All posts tagged: Elon

Pentagon Disturbed as Its Fleet of Drones Is Left Bobbing in the Ocean When Elon Musk’s Starlink Fails

Pentagon Disturbed as Its Fleet of Drones Is Left Bobbing in the Ocean When Elon Musk’s Starlink Fails

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Two dozen unmanned surface vessels — autonomous boat drones, basically — were left floating in the Pacific ocean after a massive outage of SpaceX’s Starlink internet service left them adrift. That event, first reported by Reuters, left the experimental robots disconnected and bobbing in the ocean for nearly an hour off the coast of California. It was one of several Pentagon experiments disrupted by the Starlink blackout, according to Reuters. That global outage left millions of Starlink customers in the dark back in August of 2025, dealing a blow to the company’s image as an always-on satellite internet provider. While service was eventually restored, the incident left customers frustrated and analysts concerned. According to the company website, Starlink offers “high-speed, low-latency internet with more than 99.9 percent average uptime and reliable connectivity around the globe.” That remaining 0.1 percent clearly represents a lingering pain point, though. Pentagon officials, who are increasingly leveraging Elon Musk’s pet internet company to …

NAACP Sues Elon Over His Noxious AI Data Center

NAACP Sues Elon Over His Noxious AI Data Center

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Elon Musk may have yet another day in court, at least if the NAACP has anything to say about it. The oldest civil rights organization in the United States has named Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, in a new lawsuit, alleging that the turbines powering its “Colossus” data center violate the Clean Air Act of 1970. For months, xAI has used 27 unpermitted gas turbines — each about the size of a bus — to power the data center used to run the chatbot Grok. The practice has had horrible consequences for the Black, working class neighborhood where the turbines are located, whose residents are stuck breathing xAI’s noxious exhaust. According to the Guardian, the Mississippi lawsuit seeks to force xAI to stop using the turbines without permits, plus civil penalties to cover legal fees. On top of spewing nitrogen dioxide, a gas that causes irreversible respiratory damage over time, the turbines emit a horrendous sound that’s made …

Elon Musk Is Banking on Fanboys

Elon Musk Is Banking on Fanboys

Published by Sam Flores

Elon Musk likes to do everything on a grand scale. When he takes SpaceX public in the coming months, it will likely be the biggest initial public offering in history. Although SpaceX’s recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing for the IPO was confidential, indications are that the conglomerate is looking for a valuation of $2 trillion. That would instantly make it the sixth-most-valuable U.S. company. By conventional standards, SpaceX isn’t worth anything close to $2 trillion. The company is in fact relatively small and losing money. Yet there is little doubt that Musk will get the valuation he wants. He is one of the finest corporate dream weavers we’ve ever seen, and he has a dedicated following of fanboy investors who will happily buy whatever he’s selling. SpaceX has a collection of interesting businesses—its rocket business was responsible for more than 80 percent of all commercial rocket launches in the United States last year, its healthily profitable Starlink division provides high-speed satellite-internet service to more than 9 million subscribers, and after a merger in February, …

Elon Musk Says He Could Definitely Build a Public Transit System Better Than Anything In China If He Tried

Elon Musk Says He Could Definitely Build a Public Transit System Better Than Anything In China If He Tried

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Remember the Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunneling venture that was supposed to revolutionize underground transit? Better yet, do you remember anything it’s actually done, aside from landing on a slightly amusing name? Well, despite its short list of accomplishments, Musk is insisting it could easily build something that puts one of the world’s most impressive public transit projects to shame — if he actually tried, that is. On Thursday, he took to X to weigh in on reports that the projected cost of California’s infamously mired high speed rail line project is set to soar to $126 billion. When one commentator suggested that you could use that $126 billion to “subsidize free flights between LA and San Francisco at current demand levels” for up to 200 years worth of travel, Musk suggested he could do one better. “The @BoringCompany could build a Hyperloop tunnel from downtown SF to downtown LA for <5% of this cost,” Musk proclaimed, “and it …

Beeple’s Elon Musk–Robot Dog Roams San Francisco in Viral Stunt

Beeple’s Elon Musk–Robot Dog Roams San Francisco in Viral Stunt

Published by José Betancourt

You couldn’t possibly have thought that you’d seen the last of Beeple‘s grotesque robot dogs? Last appearing in Art Basel Miami Beach‘s new Zero10 digital art section in December, Regular Animals is now on the loose in San Francisco. So, if you’ll permit me, who let the dogs out? The answer to that age-old question is none other than Palo Alto’s Node Foundation, a digital arts nonprofit and exhibition space that will open a mid-career survey for Beeple, a.k.a. Mike Winkelmann, on April 18. Among the works on the checklist for “INFINITE_LOOP” are Human One, Beeple’s first “kinetic sculpture”—purchased by ARTnews Top 200 collector Ryan Zurrer for $29 million in 2021 for his 1OF1 collection—Regular Animals, and a comprehensive presentation of “Everydays,” his ongoing series of daily drawings. (The NFT Everydays: The First 5,000 Days sold for a record $69 million in 2021 to crypto fund Metapurse, and largely is credited with setting off that year’s NFT craze.) Related Articles While Regular Animals as presented at Art Basel featured robot dogs bearing the likeness of …

5 Burning Questions About Elon Musk’s Terafab Chip Partnership with Intel

5 Burning Questions About Elon Musk’s Terafab Chip Partnership with Intel

Published by skeptic

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said Tuesday that the chipmaker will “work closely” with Elon Musk to support the billionaire entrepreneur’s Terafab project, a potentially massive chip development and fabrication operation that will be jointly developed by SpaceX and Tesla. A photo posted by Intel’s official X account shows the two executives shaking hands last weekend in front of a large Intel sign. Musk’s 1-terawatt, ultra-high performance chip fabrication facility, which may span multiple locations, could cost billions of dollars. “Terafab represents a step change in how silicon logic, memory and packaging will get built in the future,” Tan said in a social media post. “Intel is proud to be a partner and work closely with Elon on this highly strategic project.” Exactly how Tan and Musk plan to execute such an ambitious venture remains unclear. Musk has been talking about the need to develop a so-called Terafab for months, viewing the endeavor as a way to produce the vast number of chips his companies will need for cars, robots, and data centers. Some chip industry …

Intel signs on to Elon Musk’s Terafab chips project

Intel signs on to Elon Musk’s Terafab chips project

Published by skeptic

Intel will join SpaceX and Tesla in an effort to build a new U.S. semiconductor factory in Texas, although the scope of its contributions are unclear. “Our ability to design, fabricate, and package ultra-high-performance chips at scale will help accelerate Terafab’s aim to produce 1 TW/year of compute to power future advances in AI and robotics,” Intel said in a corporate post on X. Intel hasn’t shared any more information. Elon Musk announced in March a team-up between the two tech companies he leads to develop chips for AI compute, satellites, and SpaceX’s mooted space data center and to support the possibility of autonomous Tesla vehicles and robots. However, building a chip fab is one of the most difficult and expensive corporate infrastructure projects out there, typically requiring years of time and more than $20 billion to create a facility with a huge clean room for thousands of ultra-precise machines to carve silicon. It wasn’t obvious how SpaceX and Tesla, two companies with no experience in the sector, could team up to execute the project …

Elon Musk Secretly Shared His Number One Priority at Tesla and May We Just Say: Yikes

Elon Musk Secretly Shared His Number One Priority at Tesla and May We Just Say: Yikes

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Tesla’s executives might love Elon Musk, lavishing him with massive pay packages to beg him to stay on, but that doesn’t mean he loves them back. A recent interview with Tesla’s former president of global sales, delivery, and service Jon McNeill by the Washington Post revealed new details about Musk’s personal motivations as CEO of Tesla. In one particularly bizarre moment, McNeill recalls that Musk once declared that his ideal work week at the electric carmaker involved as little work as possible — so he can maximize his time playing with rocket ships. “When I asked [Musk] what success looked like,” McNeill told WaPo, “he said, ‘success is getting me down to one day a week at Tesla so I can get back to my first love, which is rockets.’” That singular goal, McNeill explained in a recently released book called “The Algorithm,” would form Musk’s true north during the executive’s three-year stint as Tesla president. Other issues …

Maybe it’s time to give Elon Musk control of the sun

Maybe it’s time to give Elon Musk control of the sun

Published by Sam Flores

The world of finance is creaming its pants over the imminent public offering for SpaceX, Elon Musk‘s space-flight operation. It might be the largest such offering in history, according to Axios, which delivered the news under the headline “SpaceX’s monster IPO is unlike anything we’ve seen.” SpaceX is predicted to become the first company to debut on the stock market already valued at more than not just $1 trillion, which is in itself a record, but $2 trillion — instantly dwarfing the wealth of Walmart, Meta or ExxonMobil. In fact, if SpaceX’s pitch goes through, it would rank behind only five companies in the S&P 500 Index — Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon. It will also, of course, cement Musk, who is already worth some $817 billion, as history’s first-ever trillionaire. A trillion is an inconceivably large number — for that matter, so is a billion, which is a thousand million, while a trillion is a thousand billion. Yes, that’s basic math, but it helps to spell it out, as our feeble primate brains can barely …

Will data centers in space work? Elon Musk says yes : NPR

Will data centers in space work? Elon Musk says yes : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

AFP via Getty Images and NASA/Collage by Emily Bogle/NPR Standing before a friendly crowd in March, Elon Musk laid out his plan for the future of his companies, and it was literally out of this world. Musk announced that his space-launch company, SpaceX, which had recently merged with his artificial intelligence company, xAI, would put data centers into orbit around the Earth. It all comes down to electricity, he explained. “You’re power constrained on Earth,” he said. “Space has the advantage that it’s always sunny.” Musk envisions legions of data-crunching satellites spinning around the planet, powering the AI revolution from above. It’s the perfect pitch for taking SpaceX public. This week, Bloomberg reported that the company had filed documents confidentially to the Securities and Exchange Commission with the goal of listing an initial public offering this summer. Musk also claims it makes financial sense. “I actually think that the cost of deploying AI in space will drop below the cost of terrestrial AI much sooner than most people expect,” he said. “I think it may …