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Tesla starts selling cars in Saudi Arabia on Thursday, a country where on a 900-kilometre (559 mile) stretch of its main east-west highway linking the capital Riyadh and the holy city of Mecca there isn’t a single charging station. Electric vehicle sales in the kingdom totaled just 2,000 last year, according to Telemetry analyst Sam Abuelsamid, fewer than Tesla sold between breakfast and dinner on an average day. But Saudi Arabia has huge plans for EVs that Tesla has not been able to tap, partly because of a feud between its billionaire CEO Elon Musk and the kingdom’s powerful Public Investment Fund sovereign wealth fund that dates back to 2018. A new political landscape has given Musk an opportunity to change that. Relations between Riyadh and Musk have improved since he took a high-profile role in U.S. President Donald Trump’s election campaign and then a top position in his administration, slashing the federal bureaucracy. In a coup for Riyadh, Trump is set to visit Saudi Arabia in the coming weeks in his first foreign trip, after asking the kingdom in January to spend upwards of $1 trillion in the U.S. economy over four years, including military purchases. “Plenty of business people are thinking about how to position their firms around President Trump’s anticipated visit to the Gulf,” said Robert Mogielnicki, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “I suspect Tesla wants to firmly plant their flag in the Saudi market before President Trump’s visit and then try to capitalise on momentum thereafter.” MISSING OUT Musk could do with a boost. Tesla posted a 13% drop in first-quarter sales earlier this month, its weakest performance in nearly three years, driven by a backlash against Musk’s politics, rising competition, and delays for a Model Y refresh. But Musk has work to do in Saudi Arabia after his public spat with PIF boss Yasir al-Rumayyan. The dispute started when Musk tweeted in 2018 he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private after a meeting with the PIF. In the ensuing lawsuit filed by investors when a bid failed to materialise, tense text messages between Musk and al-Rumayyan were made public. In the following years, Musk missed out on the billions Riyadh has poured into its Vision 2030 programme to diversify the economy away from oil. The kingdom is investing an estimated $39 billion in developing the EV sector, according to a 2024 report by consultants PwC. Tesla’s Saudi debut also lags that of Chinese giant BYD, which opened its Riyadh showroom in May 2024. CHALLENGES Now Tesla has arrived in Saudi Arabia, it faces a number of challengeseven if one of them is unlikely to be the angry protests against Musk’s politics that have recently dogged its operations in Europe and the United States. These include the paucity of charging stations and summer temperatures that can top 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), draining EV batteries more rapidly. As of 2024, Saudi Arabia had just 101 EV charging stations, compared with 261 in neighbouring United Arab Emirates, a country with a third the population, data from Statista based on Electromaps showed. Most are in major cities, making long journeys across desert highways unfeasible. “I think charging is probably one of the main, if not the main, point of concern,” said Carlos Montenegro, BYD’s general manager in Saudi Arabia, adding Saudi drivers clock up many more kilometres each year than in other markets. Around 70% of the cars BYD sells in Saudi Arabia are hybrids rather than pure EVs, Montenegro said. Fahd Abdulrahman, a Saudi browsing at BYD’s Riyadh showroom, said driving range was his major concern about buying an EV. “I drive a lot, my average is more than 50,000 km (per year). I am afraid that an EV would not serve for that.” Yet Riyadh has massive development plans, which include a goal of 30% EV adoption by 2030. It has formed the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Company, which aims to boost the number of chargers to 5,000 by 2030, 50 times the current number. “EV adoption (in Saudi Arabia) will likely remain below leading countries, such as China, but could still see growth in the coming years,” said Seth Goldstein, equity strategist at Morningstar. “I see growing EV demand as more fast chargers are built and affordable long-range EVs enter the market.” Pesha Magid and Manya Saini, Reuters
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E-Commerce
A day care facility in a Texas county that’s part of the measles outbreak has multiple cases, including children too young to be fully vaccinated, public health officials say.West Texas is in the middle of a still-growing measles outbreak with 505 cases reported on Tuesday. The state expanded the number of counties in the outbreak area this week to 10. The highly contagious virus began to spread in late January and health officials say it has spread to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Mexico.Three people who were unvaccinated have died from measles-related illnesses this year, including two elementary school-aged children in Texas. The second child died Thursday at a Lubbock hospital, and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attended the funeral in Seminole, the epicenter of the outbreak.As of Friday, there were seven cases at a day care where one young child who was infectious gave it to two other children before it spread to other classrooms, Lubbock Public Health director Katherine Wells said.“Measles is so contagious I won’t be surprised if it enters other facilities,” Wells said.The measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine is first recommended between 12 and 15 months old and a second shot between 4 and 6 years old.Maegan Messick, co-owner of Tiny Tots U Learning Academy, where the outbreak is occurring, recently told KLBK-TV in Lubbock that they’re taking precautions like putting kids who are too young to get the vaccines together in isolation.“We have tried to be extremely transparent,” she told the TV station.There are more than 200 children at the day care, Wells said. Most have had least one dose of the vaccine, though she added, “we do have some children that have only received one dose that are now infected.”The public health department is recommending that any child with only one vaccine get their second dose early, and changed its recommendation for kids in Lubbock County to get the first vaccine dose at 6 months old instead of 1. A child who is unvaccinated and attends the day care must stay home for 21 days since their last exposure, Wells said.Case count and hospitalization numbers in Texas have climbed steadily since the outbreak began, and spiked by 81 cases from March 28 to April 4.On Tuesday, the state added another 24 cases to its count and two additional counties, Borden and Randall. One more person was hospitalized since Friday, with 57 total.Gaines County, where the virus has been spreading through a close-knit Mennonite community, has the majority of cases, with 328 on Tuesday. Neighboring Terry County is second with 46, followed by Lubbock County with 36.The Texas Department of State Health Services tracks vaccinations rate for kindergartners, though the data doesn’t include homeschooled children or some kids who attend private school. Gaines County’s rate is 82%, which is far below the 95% level needed to prevent community spreadand health officials have said it’s likely lower in the small religious schools and homeschooling groups where the early cases were identified.In Terry County, the vaccination rate for kindergartners is at 96%, while Lubbock County is at 92%.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met with Texas officials Monday to determine how many people it would send to West Texas to assist with the outbreak response, spokesman Jason McDonald said Monday. He expected a small team to arrive later this week, followed by a bigger group on the ground next week.The CDC said its first team was in the region from early March to April 1, withdrawing on-the-ground support days before a second child died in the outbreak.A spokesperson for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said late Sunday that the governor and first lady were extending their “deepest prayers” to the family and community, and that the state health department had sent epidemiologists, immunization teams and specimen collection units to the area. AP reporter Amanda Seitz in Washington contributed to this report. Jamie Stengle, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
Last month, First Lady Melania Trump used her first public remarks of President Trumps second term to voice her support for the Take It Down Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at curbing deepfake revenge porn. She was joined by Elliston Berry, a Texas teenager who was a victim of deepfake porn. The widespread presence of abusive behavior in the digital domain affects the daily lives of our children, families, and communities, Mrs. Trump said. Every young person deserves a safe online space to express themself freely, without the looming threat of exploitation or harm. The Take It Down Act unanimously passed the Senate and is now headed for the House. Across the political spectrum, lawmakers generally agree that deepfake porn, in which generative AI renders a sexually explicit likeness of a real person, must be regulated. The public is on board as well. When pornographic deepfakes of Taylor Swift were circulated online, her fans were outraged and social media platforms raced to restrict these images. But the conversation has been framed too narrowly as a problem of exploitation and consent. It is also an existential labor problem: AI-generated porn could put thousands of Americans out of work. Like it or not, porn is big business. The industry currently operates as a hybrid market. Porn studios hire performers as private contractors, paying them a flat rate per shoot to own the recorded scene and freely disseminate it online. Performers can also create their own porn for OnlyFans, a social media platform primarily for explicit content where users pay for subscriptions to content creators accounts. Pornhub, the largest porn sitereceiving 5.25 billion visits each monthhosts around 20,000 verified performers. On OnlyFans, the numbers are even more staggering. In 2023, OnlyFans received $6.6 billion in payments, generating $1.3 billion in revenue. The company has over four million content creators, an estimated two million of whom are Americanabout twice the number of Uber drivers in the US. AI throws the porn industry, along with the rest of us, into new legal territory. For promotional purposes, porn studios have long included clauses in performers contracts giving them rights over not only the film itself but also derivatives of all images created during the shoot. These clauses could now grant studios sweeping ownership of performers likeness that they could use to make deepfakes porn scenes without providing additional pay to performers. But performers face an even broader threat, one that jeopardizes the studio and OnlyFans markets alike: In the not-too-distant future, companies will likely be able to make porn scenes generated by AI that are difficult to distinguish from scenes involving real performers and are cheaper to produce than hiring them. Even if consumers know that the person they are watching is not real, they may not care. Porn performers will not merely have to worry about having their particular likeness stolen for deepfake porn, because their profession as a whole could be largely replaced by AI. Los Angeles economy, already ravaged by wildfires, would be particularly hard-hit. The San Fernando Valley remains the epicenter of the global porn industry, supporting not only tens of thousands of porn performers and adult content creators, but also other porn industry members, from makeup artists to grips. Los Angeles is a company town, and porn workers are its employees. One might argue that the porn industry should simply be allowed to collapse. Indeed, this is the tact that has often been taken with sin industries through restrictions on banking, for example. The porn industry has a way to go when it comes to empowering performers, but further cutting into their pay is not the solution. Porn performers are workers, and AI-generated porn poses a threat to their work. Instead, the porn industry should be recognized as part of the entertainment ecosystemthe rebellious stepsister, shall we say, of the mainstream film industryand shares with it a common foe in AI. SAG-AFTRA, the labor union representing about 160,000 media professionals globally, has made the fight against AI a top priority. The union won important protections for its members in the historic 2023 strike, including consent procedures regarding deepfakes in contracts, minimum pay scales for using deepfakes, and limitations on employing generative AI for screenwriting. In the ongoing video game strike, deepfakes remain the sticking point. Unfortunately, none of these negotiations will directly help porn performers. Although SAG-AFTRA represents a wide range of media professionalsincluding mainstream actors, screenwriters, broadcast journalists, news writers, DJs, recording artists, stunt performers, puppeteers, and other media professionalsporn performers have never been eligible for membership. The porn industry also struggles to organize from within due to fragmentation and notoriously high turnover. While the Free Speech Coalition serves as the industrys trade association, the industry has no labor union. SAG-AFTRA should add porn performers to its ranks, devoting a branch to their specific needs. The entertainment ecosystem would be strengthened if media professionals recognize that, when it comes to AI, their fate is intertwined with that of porn performers. Indeed, when it comes to fair compensation and the protection of human labor, all of our jobs may depend on it.
Category:
E-Commerce
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