Year: 2019

The aerospace industry took flight with ambitious civilian and military projects over the course of 2018, and private investors took notice.

Rockets are flying to the far side of the moon. Entrepreneurs are creating new propulsion technologies to take rockets deeper into space and to make flying on Earth more electric. Finally, plans are afoot from private companies and governments to bring manned missions to the surface of the Moon and Mars.

And venture capital dollars are fueling this new boom in aerospace innovation, with firms investing over $2.3 billion in new companies over the course of 2018, according to data from Crunchbase.

This surge of interest comes as no surprise to longtime industry investors like Francois Chopard, the founder of Starburst Aerospace, an accelerator and investment fund focused on the industry since 2012.

“It started in the past with only space. It was basically rockets and satellites and it used to be just a handful of players,” said Chopard. “Now it’s extended to aviation with all the [electric vertical takeoff and landing], hybrids and supersonic and defense planes.”

One startup developing electric planes, the Boeing and JetBlue-backed Zunum Aero, expects to make its first deliveries of new planes by 2022. And it’s not the only company that’s flying to market in a hurry. Wright Electric, Joby Aviation and Ampaire are all startups that are angling for their own place in the sky.

“We are seeing huge deal flow,” says Chopard. “There are 1,000 startups emerging every year on these subjects… After five or six years we are seeing many more people getting educated… seeing more and more people interested in investing in space.”

Among the investors expressing greater interest in the emerging startups looking to transform the aerospace industry are the very companies those startups are challenging.

“We disrupt ourselves so someone else doesn’t disrupt us,” Brian Schettler, managing director of Boeing’s HorizonX venture arm, told the Wall Street Journal last year.

Space startups command the most attention 

Boeing’s launch into startup investing comes almost directly as a result of already being disrupted in the space industry.

Elon Musk and SpaceX came from nowhere to become a serious competitor to the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin that had enjoyed a near monopoly on contracts with the U.S. government for space missions.

And now the space industry is about to break wide open. In addition to Musk’s SpaceX there are companies like Relativity Space, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab, which launched its first mission for NASA in mid-December 2018.

“I’ve never seen the interest level so high to start new businesses,” said Hoyt Davidson, managing partner of investment banking company Near Earth LLC. “It’s a renaissance, a potential space renaissance,” Davidson told Space News about the newfound interest from investors in the sector.

But as Chopard notes, many investors have yet to really take the plunge into aerospace and space investing fully. 

“Right now what we’ve seen is large venture funds investing in space as a bet… if it works fine, if not… it’s not a big deal,” says Chopard. “We haven’t seen purely dedicated space or aerospace venture funds because of the lack of exits.”

Space, right now, still has a lock on investors’ attention. Google first showed the early promise of returns in the satellite business to investors when it bought Skybox Labs for $500 million back in 2014. Although the investment wasn’t a huge hit for Google, which spun out the company and eventually sold it to Planet. And Planet labs itself is highly valued, given a 2018 funding round that pegged the company at roughly $1.4 billion.

Between funding for Rocket Lab, SpaceX, Astroscale, Terran Launch, VectorLaunch, AxelSpace and Spin Launch, the bulk of venture dollars were invested in space and satellite companies.

More money is still needed 

That’s music to the ears of U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who sees in the new space race a nascent industry that could spur incredible job growth and wealth creation (in this, at least, Ross is right). But as Ross acknowledged, other sources of capital need to do more.

“We’re going to need better financing and insurance for the space industry,” Ross said recently in a public address quoted by Space News.”Missing from space financing are the bigger institutions, especially banks. Their participation will be necessary to execute longer-term commercial plans.”

At the start of his fifth year developing early stage aerospace companies, Chopard sees hope coming from the corporate investors who also serve as his partners … and in his own plans for for the growth of Starburst.

“I still think we are early in the process,” said Chopard. “It’s early and everybody has interest to invest in the early stage. We have seen Boeing doing follow ups and Airbus doing follow ups… they are looking at startups that will benefit the entire community.”

Meanwhile, Starburst is looking to raise a second venture fund of its own, and targeting between $100 million and $150 million for it. 

That fund will continue to support portfolio companies like Airmap, an aerospace startup focused on flight plans for drones; Nautilus, a drone for large cargo delivery; Orbital Sidekick, a developer of cubesats with hyperspectral imaging capabilities, and Optisys, which is manufacturing metal antennas for satellites using 3D printing technologies.

“The biggest obstacle is the entire maturity of the ecosystem… our next venture are building the fund and developing more early stage accelerators,” said Chopard. “The plan is to have these early stage accelerators where we take younger startups in order to build a stronger dealflow.”

Hackers are using a decade-old flaw to target and hijack dormant Twitter accounts to spread terrorist propaganda, TechCrunch has learned.

Many of the affected Twitter accounts appeared to be hijacked in recent days or weeks — some longer — after years of inactivity. A sudden shift in tone or the language used in tweets often gives away the hijack — usually a single tweet in Arabic, sometimes praising Allah or retweeting propaganda from another account.

Twitter has suspended most of the accounts we reviewed, but some remain active.

The recent resurgence in hijacked accounts appears to be hackers exploiting Twitter’s legacy lack of email confirmation. Twitter took steps to prevent the automated creation of new accounts in June by requiring new accounts to be confirmed using an email address or phone number, but many older accounts remain unconfirmed.

But while dormant Twitter accounts are never deleted, the email addresses that were used to create them either never existed in the first place, or expired long ago. As such, many older Twitter accounts can be easily hijacked by creating the email address used to initially register the Twitter account.

“This issue has been around for a while but no one really knew and took advantage of it,” said a hacker and security researcher known as WauchulaGhost, who researches and disrupts the online activities of the so-called Islamic State.

“Now, we have Islamic State supporters that have figured it out,” he said.

He found one since-suspended account following many inactive accounts, which had all been recently hijacked. His hypothesis was that, “once you create the email, password reset on the Twitter account, check the email and click the link,” he said. Many of those dormant accounts he tested hadn’t created the email that the account was registered to. The email addresses are partially masked, but it’s easy to tell how many characters are in a Twitter account’s email address. Often the email accounts were simply their Twitter handle at “@hotmail.com” or “@yahoo.com,” he said.

Some of the accounts had tens of thousands of followers, he said.

He shared several of those dormant Twitter accounts with TechCrunch, nearly all of which had registered email addresses that were identical to their Twitter handle. He was able to register all of those email addresses, which would have allowed him to access those accounts.

Many of the hijacked accounts he found in the past few days — and shared with TechCrunch — were spreading propaganda, but were later suspended from the service. The hackers often didn’t bother to change the bios on the account.

The hijacked accounts we reviewed included Arabic-speaking videos of Islamic State fighters wielding weapons and other curated content. Others simply contained text — also in Arabic — that praised violence and other attacks, or retweeted other accounts.

One tweet, roughly translated, used an Islamic State hashtag: “…with your cars, let’s go pack, you bomb, go with a bomb, you go in any way.” Another hijacked account called on Muslims to “kill these Christians wherever you find them,” while another account tweeted about turning the Christmas holidays “into grief and horror.” (These statements go against fundamental Islamic teachings, and calls for violence against non-Muslims is expressly forbidden in the Qur’an.)

Twitter said it’s trying to find a solution to a problem that it claims isn’t theirs to fix.

“Reusing email addresses in this manner is not a new issue for Twitter or other online services,” a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch. “For our part, our teams are aware and are working to identify solutions that can help keep Twitter accounts safe and secure.”

In other words, it’s the email providers — like Hotmail and Yahoo — that are deactivating accounts and recycling email addresses that are partly the problem — on top of Twitter’s lack of confirming accounts for the first decade of the service’s existence. And Twitter isn’t alone: Facebook also struggled with account hijacks through expired email accounts.

But the researcher said Twitter should shoulder the blame for the account hijacks.

Twitter said it has removed over a million accounts for promoting and sharing content since August 2015 — with more than 205,000 accounts during the first half of 2018 alone. The number of accounts suspended has declined in each reporting period as Twitter claims its technologies are preventing pro-terrorism accounts from spreading content in the first place. Even during the reporting for this story, we’ve even seen account after account get suspended off the site by Twitter. But around one-quarter of accounts that are eventually caught are still able to tweet at least once, it says.

Twitter knows it has a problem. But with other companies as much at fault, neither they — nor the social media giant — appears to have a way to fix it.

Tesla is starting out 2019 in the red following news it missed Wall Street’s delivery estimates. The company said in a letter to investors that it delivered 90,700 vehicles during the fourth quarter. That’s a bit shy of what analysts expected. This, in part, caused the company’s stock to open nearly 8 percent down on the day.

Tesla stock price is down 10 percent as of publication.

The company also announced before the bell that it is cutting $2,000 off the price of a Model S, Model X and Model 3. This is likely in response to the sunsetting of the $7,500 federal tax credit that helped offset the price of Tesla’s vehicles. Starting on January 1, that tax credit is now worth only $3,750.

In the last few days of 2018, Tesla made a large push to get buyers into vehicles to take advantage of the original tax credit. It even kept 44 Tesla showrooms open on New Year’s Eve until midnight to give buyers as much time as possible.

Tesla managed to increase the amount of vehicles it delivered during the last quarter, increasing the amount by 8 percent. In a letter to investors, the company said it delivered 13,500 Model S sedans, 14,050 Model X SUVs and 63,150 Model 3s. It was a record quarter for Tesla, but the numbers still fell short of what Wall Street expected, according to research firm, FactSet.

The company is facing headwinds as it attempts to scale production and fight off an increasing amount of competitors in its space.

The Roku Channel — Roku’s home to free, ad-supported content like movies, TV, sports and news — is expanding to include subscriptions. Essentially Roku’s own take on Amazon’s Prime Video Channels, users can now opt to add some 25 premium video subscriptions within the Roku Channel, centralizing their access to streaming services in one destination that will become more personalized over time.

At launch, consumers will be able to opt to add-on subscriptions from premium networks including Showtime, Starz, EPIX, CuriosityStream, Noggin, Baeble Music, CollegeHumor’s Dropout, Hopster, Magnolia Selects, FitFusion, Smithsonian Channel Plus, Tastemade, Viewster Anime, The Great Courses Signature Collection, MHz Choice and others.

Offering a centralized place to subscribe to paid content is a fairly significant change for Roku’s platform, where, historically, viewers would download and add apps (“channels,” in Roku’s lingo) to their Roku homepage for each service they wanted to watch. Some of those channels require subscriptions, like Netflix and Hulu, while others offer free content.

Roku in fall 2017 began to aggregate the free content from the various channels across its platform in its own Roku Channel, and combined that with content it licensed directly from studios. The Roku Channel initially featured free, ad-supported movies, giving Roku a way to further grow its advertising revenues.

Over the past year, The Roku Channel expanded to include news, sports, TV shows and other entertainment offerings both from traditional studios and digital networks. This pushed the channel to become one of the top five most-watched across the Roku platform.

Now, instead of being only a home to free content, The Roku Channel is working with video partners to offer an alternative way to watch their programming.

“We’ve been focused on ad-supported content and will continue to have a very robust offering there. But there’s lots of great content that’s available only in subscription services,” explained Roku’s vice president of Programming, Rob Holmes, as to why Roku wanted to introduce paid subscriptions. “We also wanted to try to improve the user experience in a lot of the same way that we did with the launch of The Roku Channel around ad-supported content,” he said. 

When you enter The Roku Channel, you’ll be able to explore the premium subscription content before making a decision as to whether or not you want to sign up. That’s a better experience than offered by some subscription apps today, where you’re presented only with a splash screen that directs you to sign up to see the content or offer a very limited view of their programming.

If you choose to subscribe to a premium network via the Roku Channel, you can use the payment card that’s already on file with Roku. Basically, you click a button and then confirm the subscription (in case you clicked by accidentally sitting on the remote), and then you’re signed up.

This method makes it easier to add and remove subscriptions, for those who follow individual shows and want to turn their subscription on and off, timed with the release of new seasons.

The subscriptions also support seven-day free trials, trial expiration reminders and are billed together on a single statement from Roku monthly.

Also of note, when you subscribe to networks through the Roku Channel, you’ll no longer have to download the network’s standalone Roku app to watch. Instead, your subscriptions will get their own area inside The Roku Channel, making it more of a one-stop shop for your streaming services.

The networks will be shown both in The Roku Channel’s homepage and they’ll each get their own tab in the channel, too.

In fact, you currently cannot choose to watch in the network’s standalone Roku app, we understand. Over time, some networks will offer authentication for Roku Channel subscribers, but that’s not the case at launch.

Of course, this begs the question — if you can’t authenticate with the network provider, does that mean you won’t be able to watch the channel’s content, except on a Roku device?

As it turns out, you can.

Alongside the launch of channel subscriptions, The Roku Channel’s mobile app is being updated to support video playback. That means you can watch The Roku Channel content, including subscriptions, on your smartphone or tablet, as well as on the web and on your TV.

Over time, Roku’s plan is to better personalize your subscriptions and recommendations. That means the shows you actively watch will be presented in the front of the queue, and Roku will be able to recommend content across services, based on viewing behavior.

Roku says it will add more partners to The Roku Channel over time. However, many providers will not participate because they want to own the experience, end-to-end with their customers. They also may not want to share a cut of subscription revenue with Roku, as is required today to be promoted as a subscription add-on within The Roku Channel.

For the time being, Roku doesn’t plan on expanding from premium subscriptions to offer some sort of core package of subscription programming the way live TV services like Sling TV or YouTube TV now do.

“I think where we are today is really focused on these à la carte subscriptions,” Holmes said. “Ultimately, from a user standpoint, there’s a lot of value in being able to pick and choose exactly what you want to sign up for — without having to sign up for one of these base packages to start with. That’s how we think about it today.”

Support for subscriptions will begin to roll out to The Roku Channel starting later this month and will complete the phased rollout by early 2019. The new mobile app will launch in late January, as well.

Google has won U.S. regulatory approval to go ahead with a radar-based motion sensor that could make touchscreens look obsolete in the coming years. Known as the Soli Project, the initiative began in 2015 inside Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects unit, a group responsible for turning the giant’s cutting-edge ideas into products.

We’ve seen a number of Soli’s technological breakthroughs since then, from being able to identify objects to reducing the radar sensor’s power consumption. Most recently, a regulatory order is set to move it into a more actionable phase. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said earlier this week that it would grant Project Soli a waiver to operate at higher power levels than currently allowed. The government agency also said users can operate the sensor aboard a plane because the device poses “minimal potential of causing harmful interference to other spectrum users.”

Soli fits radar sensors into a tiny chip the size of an American quarter to track slight hand or finger motions at high speed and accuracy. That means instead of twisting a knob to adjust the volume of your stereo, you can rub your fingers over a speaker that contains a Soli chip as if sliding across a virtual dial. Under the regulatory order, you also would be allowed to air press a button on your Soli-powered smartwatch in the future.

Aside from clearing safety concerns, the FCC also found that the sensing tech serves the public interest: “The ability to recognize users’ touchless hand gestures to control a device, such as a smartphone, could help people with mobility, speech, or tactile impairments, which in turn could lead to higher productivity and quality of life for many members of the American public.”

We contacted Google to ask for more detail and will update the story when and if we get a response.

The regulatory consent arrived months after Facebook raised issues with the FCC that the Soli sensors operating at higher power levels might interfere with other device systems. The two firms came to a consensus in September and told the FCC that Soli could operate at power levels higher than what the government allowed but lower than what Google had requested.

It’s a rational move for Facebook trying to shape the rules for the new field, given its own Oculus deploys motion technologies. The company also has invested in researching the area, for instance, by looking at a device that creates motion on the arm to simulate social gestures like hugging.

The update on Google’s technological development is a temporary distraction from the giant’s more questionable, revenue-driven moves in recent months, including a massive data leak on Google+ followed by the closure of the online ghost town, its failure to crack down on child porn and its controversial plan to re-enter China reportedly with a censored search engine.

If you’ve conquered China, then India — the world’s second-largest country based on population — is the obvious next port of call, and that’s exactly what has happened in the world of consumer apps.

Following the lead of Chinese smartphone makers like Xiaomi and Oppo, which have dominated mobile sales in India for some time, the content behind the touchscreen glass in India is increasingly now from China, too. That’s according to a report from FactorDaily, which found that 44 of the top 100 Android apps in India were developed by Chinese companies, up from just 18 one year prior. (The focus is on Android because it is the overwhelming choice of operating system among India’s estimated 500 million internet users.)

The list of top Chinese apps includes major names like ByteDance, the world’s highest-valued startup, which offers TikTok and local language news app Helo in India, and Alibaba’s UCbrowser, as well as lesser-known quantities like Tencent-backed NewsDog and quiet-yet-prolific streaming app maker Bigo.

Citing data from Sensor Tower, the report found that five of the top 10 Android apps in India are from China, up from just two at the end of 2017.

For anyone who has been watching the Indian technology scene in recent years, this “Chinese app store invasion” will be of little surprise, although the speed of change has been unexpected.

China’s two biggest companies, Alibaba and Tencent, have poured significant amounts into promising Indian startups in recent years, setting the stage for others to follow suit and move into India in search of growth.

Alibaba bought into Snapdeal and Paytm via multi-hundred-million-dollar investments in 2015, and the pace has only quickened since then. In 2017, Tencent invested in Gaana (music streaming) and Swiggy (food delivery) in major deals, having backed Byju’s (education) and Ola (ride-hailing) the year prior. The pair also launched local cloud computing services inside India last year.

Beyond those two, Xiaomi has gone beyond selling phones to back local companies and develop local services for its customers.

That local approach appears to have been the key for those app makers which have found success in India. Rather than taking a very rigid approach like Chinese messaging app WeChat — owned by Tencent, which failed in India — the likes of ByteDance have developed local teams and, in some cases, entirely local apps dedicated to India. With the next hundreds of millions of internet users in India tipped to come from more rural parts of the country, vernacular languages, local content and voice-enabled tech are some of the key strategies that, like their phone-making cousins, Chinese app developers will need to focus on to ensure that they aren’t just a flash in the pan in India.

You can read more at FactorDaily.

Didi Chuxing, China’s dominant ride-hailing firm, is rolling out a range of financial and insurance services as it looks to fortify its service against a range of challenges in 2019.

The company announced today that it is adding “protection” insurance and credit services for both passengers and drivers who use its platform. The former is aimed particularly at Didi drivers by offering health and car insurance that it claims will “lower the entry barrier for gig economy workers and broaden the scope of protection for more families.”

These new options will appear inside the Didi app. The company isn’t saying too much about them in detail, but they were trialed in 10 cities last year. Similar services have surfaced in Southeast Asia, where Didi ally Grab and its local rival Go-Jek have built out a range of fintech services, including payments and insurance.

It’s impossible to ignore the fact that this new Didi rollout comes amid changes that could inhibit its ability to attract and retain drivers. That’s because, as we explained this week, regulations that come into effect on January 1 require drivers to hold two licenses, a local residency permit that clears them for work and a permit to operate a vehicle for commercial purposes. That’s tricky, because the residential permit is difficult to obtain, while the commercial driving license adds a cost that may see some part-time drivers decide that driving with Didi doesn’t make sense financially.

While Didi has fought back to lower the barriers by allowing divers to rent licensed cars that it sources itself — “you supply the manpower, we provide the car,” its slogan reads — these changes could spell the end of China’s gig economy, at least in terms of ride-hailing as we know it.

It’s hard to criticize the introduction of tighter driver regulation given that two Didi passengers were murdered by their drivers last year. The company claims to have instituted a major restructuring that puts the focus on passenger safety, but government intervention was inevitable and it could mean a diminished pool of drivers from which to pick. A Didi representative told TechCrunch that the company has 31 million registered drivers on the platform, but the company didn’t provide an indicator of how many are active.

Nonetheless, for those who will continue with Didi or join its fleet in 2019, this new rollout is aimed at providing some of the financial services that they miss out on by not working a “regular” full-time job. Beyond insurance and lending, it will also see Didi offer deals on “new energy vehicles” through its partners. That will cover both buying cars outright, as well as leasing, trading and acquiring on finance, the company explained.

For Didi, these introductions will likely provide a welcome revenue boost. Little is known about the company’s finances, but it is reported to have lost more than half a billion dollars in the first half of 2018, mainly on subsidies. Using its extensive reach to help finance and retail partners tap into its registered user base will create a new source of income whilst also providing benefits to those users.

Government regulation isn’t Didi’s only challenge this year, as a number of rivals have sprouted up even as Meituan — the deep-pocketed “super app” company that went public in 2018 — decided to pull away from ride-hailing due to financial concerns.

Traditional auto giants BMW and SAIC Motor — Volkswagen’s partner in China — are driving into the ride-hailing scene, while HelloBike, which just bagged significant funding from Alibaba’s Ant Financial and others, is entering, too.

These factors make 2019 an interesting year for Didi. Talk of the company going public was rife in previous years, but there seems to have been little progress made. Last year’s spin-out of its driver services business — a relatively asset-heavy unit — was tipped to be a precursor to a listing, but already Lyft and Uber have taken their first steps and Didi is reported to have stalled its efforts.

Netflix pulled an episode of “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj” from its streaming service in Saudi Arabia after receiving a complaint from the kingdom. The removal was first reported by the Financial Times.

The episode, titled “Saudi Arabia,” centers around the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and criticizes Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. The Crown Prince has been implicated by the Central Intelligence Agency and Turkish officials in the planning of Khashoggi’s murder.

At the beginning of the episode, Minhaj, a Muslim-American whose show mixes political and cultural commentary with comedy, says “just a few months ago, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, AKA ‘MBS,’ was hailed as the reformer the Arab world needs, but the revelation of Khashoggi’s killing has shattered that image. It blows my mind it took the killing of a Washington Post journalist for everyone to go ‘oh, I guess he’s really not a reformer’ and meanwhile, every Muslim person you know was like ‘no shit, he’s the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. So now would be a good time for us to reassess our relationship with Saudi Arabia.”

He also called on tech companies to stop taking money from the kingdom, an investor in Uber and the SoftBank Vision Fund (among others).

Netflix told the Financial Times that it removed the episode from Saudi Arabia last week after receiving a request from the country’s Communications and Information Technology Commission that said it allegedly violated Saudi Arabia’s anti-cyber crime law.

Netflix said the commission cited Article 6 of the law, which states that “production, preparation, transmission, or storage of material impinging on public order, religious values, public morals, and privacy, through the information network or computers” is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine not exceeding SR3m ($800,000).” While ostensibly designed to protect internet users from cybercrimes, the Freedom House said in a 2016 report that the law contains clauses limiting freedom of expression.

“We strongly support artistic freedom worldwide and only removed this episode in Saudi Arabia after we had received a valid legal request – and to comply with local law,” Netflix told the Financial Times.

The newspaper noted that “Saudi Arabia” is available on the “Patriot Act’s” YouTube channel, where it is viewable by users in Saudi Arabia.

TechCrunch has reached out to Netflix for comment.

Three point eight.

From the first day of trading in 2018 to the last, that was the final percentage difference in Tesla’s share price. Taken on its own, the number is a modest and positive gain — and far more fruitful than automakers Ford, GM and Fiat Chrysler. It’s a number that suggests a consistent year of upwards momentum for Tesla, steady and diligent like a tugboat, even-keeled and untouched from stormy market seas.

Those two bookends of the stock market calendar — January 2 and December 31 — and the 3.8 percent gain they produced obfuscates what really happened to Tesla and CEO Elon Musk in 2018.

It wasn’t quiet. It wasn’t calm. It wasn’t constant or consistent. Tesla wasn’t a tugboat in 2018; it was a whipsaw.

The year was a dizzying ride that took Tesla shareholders and fans, critics, car owners, employees, the media and Musk himself to extreme highs and troubling lows — sometimes flip-flopping twice or more in a few days’ time.

And it was exhausting, because so much of it seemed self-inflicted and avoidable.

The chart illustrates the ups and downs of Tesla’s share price, along with specific highlights. But there were so many more.

As Tesla floundered early in the year, hamstrung by the production hell of its Model 3, Musk’s company SpaceX made history when it completed a test of its Falcon Heavy rocket, the heavy-lift orbital vehicle that can carry twice the weight of its closest competition in active operation. 

As production hell dragged on through the first quarter and into the second, Musk locked in a performance-based package that granted him $2.6 billion in stock options over 10 years. Moody’s would downgrade Tesla’s credit rating to negative from stable and Musk would make an untimely April Fool’s Day joke that the company was “bankwupt.”   

It turns out those jokes weren’t so far off.

Tesla was burning through millions of dollars a day as the company tried to solve production bottlenecks in its factory.

“Tesla really faced a severe threat of death due to the Model 3 production ramp,” Musk said in an interview with Axios in November. The company was within “single-digit weeks” of dying, he added.

Other problems emerged as Musk and his employees scrambled to solve that very real and impending existential threat to Tesla. There was the unfortunate unhinged analyst call and a spat with the National Transportation Safety Board over a fatal crash and investigation into the automaker’s semi-autonomous Autopilot system.

And then it happened. Tesla, which appeared to be in a death spiral, produced 5,000 vehicles in a week. It was a triumph. The naysayers were proven wrong; the critics were silenced; the shorts would convert!

And it was only July 1.

The rest of the year played out much the same way the first half did, just with a few new characters and twists, from the “pedo guy” episode that played out on Twitter and Musk’s “funding secured” tweet to pot-smoking, SEC investigations and earning its first profit in two years.

The last quarter of the year was marked by advancements in its Autopilot system, lawsuits and subpoenas, a new Tesla chairman, two new board members Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson and further expansion into China.

Tesla’s roller coaster ride of a year was stomach-churning — or thrilling, depending on your point of view — without Musk engaging in Twitter. But his frequent use of the social media tool repeatedly pulled the company, or himself, back into an abyss of petty fights, distractions and, at its worst, potential derailments to a company in which he has invested so much of his time, money and emotion.

In 2019, with the Model 3 moving into new regions of the world and hints of other grander plans, Tesla deserves, and will need, a captain with both hands on the wheel. Elon, take the wheel.

“Bandersnatch” offers an unusual television experience — but not a very satisfying one.

The new “Black Mirror” special follows Stefan Butler as he attempts to turn a science fiction novel (also called “Bandersnatch”) into a Choose Your Own Adventure-style video game. As the story progresses, Stefan gets pulled deeper into the mystery of what happened to “Bandersnatch” author Jerome F. Davies, a mystery that eventually involves parallel universes, government conspiracies and Stefan’s own family tragedy.

Netflix has experimented with interactive content before, though previously aimed at kids — for example with an adaptation of “Minecraft: Story Mode” from Telltale Games. The format, where the viewer is periodically given a limited time to choose Stefan’s next action, should also feel familiar to players of Telltale titles like “The Walking Dead” and “Batman: The Telltale Series.”

The big difference, however, is that most other games want you to feel that your choices are meaningful. “Bandersnatch” flips the formula on its head, ripping away the illusion of free will and consequence and instead exploring a scenario where your choices can often feel reversible or otherwise meaningless.

On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we’re joined by Kirsten Korosec to review the show. Our reactions ranged from outright hatred to tentative admiration for the creators’ ambition — but even when we found “Bandersnatch” to be at least conceptually interesting, the experience itself became tiresome by the end.

We also review “Bird Box,” the new Netflix thriller starring Sandra Bullock as a woman navigating a world overrun by monsters who cannot be seen — because if you see them, you’ll immediately kill yourself. According to Netflix, “Bird Box” set a record among the streaming service’s original films for most viewers in its first week.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)