies doing large-scale logistics have moved to sustainable powertrains, using either Tesla or others.

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Tesla’s Semi program just entered its first truly public phase, as the company handed over its first production units to companies in September, although a pilot program with companies like PepsiCo. and Frito-Lay has been ongoing for years.

IMC announced its intention to purchase 50 Semi units from Tesla in September, and according to VP of Marketing and Public Relations on September 29 to Trucking Drive, the company will take delivery either this week or took delivery late last week.

Tesla has a ‘no human contact’ approach for Semi production

With surging prices of diesel and high logistics costs, Tesla and the Semi could truly revolutionize how companies manage their fleets. With the advent of Full Self-Driving, the Semi will potentially cut down on driver fatigue and increase productivity, while decreasing the cost of operation per mile by being cheaper to refuel.

Tesla had a dedicated Semi handover event at the Semi factory in Sparks, Nevada, a few weeks back, as it officially introduced its truck to many company fleets that have been waiting to add these sustainable powertrains.

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Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley

Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.

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Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.

Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.

Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:

“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”

Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.

The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.

Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.

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Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming

Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.

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Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.

In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”

The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”

Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner

SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.

Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.

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The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.

It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”

The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.

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