DOHA (Parliament Politics Magazine) – On the second day of the Qatar Economic Forum, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Qatar’s Emir, and businessman Elon Musk were among the speakers, as the global economic recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as growing challenges such as the need for energy diversification and food insecurity were high on the agenda.
In his opening remarks on Tuesday, Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani said that supporting investments, innovation and the economy while retaining shared values and maintaining peace was the way to build capacity to address the difficulties that humanity was facing.
As a partner in the global community, Qatar was accountable for confronting global change and its impact on humans, he continued.
According to Al Jazeera’s Jamal Elshayyal, who was reporting from the event, the forum would focus on the need to diversify the economy of the world and grow the renewable energy industry.
However, the event did not just look at things from a financial standpoint; adjacent subjects such as the role of politics, and human rights in developing countries and the environment were also discussed, Elshayyal stated.
From Twitter to Tesla
Musk, the world’s richest man according to Forbes magazine, talked virtually at the event about his recent offer to buy Twitter and the challenges surrounding the social media network, including the number of spam users on the system and the debt portion of the deal coming together.
They were still awaiting resolution on that problem, and it was a pretty big matter, he said, reaffirming his scepticism of Twitter’s claims that bogus or spam accounts numbered to less than 5% of monetizable daily active users. Then there was the question of whether the debt element of the round would come together. Would the shareholders vote in favour then, Musk added.Â
Musk indicated that during the next three months, the salaried employment at Tesla, the electric automobile firm of which he is CEO, will be reduced by around 10%. According to Musk, the cuts would result in a 3.5 percent drop in the company’s total headcount.
Two former employees of Tesla have filed a complaint against the firm, arguing that the company’s decision to conduct a “mass layoff” violates federal law by failing to offer early notice of the job layoffs.
Two workers filed the case late Sunday in Texas, alleging that they were fired from Tesla’s gigafactory plant in Sparks, Nevada, in June. Over 500 employees were allegedly fired, according to the lawsuit.
The suit was dismissed by Musk as “trivial”. “Let’s not read too much into a pre-emptive lawsuit that has no standing,” he said.
Anything about Tesla appears to garner a lot of clicks, whether it’s small or substantial.” That litigation that was being referred to fell under the “trivial” category, Musk said.
Image via Twitter
