Thompson LLC, the exclusive distributor of Nikola in Tennessee & Mississippi, is entitled to an $8,000 commission fee for each Nikola vehicle it sells, to hourly warranty services charges & to 120% of the cost of certain vehicle parts 🤑 #NikolaGate
December 2016— Trevor Milton gave 21,593,927 shares + exclusive rights + seat on Nikola's board to Thompson, in exchange for a small investment of a few million dollars
How can Nikola ever be competitive when Thompson, IVECO, GM, etc. are all taking a cut? 🤔 #NikolaGate
E.g. Hydrogen fuel cell Nikola Tre sold in Tennessee
🔹Thompson gets $8,000 commission
🔹IVECO gets 1.25% royalty on Nikola revenues from vehicle, components, spare parts, and any related services
🔹GM gets cost-plus pricing on entire hydrogen fuel cell powertrain
1/4 — To mitigate the effects of #Starlink satellites on astronomy research, @SpaceX has developed a space-stable dielectric Bragg reflector film that reduces satellite visibility by an order of magnitude.
SpaceX will also be offering this film at cost to other operators! ❤️
2/4 — @SpaceX has also developed a low reflectivity black paint, which is five times less reflective than the current darkest available space-stable paint, to coat various reflective #Starlink satellite components.
3/4 — @SpaceX has also developed a special opaque coating for the backside of solar arrays and a special satellite maneuver called 'terminator tracking' to mitigate reflectivity.
🧵1/7 — My take, by real estate analogy, of what happened between @elonmusk (buyer) and @Twitter (seller)
▫️ Seller lists the house as being less than 5% infested with termites
▫️ Buyer makes an offer and enters into a purchase agreement with the buyer
2/7
▫️ Purchase agreement includes a provision that seller will provide access to the house to the buyer's building inspector
▫️ Seller breaches the purchase agreement by not providing access to the basement and cellar of the house, rendering full inspection impossible
3/7
▫️ Nevertheless, building inspector estimates the extent of termite infestation is far more than 5%
▫️ On top of the modest foreseen costs for exterminators, it now appears whole sections of the house are structurally impaired and will need to be rehabilitated or rebuilt
Setting aside the impacts of fossil fuels on climate, environment, and health, there still remains 2 very good reasons for countries to transition to sustainable energy as fast as possible: Energy Security & Price
2/9
▫️ 80% of the world's proven crude oil reserves are controlled by only 8 countries.
▫️ At our current rate of production, the world's oil reserves will be depleted in 53 years.
3/9
▫️ 75% of the world's proven natural gas reserves are controlled by only 8 countries.
▫️ At our current rate of production, the world's gas reserves will be depleted in 47 years.
🧵1/6— I believe there would be a relatively easy way to authenticate accounts as human @elonmusk
Create metric akin to a credit score for each account, let's call it a Human Score (HS), based on the premise humans engage far more w/ other humans than w/ spam or fake accounts
2/6— Build a social network graph where nodes are accounts and edges are directed, indicating who they follow
Start with @verified accounts & grow the graph from there. Incoming high-HS edges increase a node's HS. Incoming low-HS edges are ignored and have no effect on node's HS
3/6— All accounts have their Human Score (HS) publicly displayed. A badge (e.g. orange check) is awarded if the account has a high-enough HS to be deemed "human authenticated"
Newly created accounts get a probationary score w/ a newb badge for 1 year or some activity-threshold