JB Straubel

Jim Chanos’s Anti-Tesla Short Seller Arguments Debunked (Video)

All innovative companies attract negative press coverage, but the tide of anti-Tesla scare stories and misinformation has reached such preposterous proportions that it has become a story in itself (remember, colleagues, we’re supposed to report the news, not make it). It’s widely believed that much of the mud, especially the articles that focus on financial and stock-market topics, originates with short sellers, who have collectively bet some $12 billion against the California carmaker.

17 More Tesla Shareholder Meeting Highlights

I just published 11 highlights from yesterday’s 2018 Tesla shareholder meeting. I cut off right around the start of the Q&A session — tweets plus live Q&A. This article continues that initial list to include 17 more highlights. In this case, we have no charts from Tesla, but the highlights may be even more interesting. As usual, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared more details than we could have hoped for, supplemented here and there by CTO JB Straubel, CFO Deepak Ahuja, and Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen.

Looking Inside Tesla Battery Cells (Video)

Ever wondered what’s inside a Tesla battery cell? Well, don’t do what this guy did in a pair of videos from ARIES RC. Opening lithium-ion batteries is a ticklish business. They contain carcinogens, caustic acids, and flammable chemicals that shouldn’t be handled without gloves, if at all. But whatever damage the video host may have done to his own health, there’s no harm for us in watching.

sonnen — the utility of the future? (CleanTechnica Interview)

Highly regarded battery storage firm sonnen was one of the big winners of the 2017 Zayed Future Energy Prize, winning in the Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) category. I interviewed sonnen CEO and co-founder Christoph Ostermann in January just after the company won the prize. It was a fun interview because of how futuristic sonnen’s vision is and also because of Mr Ostermann’s clear propensity for fun.