The magical realism of Tesla

YOU HAVEAIEVAI to hand it to the “technoking”. For all his impish self-aggrandisement, mockery of deadlines, baiting of regulators and soon-to-be sideline as a “Saturday Night Live” comedy host, Elon Musk is deadly serious about technology. So serious, in fact, that as he was discussing the nitty-gritty of neural networks on an earnings call on April 26th, Tesla’s boss did not miss a beat when what sounded like his infant son let out a wail in the background. The electric-car maker’s record net profit of $438m in the first quarter, the seventh straight in the black, came as an afterthought.Such is the allure of Tesla’s whirring money machine that many now give the benefit of the doubt to Mr Musk’s more eccentric claims. His latest involves artificial intelligence (). In the future Tesla will be remembered not just as an electric-vehicle () and renewable-energy pioneer, he says, but also as an and robotics company. He bases this on a belief that it is close to cracking the challenge of self-driving cars using just eight cameras, machine learning and a computerised brain in the car that reacts with superhuman speed. He calls full self-driving “one of the hardest technical problems…that’s maybe ever existed”.