David Mariani, founder of five-year-old big data startup AtScale, is happy, he tells Business Insider.

In June, he replaced himself as CEO by hiring someone he's admired for years. And together they sweet-talked another successful entrepreneur, also well-known in the big data field, into signing on as chairman.

"It's OK to hand the reigns over as a founder/CEO. It's not shameful to realize and recognize where you need help and to bring in people proactively to help you versus waiting for someone to do it for you," said Mariani. He's taken a new role at the company, as VP of technology.

To replace him, Mariani hired Chris Lynch as the new CEO of AtScale in June. Lynch is well-known in the Boston tech community as the CEO who sold Vertica Systems to HP for $350 million. He was also the founder and CEO of a company called Acopia, which he sold to F5 Networks for $210 million in 2007.

The outspoken Lynch had been doing the VC thing for about six years in Boston. After joining AtScale, Lynch helped talk another big name, Jit Saxena, into joining as chairman.

Chris Lynch Chris Lynch Saxena is a serial startup founder, best known as the former founder and CEO of big data company Netezza, which he took public and then sold to IBM for $1.7 billion in 2010.

Saxena's personal story is a triumphant one, too. Some years after selling Netezza, he got sick and needed a kidney transplant.

In 2014 he launched an online campaign to look for a donor. Ultimately, his internet search didn't work, but, he was matched with a donor the old fashioned way, he tells Business Insider. Today, he's a big supporter of kidney research at Boston's Brigham Hospital.

"It was a wonderful thing that it happened," he told Business Insider. "And I was lucky and am almost fully recovered from kidney issues. I hope in the future the same thing happens to hundreds of thousands of people, and I would like to help them in any way I can."

Saxena is an angel investor in Boston and already on a number of boards, But with his health back he was willing to add another one to the roster and join AtScale.

Often when a founder leaves the CEO job, even for another role at the company, it signals trouble at the company or in the board room. But Mariani said that hiring a new CEO was his idea.

"I actually had to fight my board to allow me to do this. They thought, hey, everything is going great, why do you want to go and take this kind of a risk, and bring in a new leader?" he said.

It was a good problem to have, considering how tricky it was for Mariani to raise the venture capital to start up AtScale in the first place.

In his late 40's, Mariani went out to raise his first round from venture capitalists, he was continually rejected. This was despite his engineering background, running projects at Yahoo and Klout.

AtScale is cloud software that solves a really hard problem. It connects data from wherever it sits, be an Oracle database or an Excel spreadsheet, so companies can run big-data style analysis. Lots of companies do that, but AtScale does it without moving the data. The tech was so impressive that a who's who of angels backed it, which Mariani thought would help in the fundraising process.

A friend of his in the VC industry explained: Potential investors were saying he wasn't "blue flame" enough," Mariani had previously told Business Insider — a reference to his age. "Blue flame" refers to burning hot; as in the kind of Mark Zuckerberg-style young wunderkinds without families to support or other responsibilities that investors love to back.

Striking out with classic investors, Mariani took another tactic. He went to the investment arm of one of his early customers, Comcast. They bit and with one big name investor in his camp, others followed. He has since raised $45 million in several rounds.

But, "blue flame" age or not, he was inexperienced in running a company and wanted someone who could help him.

Mariani lobbied Lynch to take the CEO job for months, but Lynch didn't want to move his family from Boston to the San Francisco Bay Area, where AtScale is based. Ultimately, Lynch took the job without moving his family. He is currently commuting, taking flights from San Francisco home to Boston every weekend.

And today, Mariani couldn't be happier. "Along with Chris, came Chris's entourage. The people, his contact that he worked with over the years, including Jit."

With his classic bravado, Lynch adds, "If you look at my track record you can see that I can do anything I want in this business. And what I want is to build AtScale into a billion-dollar business."

Four months before Spotify went public in an unusual direct listing , $150 million of shares in the music streaming service were traded on a little-known startup called Equidate.

Equidate, a platform that helps startup employees sell their private equity, has picked up steam since its founding in 2014. As startups have started to stay private longer, employees and early investors have turned to the platform as a way to cash in on their equity.

On Wednesday, the company announced a new CEO to scale the company and expand its offerings internationally.

Kelly Rodriques, general partner at Operative Capital and an investor in Equidate, will take over the role of CEO from Equidate's co-founders, Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam. Prasad and Ramadurgam will stay on at Equidate as co-presidents.

"I looked all around the country for a firm that was in this space that had phenomenal technology and great talent, and that's what led me to Equidate," said Rodriques, who first met the founders two years ago, and later invested in the company when it fundraised a Series B.

The company raised $50 million in that round, announced at the end of July, which valued the company at $220 million, according to PitchBook. The round was led by Financial Technology Partners and Panorama Point Partners, as well as Rodriques' firm, Operative Capital.

The funding and executive shift come at a time of growth at the startup. The company said its transaction volume has consistently grown 300% year-over-year, and that the company is already profitable. It currently has a run rate of $1 billion in transactions, 40% of which is sourced internationally.

Though Rodriques has focused on investing in recent years, it's not his first time at the helm. He led the investment custodian company PENSCO for more than six years before its acquisition in 2017, and was CEO and chairman of the software company Totality before its acquisition in 2006.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek took the company public in an unusual direct listing in April. Before that, Equidate placed $150 million in Spotify equity. Andrew Burton / Getty Images

Equidate aims to solve a growing problem in Silicon Valley. Venture-backed startups are staying private longer, which means employees with thousands — and sometimes millions — of dollars of compensation in equity are stuck without liquidity, or access to payment in cash.

Sure, equity in a company like Uber could be worth a lot more once it starts trading on the public markets. But it's hard to buy a house or send your kids to college with shares of a 9-year-old company that was expected to go public two years ago.

Now, as companies find it increasingly strategic to stay private longer, they have started working with companies like Equidate directly. It's almost like an employee benefit, Rodriques said.

"Previously it might have been a handful of employees or maybe a senior executive who wanted to sell. What you're now starting to see beyond the onesie twosie sellers, you're starting to see the companies themselves now organize a liquidity program," he said.

Despite customer demand, the employee liquidity space is still pretty young. Equidate's biggest competitor, according to Rodriques, is a startup called EquityZen, which works primarily with employees selling equity in smaller startups.

Equidate, however, focuses primarily on the top 200 largest private companies, he said.

The buyer pool is shifting too. Historically, Equidate has worked mainly with high net-worth investors. But increasingly, banks and institutions are drawn into the promise of private investments and see no reason to wait until shares are trading on the public markets at a higher valuation.

In theory, less wealthy individuals can also buy equity through Equidate, he said, but currently they have to do it through an accredited investor or be accredited themselves.

Down the line, however, Rodriques said he expects Equidate will release new products and features that put private equity in the hands of smaller investors as well.

Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are trying to figure out how an unexpected Chinese-language message suddenly blared over the loudspeakers at a National Weather Service office in Maryland on Wednesday.

The intercom announcement caught employees off-guard because the office loudspeakers are not used often, The Washington Post reported .

Minutes before that message was broadcast on the intercom there, the voice of an unknown woman delivered the same message, in Chinese, to employee phones at the NOAA's Center for Weather and Climate Prediction in College Park, Maryland.

The announcement, loosely translated to English, said "you have a package from Amazon at the Chinese Embassy. Press 1 for details." The agency's technical staff said it was in contact with AT&T to determine what happened.

In an email to Business Insider on Wednesday evening, an NOAA representative said the agency was still investigating the matter.

In April, the Chinese Embassy in the US warned of an uptick in automated scam calls claiming to be from the embassy. The fraudulent calls urge people to pick up packages, or respond to criminal cases in which they are allegedly involved.

The NOAA on Wednesday sought to reassure employees, saying the phone system "is not tied to any Government-controlled IT systems in the building," The Post reported, citing an email from the agency's infrastructure chief Doug Fenderson.

Salesforce cofounder Marc Benioff has led the company as CEO since its founding in 1999. But now, the $106 billion software company has a new leader to help achieve its goal of $22 billion in annual revenues by 2020.

President and Chief Operating Officer Keith Block was promoted to co-CEO. He'll continue to focus on Salesforce's strategic growth and operations, while Benioff executes on what the company describes as "vision and innovation."

Salesforce first announced Block's promotion late Tuesday from management meeting in Hawaii, a state whose native culture is imbued through out the customer relationship software company's ethos.

While the title is new, Block has managed the day-to-day operations at Salesforce since his promotion to COO in 2016. For the last two years, it's been Block's job to grow the company's global sales and marketing units, even as he's tasked with keeping the company's 29,000 employees moving in the same direction. He has been president, vice chairman and director of the company since 2013.

In addition to the title change, Block will get a raise. His base salary will increase from $1.15 million to $1.435 million, according to a company filing. His annual target bonus will also increase from 100% to 200% of his base salary, which means if he does a good job, Block will take home $4.305 million next year. And that's not including the equity in the company he already owns.

Wall Street applauded the move, with analysts calling it "well deserved" and a "positive development for shareholders," as well as a good sign for Salesforce's upcoming Q2 2019 earnings.

Here's everything else you need to know about San Francisco's newest CEO.

Benioff and Block both have a history at Oracle

Salesforce cofounder Marc Benioff said he's known his co-CEO Keith Block since their time together at Oracle. Kimberly White/Getty The story of Salesforce is deeply linked to Oracle , its longtime rival and inspiration for the "No Software" mentality that fueled Salesforce's rise as a cloud platform. In fact, Benioff and Block met each other back in the '80s, when the pair both worked for Oracle.

"This announcement really reflects how Salesforce is run today, which is that Keith and I over the last five years have developed a very strong partnership," Benioff told Fortune . "Of course, we knew each other for quite a bit before that — we both started at Oracle in 1986 — so we have known each other forever. And we've really grown to be great partners. We wanted to cement that, so we've exchanged our vows and now we're co-CEOs."

Benioff himself joined Oracle out of college, and by age 26 he was a vice president with a $300,000 salary to boot. Oracle founder Larry Ellison was a mentor to Benioff, so much so that they reportedly spent Thanksgiving together and double-dated. But in 1999, after 13 years at Oracle, Benioff left to start Salesforce.

Block lasted twice as long the storied database giant. When he joined Salesforce in 2013, he had spent 26 years rising up the ranks at Oracle. By the time he left, he had been Oracle's executive vice president of North America for nearly a decade, making him a key player at the company.

Oracle, which has a market cap of $190 billion, sells databases and the licenses software that helps companies manage their data. But it's best known for the efficacy and performance of its sales teams.

It's that all-star sales mentality that Block brought to Salesforce. Analysts credit Block with Salesforce's move from serving primarily small customers, to winning business with the largest of enterprises. The company continues to sign big deals at a record pace, and now has roughly 150,000 customers that are under contracts worth at least $13.3 billion.

It's also noteworthy that while not many company's have multiple CEO's, Oracle similarly splits the CEO position between two executives with different strengths: the strategy-focused Mark Hurd and the financially-rooted Safra Catz.

He famously left Oracle after criticizing Mark Hurd

Despite his long tenure, Block actually left Oracle in 2012 under something of a dark cloud after the publicizing of some unflattering instant message conversations, in which he criticized Hurd, then the second in command at Oracle.

In the instant messages , which came out in the discovery process of a legal battle between Oracle and Hewlett-Packard, Block shared his strong disapproval of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, saying "We bought a dog. Mark wants us to sell the dog. ... Nobody wants to sell Sun. ... It baaaallllloooooooows."

It wasn't long after that Hurd left Oracle.

Block has deep roots in Boston

Block is a big Patriots fan, though he's currently based out of Salesforce's San Francisco office. Salesforce

While Salesforce is the biggest tech company with headquarters in San Francisco, Block maintains deep roots on the east coast.

The Carnegie Mellon alumnus and self-declared Boston sports fan is officially based in San Francisco. But in the past, he could be found hanging around the Boston office, and he's credited with building Salesforce's presence in the region.

"Ultimately, we'd like this to be one of the biggest offices that we have in the country, and one of Boston's biggest employers," Block told the Boston Globe in May 2017.

As of August 2017, the company had around 1,000 employees in Boston, including the team formerly known as Demandware, which Salesforce acquired in 2016 for $2.8 billion and turned into its Commerce Cloud.

Block's wife Suzanne Kelley also still lives in Boston, where she is a vice president at Oracle, leading operations and project management for the global business unit.

In February, the couple donated $15 million to establish the Block Center for Technology and Society, a research and policy institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Block is also involved in philanthropy with the Boston public school system through the non-profit Boston Partners in Education.

A marijuana-derived drug that recently became the first of its kind to win federal approval is not going to be cheap.

Called Epidiolex, the drug is designed to treat two rare forms of childhood epilepsy using a cannabis compound called cannabidiol (or CBD) .

On a call with investors this week, British-based GW Pharmaceuticals, who makes the drug, said it would cost roughly $32,500 per year. The medication does not contain THC, the well-known psychoactive component of marijuana responsible for the drug's characteristic high.

Julian Gangolli, who leads GW's commercialization efforts in the US, said the price point would keep Epidiolex in line with other epilepsy drugs and was largely based on feedback from insurance companies.

Gangolli also said that he expected the wait time to receive the medication — after patients get a prescription from a clinician — to be three weeks, on average. But before any prescriptions for Epidiolex can be written, the Drug Enforcement Administration must reschedule its active ingredient, the marijuana compound CBD.

Currently, CBD is scheduled alongside marijuana as a schedule 1 drug with "no currently accepted medical use." Beginning on June 25 when Epidiolex was approved, the agency had 90 days to reschedule or reclassify it as a schedule 2, 3, 4, or 5 substance.

"We don't have a choice on that," DEA public affairs officer Barbara Carreno told Business Insider in June. "It absolutely has to become Schedule 2, 3, 4, or 5."

Epidiolex's approval in June came on the heels of several months of promising research results and a positive preliminary vote from the Food and Drug Administration this spring. Experts are hopeful that the approval will unleash a wave of new interest in the potential medical applications of CBD and other marijuana compounds.

"This approval serves as a reminder," Scott Gottlieb, the FDA commissioner, said in a statement shortly after the approval, "that advancing sound development programs that properly evaluate active ingredients contained in marijuana can lead to important medical therapies."

In three large clinical trials which the FDA considered before giving Epidiolex the official green light, researchers presented strong evidence that the pharmaceutical-grade CBD in the medicine had the power to significantly curb some of the worst symptoms of two of the hardest-to-treat forms of epilepsy, known as Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome .

"This is clearly a breakthrough drug for an awful disease," John Mendelson , a panel member and senior scientist at the Friends Research Institute , said at a public FDA meeting this spring that was called to discuss the scientific merits of the drug.

But although the green light means that patients will soon be able to access Epidiolex with a doctor's prescription, many will also likely turn to less expensive sources of CBD , such as those sold in marijuana dispensaries. Researchers and advocates caution against this, however, with the caveat that it's impossible to verify that what's in those products is actually pharmaceutical-grade CBD.

Gangolli added that with insurance, Epidiolex could be substantially cheaper than dispensary CBD.

"The cost of a co-pay [for Epidiolex] is significantly — or could be significantly — less onerous and burdensome than the cost of the product either over the internet or from dispensary," Gangolli said.

Roku's evolution from being a seller of inexpensive streaming video boxes, to being a significant player in the world of video advertising, took another leap forward Wednesday.

The company announced much better-than-expected second-quarter results, driven largely by its so-called platform business. Among other things, that business involves selling ads that will run on the millions of Roku video players smart TVs in use.

The company is benefitting from the growing number of consumers who are watching video streamed from the internet and the growing number of hours of streaming television they're viewing, company CEO Anthony Wood told Business Insider.

"The shift to streaming is really happening," he said. "It's a big opportunity for us."

Investors cheered the results. In after-hours trading, the company's stock shot up as much as 9%. In recent trading it was up $3.95, or 8%, to $51.20.

Roku's ad business is taking off

Roku got its start by selling media players that allowed consumers to watch Netflix on their televisions. The company now offers a whole line of such devices and those gadgets now let consumers stream thousands of online channels. It also licenses its software to television manufacturers and pay TV providers for use in their set-top boxes.

But its goal has always been to be more than a device maker or software provider, Wood said. The company always planned to create a direct relationship with consumers and build its business around that relationship, he said.

Roku now has 22 million active customer accounts. That's up from 20.8 million in the first quarter, and 15.1 million in the second period last year. The company has been able to grow that number by selling more of its streaming players and convincing more consumers to buy smart TVs with its software — and then convincing those consumers to sign up for Roku accounts.

With Roku accounts, consumers can download new channels to their devices and TVs, rent movies, or purchase programs. The company gets something too: detailed data on the viewing habits of those customers, allowing it to target ads at them.

Roku has long sold interactive ads that run in its user interface, promoting channels or particular videos. But it's increasingly selling video ads that run before, during, or after the videos that are streamed through its service. And it's selling those ads on a growing number of the channels users watch through its players and TVs.

Its also attracting a fair number of advertisers. More than half of the top 200 advertisers listed by Ad Age now advertise via Roku, Wood said.

"It's a mainstream ad business," he said.

The company's seeing success with its own streaming channel

Thanks in large part to its advertising efforts, Roku's platform business has been growing rapidly and now accounts for more revenue than sales of its devices. In the second quarter, the platform business grew 96% from the same period a year ago to $90 million.

Part of the reason for that is that Roku is growing the amount of money it's bringing in per user. On a trailing 12-month basis, Roku it garnered $16.60 per user, as of the end of the second quarter. A year ago, that figure stood at $11.22 per user.

The platform business "is obviously hitting its stride," Wood said.

Roku is also making a push to be something of a streaming provider in its own right. In September, it launched the Roku Channel, an ad-supported streaming service that offers a collection of TV shows, live news feeds, and movies. The channel has since become one of the top 5 most watched among Roku's active users. And the company is hoping to attract even more users, announcing Wednesday that consumers can watch it via a web browser on their computers after signing in with a Roku account.

To be sure, Roku still gets much of its revenue — some 42% in the second quarter — from selling devices. That business has started to slow down as smart TVs have become more common.

And for all the success of the Roku Channel and all the thousands of channels Roku offers through its service, Roku customers still spend a disproportionate amount of time watching one particular service — Netflix.

"No one's even close," Wood said.

That dependency on Netflix poses a potential threat to Roku. Consumers could see little harm in potentially replacing their Roku boxes for other devices or smart TVs, since nearly every internet-connected video box offers Netflix.

But Roku has been decreasing its dependency on Netflix over time, Wood said. Netflix viewing has gone from 100% of Roku users streaming to less than a third today, he said.

What customers watch "is diversifying as people stream more," he said.

Roku's blew the doors off Wall Street's expectations

Regardless, the company had a lot to crow about on Wednesday. Here are how its outlook and results compared to Wall Street's expectations:

Since setting Wall Street ablaze on Tuesday with an unexpected tweet about taking his car company Tesla private, Elon Musk has been met with a healthy dose of skepticism over his proposed plan as well as his unconventional method of announcing it.

Analysts are taking Musk at his word that he has indeed secured funding , has investor support , and is seriously considering taking the company private — he could face serious legal consequences if he wasn't entirely truthful. But many nonetheless find the $420 a share price tag he's floated exceptionally high given that Tesla ended trading on Wednesday at $370.34 a share.

It would be the largest buyout of all time and would require gargantuan amounts of capital to complete at the more than $70 billion valuation implied by Musk's tweet. The company would need roughly $57 billion in committed financing to buy up the 80% of the company Musk doesn't own, according to Goldman Sachs estimates.

"We don't believe the current fundamentals of Tesla support a valuation anywhere close to $420 per share," Cowen analyst Jeffrey Osborne said. He set a price target of $200 .

Colin Langan at UBS set a target of $195, taking an even more dubious view: "Disclosing news of this nature via Twitter is unprecedented and, according to a former SEC chairman , may constitute fraud if Tesla does not already have the financing lined up.

"The deal would likely require participation from numerous banks and institutional investors, and we think it likely that news of the deal would have leaked had Tesla already held discussions to secure funding," Langan added.

In short, the skepticism around Musk's proposed deal is abundant.

So let's focus instead on a couple reasons why he might actually be able to pull it off.

Lots of capital sloshing around

Musk's take-private of Tesla would be unprecedented.

But so is the amount of capital available for investment right now — a byproduct of the ultra-low interest rate environment the decade following the financial crisis.

Private equity shops having been accumulating record amounts of dry powder as funding remains plentiful while smart deals are comparatively scarce. Pitchbook estimated in March that PE funds had amassed nearly a trillion in undeployed funds .

Sovereign wealth funds and other large backers, such as Japanese investor SoftBank, have billions in cash to throw around and the appetite to do so, too.

A market ripe with cash looking to be invested is ideal for Tesla's charismatic leader.

"Right now there is so much money sloshing around the system that has no place to go," Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School, told Business Insider.

As McGrath sees it, there are two types of Tesla investors: Those who view the company as just another car company, akin to Ford or General Motors. These tend to be the skeptics.

Then there are those who believe the company is on the cutting edge of batteries, energy transmission, and renewable energy and that "owning Tesla is a front-seat ticket to whatever the future holds."

An investment like Musk is seeking would carry a lot of risk given the rich price tag, but for those in the latter camp who believe Tesla offers incredible upside, that may be a bet worth making "if you've got nothing else to do with that cash."

Forget about the debt

Many have pointed out that the math on a leveraged buyout for Tesla looks dicey. The company doesn't generate enough free cash flow to justify massive amounts of additional debt burden, which would create crushing interest payments for company.

Given the cash-flow pressures and the ongoing Model 3 ramp-up, "adding as much as $50 billion of net debt to the capital structure would clearly intensify the outcomes of such an action," Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote.

"Given Tesla's financials, we don't believe lenders would sign up to support the deal," RBC's Joseph Spak added.

But people shouldn't be viewing this as a potential LBO, according to David Erickson, a lecturer at the Wharton School.

The deal would instead be a debt-light transaction focused on converting existing public shareholders into private shareholders, and then raising enough additional equity to cash out the shareholders that want to exit.

"What it would have to be, predominantly, is an equity take out," said Erickson, who spent 25 years on Wall Street, including several years as the global co-head of equity capital markets at Barclays . "They would have to come up with enough cash to monetize whoever doesn't want to stay in. Most of that I would assume would be equity related."

Getting a large chunk of existing shareholders to convert isn't that far-fetched. Large mutual funds have grown increasingly willing to invest in promising private companies.

As Musk himself has pointed out, Fidelity, the third-largest Tesla shareholder with an 8% stake, has already invested in private tech companies, including the likes Uber, Blue Apron, and his own SpaceX.

T. Rowe Price, the second-largest shareholder with a 9% stake, has as well .

While funds that hold Tesla stock in their publicly traded indexes would be different, they could potentially cash out and shift their investment to a different arm of the company.

The unknowable question at this point is how many shareholders would want to exit, and how much Tesla would need to raise to cash them out.

"Let's assume $20 billion is required. Is there somebody going to write equity checks for $20 billion?" Erickson asked, noting that Japanese investor SoftBank could be a possibility, as could a sovereign wealth fund.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son held talks with Musk about a potential investment in 2017, though a deal failed to materialize and discussions are no longer active, Bloomberg reported Wednesday .

Musk has assured us the funding has been secured.

And it's quite possible it has.

Don't sleep on the Saudis

Who has that kind of money laying around?

As previously mentioned, private equity funds have mammoth amounts of capital to deploy. However, they tend to prefer companies that already generate gobs of cash rather than those that are still rapidly burning it as they carve out a business model.

A large private investor or a sovereign wealth fund are considered more likely candidates, with many suggesting the aforementioned SoftBank and the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia as potential suitors.

The Saudis could make for a particularly good fit.

Under the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country has been trying to reduce its dependence on its vast oil reserves and diversify its income streams. The much ballyhooed initial public offering of state oil giant Saudi Aramco has yet to materialize as a solution .

"The Saudi angle is interesting to me. Their existential problem is their whole economy is based on oil," McGrath said.

Tesla's rich price could seem justifiable to the Saudis if they believe Tesla isn't just car company, but rather a bet on the future that hedges their oil riches with a "window into batteries and renewable energy," McGrath said.

And there's evidence that of the two types of Tesla investors that McGrath highlights, the Saudis are Musk believers: The Financial Times reported Tuesday that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund had acquired a nearly 5% stake in Tesla.

Would they be willing add substantially to that stake? Or would several other large players need to step up as well?

Musk has a great track record of wooing big investors to back his projects. Even so, it still won't be easy.

"He'll have to convince an awful lot of people with very deep pockets," McGrath said.

Only 12 Tesla solar roofs were connected to the grid in California as of May 31, Reuters reports.

The publication said Tesla has faced delays in its efforts to ramp up production of its solar roof tiles due to assembly-line issues at its Buffalo, New York, factory and the challenges involved in meeting CEO Elon Musk's aesthetic expectations.

Tesla declined to comment on the number of solar roofs it has installed. A Tesla representative said the company is ramping up solar roof production and will increase the rate of production near the end of this year.

The representative referred Business Insider to a comment Musk made during the company's second-quarter earnings call in which he said there are "several hundred homes with the solar roof on them." The representative said that number includes homes that are in the installation process or are scheduling an installation, in addition to homes where installation has been completed.

During the call, Musk said the solar roof testing process is time-consuming.

"It's quite a long validation program for a roof which is going to last for 30, 40, 50 years," he said.

Tesla's solar roof — which consists of a series of solar panels that resemble roof tiles and are meant to cover a customer's entire roof — is a major selling point for the company. It was designed to be more aesthetically pleasing than typical solar panels and more durable than traditional roof tile materials like clay, slate, and terra cotta.

Tesla began taking reservations for the solar roof in May 2017 and said installations would begin that summer, but the first installations for customers who weren't Tesla employees didn't begin until April 2018.

In its first-quarter earnings report this year, Tesla said it anticipated a significant increase in solar roof production during the second half of the year.

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Twitter's Jack Dorsey made a brief appearance on the Sean Hannity Show on Wednesday.

The Twitter CEO called in to Hannity's radio show in the wake of recent accusations of shadow banning right-wing users, and after facing criticism for choosing to allow Alex Jones to remain on the platform, after tech giants like Facebook, Youtube, and Apple removed Jones from their services.

"We do not shadow ban according to political ideology, or viewpoint, or content" Dorsey said on the call with Hannity, reiterating much of what he's publicly said in the past on the topic.

After some prominent Republicans weren't showing up in Twitter's drop-down search results, many were quick to accuse Twitter of 'shadow banning,' even President Trump. Twitter explained this as an error , and said the accounts weren't purposefully left out of search results and had always been available, even during the time when the bug was active.

Dorsey also spoke about Twitter's process of deciding whether to suspend specific users, but didn't stray far from the company's previous talking points.

"We have to really understand what the context of the conversation is," Dorsey said. "Some cultural contexts enable some speech that other cultural contexts don't," and added that algorithms and humans both have trouble always getting those contexts right.

On Tuesday, Dorsey took to Twitter to explain the company's decision to let Alex Jones stay .

Listen to Dorsey's full conversation with Hannity here .

Details continue to trickle out about Google's work on a search engine built specifically to appease the Chinese government, which keeps a tight grip on the flow of information in that country.

To refine the search engine, Google engineers relied on samples of search queries obtained from 265.com, a Chinese-based web directory that Google acquired in 2008, the Intercept reported Wednesday .

It was the Intercept that broke the news last week, that Google was building a search engine that complied with China's strict ban on certain web sites and search terms. The move would be a reversal of a 2010 decision by the company to pull search operations out of China rather than censor information.

The apparent flip-flop brought heaps of criticism on Google's leadership, from politicians, media pundits, and even some employees. Earlier this year, Google appeared to put some distance between itself and the military when it promised never to use artificial intelligence to build weapons or cause harm.

Many people asked why Google refused to work with the US military but was seeking to help a communist government supress free speech. One group that wasn't critical of Google's decision was the Chinese government. Chinese state media welcomed Google back to the country, saying things will be fine as long as the company follows the law, according to a story in The Washington Post .

Right now, Google.com and some of the companies other services, such as YouTube are not accessible in China, but 265.com is not blocked, the Intercept reported.

"It appears that Google," the Intercept wrote, "has used 265.com as a de facto honeypot for market research, storing information about Chinese users' searches before sending them along to Baidu (Google's largest competitor in China)."

Google did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

The next step after smartphones is almost certainly some form of augmented reality — at least, that's what investors believe, to the point where they've pumped over $2.3 billion into Magic Leap, a Florida-based startup that creates AR headsets.

For years, Magic Leap has raised astronomical rounds of funding from the likes of Google, Alibaba, Fidelity, and JPMorgan. And on Wednesday morning, after years of hype and fundraising, Magic Leap released its first product: the Magic Leap One Creator Edition .

It includes a headset, a controller, and a corresponding computer (the circular thing on the left in the picture above). The idea is simple: It's a wearable computer.

The Magic Leap One headset, known as "Lightwear," debuted earlier this year. Magic Leap

Looking through Magic Leap One's "Lightwear" glasses, you can manage your email, watch YouTube videos, or do whatever other stuff you'd do on a smartphone or computer. Instead of on a screen, it's projected into the world around you.

You know the movie "Minority Report"? It's kind of old at this point, but if you've seen it, you may remember Tom Cruise using a computer essentially projected into the world in front of him.

"Minority Report" came out in 2002, when Tom Cruise was just 40. Unlike Tom Cruise, Magic Leap requires a headset to see the computer. Twentieth Century Fox / Dreamworks SKG

Magic Leap's headset is similar, and it goes where you go. But there's a huge difference between what Magic Leap is promising and what it's offering.

This line in one hands-on with the headset, from CNET's Scott Stein , says it all: "The display's small field of view doesn't cover everything you see in the room."

Simply put, Magic Leap's headset offers a viewing window into an "augmented" reality, rather than fully engulfing users in that reality.

Imagine a window-sized rectangle in the middle of your view, through which you can see various things — your emails floating in mid-air, or an NBA game running on a floating screen, or whatever other stuff you'd normally do on a smartphone or a computer. That's what it's like using Magic Leap One. It's like looking through a window into a digital world, but the edges of it disappear the moment you turn your head.

It turns out, that feels about as natural as it sounds.

"Not being able to see a fuller view of the room's virtual objects is a serious drawback," Stein said. "Sometimes I lose track of things I can't see, and require sound to help me track where the augmented things are hiding, and where to turn." Stein wasn't alone in his criticism — every one of the handful of previews Magic Leap One issued the same concern.

It's the same problem that Microsoft's similarly futuristic AR headset, HoloLens, suffers from; using HoloLens feels like looking through a window into a different world rather than moving into one.

Stein makes a similar comparison: "It's not all that fundamentally different from the HoloLens," he wrote. "The Magic Leap One feels better in terms of display, controls, graphics and immersiveness ... Still, though, there are significant drawbacks to Magic Leap's AR hardware, mostly in terms of its limited field of view."

Microsoft's HoloLens, left, and the Magic Leap One "Lightwear." Microsoft / Magic Leap

Seeing only what's directly in the middle of your vision while wearing a headset is one of HoloLens' biggest limitation, and it ends up feeling like a tease of something amazing.

When I last wore the HoloLens, it told me where to walk by painting arrows on the floor in front of my eyes.

The proof of concept there is obvious — imagine wearing a simple pair of glasses that offered Google Maps within your vision. Amazing!

But so are the limitations. Magic Leap One and HoloLens can't project anything into your peripheral vision, nor can they get anywhere near close to filling the field of vision of an average person.

This is tremendously meaningful in ways that are inherently human, like seeing something moving out of the corner of your eye and being able to shift attention accordingly. It's only after you limit your field of vision that it feels so integral to sight, but it really is — try walking around for a few minutes with your hands held up to your eyes, binoculars-style, and see how it goes.

This is one of the largest limitations of all augmented/mixed reality at the moment, and Magic Leap One is no different. Subsequent models of Magic Leap's hardware are said to expand the field of view, but in reality it's clear that it needs to fill your field of view — or at least come close enough to not feel like you're looking through a window.

When that future comes, augmented-reality products will come much closer to delivering what they promise. But, for now, they're just very impressive computer glasses.

In the San Francisco Bay Area housing market, it's not uncommon to find fire-gutted properties listed for a cool $2 million or a 1-acre dirt lot selling for $15 million.

But it seems the most overheated and competitive real estate market in the nation has finally seen something it's not used to: a rare 14.73-acre undeveloped waterfront chunk of a peninsula listed for $37 million. And that's excluding home construction costs.

The forested bay front property, known as Bluff Point, at 2800 Paradise Drive in Tiburon, California, sits on the end of the Tiburon Peninsula and spans a whopping 2,000 square feet of shoreline. It offers its future owners an unrivaled bayside oasis, complete with private sandy beaches and views of the Golden Gate Bridge, just an hour from downtown San Francisco.

The future owners of the waterfront property will have access to private sandy beaches.Golden Gate Sotheby's International Realty/YouTube

The acreage is about 45 minutes by car from downtown San Francisco, though sadly it looks like views of the glistening city lights won't be seen from the property. Angel Island State Park sits squarely between Bluff's Point and downtown.

You can also reach it via a 45-minute ferry ride to Tiburon. From the ferry's drop off point to Bluff Point is a seven-minute drive.

That commute would be even further if you're coming from south of the city, from Silicon Valley, which is a strong possibility considering the island's price tag and opulence would attract the region's wealthy tech clientele.

According to the listing , property plans are approved for a 15,000-square-foot main residence, an estimated 2,200-square-foot guest house and a 700-square-foot "caretaker's cottage." And if the listing in and of itself wasn't rare enough, the property's ownership has only changed once in the last 100 years.

It'll change once more when the land finally sells, though its 532 days spent listed on Zillow doesn't exactly spell a promising forecast. Still, it's the ultimate private beach paradise nestled in the tech capital of the world. What tech bigwig wouldn't jump at that?

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. YouTube

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Tuesday.

1. Tech giants banned conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from their platforms, but his InfoWars app is still available through Apple's App Store . Apple banned InfoWars from its podcast service, but the App Store doesn't have the same guidelines around hate themes.

2. Google is rolling out the latest version of the Android operating system to Pixel and Essential Phone users . But Android 9.0 only includes a few features at launch, with the rest coming in the fall.

3. Twitter said Alex Jones and InfoWars don't violate their hate speech policy, and their accounts remain active on the platform for now, according to CNBC . The company said it will take action if it needs to.

4. Facebook has reportedly been in talks with banks about accessing users' financial data and integrating it into its platform . The report has sparked immediate outrage from critics and privacy activists, who fear the Silicon Valley tech firm is attempting to gobble up ever-more information.

5. MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe told Business Insider the mission of the company now is to focus on the "occasional moviegoer ." That's after the troubled cinema subscription firm introduced a bunch of changes, including capping the number of films people can see per month.

6. YouTube managers have spoken to San Bruno city officials about beefing up office security at headquarters, a city development director told Business Insider . That's after a shooting on April 3 that injured three people.

7. Uber is facing a a $650 million class-action lawsuit from London black cab drivers . Thirteen trade unions and London cabbie representatives are coming together to pursue High Court action against Uber for loss of earnings.

8. The FCC has admitted that its comment system around net neutrality plans was never hacked, despite claiming otherwise at the time . Chairman Ajit Pai blamed the previous administration for providing "inaccurate" information.

9. Apple is reportedly planning to open retail stores in India next year, in an effort to stop losing ground in the country . According to Bloomberg, Apple is also considering offering holiday-style discounts all year round.

10. French ride-sharing unicorn BlaBlaCar has acquired Russian rival BeepCar from its owner Mail.ru, according to VentureBeat . BlaBlaCar will continue operating BeepCar, and will pay Mail.ru to promote its services.

Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.

YouTube managers have spoken to San Bruno city officials about beefing up office security at headquarters, David Woltering, the city's community development director, told Business Insider on Monday.

Woltering and his staff have had discussions with YouTube representatives "about various measures to better secure points of access to their facilities here in San Bruno," he said in a statement. "These measures include fencing, increased surveillance, and improved access controls."

Woltering was responding to questions posed to him last week when the city unveiled development plans for the area surrounding YouTube's headquarters. YouTube seeks to expand its office space, add thousands of workers, as well as build more parking facilities. The company hopes to break ground sometime next year, Woltering said. It's not yet clear if YouTube will make some of the sought-after security upgrades part of this expansion.

David Woltering (left), the community development director for the city of San Bruno, discusses plans to expand the area around YouTube's HQ. Greg Sandoval/Business Insider

YouTube was not immediately available for comment.

Woltering said that YouTube began bolstering security at the San Bruno campus in the form of adding larger numbers of "on-site security personnel," four months ago, immediately after Nasim Aghdam arrived there on April 3 armed with a 9 mm and opened fire on employees, wounding three. She later killed herself.

Aghdam's attack is believed to be the first shooting at YouTube but employees have received numerous death threats going back more than a decade, Business Insider reported after the shooting.

As YouTube's popularity has grown and as some video creators have become more dependent on the ad revenue their clips generate, the service is often accused of harboring a wide range of biases against one group or another. Police have said that Aghdam was a disgruntled YouTube video creator who believed the video service was discriminating against her because of her strong views on animal rights.

On Monday, fans of political commentator and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones took to online message boards to claim YouTube was part of a left-wing plot to silence conservative voices. YouTube had followed Facebook, Spotify and Apple in removing Jones content from its site for violating their terms of service.

"Alex Jones and Infowars are a national treasure!," wrote one Twitter user. "YouTube, Google, and Fakebook are cowardly leftist criminals."

Pinduoduo CEO Colin Huang. YouTube/Bloomberg

In just three and half years, Chinese e-commerce platform Pinduoduo grew from a burgeoning direct-to-consumer delivery service into a multibillion-dollar company with a successful IPO under its belt. When the Shanghai-based startup went public in late July, its stock soared to nearly $27 a share — 41% higher than the company originally anticipated — making Pinduoduo worth nearly $24 billion.

Its remarkable growth is the result of a confluence of factors, says Ron Cao, partner of Shanghai-based venture firm Sky9 Capital. Cao has helped oversee much of Pinduoduo's growth since his firm led the e-commerce platform's Series B funding round in 2015.

At the time of Sky9's investment, Cao said Pinduoduo was a fast growing e-commerce platform primarily focused on selling affordable, perishable fruits.

But with a fresh cash injection of $110 million from a number of investors including Lightspeed, Sequoia, and Tencent, Pinduoduo rapidly expanded its purview: Now, the site sells nearly every product imaginable ( breast enhancement cream, smartphones, mangoes, toilet paper, and men's loafers to name only a few) along with fashion goods, sports items, books, and electronics.

Pinduoduo's CEO, former Google engineer Colin Huang, has described his company as "a combination of Disneyland and Costco" that sells low-cost products to shoppers through bulk suppliers. Once a group of people opt in to buy an item, the platform ships it out directly from the supplier at a competitive price.

In an interview with Business Insider, Cao broke down how Pinduoduo became such an instant success:

Dave Bautista is taking his displeasure with James Gunn's firing to a new level.

The "Guardians of the Galaxy" actor told Short List that he would ask Marvel to release him from his contract on the third movie if it didn't use Gunn's script. Disney fired Gunn last month from "Guardians 3" over offensive tweets from years ago that conservative personalities resurfaced.

"Where I'm at right now is that if [Marvel] don't use that script, then I'm going to ask them to release me from my contract, cut me out or recast me," Bautista said. "I'd be doing James a disservice if I didn't."

He added that he spoke to costar Chris Pratt after Gunn was fired, but Pratt "wanted time to pray and figure it out."

"But I was more like: f--- this," Bautista said. "This is bulls---. James is one of the kindest, most decent people I've met."

Gunn had recently finished the script for the movie and was set to begin filming later this year before being fired.

Bautista has been the most outspoken out of the entire "Guardians" cast about Gunn's firing, and tweeted over the weekend that it was "nauseating" to work for Disney now.

Bautista, Pratt, and the rest of the "Guardians" cast released a letter last week in support of Gunn, but, according to Variety , Disney does not have any plans to re-hire him.

"Guardians of the Galaxy 3" is scheduled to come to theaters in 2020.

NASA launched its most powerful planet-hunting telescope to date on April 18, but it's taken the spacecraft months of maneuvering to reach a crucial sweet spot.

On July 25, TESS — short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — finally slipped into a unique orbit between Earth and the moon. The telescope is now starting to scan 85% of the night sky , stare down distant solar systems, and hunt for small, rocky, Earth-like planets.

The two-year observation of about 200,000 stars may potentially reveal thousands of new planets within about 200 light-years of Earth — a cosmic stone's throw away from our world.

"[W]e know there are more planets than stars in our universe," Paul Hertz, NASA's director of astrophysics, said in a press release about TESS. "I look forward to the strange, fantastic worlds we're bound to discover."

Sara Seager , the deputy science director for TESS and an astrophysicist at MIT, told Business Insider that it may not take TESS long to find its first planet candidates.

"The first science orbit of data (13.7 days) is coming down tomorrow and the TESS Science Team will begin planet hunting soon after that," Seager said in an email on Monday.

Seager and others expect to find dozens of Earth-like worlds in the coming years, perhaps doubling scientists' inventory of potentially habitable exoplanets .

The research may also lead to the first looks at the atmospheres of small, rocky alien worlds , and maybe — just maybe — the first indirect evidence that extraterrestrial life could exist beyond our solar system.

Why TESS is NASA's most powerful search yet for alien Earths

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite at Kennedy Space Center in Florida before launch.NASA After SpaceX launched TESS, the car-size spacecraft spent more than two months winding out to an orbit between Earth in the moon. Researchers then checked out the spacecraft (and took some photos of a passing comet ) remotely before officially kicking off observations.

In many ways, TESS is an extension to the biggest boon in NASA's search for exoplanets, called the Kepler space telescope.

Kepler launched in March 2009 and stared at a small patch of space for more than three years. This enabled the telescope to record very subtle dips in the brightness of stars — a telltale sign that a planet is passing in front.

In two multi-year missions, Kepler has found nearly 4,000 planets . This led scientists to an astonishing realization: There could be about 2 trillion planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone, or some 10 per star.

Kepler also found about 50 rocky, Earth-size worlds that may be habitable. A Google artificial intelligence algorithm has since sifted through the data and possibly detected even more .

But Kepler is on its last leg, as it has nearly run out of fuel (though it did recently wake up from a potentially deadly nap to beam back new data).

TESS will use a technique to find planets that's similar to Kepler's approach, yet it will be an eminently more powerful mission. If Kepler's search area was like a shotgun blast, then that of TESS is an exploding grenade or bomb.

The TESS exoplanet search zone compared to that of the Kepler Mission.Zach Berta-Thompson/NASA

TESS will conduct its hunt by taking pictures of a different sector of the sky every 27 days. All of the sectors overlap, enough in some parts to provide about a year's worth of transit observations.

The spacecraft will use its unique vantage in space and four cameras to stitch together a huge map of about 200,000 stars — about 33% more than Kepler studied. The observation area for TESS will also be about 350 times as large as Kepler's and about 15 times as close.

"TESS will discover thousands of planets and is further specially designed to find a pool of small planets transiting small stars," a website for the project explains.

Researchers working on TESS expect to find at least 50 rocky, Earth-size worlds for scientists to scrutinize — about double what Kepler has found. However, TESS is likely find many more than that, as it is viewing more stars (and Kepler defied its creators' predictions).

However, Seager said it's "anyone's guess" when TESS' first newly discovered worlds will be confirmed.

"Finding planet candidates is just the first step in a lengthy follow-up process to discriminate between actual planets," she said.

That follow-up has to account for other factors that could skew the data, such as two-star systems or any peculiarities with the spacecraft's cameras.

Once TESS' discoveries are confirmed, however, they could prove vital to the work of NASA's upcoming and powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is scheduled to launch after March 2021.

The next-generation observatory will rival the abilities of the Hubble Space Telescope and will be the largest observatory ever launched into space. JWST will take pictures in infrared light, which is invisible to human eyes yet perfect for studying planets through clouds of gas and dust in space that typically obscure distant worlds.

How TESS may lead to the discovery of life beyond the solar system

NASA

TESS' fresh catalog of nearby and likely Earth-size alien worlds will give JWST many compelling targets to study in detail.

JWST might even sample light from an exoplanet's atmosphere to look for indirect evidence of life.

The ability to study the air supply of a distant Earth-size planet is made more possible by yet another telescope: the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), one of the two largest ground-based observatories under construction today.

Slated to open in 2023, GMT is designed to resolve details four times finer than JWST. This may help astronomers study exoplanets in ways what they've been dreaming of since the first confirmed discovery of an alien solar system in 1992 .

"As a planet passes in front of its star, a large telescope on the ground, like the GMT, can use spectra to search for the fingerprints of molecules in the planetary atmosphere," Patrick McCarthy, a leader of the project, said in a previous statement to Business Insider.

Spectra refers to the blend of colors in starlight. When that light passes through a planet's atmosphere, chemicals absorb and remit certain parts — leaving a smoking-gun pattern of their presence.

Artist's representation of the seven giant mirrors installed in the Giant Magellan Telescope.Giant Magellan Telescope – GMTO Corporation

For example, if a planet's atmosphere were to have a mix of oxygen and methane gases — similar to Earth's atmosphere — that could be a "fingerprint" of life's presence on an exoplanet.

McCarthy also said large and powerful new telescopes like GMT might be able to deduce weather systems and surface features of planets located trillions of miles away.

With some luck, we might even be able to fly tiny, high-speed spacecraft past the most promising planets to get a closer look.