Tesla Q1 Down & So is Elon’s Giant Rocket; Microsoft Drops Twitter from Ad Platform; Google Employees Called Bard ‘Pathological Liar’; 15 Inch MacBook Air-No M2 Pro Chip

Another terrible, very bad week for Elon Musk. Tesla reported net income for the first quarter yesterday of $2.51 billion. That’s down 24% from first quarter of 2022. TechCrunch.com notes that the EV maker has repeatedly dropped prices on its four models, the Model S, Model X, Model Y, and Model 3 in the US, Europe, and China. That’s boosted sales, with revenue up 24% over last year…but at the expense of profit margins. Meanwhile, this morning, SpaceX’s enormous Starship exploded 4 minutes after liftoff. “Starship just experienced what we call a rapid, unscheduled disassembly,” said John Insprucker, SpaceX’s principal integration engineer. Talk about double-talk…he could have cut to the chase…the sucker blew up!

Microsoft has dropped Twitter from its ad platform. According to mashable.com, Redmond will no longer support Twitter starting April 25…just 5 days from now. From that date, users will no longer be able to access their Twitter account through its Digital Marketing Center’s social media management tool, according to Microsoft. Users will also no longer be able to schedule, create, or manage tweets or tweet drafts. In addition, users won’t be able to view their past tweets and engagement on the Microsoft Advertising platform. In true form, Elon Musk is threatening to sue.

After Microsoft integrated ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, Google has been in high gear, rolling out the first tools of its Bard artificial intelligence chatbot in the next few weeks for search. Theverge.com says some employees have complained in internal messages that the system is a ‘pathological liar’ and have begged Google not to launch it. A Bloomberg report about this was based on talking to some 18 current and former Google employees. one employee noted how Bard would frequently give users dangerous advice, whether on topics like how to land a plane or scuba diving. Another said, “Bard is worse than useless: please do not launch.” Bloomberg says the company even “overruled a risk evaluation” submitted by an internal safety team saying the system was not ready for general use. Caveat emptor…let the buyer beware…and you ARE the buyer…you pay to use Google with troves of your data!

Well connected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo now says the upcoming 15 inch MacBook Air will have 2 different M2 chips available…but neither will be the Pro chip. 9to5mac.com reports that the M3 chip should be going into production in the second half of this year, followed by the M3 Pro and M3 Max versions. The 15 inch Air will just get an M2 chip with a couple varieties available…but really only more cores in one. This will pretty much be the same setup as the 13 inch MacBook Air. the bigger Air is expected this summer, and will probably be previewed at WWDC in June.

I’m Clark Reid, and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.