Elon Musk is fairly active on social media. The billionaire tech titan tweets often and posts on Instagram fairly regularly too.
But there's one social media platform of which he is not a fan: Facebook.
Friday, Musk deleted his company Facebook pages for both SpaceX and Tesla.
Then, on Saturday, in response to a story from enthusiast site Tesla Motor Club reporting the news, Musk said deleting the pages was not an effort to make a public comment about Facebook, nor was it any response to a dare.
Instead, he says he deleted the pages for Tesla because he does not like the social media behemoth. "Gives me the willies," he tweeted.
Though both Tesla and SpaceX had public company pages on Facebook before Friday, neither company paid for advertisement on the platform, Musk says.
Further, Musk expressed distrust of the way Facebook handles consumer data.
In response to a story published by technology website Ars Technica Saturday claiming Facebook scraped call and text message data from some Android phones, Musk tweeted a single word: "Shocker."
The story from Ars Technica reported that the social media behemoth "surreptitiously" sometimes stores names, phone numbers and the length of calls made or received by "exploiting the way an older Android API handled permissions." Ars Technica said Android users may have "inadvertently" given permission for Facebook access to call and message logs in older versions of Facebook's mobile app.
New Zealand man Dylan McKay, who tweeted about finding his call history with his "partner's mum" when he downloaded an archive of what Facebook knew about him, was included in the Ars Technica story.
In response to reports that Facebook sometimes stores call and text metadata, the social media behemoth posted a "Fact Check" blog post Sunday.
Facebook says it only saves and stores call and text metadata if given permission. The feature is "opt-in," Facebook says.
"This feature does not collect the content of your calls or text messages. Your information is securely stored and we do not sell this information to third parties. You are always in control of the information you share with Facebook," the blog post from Facebook says.
Musk's remarks about Facebook come at a time when CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg are already playing defense against a tidal wave of criticism in the wake of the Cambridge Analytics data scandal.
Monday, the social media behemoth's stock price plunged after the Federal Trade Commission announced it is investigating the company's data practices.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has long been promising a highly anticipated revamped navigation and maps engine for the company’s fleet of electric vehicles and it is apparently finally coming this weekend.
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It’s a complete new overhaul of the system that Tesla has been working on for a while now.
We have been reporting on unreleased iterations of it since last summer.
Back in July, we reported that Tesla is working on revamping its maps and navigation system with its own maps using new open source modules from MapBox and Valhalla.
The new map system called ‘Tesla Maps’ was discovered by friend of the site and Tesla hacker verygreen who was able to enable it in his car and gave us our first look at Tesla’s new map system.
Later in 2017, we came out with another report after he discovered a new map module in Tesla’s 2017.44 software update called ‘Vector Maps’. The main difference seems that it enables a significantly more important zoom and smoother engine.
The first picture is the current maximum zoom and the other two pictures are of the same location but zoomed in with the new Vector Maps enabled:
That’s on the Google Map application on the center display, but verygreen also told us that the navigation system on the instrument cluster also appears to be “smoother and more detailed” than under the current version.
As for navigation, Tesla has been working on a new routing engine, but the differences with the current systems are not clear.
Though we often get anecdotal reports of bad route planning from Tesla’s current system, which is likely an area where they could improve with the new system.
A few months ago, Musk said that new system was ‘light years ahead’ of the current version:
Major navigation overhaul coming in early 2018. Will be light-years ahead of current system, but we are testing it rigorously before rolling out. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 21, 2017
Earlier this month, Musk also said that it was “almost done” and last night, he added that it is coming “this weekend” and elaborated on the capacity to improve with the new engine:
New nav starts rolling out this weekend. Should be considered a mature beta at first, so won’t be perfect, but will improve rapidly. With the old system, we were stuck with legacy 3rd party black box code and stale data. No way to improve. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2018
We will look out for the update this upcoming weekend.
Electrek’s Take
As Seth and I discussed in the last episode of the Electrek Podcast, I have never experienced a problem with Tesla’s navigation system until the very last update two weeks ago.
I had always heard about these stupid routing suggestions and unnecessary detours that Tesla’s navigation system would often suggest, but I had never experienced it myself after using the system hundreds of time.
But for some reason, it happened several times following the last update. I am talking about things like taking me off the highway and right back on it for no reason and other nonsensical routes.
I wasn’t that excited about this update, but now I see why people were asking for it.
Elon Musk's estranged father Errol Musk has confirmed that he has welcomed a baby with his stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout.
Errol - an entrepreneurial engineer and former emerald dealer who lives in South Africa where Elon was raised - married Jana's mother Heide when Jana was just four.
The couple were married for 18 years, and have two children together.
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However, Errol, 72, said he didn't consider 30-year-old Jana as his stepdaughter because, despite marrying her mother when she was a small child, she was raised away from him for long periods of time, according to The Sunday Times.
Musk senior also suggested that it was "God's plan" that led him to having a child with Jana, who reportedly got in touch with him after splitting from her boyfriend.
"We were lonely, lost people," Errol told The Sunday Times. "One thing led to another - you can call it God's plan or nature's plan."
Getty Images Denver Post Photo by Cyrus McCrimmon
When Jana called Errol two months later to say she was pregnant, Errol requested a DNA test to confirm that he was the father.
"Jana is a delightful girl and a wonderful mother. She said I had changed her life," he added.
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He also described their 10-month-old son as an "exquisite child". Musk doesn't live with Jana and their son Eliot Rush, but is helping to support them.
According to the Mail Online, Errol initially told his daughter Ali about their new baby, but she was upset by the news and called him "insane, mentally ill".
"She told the others and they went berserk," Errol disclosed to the Mail Online.
Last year, 46-year-old billionaire tech tycoon Elon broke down in tears during an interview with Rolling Stone, during which he professed that his father was a "terrible human being".
Elon - cofounder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX - added that Errol was guilty of "almost every crime you can possibly think of", and had done "almost every evil thing you could possibly think of".
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"My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil," he added to the publication. "He will plan evil."
Errol denied his son's comments and said that he had never intentionally hurt or threatened anyone, or been charged with anything except for an incident when he shot dead three armed people who broke into his home.
He was later cleared of all charges on the grounds of self-defence.
Errol and Elon's mother Maye - a successful model and dietician - divorced when he was ten. It's claimed that father and son have not spoken for more than a year.
Meanwhile, Elon has six children from his former eight-year marriage to Canadian author Justine Musk. He married English actress Talulah Riley in 2010 before divorcing two years later, only to remarry in 2013. They divorced again in 2016.
Elon recently split from Hollywood star Amber Heard after dating on and off for a year.
