Tesla's TechnoKing of Tumult - Elon Musk - Caps a Wild Quarter With Silence

tech.hindustantimes.com:

The man who dominates discussion about the future of transportation has gone uncharacteristically quiet at the close of a manic quarter. Even by Elon Musk’s high bar for bedlam, the last three months have been wild. Considering all that happened — Shanghai’s shutdown, another factory opening, the chaotic Twitter deal and job cuts at Tesla — it’s no wonder the technoking has hunkered down (he fired off his last tweet on June 21).

Tesla started this quarter with a bang, reporting deliveries of more than 310,000 cars in the prior three months. The company is expected to come up well short of that mark for the period ending in June, with several analysts calling for fewer than 250,000 units.

When Musk disclosed the supposedly passive stake he’d taken in Twitter in early April and soon thereafter bid $44 billion for the company, it signaled Tesla was on stable footing. Surely, the carmaker’s chief executive officer — who already had his hands full also running SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company — wouldn’t add more to his plate if all was not well at his most valuable venture.

But Tesla was already in the midst of a work stoppage at its top-producing plant, which is all but certain to have brought an end to its impressive run of record-setting deliveries. This was, of course, out of Musk’s control, and the supply chain challenges bedeviling the global auto industry have spared no one.

While Musk’s commentary during the quarter wasn’t exclusively positive — he said the “insane” price of lithium might force Tesla to get into mining and refining, for instance — his pursuit of Twitter wasn’t the only indication he gave that Tesla was maintaining momentum. He staged a splashy “Cyber Rodeo” in Austin and told fans the highly