It took only a couple of tweets to plunge Elon Musk into the morass of a securities fraud trial that could cost him billions of dollars from his rapidly diminishing fortune.

The Tesla Inc. chief executive officer is set to be the star witness at a jury trial that starts Tuesday in San Francisco federal court over his infamous tweets 4 1/2 years ago about a plan to take the electric-car maker private with “funding secured.”

Lawyers for the shareholders will try to show jurors that Musk lied in the statement, and that it caused them deep losses from wild stock price swings over a 10-day period before the plan was abandoned. Musk’s defense team will work to tear down that narrative.

Losing a class-action case of this magnitude could put Musk on the hook for damages in the billions of dollars, according to Adam Pritchard, a professor at University of Michigan Law School.

“Elon enjoys a good fight,” Pritchard said. “He has a lot of money, and is apparently willing to take substantial risks with that money.”

The trial comes as Musk’s wealth has dwindled from a peak of $340 billion in November 2021. He became the first person in history to lose more than $200 billion, all while he spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter Inc. Last month, he was dethroned as the world’s richest person and Tesla’s stock plummeted 37% since Dec. 1, with the electric car maker facing increased competition and a looming recession.

The stir created by the August 2018 tweets is best remembered for throwing Musk into the orbit of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. It resulted in a pledge from Musk to have his future social media posts screened by a Tesla lawyer.

Investors must prove Musk knew his tweets were misleading, and that they were “material,” or important to a reasonable investor. Shareholders would also need to tie Musk’s tweets to their trading losses.

US District Judge Edward Chen has already hobbled Musk with a pretrial ruling that the tweets were reckless and false — and he will tell the 12-member jury to assume that from the get-go, to set the parameters of the trial.

That instruction to the jury puts Musk at a “huge disadvantage,” Pritchard said.

To beat back the allegations he was deceitful, Musk has said in court filings he may call on others who can vouch for the take-private plan, including friend and confidant Larry Ellison, as well as executives at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and private-equity firm Silver Lake Management.

Musk’s lawyers have failed repeatedly to persuade Chen not to share his finding with the jury, saying as recently as last week that it could be “highly prejudicial” to the CEO’s defense.

A lawyer for Musk declined to comment before the start of the trial and an attorney for the shareholders didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Musk has insisted his short-lived plan to take Tesla private was solid based on discussions he had with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. He subpoenaed the governor of the Kingdom’s Private Investment Fund to testify at the trial, but withdrew the request after attorneys for Yasir Al-Rumayyan argued he isn’t legally obligated to show up.

Proving Musk’s state of mind will be nuanced and tricky. Ordinary investors understand that deals can get done even if they’re not 100% nailed down, Pritchard said. Musk might have believed in his ability to take Tesla private, even if he wasn’t across the finish line yet.

“Elon Musk is an achiever, he gets things done,” Pritchard said. “If he says he’s going to take Tesla private, in his mind he’s going to take Tesla private. Did you ever decide that you were going to put a rocket in space? Elon did. He did it. He believes in Elon. He’s a little crazy. Which is part of the secret of his success. He might believe that because he’s Elon Musk.”

–With assistance from Pierre Paulden.

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©2023 Bloomberg L.P.

The controversy erupting from mere talk of banning gas stoves has sparked a culture war that’s about more than politics— it’s about food. And it boils down to one question: Which cooks better, gas or electric?

For most home chefs forced to choose between gas ranges that heat quickly or electric-coil stoves that are inefficient and ugly, the answer is simple: gas. But there’s a third option: induction stoves, which heat with a tightly controlled magnetic field rather than a flame.

On this, even professional chefs are divided. California chef Andrew Gruel, who owns American Gravy Restaurant Group, says induction stoves are “just less efficient” than gas ranges. But Chef Rachelle Boucher, of the Building Decarbonization Coalition, says: “I can boil water or sear a steak or cook something twice as fast on induction.”

What they can agree on is that cooking is an emotional topic.

“When it comes to cultural topics that are close to our hearts and stomachs — mine are one and the same — people have some pretty big opinions,” Gruel said.

The issue raises some genuine cultural questions, too. For instance: Can authentic Chinese food be cooked without a flame or a wok? Can an electric stove produce the quick sear essential to certain cuisines?

Chef and and sustainable cooking consultant Christopher Galarza, who traces his ancestry to a tribe in the Amazon rainforest, says cooking his family’s recipes is a way of connecting with that heritage. “When folks say, ‘You’re trying to change how I cook,’ they think you’re trying to come after my heritage, my past.” But Galarza, who’s opened the country’s first all-electric campus kitchen, argues that traditional cooking doesn’t have to be done in traditional ways, such as over coals or wood.

The debate is front and center after a member of the US Consumer Product Safety Commission said this week that the government could  prohibit gas stoves to curb indoor air pollution. Blowback from lawmakers was so severe that the agency’s head walked back the idea days later.

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©2023 Bloomberg L.P.

As the state’s water supply shrinks from too much consumption and not enough replenishment amid climate change and long-term drought, and extreme weather brings floods, companies are paying increased attention to water, and the risks to commerce — including regulation — that arise when supply can’t meet demand.

“Water is the new carbon,” says water-resources engineer Nick Silverman, chief scientist at Bay Area water-risk analysis firm Waterplan, which counts major companies including Facebook parent Meta of Menlo Park — which, like Google, has its headquarters at close to sea level near the San Francisco Bay — among its customers.

From 2000 to 2021, California and the southwestern U.S. have seen the driest 22-year period since at least 800 A.D., “which may be a harbinger of more global warming-fueled extreme megadrought in the future,” according to a December paper in the journal Nature co-written by former NASA senior water scientist and Waterplan adviser Jay Famiglietti. “Stress on groundwater resources under these drying conditions will likely increase in the coming decades, and will be exacerbated by the need to provide more water and produce more food for a growing population.” Recent torrential storms notwithstanding, almost half of long-parched California remained under severe drought as of Jan. 10, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Waterplan uses data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, a program known as GRACE. Variations in the relative positions of the program’s pair of satellites reflect gravity’s pull, and the amount of pull can be analyzed to provide information about where water, including snow and ice, lies on and under the earth. Waterplan, headquartered in San Francisco and launched in 2020, has analyzed every watershed on Earth.

Satellite data, supplemented with information from other sources including client companies, allows Waterplan to calculate a firm’s risks related to water supply, water quality, and flooding, along with hazards associated with regulation and corporate reputation.

The Bay Area News Group asked Silverman about Waterplan’s work. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What types of business are affected by water risk?

A: Every type of business. It’s more like, ‘Is it direct or indirect?’ Maybe it’s a supply chain kind of issue, where it’s not your water risk where you’re located but it’s that supply chain: Where do you get your products from? We use water in so many different ways, we use if for cooling in data centers, we use it for energy generation. And of course we use it in agriculture. I’m not aware of a major economic sector that shouldn’t be concerned. Any company has water risk that they should be concerned about.

Q: How does water risk affect a business?

A: If a facility does not have access to water, let’s say, that can be either their water runs out, or water quality decreases … it’s a financial risk. The water risk itself can be translated to financial risk through some fairly simple calculations which I think can hit home for a lot of corporations. You use 100 gallons to produce 100 units of such and such, you sell each unit for this amount, you can calculate how much a gallon of water is worth.

Q: How large a market does Waterplan see in California for its services?

A: The market in California is huge. California’s economy is hugely based on water. I don’t need to tell you how important agriculture is for the state… also all the data centers out there and technology centers. Fifty percent of the state uses groundwater as a water supply, and it’s difficult to track groundwater availability and changes. A third of California’s water supply comes from snowpack. Tracking the amount of water that’s way up in the mountains, oftentimes inaccessible, and also stored deeply underground, which is really hard to track … becomes really critical in terms of California understanding its water.

Q: What are the causes of water risk in California beyond consumption exceeding supply?

A: We can’t forget about water quality as aquifers deplete. Contaminants that are in those aquifers get more concentrated. You also get intrusion in a lot of places of water from the ocean. Saltwater is flowing into the groundwater.

Q: How do you assess water risk?

A: We define it as the combination of hazard exposure and vulnerability. Flooding is a really good example. What’s the probability of magnitude of a flood event? Is your facility located within a flood plain? (What is) the value of infrastructure that’s exposed? Do you have some sort of coping mechanisms if your facility gets flooded? We then break down hazard exposure and vulnerability into indicators that we can capture from hydrologic models or satellite imagery, and also facility-level information that our client provides.

A: California leads the way in water research and science but a lot of that sort of lives in academia or big institutions. There’s tremendous opportunity to connect this available science with the on-the-ground users of water, to make science accessible to the folks that need it to make informed decisions.

Name: Nick SilvermanTitle: Head of science at WaterplanAge: 44Education: PhD in regional hydroclimatology, University of Montana; master’s in engineering, University of Washington; Bachelor’s in physics and engineering, Washington and Lee UniversityFamily: Married 13 years; 8-year-old daughterBorn in: Gainesville, FloridaCity of residence: Missoula, Montana

———————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Five things about Nick Silverman:

1: My favorite thing to do is play in or on top of water: surfing, kayaking, stand-up paddle-boarding or just jumping into a mountain stream on a hot day.

2: I love to read all types of books, especially sci-fi.

3: I have become rather passionate about trying to hunt and harvest my own meat and fish. It has taught me invaluable lessons on land and wildlife conservation, food ethics, and humility.

4: I like to travel by foot, bike, or my pickup truck — planes not so much.

5: I view food in a very utilitarian way. I like to eat healthy things but my wife is the foodie.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has agreed to cut his pay this year after shareholders rebelled.

The world’s largest tech company said it would reduce Cook’s target pay package to $49 million, 40% lower than his target pay for 2022 and about half Cook’s $99.4 million total compensation that he was granted last year.

The vast majority of Cook’s 2022 compensation — about 75% — was tied up in company shares, with half of that dependent on share price performance.

But shareholders voted against Cook’s pay package after Apple’s stock fell nearly 27% last year. The vote is nonbinding, but the board’s compensation committee said it took the vote into consideration.

“The compensation committee balanced shareholder feedback, Apple’s exceptional performance, and a recommendation from Mr. Cook to adjust his compensation in light of the feedback received,” the company said in its annual proxy statement released Thursday.

This year, the executive’s share award target has been cut to $40 million. About $30 million, or three-quarters, of that is linked to share price performance.

Cook’s base salary of $3 million will stay the same, the company said, as well as a $6 million bonus.

The board said it believes Cook’s new pay package is “responsive to shareholder feedback, while continuing both to align pay with performance and to recognize Mr. Cook’s outstanding leadership.”

The tech boss, who has headed up Apple since 2011, is estimated to have a personal wealth of $1.7 billion, according to Forbes.

Apple’s share price, like other tech companies, plunged last year as coronavirus lockdowns shuttered some of its factories in China. Supply chain bottlenecks and fears that a global economic slowdown would crimp demand also dragged down its stock.

In January last year, the tech giant became the first publicly traded company to notch a $3 trillion market capitalization, yet has has shed nearly $1 billion of that value since.

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Tesla Inc. has failed to derail a suit by the California Civil Rights Department accusing the company of engaging in a pattern of racial harassment and bias at its main factory.

A judge issued a tentative ruling throwing out counterclaims by the electric-car maker that the department’s 2022 suit is unlawful. Tesla had claimed state officials didn’t provide adequate information about the civil rights allegations or engage in efforts to resolve the dispute before going to court.

The company will have a chance at a hearing set for Wednesday to persuade Alameda County Superior Court Judge Evelio Grillo to change his ruling before making it final. Grillo also said in his tentative ruling that Tesla can revise and refile its claims by Feb. 3.

Before Tesla countersued, Grillo in August denied Tesla’s request to throw out the state’s complaint, which described the Fremont plant as a “racially segregated workplace.”

California officials alleged that they found widespread evidence of Black workers subject to mistreatment, including harassment, unequal pay, and retaliation, at Tesla’s Fremont plant during a three-year investigation.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has said it “strongly opposes all forms of discrimination and harassment” and called the state’s suit “misguided” in a blog post before the complaint was filed.

Diaz, who won a $137 million jury verdict against Tesla, is scheduled to face off again with the company over monetary damages in March after he refused to accept a judge’s decision that he was entitled to just $15 million.

The case is Department of Fair Employment and Housing v. Tesla Inc., 22CV006830, California Superior Court, Alameda County.

–With assistance from Robert Burnson.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

©2023 Bloomberg L.P.

Robert Fichidzhyan, 40, admitted in a plea agreement filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego that he built “skimmers” — customized electronic devices that his accomplices secretly installed at dozens of gas stations to steal credit and debit card information.

In addition to the prison term handed down Monday, Jan. 9, Fichidzhyan was ordered to forfeit $249,890, which is the amount he personally received from the scheme, and participate with seven co-defendants, who primarily reside in Granada Hills, Glendale and North Hollywood, in paying an additional $619,923 in restitution.

“Identity thieves should not assume they are safe committing electronic larceny,” U.S. Attorney Randy S. Grossman said in a statement. “Anyone who victimizes the public in our jurisdiction will be brought to justice.”

Agents with the U.S. Secret Service and Internal Revenue Service assisted federal prosecutors in the investigation.

A federal grand jury returned a six-count indictment in September 2021 against the defendants, alleging access fraud conspiracy and various counts of aggravated identity theft. Fichidzhyan pleaded guilty to conspiring to use unauthorized access devices and possess device-making equipment.

Fichidzhyan is a prolific scammer, with credit card fraud and identity theft-related convictions dating back to 2002, when he was 19, according to prosecutors. In 2010 he and another individual were convicted in Utah of skimming victims’ financial information at gas pumps, collecting 4,052 stolen credit card numbers in 11 days, a sentencing memorandum says.

Fichidzhyan’s role in the Southern California scheme was to build skimming devices used extensively by his alleged co-conspirators.

Typically, fraudsters insert a skimming device inside an ATM or a gas pump to steal transaction data used by customers to complete bank withdrawals or gas purchases. The skimming device stores the stolen data until it is retrieved by the skimmer or an associate.

After retrieving the stolen data, a fraudster can encode a new unauthorized card bearing the victim’s real information, including the account and PIN number, and use it to make purchases or withdraw cash.

Fichidzhyan’s fingerprints showed up on skimming devices recovered during the investigation and were linked to his alleged co-conspirators, according to court documents.

Electronics supplier records show that Fichidzhyan ordered at least 14 separate shipments of the kinds of components used to build skimmers from July 2016 to July 2018 at his former residence and then transitioned to using straw recipients or addresses to receive supplies. Additionally, telephone records show that Fichidzhyan was in regular contact with the co-defendants who installed the skimming devices, suggesting that he actively provided technical support for his products, prosecutors said.

Federal agents began observing the alleged co-conspirators intensively installing and downloading from skimming devices at gas stations across Southern California in September 2019. Fingerprints belonging to two of the defendants were found on some of the skimmers seized by law enforcement, prosecutors said.

Other fingerprints and DNA recovered on the skimmers led agents to those involved in building the devices, including Fichidzhyan. Specifically, they found Fichidzhyan’s fingerprints on a skimming device recovered from a gas station in South Gate in September 2019 and his DNA on a device at another station in National City in July 2020, court records state.

Although Fichidzhyan’s only source of reported income besides unemployment and disability benefits was a $10-an-hour job at his parent’s health care business, his bank account included cash deposits of $249,890 during the duration of the conspiracy, according to court records.

Prosecutors say they haven’t been able to determine the exact number of victims in the skimming scheme because they are too numerous to calculate.

“Calculating the number of victims is difficult and time-consuming, as it requires comparing card numbers across hundreds of transactions and then attempting to trace card numbers to individual victims, which often requires multiple rounds of subpoenas and many hours of analysis by bank staff and investigating agents,” according to the sentencing memorandum.

A hearing for the seven remaining defendants is scheduled for March 20.

After months of uncertainty and feeling left in the dark, many former Twitter employees impacted by a mass layoff in early November began receiving their severance offers over the weekend. But some are frustrated by the offer and the conditions attached to it.

The severance offer promises one month’s pay in exchange for agreeing to various terms, including a non-disparagement agreement and waiving the right to take any legal action against the company, according to Lisa Bloom, a lawyer representing dozens of former Twitter employees affected by the layoffs.

Many were dissatisfied by the offer, according to public posts and attorneys representing ex-employees, saying it falls short of the “3 months of severance” that new owner Elon Musk had previously promised would be provided. (That time period appeared to include pay for the 60-days advanced notice Twitter was obligated to provide under various state laws.) The amount is also significantly less than provided at rivals like Facebook-parent Meta, which laid off thousands of workers around the same time and guaranteed them 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for each year they were employed at the company.

The former Twitter employees are now stuck deciding whether to accept the money or join the hundreds of others who have already filed arbitration demands or lawsuits against the company.

“We’ve been hearing from hundreds of Twitter employees who are considering their options and not happy about only being offered one month severance, after they were promised much more,” Shannon Liss-Riordan, another lawyer working on behalf of former Twitter employees, told CNN in a statement Monday. “We have filed hundreds of arbitration claims already and will continue to file them.”

The severance fight comes as Musk scrambles to cut costs at the company he bought in October for $44 billion, including a significant amount of debt. After laying off half the company in early November, Musk continued cutting and pushing out additional employees, including by requiring anyone who remained to sign a pledge committing to “hardcore” work.

Twitter’s trust and safety team experienced at least a dozen additional cuts on Friday, according to a report from Bloomberg over the weekend.

Bloom, who said she has also filed dozens of demands for arbitration on behalf of former Twitter employees, said the severance offer does not include pro-rated bonuses or accelerated stock vesting for eligible employees, which could amount to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost funds for some affected workers. The company typically provided such benefits to laid-off employees prior to Musk’s acquisition, she said.

One Twitter employee laid off during the early November mass layoffs tweeted over the weekend urging fellow affected employees not to “click or accept ANYTHING in that package” without first speaking to an attorney. “For me personally, the money is one component,” they said. “It’s about principle. I strongly believe that we should be keeping people accountable for the promises that they make and failing to deliver on them.”

To add insult to injury, at least one former employee claimed on Twitter that the severance offer went to their email’s spam folder.

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Shortly before Thanksgiving, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy confirmed rumors that layoffs had begun in multiple departments at the e-commerce giant and said it would review staffing needs into the new year.

On Wednesday, Jassy provided a sobering update on that review: Amazon is cutting more than 18,000 jobs, nearly double the 10,000 that had previously been reported and marking the highest absolute number of layoffs of any tech company in the recent downturn.

At Amazon and other tech companies, the second half of last year was marked by hiring freezes, layoffs and other cost-cutting measures at a number of household names in Silicon Valley. But if 2022 was the year the good times ended for these tech companies, 2023 is already shaping up to be a year when people at those companies brace for how much worse things can get.

On the same day Amazon announced layoffs, cloud-computing company Salesforce said it was axing about 10% of its staff — a figure that easily amounts to thousands of workers — and video-sharing outlet Vimeo said it was cutting 11% of its workforce. The following day, digital fashion platform Stitch Fix said it planned to cut 20% of its salaried staff, after having cut 15% of its salaried staff last year.

The continued fallout in the industry comes as tech firms grapple with a seemingly perfect storm of factors. After initially seeing a boom in demand for digital services amid the onset of the pandemic, many companies aggressively hired. Then came a whiplash in demand as Covid-19 restrictions receded and people returned to their offline lives. Rising interest rates also dried up the easy money tech companies relied on to fuel big bets on future innovations, and cut into their sky-high valuations.

Heading into 2023, recession fears and economic uncertainties are still weighing heavily on consumers and policymakers’ minds, and interest rate hikes are expected to continue. Beyond that, the growing number of layoffs may also give certain tech companies some cover to take more severe steps to trim costs now than they may have otherwise done.

While there have been some layoffs recently in the consumer goods sector and hints of more to come elsewhere, the situation in Silicon Valley remains in stark contrast to the economy as a whole.

The Labor Department’s latest employment report on Friday pointed to a year of extraordinary job growth in 2022, marking the second-best year for the labor market in records that go back to 1939. Meanwhile, a separate report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found tech layoffs were up 649% in 2022 compared to the previous year, versus just a 13% uptick in job cuts in the overall economy during the same period.

In his note to employees this month, Jassy chalked up the need for significant cost cutting at Amazon to “the uncertain economy and that we’ve hired rapidly over the last several years.” Others across the industry have echoed those points, with varying degrees of atonement.

In a series of apologies that are beginning to sound the same, Silicon Valley business leaders from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to Salesforce’ Marc Benioff have blamed the wave of job cuts on their own misreading of how pandemic-fueled demand for tech products would play out.

Benioff began a memo to the employees of Salesforce last week by invoking, as he so often does, the Hawaiian word for family. “As one ‘Ohana,” he wrote, “we have never been more mission-critical to our customers.” But the economic environment was “challenging,” Benioff wrote. “With this in mind, we’ve made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 10 percent, mostly over the coming weeks.”

“As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that,” Benioff went on to say. Like other tech leaders, however, it’s unclear if Benioff will face any repercussions to his title or compensation.

Patricia Campos-Medina, the executive director of the Worker Institute at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, slammed this spate of mea culpas as “empty apologies” to the workers now paying for their miscalculations.

While there will be a lot of near-term uncertainty for these tech workers, as well “a big economic hit on their lives,” Campos-Medina added, “I do think that this is a very skilled workforce that will find a way to engage back in the economy.” She predicts many of the laid-off tech workers will likely be able to find jobs and “we will see more stability in the mid-to-long term.”

And despite the robust overall labor market, there are growing concerns that tech layoffs could spread elsewhere.

“I think we’re seeing an inflection point; the rate of jobs growth is slowing and a lot of these tech layoffs that we’re hearing about, I think are going to start materializing across the broader economy by the end of the first quarter,” John Leer, chief economist at Morning Consult told CNN’s Chief Business Correspondent Christine Romans in an interview Friday.

In that sense, at least, Silicon Valley may once again be ahead of the curve, but not in the way it wants.

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The crisis is over a century in the making and water experts have been ringing alarm bells for decades. Now government officials have weeks or months, not years, to find ways to save massive amounts of water.

At risk are the country’s two largest reservoirs — lakes Powell and Mead — both of which are losing water. Levels could drop so low this year that Glen Canyon and Hoover dams would no longer be able to generate electricity for millions of people. By the end of next year, Powell’s water level could fall so low that its dam will only be able to send smaller quantities of water downstream to Arizona, California and Nevada.

Federal officials need the seven states in the Colorado River Basin to save at least 2 million acre-feet but water managers now acknowledge that number might need to be three times higher, enough to bury the entire state of Rhode Island under more than seven feet of water.

And that’s just so the basin can survive long enough to plan for the years ahead. Nobody wants to be the one responsible for turning down — or off — taps to farmers, ranchers, companies or even major cities.

Local, state and federal officials often mention using more efficient irrigation methods on cropland and they discuss accounting for water lost to evaporation or as it’s transported across thousands of miles of desert terrain. But neither of those two — necessary — steps will be enough.

The Denver Post spoke to experts across the region about ideas, both substantive and farfetched, that could save enough water to keep the Colorado River Basin afloat. Nobody could say precisely how much water a given strategy might provide but each of them acknowledged that officials throughout the American West must think creatively and be prepared to use any and all available resources.

Here are several of those ideas:

Desalination

The gist: The Pacific Ocean has more than enough water to supplement whatever the Colorado River has lost. But, as it is, ocean water is not safe to drink, nor can it be used on crops. Running ocean water through a desalination plant can filter out its dangerously high salt content, bacteria and other impurities to make it safe for use.

Could it work? The technology is already in use but no plants in existence can replace the amount of water the Colorado River is losing. Plus, desalination is expensive, time consuming and the waste it produces would create new problems.

Click here to see how desalination could fit in to the West’s strategy to save the Colorado River.

Reuse and recycling

The gist: Collect water that’s already been used and use it again.

Could it work? Many cities and states are already using these strategies, though the amount of water that can be recycled and reused is limited by population size and legal constraints.

Click here to see how reuse and recycling could fit in to the West’s strategy to save the Colorado River.

Importing water

The gist: If the Colorado River is losing water so fast, why not take water from the places that have it and transport it into the basin that needs it, likely with a system of pipes?

Could it work? Water is already transported all across the country using pipelines and canals. But this is an expensive, time-consuming undertaking that would come with substantial political challenges. In addition, many other regions across the country are suffering droughts as well.

Click here to see how importing water could fit in to the West’s strategy to save the Colorado River.

Cloud seeding

The gist: By spraying a chemical compound — typically silver iodide — into certain types of clouds, seeders can agitate super-chilled water particles inside, causing them to freeze and fall to the ground as snow.

Could it work? The technology is already in use across the West, though the process likely doesn’t create snow or moisture. Instead, it uses moisture that’s already in the air and causes snow to fall in one location rather than another.

Click here to see how cloud seeding could fit in to the West’s strategy to save the Colorado River.

Managing growth

The gist: The more people, industries and businesses that call the American West their home, the more water those communities will need. Cities and states can encourage current residents to use less water, especially with aspects like water-dependent lawns. And they can require new homes and businesses to ensure they have a water supply before building.

Could it work? Cities across the West are taking steps to grow responsibly and sustainably. But new laws depend on the political atmosphere of a given city or state and can take time to enact. Plus, cities and businesses only account for a fraction of overall water use.

Click here to see how managing growth could fit in to the West’s strategy to save the Colorado River.

Agriculture

The gist: State and federal officials could use huge chunks of now-available money to “buy and dry” farmland, farmers could periodically let their fields lay fallow or they can switch to less water-consumptive crops. Likely, the basin needs a combination of all of these combined with efficiency improvements throughout the industry to save water from the irrigating process.

Could it work? Averaging the seven states together, agriculture consumes about 75% of the Colorado River’s water, so the biggest potential savings will likely stem from changes to the industry. Changes would be costly and depend on variables like the types of crops and the region in which they’re being grown. The agriculture industry is also a major employer across the West upon which many other industries depend. Agriculture also provides food across the world, so changes could disrupt the supply and cost of food.

Click here to see how changes to the agriculture industry could fit in to the West’s strategy to save the Colorado River.

Demand management

The gist: Pay people not to use water or to use less. Or hike the price of water to encourage less use.

Could it work? Finding ways to reduce demand for water across the Colorado River Basin encompasses many other strategies and has been described as the way of the future. Some aspects only qualify as short-term solutions, though. They must be followed by a long-term strategy.

Click here to see how demand management could fit in to the West’s strategy to save the Colorado River.

Native American tribes

The gist: By legally cementing the water rights for the tribes depending on the Colorado River, state and federal governments could begin to lease, buy or otherwise compensate the tribes for their water. In addition, this would give the tribes better access to their own water, which they need to drink, farm and develop their communities.

Could it work? State and federal officials must work with Native American tribes to solve the Colorado River’s water crisis. But governments have a poor track record of working with the tribes, sewing generations of mistrust. Many of the tribes remain without clean drinking water and the necessary infrastructure to access what’s rightfully theirs.

Click here to see how working with Native American tribes could fit in to the West’s strategy to save the Colorado River.

WASHINGTON — Elon Musk has urged a federal judge to shift a trial in a shareholder lawsuit out of San Francisco because he says negative local media coverage has biased potential jurors against him.

Instead, in a filing submitted late Friday — less than two weeks before the trial was set to begin on Jan. 17 — Musk’s lawyers argue it should be moved to the federal court in the western district of Texas. That district includes the state capital of Austin, which is where Musk relocated his electric car company, Tesla, in late 2021.

The shareholder lawsuit stems from Musk’s tweets in August 2018 when he said he had sufficient financing to take Tesla private at $420 a share — an announcement that caused heavy volatility in Tesla’s share price.

In a victory for the shareholders last spring, Judge Edward Chen ruled that Musk’s tweets were false and reckless.

If moving the trial isn’t possible, Musk’s lawyers want it postponed until negative publicity regarding the billionaire’s purchase of Twitter has died down.

“For the last several months, the local media have saturated this district with biased and negative stories about Mr. Musk,” attorney Alex Spiro wrote in a court filing. Those news items have personally blamed Musk for recent layoffs at Twitter, Spiro wrote, and have charged that the job cuts may have even violated laws.

The shareholders’ attorneys emphasized the last-minute timing of the request, saying, “Musk’s concerns are unfounded and his motion is meritless.”

“The Northern District of California is the proper venue for this lawsuit and where it has been actively litigated for over four years,” attorney Nicholas Porritt wrote in an email.

“A substantial portion of the jury pool … is likely to hold a personal and material bias against Mr. Musk as a result of recent layoffs at one of his companies as individual prospective jurors — or their friends and relatives — may have been personally impacted,” the filing said.

Musk has also been criticized by San Francisco’s mayor and other local officials for the job cuts, the filing said.