Month: April 2020

Enlarge / Tesla's Shanghai battery factory. (credit: Tesla)

There were plenty of reasons to expect Tesla to show a loss in the first quarter of 2020. The quarter began with the expiration of the federal electric vehicle tax credit—at least for Tesla customers. It ended with the fast-spreading coronavirus pandemic forcing lockdowns around the world. That dampened consumer demand for cars and forced Tesla to shut down its Fremont factory late in the quarter.

Despite all of those challenges, Tesla says it made a small $16 million profit during the quarter. And that's on a GAAP basis, leaving little room for accounting trickery. Investors responded by bidding Tesla's stock up almost 10 percent in after-hours trading. One share is now worth around $875, the highest value since February.

It was Tesla's third-straight profitable quarter. Tesla says it's also the first time the company has earned a profit in the first quarter, traditionally a weak quarter for the carmaker.

Enlarge / This is what PUBG on console feels like right now. At least, without the "hookers and blackjack." Sorry, Bender army. (credit: Aurich Lawson / PUBG Corp)

This week, Google Stadia emerged with a surprise announcement of a pretty big game launching immediately: Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG). Say what you will about the game's age or its arguably dated take on battle royale, but PUBG still enjoys a healthy population of PC and console players. And now, it's included with paid Stadia Pro subscriptions (which includes the new two-month trials that dropped earlier this month) and supports cross-play with a healthy population of Xbox One and PlayStation 4 players.

But what could have been a no-brainer blip of good Stadia news has been bungled by a design decision that's sparking frustration and annoyance and is even affecting the existing console versions: new, stupid, spawn-out-of-nowhere bots.

98 problems, and a bot is... all of them

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  Stadia hopes that you like its color motif, since you can claim a cosmetic package for the game as a Stadia Pro player. [credit: PUBG Corp ]

After hearing reports about a surprising bot influx on Tuesday, I booted PUBG using my Stadia Pro account on a laptop to confirm the bad news. I took an angry Redditor's advice and jumped into a less popular matchmaking queue in order to guarantee I'd run into at least a few bots: a "first-person" solo-battling queue on the newly reworked Vikendi map.

Enlarge / A Garuda Indonesia 737-800. The airline is moving to cancel orders for the 737 MAX after the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes. (credit: Boeing)

Boeing released its financial results for the first quarter of 2020, and as one might expect for a company that manufactures aircraft amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the numbers were not good.

The company reported revenues of $16.9 billion, down from $22.9 billion in the first quarter of 2019, and Boeing's operating cash flow was a negative $4.3 billion. Boeing officials attributed the losses to the dual whammy of the effects of the global pandemic and the 737 Max aircraft grounding after two fatal accidents. US passenger volumes are down 95 percent compared to this time in 2019.

"We're in an unprecedented period for the industry and the world," chief executive David Calhoun said Wednesday during a call with investors. The global economic recovery will take years, not months, Calhoun said. "The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting every aspect of our business, including airline customer demand, production continuity, and supply chain stability."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Earlier on Wednesday, we reported on some clinical trial data that offered good, if ambiguous, news about treating COVID-19. In the study, participants treated with a drug called remdesivir recovered on average 30 percent quicker than those receiving a placebo. But who owns the drug, how much of it can be made, and what does it cost?

To answer the first question, remdesivir is owned by Gilead Sciences, a US biotechnology company. Gilead got its first patent for the drug in 2017, when the company was originally targeting it as a possible treatment for the Ebola virus. That didn't pan out, but as our earlier article explains, biochemical similarities in how the Ebola and SARS-CoV-2 viruses function led Gilead to see if remdesivir could be repurposed for treating COVID-19. Gilead's patents mean that it has a monopoly on the drug in the United States, so barring government intervention or Gilead licensing the patent to others, it's the only company that can manufacture it until 2037, at which point a generic version could be possible.

To answer the second question, Gilead announced in April that it had ramped up production of remdesivir at its factory in La Verne, California, in January, and by the beginning of April, it had already stockpiled enough to treat 140,000 patients, each over the course of 10 days. The company also said that it plans to produce enough remdesivir to treat 500,000 patients by October and a million patients by the end of 2020. (This explains why there was some outcry in March when it was revealed that Gilead had applied for something called "orphan drug status" for remdesivir, which is supposed to be reserved for rare diseases. Gilead withdrew that application.)

Enlarge (credit: Lyft)

Lyft is laying of 982 people, the company said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday. That represents 17 percent of the company's official workforce (the company considers its thousands of drivers to be independent contractors).

An additional 288 employees will be furloughed, Lyft said. Most of the remaining salaried employees will take 10 percent pay cuts, while executives will face pay cuts of 20 to 30 percent.

The cuts reflect the dire state of Lyft's business during the coronavirus lockdown. Demand for on-demand passenger rides has plummeted. Lyft didn't disclose booking figures in its filing, but The Information's Amir Efrati reported last week that Uber's global bookings for ride hailing were down 80 percent. Lyft has presumably suffered similarly large losses.