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      Auto Safety Regulator Investigating Tesla Recall of Autopilot

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      The National Highway Safety Administration said it had concerns about how Tesla handled the recall based on recent crashes and testing of cars that had been updated.The federal government’s main auto safety agency said on Friday that it was investigating Tesla’s recall of its Autopilot driver-assistance system because regulators were concerned that the company had not done enough to ensure that drivers remained attentive while using the technology.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in documents posted on its website that it was looking into Tesla’s recall in December of two million vehicles, which covered nearly all of the cars the company had manufactured in the United States since 2012. The safety agency said that it had concerns about crashes that took place after the recall and results from preliminary tests of recalled vehicles.The investigation adds to a list of headaches for Tesla, the dominant electric vehicle maker in the United States. The company’s sales fell more than 8 percent in the first three months of the year compared with the same period a year earlier, the first such drop since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.Tesla announced in December that it would recall its autopilot software after an investigation by the auto safety agency found that the carmaker hadn’t put in place enough safeguards to make sure the system, which can accelerate, brake and control cars in other ways, was used safely by drivers who were supposed to be ready at any moment to retake control of their cars using Autopilot.The agency said it had identified at least 13 fatal crashes tied to use of Autopilot. The company is also facing lawsuits from individuals who claim the system is defective, and its design contributed to or is responsible for serious injuries and deaths.The recall, which entails a wireless software update, includes more prominent visual alerts and checks when drivers are using Autopilot to remind them to keep their hands on the wheel and pay attention to the road. The recall covers all five of Tesla’s passenger models — the 3, S, X, Y and Cybertruck.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tesla Settles Lawsuit Over a Fatal Crash Involving Autopilot

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      A Tesla driver’s family had sought damages for the 2018 crash, which happened while the carmaker’s driver-assistance software was in use.Tesla on Monday settled a lawsuit that blamed the automaker’s driver-assistance software for the death of a California man in 2018, averting a trial that would have focused attention on the company’s technology several months before it plans to unveil a self-driving taxi.The trial stemming from the death of Wei Lun Huang, an Apple software engineer who went by Walter, was scheduled to start Monday with jury selection. The case was one of the most prominent involving Tesla’s Autopilot software, attracting significant public attention and prompting an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.Terms of the settlement with Mr. Huang’s children and other members of his family were not disclosed, and Tesla filed court documents seeking to prevent them from being made public.Testimony in the trial would have put Tesla’s autonomous driving software under close scrutiny, further fueling a debate about whether the technology makes cars safer or exposes drivers and others to serious injury or death.Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, has said the company’s self-driving software will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. Investors have used his claims to justify the company’s lofty stock market valuation. Tesla is worth more than any other carmaker even though its shares have plunged in recent months.Mr. Musk said on X last week that Tesla would introduce a self-driving taxi, Robotaxi, in August. If Tesla has in fact perfected a vehicle that can ferry passengers without a driver — which many analysts doubt — the development will help answer criticism that the company has been slow to follow up its Model 3 sedan and Model Y sport utility vehicle with new products.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Some Billionaires Will Back Trump

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      Donald Trump’s campaign is reportedly strapped for cash. Small-dollar donations are running far behind their 2020 pace. Big Trump rallies aren’t yielding his biggest cash hauls. Some large-dollar donors are hesitant, in part because they worry (with good reason) that their money will be used not for the campaign but to pay his legal bills. So he has been wooing right-wing billionaires.I have no idea how successful he’ll be, but it seems highly likely that at least some billionaires will provide substantial sums to a man who tried to overturn the last election and has been open about his authoritarian intentions — using the Justice Department to go after his political opponents, rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants and putting them into detention camps and more.Which raises the question: Why would billionaires support such a person?After all, it’s not as if they’ve been suffering under President Biden. Economists, myself included, often remind people that the stock market is not the economy. Low unemployment and rising real wages — both of which, by the way, the Biden economy has delivered, even if many people don’t believe it — have much more relevance to most people’s lives.But stock prices are probably a much better indicator of how the very wealthy, who hold a lot of financial assets, are doing. And although in 2020 Trump predicted a stock crash if Biden won, the market has, in fact, been hitting record highs under the current administration.Why, then, back a candidate who more or less promises to unleash social and political chaos?One straightforward answer is that the wealthy will almost certainly pay lower taxes — and corporations will be less regulated — if Trump wins than if Biden stays in office.If you believe, like some leftists, that Republicans and Democrats are basically the same — that both serve the interests of corporations and the elite — you’re wrong. The modern Democratic Party isn’t, despite what prominent Republicans say, Marxist or socialist. It does, however, have a track record of raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for social programs. Notably, the Affordable Care Act used new taxes on high-income individuals to pay for health care subsidies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      R.B.G. Award Organizer Cancels Ceremony After Fallout Over Honorees

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      The Opperman Foundation said it would “reconsider its mission” but did not say whether those selected, including Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch, would still receive the award.The organizer behind an honor named for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a lifelong champion of women’s rights and liberal causes, is canceling the award ceremony scheduled for April after facing blistering criticism from her family and friends over several of this year’s planned recipients.Justice Ginsburg helped establish the award in 2019, the year before she died. It was originally intended for “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility,” but four of the five intended recipients this year are men. Among them are Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur who frequently lobs tirades at perceived critics; Rupert Murdoch, the tycoon whose empire helped give rise to conservative news media; and Michael R. Milken, the financier who was a face of corporate greed in the 1980s and served nearly two years in prison before becoming a philanthropist.“The last thing we intended was to offend the family and friends of R.B.G.,” Julie Opperman, the chairwoman of Dwight D. Opperman Foundation, which awards the prize every year, said in a statement on Monday. She added: “The foundation is not interested in creating controversy. It is not interested in generating a debate about whether particular honorees are worthy or not.”Ms. Opperman explained that the reason for including men as recipients this year was to reflect and uphold Justice Ginsburg’s “teachings regarding equality.” The foundation “did not consider politics” but focused on selecting leaders who “have made significant contributions to society,” she said.Before the foundation released the statement, the children of Justice Ginsburg had demanded that their mother’s name be removed from the prize, which until this year was called the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award.Her daughter, Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia, said the choice of winners this year was “an affront” to the values the justice stood for.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tesla’s Troubles Raise Questions About Its Invincibility

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      As the share price plunges, investors wonder whether the company, led by Elon Musk, can withstand intensifying competition.Elon Musk appeared to be in a defiant mood Wednesday when he stood before employees at Tesla’s factory near Berlin a week after an arsonist set fire to a high-voltage power pylon and brought production to a standstill.“They can’t stop us,” Mr. Musk, the company’s chief executive, told workers in a giant tent beside the plant.But there are proliferating signs that Tesla may not be as unstoppable as it once seemed. The company’s car sales are no longer growing at a torrid pace. Chinese automakers and established brands like BMW and Volkswagen are flooding the market with electric cars. And Tesla has been slow to respond with new models.Mr. Musk’s many outside ventures, and his penchant for making polarizing political statements and attacking people he disagrees with, have raised questions about how focused he remains on managing Tesla. Wall Street is increasingly concerned about the company: Tesla’s share price has lost one-third of its value this year even as major stock indexes have hit record highs.“A bet on Tesla has always been a bet on Mr. Musk,” said Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School who focuses on corporate law, governance and finance.In an interview with the former television anchor Don Lemon that streamed online on Monday, Mr. Musk brushed off the drop in the company’s share price as part of the cycle.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Elon Musk Said in Testy Interview on Don Lemon’s New Show

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      The former CNN frontman released a wide-ranging interview with the billionaire about business, politics, hate speech online and more.It was raw and occasionally tense.The former television anchor Don Lemon’s wide-ranging, testy interview with Elon Musk was released online on Monday morning, touching upon topics including politics, particularly the billionaire’s recent meeting with former President Donald J. Trump; Mr. Musk’s reported drug use; hate speech on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that he now owns; and more.The interview was intended to be the debut episode of a new talk show in a partnership between Mr. Lemon and X, but Mr. Musk called off the deal a day after filming the hour-plus interview at Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. The first episode of “The Don Lemon Show” was streamed on YouTube and posted to Mr. Lemon’s account on X.In the interview, Mr. Musk said that earlier this month he was having breakfast at an unnamed friend’s home in Florida when Mr. Trump came by.When asked what was discussed, Mr. Musk said that Mr. Trump did most of the talking and that the former president did not ask for money or a donation toward his campaign. Mr. Musk also said he would not loan Mr. Trump money to pay his legal bills.While Mr. Musk said he would not donate to any candidate, he said he would consider endorsing one in the final stretches of the race.“I don’t know yet, I want to make a considered decision before the election,” he said, and noted that he was leaning away from President Biden. “I’ve made no secret of that,” he added.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk to Open Source Grok Chatbot in Latest AI War Escalation

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      Mr. Musk’s move to open up the code behind Grok is the latest volley in a war to win the A.I. battle, after a suit against OpenAI on the same topic.Elon Musk released the raw computer code behind his version of an artificial intelligence chatbot on Sunday, an escalation by one of the world’s richest men in a battle to control the future of A.I.Grok, which is designed to give snarky replies styled after the science-fiction novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a product from xAI, the company Mr. Musk founded last year. While xAI is an independent entity from X, its technology has been integrated into the social media platform and is trained on users’ posts. Users who subscribe to X’s premium features can ask Grok questions and receive responses.By opening the code up for everyone to view and use — known as open sourcing — Mr. Musk waded further into a heated debate in the A.I. world over whether doing so could help make the technology safer, or simply open it up to misuse.Mr. Musk, a self-proclaimed proponent of open sourcing, did the same with X’s recommendation algorithm last year, but he has not updated it since.“Still work to do, but this platform is already by far the most transparent & truth-seeking (not a high bar tbh),” Mr. Musk posted on Sunday in response to a comment on open sourcing X’s recommendation algorithm. The move to open-source chatbot code is the latest volley between Mr. Musk and ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, which the mercurial billionaire sued recently over breaking its promise to do the same. Mr. Musk, who was a founder and helped fund OpenAI before departing several years later, has argued such an important technology should not be controlled solely by tech giants like Google and Microsoft, which is a close partner of OpenAI.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      After R.B.G. Awards Go to Musk and Murdoch, Justice Ginsburg’s Family Objects

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      The children of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who championed liberal causes and women’s rights, said the choice of recipients this year was an “affront” to the memory of their mother.When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of liberal causes whose advocacy of women’s rights catapulted her to pop culture fame, helped establish a leadership award in 2019, she said she intended to celebrate “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility.”But this year, four of the recipients are men, including Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur who frequently lobs tirades at perceived critics; Rupert Murdoch, the business magnate whose empire gave rise to conservative media; and Michael Milken, the face of corporate greed in the 1980s who served nearly two years in prison. It has prompted family members and close colleagues of Justice Ginsburg to demand that her name be removed from the honor, commonly called the R.B.G. Award.In a statement, her daughter, Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia University, said the choice of winners this year was “an affront to the memory of our mother.”“The justice’s family wish to make clear that they do not support using their mother’s name to celebrate this year’s slate of awardees, and that the justice’s family has no affiliation with and does not endorse these awards,” Ms. Ginsburg said.Even as he declined to specify any of the recipients who he believed undermined the spirit of the award, Trevor W. Morrison, a former dean of New York University School of Law and one of the justice’s former law clerks, expressed concern that not all of them reflected the justice’s values.“Justice Ginsburg had an abiding commitment to careful, rigorous analysis and to fair-minded engagement with people of opposing views,” he said in a letter addressed to the organization that confers the awards, the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation. “It is difficult to see how the decision to bestow the R.B.G. Award on this year’s slate reflects any appreciation for — or even awareness of — these dimensions of the justice’s legacy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More