With a refocused Elon Musk at the helm, Tesla is making its move.
The 10th largest company in the world announced strong quarterly results after the bell Wednesday:
Record revenue: $28.1 billion, up 12 percent from a year ago
Record vehicle deliveries: 497,099 cars in Q3, up 7 percent from a year ago
Record free cash flow: $3.99 billion, up 46 percent from a year ago
Record cash pile: $41.6 billion in cash and investments, up 23.7 percent from a year ago
Despite those records, the stock dipped as Tesla missed estimates for $0.54 adjusted earnings per share, coming in at $0.50.
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After a volatile election season and Musk’s high-profile political ventures, Tesla’s cash engine accelerated once again.
The company now has more capital than ever ready to deploy for its pursuits in AI, robotics and energy storage.
Operating margins improved slightly in the third quarter, though they remain below levels seen a year ago.
Still, narrowing margins also reflect Tesla’s transition from a pure-play car company to a vertically-integrated energy and technology leader.
Despite political and tariff-related headwinds, Tesla continues to scale efficiently, as the revenue jump illustrates.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s energy revenue is now growing far faster than its automotive, which is helping off-set thinner margins on its still-growing core vehicle business.
Tesla is also rebounding from its weaker quarters following President Trump’s election win, as car sales dropped by double-digits in the first half of 2025.
With its after-hours choppiness Wednesday, the stock has climbed more than 15 percent so far in 2025.
That’s weaker than every Magnificent 7 name except Amazon and Apple.
Tesla’s board is set to vote on Musk’s new compensation at the company’s annual meeting on November 6, which could be worth $1 trillion over the next decade.
That pay package, according to Tesla, will keep Musk focused and committed to the company, and it’s contingent on unprecedented and unrealistic milestones that no other executive would be able to achieve for the business.
“I think it’s important to emphasize that Tesla really is the leader in real world AI,” Musk said on the earnings call.
“No one can do what we can do with real world AI,” he added. “I think that Tesla has the highest intelligence density of any AI out there in the car.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is facing the possibility of becoming the world’s first trillionaire if investors vote in favor of an unprecedented $1 trillion pay package on November 6.
In the company’s third quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Musk made the case that he wasn’t actually in it for the money but that he needed the voting power that comes along with it.
“I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army if I don’t have at least a strong influence,” Musk said, adding that he is looking for voting power in the “mid-20s approximately.” Musk currently has around 13.5% voting power, and the proposed plan would see him add 12% to that stake over the next decade.
Proxy advisors Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis have urged Tesla investors to reject the plan due to potential decrease in company value and concerns over the details of the proposal.
In the earnings call on Wednesday, Musk called both “corporate terrorists.”
The “robot army” in question that Musk is fighting for is the company’s Optimus robot project. In the earnings call, Musk said that Tesla would be unveiling Optimus V3s early next year, and called the robots “an infinite money glitch,” while making bold claims about their potential.
The Tesla chief said that the robots can achieve “probably 5x the productivity of a person per year,” and that one would make for an “incredible surgeon.”
“It won’t even seem like a robot. It’ll seem like a person in a robot suit,” Musk said. “It’ll seem so real that you’ll need to, like, poke it, I think, to believe that it’s actually a robot.”
The billionaire is known for his optimistic claims and timelines that don’t always play out as he expects.
The company delivered a record number of vehicles this past quarter, but that was not enough to save profits, which Tesla executives claim were dented in part by tariffs set by President Trump (whom Musk campaigned hard to get elected).
With the EV tax credit now also gone, Tesla is looking down a path were there won’t be as many record vehicle deliveries. Possibly prompted by this, the company has increasingly shifted its focus to AI and robotics to drive value for the company, and Wednesday’s earnings call was yet another example of that.
Musk’s ambitious self-driving plans
Tesla is expecting to get rid of safety drivers in its robotaxis, “at least in large parts of Austin by the end of this year,” Musk said in the earnings call.
Tesla currently operates its self-driving robotaxi service in two cities: Austin and San Francisco. In both cities, robotaxis include human safety monitors in case things go awry. Tesla’s robotaxi adventure so far has been riddled with regulatory scrutiny and legal headaches.
The service will also reportedly expand its operations to new locations. Tesla now expects robotaxis to be operational in eight to ten metro areas, including in Nevada, Florida and Arizona, by the end of the year. Those new markets will start off with a safety monitor for at least the first three months or so, Musk said.
Tesla’s biggest competitor in the robotaxi space, Waymo, is operational in five metro areas, and has plans to launch in five more.
Across the automotive world, autonomous vehicles were the hot topic of the day on Wednesday.
The company’s third quarter earnings call took place just hours after competitor GM unveiled plans to debut not just hands-free but also “eyes-off” electric vehicles by 2028, to much fanfare and investor applause. Musk spent most of the call assuring investors that the company’s artificial intelligence and autonomous driving initiatives were scaling “quite massively.”
Musk said that Tesla had achieved “clarity” on unsupervised full self-driving, and now feels confident in expanding Tesla’s production as fast as possible.
“At this point I feel 100% confident that we can solve unsupervised full self-driving at a safety level much greater than any human,” Musk said.
Musk also claimed that the autonomous Teslas will be better than humans at spotting empty parking spots, thanks to 360 degree vision and advanced intelligence.
“I’m confident in saying that Tesla has the highest intelligence density. When you look at the intelligence per gigabyte, I think Tesla AI is probably an order of magnitude better than anyone else,” Musk said.
During his ramblings, the billionaire also claimed that Tesla’s self-driving cars will, in fact, become too intelligent for their own good.
Tesla might be an electric auto maker, but CEO Elon Musk has made clear that he thinks of it as much more: an innovator in artificial intelligence and software, a builder of world-shaking robots. He’s also argued that Tesla should be worth a lot more than it is today: up to $20 trillion, he posted in July, more than five times the current worth of Nvidia.
Musk has also made it clear that he wants to get paid, a lot. In November, Tesla shareholders will vote on the board’s proposal to pay the CEO a remarkable $1 trillion over the next decade. The deal would also increase Musk’s stake in Tesla from 13 percent to a quarter. But Musk would only get that big figure—and the extra control—if he hits a series of ambitious metrics, including 20 million vehicles delivered, 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation, and an $8.5 trillion valuation. And also, 1 million Optimus humanoid robots delivered.
On a call with investors on Wednesday, Musk locked on to that last point to make his most threatening argument for a gigantic payday yet. “My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?” he said. “If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army? Not control, but a strong influence … I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.”
Generally, Musk talks about Tesla’s Optimus project as more of a force for peace than war. He’s said that Optimus will upend the job market and free humanity from the drudgery of work. (“Working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables, instead of buying them from the store,” he posted this week.) Elsewhere on the investor call Wednesday, he said that Tesla’s robots would “actually create a world where there is no poverty, where everyone has access to the finest medical care.”
Optimus, he added, “will be an incredible surgeon, and imagine if everyone had access to an incredible surgeon.” For Tesla, Optimus will be “an infinite money glitch,” Musk said, arguing that everyone will want a humanoid robot who can do their work for them.
Tesla’s record sales quarter has offered the company a reprieve after a terrible start to 2025. But CEO Elon Musk is focused on building a “robot army” and making good on his years-long, unfulfilled promise of self-driving cars — tasks he needs to accomplish if he is to unlock the full value of the $1 trillion compensation package that Tesla wants to award him.
The tension between Tesla’s current automotive-driven business and the AI-centric one that Musk is aiming for has never been more clear.
Tesla delivered a record number of vehicles in the third quarter of 2025, thanks in large part to a rush of customers in the United States who took advantage of the expiring federal EV tax credit. But that record quarter did not lead to greater earnings. In fact, Tesla’s third-quarter profit was still 37% lower than it was in the same quarter last year.
Tesla shipped 497,099 cars in the third quarter, which generated $21.2 billion in automotive revenue — the company’s best revenue figure in more than a year. But Tesla only pulled in a profit of $1.4 billion, up just $200 million from the second quarter of this year, according to a shareholder letter released Wednesday. The record quarter came after an abysmal start to the year for Tesla, which saw sales drop mightily in part because of Musk’s involvement with the Trump administration.
The company explained in the letter that a big increase in operating expenses — 50% higher compared to the third quarter last year — was one of the culprits. That operating expense bump was thanks to spending on AI and other R&D projects, as well as “restructuring” charges of nearly $240 million. Tesla didn’t explain what those restructuring charges were for, but it’s possibly related to the recent decision to shut down the company’s six-year-old Dojo supercomputer project.
Tesla cited tariffs as another drag on profits this past quarter, meaning Musk spent around $300 million to help elect a president who has hurt the company’s business. Tesla’s chief financial officer, Vaibhav Taneja, said on a conference call Wednesday the tariff hit was about $400 million.
“We’re at a critical inflection point for Tesla and our strategy going forward as we bring AI into the real world,” Musk said on the call. Tesla is at the “beginning of scaling, quite massively, Full Self-Driving and Robotaxi, and fundamentally changing the nature of transport,” he said.
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All of this will put even more pressure on the company’s final quarter of the year.
Tesla already needs another record quarter (and then some) if it wants to simply match the number of cars it shipped in 2024 or 2023. The company could get some help from the new slightly cheaper stripped-down versions of the Model 3 and Model Y EVs. But even in that best-case scenario, Tesla is way off the path of 50% year-over-year growth that it once promised to investors and shareholders.
But Musk has spent the last few years trying to get shareholders, investors, employees, and everyone else to look beyond the company’s core business of making and selling cars. He’s bet the future of Tesla on being able to create a vast network of self-driving vehicles that he thinks can challenge Uber. And he thinks the humanoid robot, Optimus, will become the best-selling product ever.
Tesla offered little new info on those programs in Wednesday’s letter. Musk said on the conference call that Tesla may start building the third version of Optimus in the first quarter of 2026. He had once promised to build thousands of the robots by the end of this year, but as The Information has reported, Tesla has run into problems in early production with Optimus.
“Bringing Optimus to market is an incredibly difficult task, to be clear. It’s not like some walk in the park,” Musk said.
But Musk continued Tesla’s gauzy, unspecific claims about how much Optimus will change the world. “You can actually create a world where there is no poverty, where everyone has access to the finest medical care,” he said. “Optimus will be an incredible surgeon.”
The increased focus on AI, robotics, and self-driving cars (including starting production of the two-seater “Cybercab”) will also cost Tesla more next year. Taneja said capital expenditures will increase “substantially” in 2026 thanks to those projects. He also said Tesla has had to increase employee-related spending to stay competitive in the ongoing AI talent war.
Tesla’s third-quarter results come amid the backdrop of the company’s proposal to hand $1 trillion worth of shares to Musk. That plan is up for a vote at the Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in a few weeks. The company — and Musk — are campaigning hard. While advisor groups like ISS and Glass Lewis are recommending against the pay package, it’s most likely going to pass given the overwhelming support from shareholders on previous efforts.
On Wednesday’s call, he reiterated his claim that he cares more about the voting control the compensation package would afford him than the money.
“I just don’t feel comfortable building a robot army here and then being ousted because of some asinine recommendations from ISS and Glass Lewis, who have no friggin’ clue. I mean, those guys are corporate terrorists,” Musk said.
This story has been updated with new information from Tesla’s third-quarter conference call.
Tesla’s Q3 2025 update reports record vehicle deliveries and record energy storage deployments, alongside higher revenue, but earnings pressure persisted due to margin headwinds and a likely pull-forward of demand before U.S. EV tax credits expired in September.
Shares dipped about 1.4% in after-hours trading as investors appeared to brace for softer demand through the remainder of the year.
CEO Elon Musk is expected to give more detail on the company’s quarterly earnings call at 5:30 p.m. Eastern time.
Q3 results
Tesla delivered 497,099 vehicles in Q3 2025, a new quarterly record, with total production at 447,450 units, reflecting inventory drawdown to meet demand surge before tax credit expiry.
Management materials and coverage indicate revenue reached about $28.1 billion, exceeding many previews, while non-GAAP EPS was around 0.50, below year-ago levels as automotive margins remained compressed.
U.S. buyers accelerated purchases ahead of the federal EV tax credit expiration on Sept. 30, boosting Q3 but setting expectations for a potentially softer Q4 demand backdrop, per media and analyst commentary.
Segment performance
Automotive: Record deliveries were led by Model 3/Y at 481,166 deliveries (production 435,826) with “Other Models” at 15,933 deliveries (production 11,624), and about 2% of deliveries under operating lease accounting, pointing to mix and pricing dynamics supporting volume at the expense of margin.
Energy: Storage deployments hit 12.5 GWh, an all-time high, with analysts and coverage noting energy’s role as a stabilizer given higher margins versus automotive during price-competitive periods.
Services/Other: Not detailed numerically in coverage, but typically benefits from fleet growth and software; investors focused more on FSD/AI and energy momentum per previews and media.
Profitability and margins
Third-party coverage highlights earnings pressure despite record revenue, with non-GAAP EPS ~0.50 and commentary that auto gross margins (ex-credits) were likely in the mid-to-high teens, reflecting continued price competition and cost pressures.
The Wall Street Journal noted net income fell about 37% year-over-year, attributing margin compression and one-time demand pull-forward effects tied to tax policy timing, underscoring the near-term profitability challenge.
Consensus previews set expectations around revenue in the mid-to-high $26 billion range and EPS in the mid-0.50s, which Tesla largely met or exceeded on revenue but trailed on profitability, per Electrek and other outlets.
Guidance and outlook themes
Management directed investors to the update letter on the IR site, framing discussion around results and outlook following the tax credit expiration.
Analysts and media emphasized watch items: post-credit demand trajectory, automotive margins, and energy growth durability, with particular attention on how Q4 shapes up after the pull-forward.
Strategic focus remains on AI/FSD and robotaxi initiatives to support long-term valuation; several reports noted investor sensitivity to credible timelines and capability updates in these areas.
Notable context
Tesla confirmed a record quarter for both deliveries and storage deployments, thanking stakeholders and cautioning deliveries and deployments alone are not proxies for full financial performance, with details in the 10-Q to follow.
Investor materials hub lists the Q3 2025 documents and webcast access; several outlets hosted live coverage and recaps of the update letter and call.
Broader coverage connected the quarter’s stock setup to AI narratives and macro/policy dynamics, including the timing around U.S. incentives and investor expectations for autonomy progress
Musk’s earlier warning
In July, CEO Elon Musk cautioned Tesla could face “a few rough quarters” spanning Q4 into the first half of next year as U.S. federal EV tax credits expire and volumes normalize post-pull-forward, a dynamic echoed in Fortune’s reporting on tax-credit-driven demand timing and the risk of a second annual sales decline.
In the last earnings call, Musk reiterated autonomous service coverage could reach about half of the U.S. by year-end pending approvals, even as the current pilot in Austin remains small and supervised; investors are left without concrete milestones.
On AI hardware: Musk previously said Tesla’s next “AI5” inference chip would be so capable it might require performance limits outside the U.S. due to export restrictions, reinforcing the pitch that every Tesla is an AI device even as commercial autonomy metrics remain sparse.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
Duffy also cites “maybe others” getting involved. This refers to a third option. In recent weeks, officials from traditional space companies have been telling Duffy and the chief of staff at the Department of Transportation, Pete Meachum, that they can build an Apollo Lunar Module–like lander within 30 months. Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, favors this government-led approach, sources said.
On Monday, in a statement to Ars, a Lockheed Martin official confirmed that the company was ready if NASA called upon them.
“Throughout this year, Lockheed Martin has been performing significant technical and programmatic analysis for human lunar landers that would provide options to NASA for a safe solution to return humans to the moon as quickly as possible,” said Bob Behnken, vice president of exploration and technology strategy at Lockheed Martin Space. “We have been working with a cross-industry team of companies, and together we are looking forward to addressing Secretary Duffy’s request to meet our country’s lunar objectives.”
NASA would not easily be able to rip up its existing human lander system contracts with SpaceX and Blue Origin, as, especially with the former, much of the funding has already been awarded for milestone payments. Rather, Duffy would likely have to find new funding from Congress. And it would not be cheap. This NASA analysis from 2017 estimates that a cost-plus, sole-source lunar lander would cost $20 billion to $30 billion, or nearly 10 times what NASA awarded to SpaceX in 2021.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk, responding to Duffy’s comments, seemed to relish the challenge posed by industry competitors.
“SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry,” Musk said on the social media site he owns, X. “Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole moon mission. Mark my words.”
The Timing
Duffy’s remarks on television on Monday morning, although significant for the broader space community, also seemed intended for an audience of one—President Trump.
The president appointed Duffy, already leading the Department of Transportation, to lead NASA on an interim basis in July. This came six weeks after the president, for political reasons, rescinded his nomination of billionaire and private astronaut Jared Isaacman to lead the space agency.
If you love paying for things, and you love posting on social media, Elon Musk’s X says it will soon have another exciting opportunity for you: a “marketplace” where users can buy notable @handles. But part of the program will be less of a market than a perk for X Premium+ and Premium Business members that seems like less of a perk the more you think about it, unless you’re positive you want to pay for X for all eternity.
The X Handle Marketplace is our industry-first solution to redistribute handles that are no longer in use.
Eligible Premium subscribers will be able to search and make requests, with both complimentary and paid options available.
In its description of the program, X says it will be “redistributing handles that are no longer in active use, but still attached to old accounts.” Some handles—one example the site provides is @Pizza—will be acquired either for free through “public drops” for accounts deemed to have sufficient merit, or by direct purchase. Pricing will apparently start at $2,500 and run to $1 million or more, “depending on demand and uniqueness.”
It’s a fairly complex program though, and it seems “priority handles” will not be simply purchased. They’ll be a new subscriber perk for Premium+ and Premium Business subscribers, available at no additional cost. The example the site provides of a priority handle is @PizzaEater.
Instead of buying your priority handle, or receiving it as a gift from the site, you’ll request it, and hear back within three business days. Then apparently you’ll have your request approved or declined, and if it’s approved, the handle will be reserved for you. Next, you should expect some kind of transition period in which a fair amount of rejiggering must occur behind the scenes, ensuring that during “the switch,” your follower list and posts will remain the same.
There’s a pretty huge catch though: “If you cancel or downgrade your subscription after receiving a Priority Handle, your old handle will be restored,” the program description says.
That’s a harsh switcheroo to pull on someone who changes their handle, forms relationships, and gets established with that name, but then, say, falls on hard times, and can no longer pay $40 per month for a Premium+ membership to a formerly free service.
X may also want to consider what it wants to do with the priority handles of users who die.
Investor Cathie Wood, a long-time Tesla bull known for first investing in the company a decade ago at $13 per share, condemned the growing resistance to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s potential $1 trillion pay package. Over the weekend, the ARK Invest CEO suggested the financial system that’s enabling the pushback against it is the one with the problem, not the company that wants to make the world’s richest man richer by such a magnitude.
Wood said in a Sunday post on X that it was “sad if not damning” that proxy advisory firms, which make recommendations for how shareholders should vote during companies’ annual meetings, have so much influence. Wood’s comments come after two of the most important proxy firms, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass-Lewis, urged shareholders to reject during Tesla’s annual meeting on Nov. 6 the giant pay package that would give the world’s richest man 29% of the company, up from about 13% now.
Wood particularly criticized the relationship between these proxy firms and index funds, which have an outsized influence over voting because of the large number of shares they control for their investors. Each shareholder gets a certain number of votes based on how many shares they own. Yet, large institutional investors, including index funds, control massive amounts of shares held by their investors, which gives them sway over voting.
“Index funds do no fundamental research, yet dominate institutional voting. Index-based investing is a form of socialism. Our investment system is broken,” she added.
While Wood claims index funds don’t do research, their parent companies absolutely do. The three largest index funds in the world are managed by Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock, and all three do extensive research for proxy voting decisions and have their own proxy voting guidelines that they publish. Also, those three funds hold over $2 trillion tracking the S&P 500 index and represent the vast majority of retail traders invested in the stock market. While index funds don’t do research to pick stocks, they utilize their research base for voting decisions.
Both proxy firms recommended shareholders vote against Musk’s pay package partly because it dilutes existing investors’ shares and gives Tesla’s highly compensated board too much flexibility when it comes to the goals Musk has to meet to get the full payout, which is about equal to the company’s total market cap.
In another series of posts, Wood added that ISS and Glass Lewis don’t see the potential in Tesla that ARK Invest does and seemingly suggested index funds should be stripped of their voting power. ARK Invest’s flagship ARK Innovation ETF’s largest holding is Tesla, which makes up about 12% of its $8 billion portfolio.
“I believe that history will decide that Glass Lewis and ISS have been menaces to innovation, enabling passive investors who care about ‘tracking errors’ to their indexes but do not care about much else,” Wood wrote in a post referring to how closely index funds track indexes such as the S&P 500.
Russell Rhoads, a clinical associate professor of financial management at Indiana University, said while investors in an active fund know its management may push for changes to a company if it is struggling, the same isn’t true for passive investors who put their money into index funds.
“In general, if I put money into a fund, that’s supposed to mirror the index, that is a passive investment,” he said. “I’m just investing in the market and not trying to influence anything what any other companies are doing business wise.”
Tesla, for its part, said in a Monday statement that the proxy firms aren’t considering the previous 2018 pay package approved by shareholders on two different occasions that allocated $56 billion to Musk over 10 years. Both ISS and Glass Lewis also recommended voters reject the 2018 pay package.
“Glass Lewis’s one-size-fits-all checklists undermine shareholders’ interests, including by opposing proposals designed to build long-term value at Tesla,” the statement read.
When reached for comment, representatives from Glass Lewis and ISS directed Fortune to their respective proxy papers on Tesla.
Prior to the proxy firms’ reports, the SOC Investment Group, which works with pension funds sponsored by major unions such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, as well as several parties with an interest in Tesla including state financial officers, signed a letter with the Securities and Exchange Commission urging shareholders to vote no on Musk’s pay package earlier this month.
If Musk’s pay is approved and the three board members are reelected, “this year may be one of the last times that public shareholders have a meaningful voice in the Company and its leadership given the level of dilution that is likely to take place,” the letter argued.
Tejal Patel, the executive director of Tesla shareholder group SOC Investment Group, saiddespite the company claiming Musk needs more incentive to stay engaged with Tesla, Musk’s incentives should already align with the company whose shares represent the bulk of his $455 billion net worth. SOC has been vocally critical of Tesla and its corporate governance for multiple Musk pay packages on multiple grounds.
“We just don’t believe that these pay packages are going to really incentivize Mr. Musk to stay at Tesla, nor to be focused on Tesla over his other business endeavors,” Patel told Fortune.
Still, Wood said she was confident Musk’s pay package would pass, in part because of the support of retail investors, which hold about 40% of Tesla’s voting shares.
“Although the proxy firm ISS has recommended against the package, retail investors are likely to dominate the vote once again. America!”
[This report has been updated to include a paragraph providing additional context on the extent of the major index funds’ research activities.]
On Monday, a major outage at Amazon Web Services affected a large number of websites and apps, including end-to-end encrypted messenger Signal. In response, X Executive Chairman and Chief Technical Officer Elon Musk claimed that he no longer trusts Signal. “I don’t trust Signal anymore,” Musk stated, plainly.
To be clear, the centralized infrastructure upon which Signal relies does not necessarily put encrypted communications made via Signal at risk, as Signal does not hold the keys to the encrypted data held in that infrastructure.
PSA: we are aware that Signal is down for some people. This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by.
Signal President Meredith Whittaker responded to Musk’s post on X, noting, “Signal is trusted by the security and hacker community, and hundreds of millions of others, BECAUSE they can examine it, and because on examination, it has shown to be robust, private, and secure–for over a decade.”
In recent months, Musk has been promoting the use of X Chat as a method of secure, encrypted communications between its users. However, security experts have noted that any encrypted messaging app should be open source if it is to be trusted with secure communications, in addition to other concerns. After all, how is someone supposed to know what the app is actually doing if they cannot look at the code?
Try 𝕏 Chat, our new, encrypted communication system for texts, file transfers and audio/video calls.
X themselves label X Chat, which is intended to eventually replace the traditional direct messaging system, as beta software on their platform. There were reports in 2018 that X (then known as Twitter) was testing end-to-end encryption; however, the feature did not get an official support announcement until 2023. X has also said they plan to eventually make it easier to verify that their chat features are as safe and secure as they claim.
Jack Dorsey, who originally co-founded X as Twitter and led the company for years, was open to this move towards end-to-end encryption during his time as CEO. More recently, Dorsey “vibe coded” a geographically-focused messaging app called Bitchat over a weekend.
Bitchat gained notoriety during the recent overthrow of the Nepalese government due to the app’s mesh networking features that allow it to function in localized areas without internet access. An app with similar features, known as FireChat, was used during the Hong Kong protests all the way back in 2014.
Of course, Signal is not perfect either and has received its own fair share of criticisms over the years. Signal’s reliance on phone numbers was routinely brought up as a bad idea by security researchers until the messaging app recently allowed users to sign up with just a username.
Notably, Whittaker received some pushback to her comments today regarding Signal’s openness and verifiability from multiple developers who have worked on Bitcoin. Peter Todd, who is perhaps best known for the accusation that he’s Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in an HBO documentary released earlier this year, pointed out that the app stores on Android and iOS get in the way of users being able to confirm that the open-source code run on users’ devices actually matches the code published by Signal.
Additionally it has had reproducibility issues for over a year and the issue keeps getting closed due to lack of interest in fixing https://t.co/487B9bhMUC@elonmusk please make sure X chat prioritizes reproducible builds
Todd has contributed to Bitcoin Core over the years, which is Bitcoin node software that has a strict adherence to enabling reproducible builds, which allow end users to verify that an app is built from the same open-source code that has been published elsewhere. Steve Lee, who leads Bitcoin open-source development grant provider Spiral, also pointed out that there is an open issue related to reproducible builds for Signal on Android.
Obviously, Bitcoin purists, who talk endlessly about the benefits of the network’s decentralization, also have a problem with Signal’s reliance on centralized infrastructure that led to this morning’s down time in the first place.
Whether you’re talking about Bitcoin or private messaging, there are oftentimes tradeoffs made when balancing perfect privacy and security with building a user-friendly app that people will actually use. Signal is still the standard when it comes to encrypted messaging, but more competition in this area can never hurt, as long as it provides privacy that is verifiably trustworthy.
Building a tunnel across the Bering Strait, from Russia to Alaska, is an idea that’s been around since at least the 1950s. And the Kremlin apparently thinks it’s good enough to revive, if the CEO of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund is to be believed.
Kirill Dmitriev, the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, tweeted the idea on Thursday, complete with a map of where the tunnel might be built. And he thinks that billionaire oligarch Elon Musk would be the man to do it.
“@elonmusk, imagine connecting the US and Russia, the Americas and the Afro-Eurasia with the Putin-Trump Tunnel – a 70-mile link symbolizing unity. Traditional costs are $65B+, but @boringcompany’s tech could reduce it to <$8B. Let’s build a future together!” Dmitriev tweeted.
President Donald Trump was asked about the proposal by a reporter at the White House during a press availability with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Friday. Trump called the idea an “interesting one,” but said, “We’ll have to think about that. I hadn’t heard that,” according to CNBC.
How feasible would a tunnel be? Theoretically, it’s entirely possible. But Elon Musk might not be the guy to do it. The billionaire CEO has over-promised and under-delivered when it comes to his tunneling projects. Musk has often floated big ideas, but when it comes time to actually do them, he will frequently produce something much less fantastic.
Dmitriev tweeted about a proposal for a “Kennedy-Khrushchev World Peace Bridge,” which was imagined in the early 1960s.
From the Soviet JFK docs released by @RepLuna: Kennedy–Khrushchev World Peace Bridge “could and should be built between Alaska and Russia at once.”
But the idea is even older, as you can see from the March 3, 1959, edition of Arthur Radebaugh’s “Closer Than We Think” Sunday comic strip.
From the strip:
Sen. Magnuson of Washington has a bold new idea for linking our newest state, Alaska, with Siberia via a bridge or vehicular tunnel across the 30- to 40-mile stretch of shallow waters of the Bering Strait. It would go from Wales, on the tip of Seward Peninsula, to Little Diomede and Big Diomede Islands, thence to Peyak, Siberia.
The Senator forecasts this hook-up within the lifetime of the present generation, to create a rail and highway route between points as distant as New York and Paris. “I am convinced,” he says, “that the tourists who one day will drive this route will be our best ambassadors!”
Is the idea of a tunnel connecting Russia and the U.S. just a troll by the Russian government to poke at Trump during a time when the country continues to wage war against Ukraine? Almost certainly. But that doesn’t mean a tunnel couldn’t happen in the future. Especially if Trump makes another wild pivot and decides he doesn’t want to help Ukraine anymore.
In fact, there were some signs that Trump is ready to throw in the towel on Friday. Trump posted on Truth Social about his meeting with Zelenskyy, describing it as “very interesting, and cordial,” and said that he wanted the killing to stop and for the Ukrainian leader to make a deal. And then he went into some weird territory.
“Enough blood has been shed, with property lines being defined by War and Guts. They should stop where they are. Let both claim Victory, let History decide! No more shooting, no more Death, no more vast and unsustainable sums of money spent. This is a War that would have never started if I were President. Thousands of people being slaughtered each and every week — NO MORE, GO HOME TO YOUR FAMILIES IN PEACE!” Trump wrote.
We may or may not get a tunnel between the U.S. and Russia anytime soon. But it feels like peace between Russia and Ukraine is further away than ever.
Elon Musk loves responding to posts on X with heart emojis. He’s sent dozens this year alone, often in response to people praising his cars or directly to his mother’s posts.
But this week, Musk sent a heart emoji to Tommy Robinson, the far-right Islamophobic activist from the United Kingdom. Though Musk largely ignored UK politics this year while working in the US government at his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he appears to be back across the pond, spending his money and using his platform to elevate far-right extremists.
“A HUGE THANK YOU to @elonmusk today. Legend,” Robinson wrote on Monday, following the first day of his two-day trial for a charge related to counter-terrorism law at Westminster Magistrate’s Court in London. Robinson claimed this week that Musk had funded his defense.
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was charged under the Terrorism Act after he refused to give police access to his cell phone in July 2024 while trying to leave the UK. Prosecutor Jo Morris told the judge this week the police believed “there may be information relevant to acts of terrorism” on the phone at the time. Robinson has pleaded not guilty and claimed the stop was unlawful. A decision in this case is due next month.
In a video posted on X ahead of the trial this week, Robinson said Musk had agreed to fund his defense. Robinson did not say how much Musk was contributing to his defense fund, but Mark Stephens, a prominent British solicitor who has in the past served as legal counsel for Julian Assange, tells WIRED that if he were covering Robinson’s entire defense, Musk’s bill would come to “easily half a million pounds [$665,000], maybe more with appeals.”
Robinson and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Musk posted incessantly about British politics at the beginning of the year, until his focus was consumed by DOGE. But, following his stormy departure from Washington, Musk’s focus on Europe is once again creating chaos. WIRED analyzed data provided by BrightData that shows a significant dropoff in the number of posts Musk made about the UK after January of this year. After he left DOGE in May, Musk’s posts about the UK increased dramatically again in August.
Experts believe Musk’s current outpouring of support for the UK’s far right is part of a possible concerted effort to destabilize the region politically to prevent onerous regulations—such as the EU’s Digital Services Act or the UK’s Online Safety Act—being used to punish X.
They say journalists never truly clock out. But for Christian, that’s not just a metaphor, it’s a lifestyle. By day, he navigates the ever-shifting tides of the cryptocurrency market, wielding words like a seasoned editor and crafting articles that decipher the jargon for the masses. When the PC goes on hibernate mode, however, his pursuits take a more mechanical (and sometimes philosophical) turn.
Christian’s journey with the written word began long before the age of Bitcoin. In the hallowed halls of academia, he honed his craft as a feature writer for his college paper. This early love for storytelling paved the way for a successful stint as an editor at a data engineering firm, where his first-month essay win funded a months-long supply of doggie and kitty treats – a testament to his dedication to his furry companions (more on that later).
Christian then roamed the world of journalism, working at newspapers in Canada and even South Korea. He finally settled down at a local news giant in his hometown in the Philippines for a decade, becoming a total news junkie. But then, something new caught his eye: cryptocurrency. It was like a treasure hunt mixed with storytelling – right up his alley!
So, he landed a killer gig at NewsBTC, where he’s one of the go-to guys for all things crypto. He breaks down this confusing stuff into bite-sized pieces, making it easy for anyone to understand (he salutes his management team for teaching him this skill).
Think Christian’s all work and no play? Not a chance! When he’s not at his computer, you’ll find him indulging his passion for motorbikes. A true gearhead, Christian loves tinkering with his bike and savoring the joy of the open road on his 320-cc Yamaha R3. Once a speed demon who hit 120mph (a feat he vowed never to repeat), he now prefers leisurely rides along the coast, enjoying the wind in his thinning hair.
Speaking of chill, Christian’s got a crew of furry friends waiting for him at home. Two cats and a dog. He swears cats are way smarter than dogs (sorry, Grizzly), but he adores them all anyway. Apparently, watching his pets just chillin’ helps him analyze and write meticulously formatted articles even better.
Here’s the thing about this guy: He works a lot, but he keeps himself fueled by enough coffee to make it through the day – and some seriously delicious (Filipino) food. He says a delectable meal is the secret ingredient to a killer article. And after a long day of crypto crusading, he unwinds with some rum (mixed with milk) while watching slapstick movies.
Looking ahead, Christian sees a bright future with NewsBTC. He says he sees himself privileged to be part of an awesome organization, sharing his expertise and passion with a community he values, and fellow editors – and bosses – he deeply respects.
So, the next time you tread into the world of cryptocurrency, remember the man behind the words – the crypto crusader, the grease monkey, and the feline philosopher, all rolled into one.
SpaceX’s latest test flight of its Starship rocket was a success Monday evening, paving the way for the aerospace company to debut an even more powerful version. It marked an optimistic ending to a test campaign of Starship version two that was initially marked by failures.
On the back of Monday evening’s successful launch—the eleventh for Starship overall and final for version two—SpaceX is poised to begin testing Starship V3 later this year or early next.
“Starship’s eleventh flight test reached every objective, providing valuable data as we prepare the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy,” SpaceX detailed in a post on social media platform X.
The Starship lifted off from Starbase, the SpaceX company town incorporated in Texas earlier this year, on Monday evening around 7:23 p.m. ET. The Super Heavy rocket successfully splashed down off the coast of Texas, using 12 of 13 engines (one did not ignite). After liftoff, Starship achieved its desired velocity and trajectory and deployed eight satellites meant to represent real Starlink satellites. After the satellite test, Starship relit an engine in flight, which CNN noted was meant to test how the spacecraft may in the future maneuver itself back to land after a mission. It then re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, enabling data gathering on its heat shield, and splashed down in the Indian Ocean.
An Inc.com Featured Presentation
SpaceX disclosed in a statement that it has multiple vehicles of the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy in active build. Whereas the Super Heavy is the first stage rocket booster, the Starship is the second stage booster and spacecraft in one. Those future vehicles will be used to test Starship in orbital flights, for “operational payload missions,” and more.
The Starship and Super Heavy rocket are designed to be fully reusable and capable of returning to their launch site and relaunching without refurbishment. The system is meant to carry payloads of up to 150 metric tons, or 250 metric tons if not being reused. SpaceX also states on its website that it aims for the Starship to carry up to 100 people on “long-duration, interplanetary flights” as well as to deliver satellites and help develop a moon base. This language hints at SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s grander ambitions for the Starship and its Heavy Rocket to ferry passengers to Mars.
But this past year in testing has been a fraught one for Starship. This year alone, four vehicles exploded—three during flight tests and one on the ground. That said, Musk and the team at SpaceX are already looking ahead to Starship version three, which CNN reported is expected to test later this year or early next.
In the closing moments of Monday’s flight, Starship flexed its flaps to perform a “dynamic banking maneuver” over the Indian Ocean, then flipped upright and fired its engines to slow for splashdown, simulating maneuvers the rocket will execute on future missions returning to the launch site. That will be one of the chief goals for the next phase of Starship’s test campaign beginning next year.
Patience for V3
It will likely be at least a few months before SpaceX is ready to launch the next Starship flight. Technicians at Starbase are assembling the next Super Heavy booster and the first Starship V3 vehicle. Once integrated, the booster and ship are expected to undergo cryogenic testing and static-fire testing before SpaceX moves forward with launch.
“Focus now turns to the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy, with multiple vehicles currently in active build and preparing for tests,” SpaceX wrote on its website. “This next iteration will be used for the first Starship orbital flights, operational payload missions, propellant transfer, and more as we iterate to a fully and rapidly reusable vehicle with service to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond.”
Starship V3 will have larger propellant tanks to increase the rocket’s lifting capacity, upgraded Raptor 3 engines, and an improved payload compartment to support launches of real Starlink satellites. SpaceX will also use this version of the rocket for orbital refueling experiments, a long-awaited milestone for the Starship program now planned for sometime next year. Orbital refueling is a crucial enabler for future Starship flights beyond low Earth orbit and is necessary for SpaceX to fulfill Musk’s ambition to send ships to Mars, the founder’s long-held goal for the company.
It’s also required for Starship flights to the moon. NASA has signed contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a human-rated derivative of Starship to land astronauts on the moon as part of the agency’s Artemis program. The orbital refueling demonstration is a key milestone on the NASA lunar lander contract. Getting this done as soon as possible is vitally important to NASA, which is seeing its Artemis moon-landing schedule slip, in part due to Starship delays.
No, your new “AI PC” or “Copilot+ PC” is not great at running AI—at least, not with any amount of compute that matters. The real artificial intelligence is being processed behind the closed doors of sprawling data centers that are currently springing up all around the United States. Nvidia, which became a trillion-dollar company thanks to AI, is now asking you to stick an ounce of that cloud on your desk.
Nvidia first announced its $4,000 DGX Spark AI compute machine, then dubbed “Project Digits,” during CES 2025. If you don’t remember the specifics, I don’t blame you. While CEO Jensen Huang was talking up the AI and graphics capabilities of the firm’s RTX 50-series GPUs, Spark was being pushed elsewhere on the floor as an at-home device built specifically for high-end AI workloads. The company went so far as to call it a “new class of computer” in its announcement post—despite the fact that it’s powered by a Blackwell chip, an architecture that shows up across several other Nvidia lines.
The DGX Spark is set to start shipping on Wednesday. Nvidia’s usual partners like Acer, Asus, Lenovo, MSI, Dell, and Gigabyte are already lined up to put out their own versions of the device. You may not find those products when roaming the sparse halls of your nearest Best Buy, but Nvidia said it will ship them to Micro Center stores in the U.S. Nvidia made a big deal of handing out Sparks to major companies like OpenAI and Microsoft, as well as to Elon Musk at the Starbase headquarters in Texas. Maybe the billionaire founder of xAI will plug it in and use it to vibe code that AI-centric “Wokipedia” competitor—which he promised would help people “understand the universe.”
You won’t use the ‘AI supercomputer’ for anything but AI
I saw both Nvidia’s and Acer’s versions of Spark at IFA 2025. They both looked like big, shiny mini PCs—but they weren’t actually running Windows. Spark runs a customized, Ubuntu-based Linux distribution loaded with several of Nvidia’s AI tools for AI image models and LLMs, or large language models. A 20-core, ARM-based CPU accompanies a Grace Blackwell GPU. If all that mattered was core count, the Spark would tie Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070, one of its lower-end GPUs.
On its face, those specs don’t sound very “supercomputer.” But inside, you’ll find much more performance and power draw than a typical desktop PC. The 2.65-pound Spark box holds 128GB of system memory and 4TB of storage. Its Blackwell chip promises 1 petaflop of AI compute performance, which is many times more than the 170 teraflops Nvidia’s 2016 DGX-1 AI compute machine offers, though it’s worth noting that flops, a measure of how fast a GPU can perform a certain number of floating point operations per second, are a rough metric. The Spark is also running at 240W, compared to the older model’s 3,200W power draw.
For another loose example of AI compute capability, the DGX Spark promises to perform around 1,000 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second. Though that comes in below the RTX 5090, which boasts 3,352 TOPS, it surpasses any equivalent PC of the same size, and its memory puts it over the edge for the sake of developing and designing the next chatbot. For comparison, Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip is supposed to be much better for AI than its predecessor, thanks to a redesigned neural processing unit, but that can only claim 70 TOPS of AI performance. Your usual PC is still limited to running extremely low-end AI models or background AI tasks.
Oh, and all of that comes with a retail price of around $4,000. Don’t worry: Nvidia doesn’t expect every Joe Schmoe to buy one of these for the sake of running Windows 11 Recall. The DGX Spark is built for nascent AI developers, students, or, perhaps, curious AI dabblers who can afford to drop the equivalent of two $2,000 RTX 5090 GPUs to buy a specialized computer. Its real mission is to get more developers to create AI applications that people actually want to use—or, in Huang’s words, “the next wave of breakthroughs.” Hopefully, that’ll take the form of something beyond a chatbot interface promising to fix home decoration or remedy the abstract concept of loneliness.
Did you find this article by typing in the name of a website associated with Elon Musk? Did it sound like you could invest in SpaceX, Neuralink, or one of Musk’s AI ventures like Grok and xAI? It’s fake. It’s 100%, without a doubt, completely fake.
I know you may not believe it, but please read on. Because this article could save you from losing a lot of money. Elon Musk is a very wealthy man. He’s worth $500 billion, according to Forbes, making him the wealthiest person on the planet. But Musk does not have a website dedicated to making other people rich.
You may have seen an ad on Facebook or maybe a video on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. It may have even looked like Elon Musk was talking about some amazing investment opportunity. Maybe it looked like Elon was raising money for a sick child. You may have even been asked to send money through gift cards or a bitcoin ATM. But it was fake. You need to believe us. Because it’s true.
Musk does not have a website selling cryptocurrencies. He doesn’t have a website for trading stocks. He doesn’t have a public website selling shares of his private companies like SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI, and X. The promotional video you saw is fake and probably used artificial intelligence tools to make it look like Elon Musk was saying something he never said.
People are losing millions
Did someone reach out to you on a social media site like Facebook or Instagram claiming to be Elon? Did they tell you to talk with them over Signal or Telegram or WhatsApp? That person is a scammer. Elon Musk does not reach out to people on websites and ask them for money. And if they haven’t already asked you to send money, that part is coming.
Again, you might be skeptical. A lot of people want to believe that Elon Musk is offering ways for the average person to become rich. But he’s not. Among other reasons, he doesn’t have time.
Here at Gizmodo, we’ve written about scammers impersonating Elon Musk for years.
There was the woman in Washington who lost $63,000 because she thought she was talking to Elon.
There was the person who lost over $18,000 watching a video livestream they thought was for Tesla.
There was also the Florida principal who sent an Elon Musk scammer a check for $100,000.
People have literally been losing millions of dollars to scammers over the years because they thought they were investing in something approved by Elon Musk. But it was all fake.
Scam AI Videos
It’s incredible what can be accomplished with AI these days. You can make people appear to say things they never said. For example, here’s an ad we spotted below. Elon never said any of that.
Fake Elon Websites
All of the websites below are scams. And while Gizmodo is often reluctant to advertise the web domains of scammers, because it risks inadvertently driving more people to scammy websites, using the names of the scams is the only way to help get the word out that these specific websites will steal your money.
And this list only scratches the surface. These are some of the domains that have been reported to the FTC, but there are so many more out there.
ceomusk.org [SCAM]
elonbitcoin.fun [SCAM]
elonchristmas.com [SCAM]
fastmars.net [SCAM]
investmuskspace.icu [SCAM]
marshome.us [SCAM]
marsway.net [SCAM]
marsyox.com [SCAM]
marsvalue.net [SCAM]
myteslatoken.com [SCAM]
official2xMusk.com [SCAM]
shippingteslamail.com [SCAM]
tesla-clubs.com [SCAM]
tesla-prize-x.com [SCAM]
teslaminingprogram.com [SCAM]
teslaminingplatform.aphatrad.com [SCAM]
teslaoption.com [SCAM]
teslapresale.net [SCAM]
tesla.token-presale.org [SCAM]
teslatoken-presale.online [SCAM]
telsaxmarketing.com [SCAM]
tsla-marketspro.com [SCAM]
teslgets.com [SCAM]
tsl-xspace.pw [SCAM]
x-coin-platform.io [SCAM]
Scam Names
There are also scams that you may know by various names that aren’t dedicated websites, but are being spread through social media platforms. Some of the common ones we’ve seen are below.
Elon Musk Fan Page Membership Card
Elon Musk x Donald Trump Crypto Giveaway
Space Stock Mining
Tesla Bitcoin
Tesla Token
Tesla Mining
Neuralink Crypto Token
SpaceX Token
Please believe us. It’s not real.
Maybe someone sent you this article. Maybe you found it through Google. Please know that visiting these websites and “investing” in them will only lead you to heartache and pain.
The people who’ve been scammed at these sites often feel foolish afterward. And we don’t want you to feel foolish. We want you to avoid just handing your money away for nothing.
If you’re interested in investing, there are plenty of reputable places to do that. You can even invest in Musk’s company, Tesla, if you want to buy stock in that company through a reputable stockbroker. All investing involves risks, but the websites we’ve featured here aren’t just risks where you might make some money or you might lose some money.
If you give any of these websites your money, you will only lose. We promise you.
Have you been scammed and want to tell your story? You can email the author of this article at [email protected].
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Nevada state regulators have accused Elon Musk’s Boring Co. of violating environmental regulations nearly 800 times in the last two years as it digs a sprawling tunnel network beneath Las Vegas for its Tesla-powered “people mover.” The company’s alleged violations include starting to dig without approval, releasing untreated water onto city streets and spilling muck from its trucks, according to a new document obtained by City Cast Las Vegas and ProPublica.
The Sept. 22 cease-and-desist letter from the state Bureau of Water Pollution Control alleged repeated violations of a settlement agreement that the company had entered into after being fined five years ago for discharging groundwater into storm drains without a permit. That agreement, signed by a Boring executive in 2022, was intended to compel the company to comply with state water pollution laws.
Instead, state inspectors documented nearly 100 alleged new violations of the agreement. The letter also accuses the company of failing to hire an independent environmental manager to regularly inspect its construction sites. State regulators counted 689 missed inspections.
The Boring Co. is disputing the violation letter, a state spokesperson said.
The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection could have fined the company more than $3 million under the 2022 agreement, which allowed for daily penalties to be assessed. But regulators knocked down the total penalty to $242,800. For example, the bulk of the total possible fine was linked to the alleged missed inspections, but the agency chose to levy just a $10,000 penalty for each of the company’s 11 permits.
“Given the extraordinary number of violations, NDEP has decided to exercise its discretion to reduce the penalty to two $5,000 violations per permit, which it believes offers a reasonable penalty that will still serve to deter future non-compliance conduct,” regulators wrote in the letter.
Payment of the penalty isn’t required until after the dispute resolution process is complete, a state spokesperson said. In the letter, the agency reminded the company that it “reserves the right to direct TBC to cease and desist construction activities” under the agreement.
In the past, Musk has espoused paying penalties rather than waiting for approvals as a way of doing business.
“Environmental regulations are, in my view, largely terrible,” he said at an event with the libertarian Cato Institute last year. “You have to get permission in advance, as opposed to, say, paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which I think would be much more effective.”
Neither Musk nor Boring responded to requests for comment for this story.
The Sept. 22 letter documents the latest in a string of alleged violations of state and local regulations by The Boring Co. since it began construction in 2019 of the Loop project, which uses driver-operated Teslas to move people through the tunnels. The project, initially a 0.8-mile underground route connecting the sections of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority campus to each other, has grown to a planned 68 miles of tunnels and 104 stations across the Las Vegas Valley. It’s carried out in partnership with the LVCVA, the tourism board best known for the “What Happens Here, Stays Here” slogan.
Boring uses a machine known as Prufrock to dig the 12-foot-diameter tunnels, applying chemical accelerants as part of the process. For each foot the company bores, it removes about 6 cubic yards of soil along with any groundwater, according to a company document prepared for state environmental officials.
Because it is privately funded and receives no federal money, the project is exempt from many exhaustive governmental vetting and environmental analysis requirements. But it is required to obtain state permits to ensure the waste does not contaminate the environment or local water sources.
A January story by ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas documented how the company worked to escape county and state oversight requirements by arguing its project didn’t fit under existing regulations and promising to hold itself accountable through independent audits — all while being cited for permitting and water pollution violations in 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023. Last year, the company successfully lobbied to be exempted from holding a county “amusement and transportation system” permit, arguing instead for an oversight plan that removed multiple layers of inspection.
Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns. The Boring Co. has contested the violations. Just last month, a construction worker suffered a “crush injury” after being pinned between two 4,000-foot pipes, according to police records. Firefighters used a crane to extract him from the tunnel opening.
After ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas published their January story, both the CEO and the chairman of the LVCVA board criticized the reporting, arguing the project is well-regulated. As an example, LVCVA CEO Steve Hill cited the delayed opening of a Loop station by local officials who were concerned that fire safety requirements weren’t adequate. Board chair Jim Gibson, who is also a Clark County commissioner, agreed the project is appropriately regulated.
“We wouldn’t have given approvals if we determined things weren’t the way they ought to be and what it needs to be for public safety reasons,” Gibson said, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. “Our sense is we’ve done what we need to do to protect the public.”
Asked for a response to the new proposed fines, an LVCVA spokesperson said, “We won’t be participating in this story.”
The repeated allegations that the company is violating regulations — including the bespoke regulatory arrangement agreed to by the company — indicates that officials aren’t keeping the public safe, said Ben Leffel, an assistant public policy professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
“Not if they’re recommitting almost the exact violation,” Leffel said.
Leffel questioned whether a $250,000 penalty would be significant enough to change operations at The Boring Co., which was valued at $7 billion in 2023. Studies show that fines that don’t put a significant dent in a company’s profit don’t deter companies from future violations, Leffel said.
A state spokesperson disagreed that regulators aren’t keeping the public safe and said the agency believes its penalties will deter “future non-compliance.”
“NDEP is actively monitoring and inspecting the projects,” the spokesperson said.
[ad_2]
Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica, and Dayvid Figler, City Cast Las Vegas
SpaceX’s Starship megarocket is back on the launch pad at Boca Chica, prepared and ready for its final flight test of the year. Flight 11, scheduled to lift off on Monday evening at the earliest, will also be the final test flight for this iteration of Starship, Version 2—if everything goes to plan.
The launch window will open at 7:15 p.m. Eastern on Monday, October 13, according to SpaceX. A livestream of the event will begin approximately 30 minutes before liftoff, which you can watch at SpaceX.com or the company’s account on X. You can also tune in through any of the third-party webcasts below.
A transitional moment for SpaceX
Last week, SpaceX shared photos of Starship’s Super Heavy booster set up on its pad at Starbase, the company’s launch site in Boca Chica, Texas. The rocket’s upper stage, called Starship or “Ship” for short, is stacked on top of the booster ahead of its flight.
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Altogether, it stands about 400 feet (122 meters) tall. But SpaceX is going bigger: The next iteration of Starship—Version 3—will be even larger and capable of carrying 100 tons (363 metric tons) to orbit, according to CEO Elon Musk. Its first launch is expected sometime in early 2026.
But before SpaceX can roll out Version 3, the company needs this last test of Version 2 to go smoothly. It’s last test, Flight 10, which lifted off from Starbase in August, went off without a hitch. But that launch followed a string of explosive failures that had put Starship off-track.
For this test, Starship will follow a very similar flight plan to its last launch, just with a few tweaks to further stress-test the rocket’s heat shield and demonstrate maneuvers that are designed to mimic how its upper stages will behave when it is returning to its launch site—Starhsip, after all, is meant to be fully reusable.
A similar but different flight plan
In the eleventh test flight, Starship’s Super Heavy Booster is supposed to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico while, its upper stage progresses along a suborbital arc, then reenters the atmosphere for a water landing in the Indian Ocean, according to SpaceX.
The test will attempt several in-space objectives, including a deployment of eight dummy Starlink satellites and a relight of one of its Raptor engines. SpaceX has again removed several ceramic tiles from the heat shield to stress-test the rocket’s thermal protection system.
Unlike flight 10, however, this time the spacecraft will perform a “dynamic banking maneuver” during the final phase of the rocket’s reentry, designed to mimic the path it will take on future flights returning to Starbase.
The booster will also demonstrate a “unique landing burn engine configuration planned to be used on the next generation of Super Heavy,” according to SpaceX. The booster will ignite 13 of its 33 engines to start the burn, transition to five engines to fine-tune its trajectory, then downshift to three center engines for the final stage of the burn.
The booster selected for this launch is flight-proven, having already flown on flight 8 in March. Twenty-four of the booster’s Raptor engines are also flight-proven. This will be the second reuse of a Super Heavy booster, a critical test of SpaceX’s rapid reusability strategy.
It’s been a turbulent year for the Starship program. After a very shaky start to the rocket’s 2025 launch schedule, SpaceX is now under pressure to reach critical development milestones ahead of its next iteration. Monday’s launch is one you won’t want to miss.
Another tech giant has joined Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in calling for National Guard troops to be deployed in San Francisco. Tesla CEO Elon Musk criticized the city this week, saying he supports federal intervention to combat crime.
The debate comes as tens of thousands of tech workers from around the world arrive in the city for the annual Dreamforce conference, which kicks off on Tuesday and is expected to draw about 50,000 attendees.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has rejected the idea of bringing in the National Guard by pointing to recent crime reductions and praising local law enforcement. Laurie has also been careful not to offend those who contribute millions of dollars to the city.
At the annual Italian Heritage Parade on Sunday, support for the mayor’s stance was evident among San Franciscans. Parade-goer Ana Hernandez said she does not believe soldiers are necessary.
“I’ve been here 25 years, and we’ve never had the need of having them here. Bringing them here, I think it would bring more chaos, scare for the people,” Hernandez said.
She and her family said they feel safe in the city, although they acknowledge that homelessness and open-air drug markets remain significant challenges.
“It takes time, but I feel like it will change for good,” Hernandez added.
Her sister, Susana Chavez, emphasized collaboration.
“We have work to do. I say we collaborate and work with what we have,” Chavez said.
Benioff recently told The New York Times that President Trump should send in the National Guard to fight crime. Musk supported Benioff over the weekend on X, formerly Twitter, describing downtown San Francisco as a “drug zombie apocalypse” and saying federal intervention is needed.
“Crime is down 30 percent citywide. SFPD, our sheriff’s department, is doing an incredible job. We’re going to keep people safe during Salesforce and Dreamforce this week. And we’re going to keep people safe 365 days a year,” Lurie said.
The mayor added that involving the National Guard would strip local control from law enforcement.
“Local law enforcement knows how to police here in San Francisco. They know how to protect our citizens. They know how to protect our conference-goers,” he said.
Interim SFPD Chief Paul Yep echoed the mayor’s praise for the police.
“Crime is down in San Francisco. I’m proud of the work that the rank and file do every day,” he said.
Benioff appeared to soften his stance on Sunday, tweeting that his comments were really about addressing the city’s police shortage. He also announced that Salesforce will donate $1 million to fund larger hiring bonuses for new police officers.
Many residents said that focusing on local law enforcement is the right approach.
“Invest more money into the law enforcement. Let them clean it up, not the National Guard,” Antonio Carter, a new San Francisco resident, said.
“That’s why we have our own local police, to fix whatever problems or issues we have,” Hernandez said.
Lurie said the city is working hard to recruit and retain police officers and is confident that Dreamforce will be safe.
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Elon Musk has never had the best relationship with regulators, often bumping up against or outright sidestepping local and state laws where his numerous companies operate.
This week has been particularly active on the regulatory front.
Musk’s tunneling and infrastructure firm The Boring Companyis accused of nearly 800 violations by Nevada regulators, including digging without approval, dumping untreated water onto city streets, failing to install silt fences, and tracking dirt from construction sites onto nearby roadways, a ProPublica investigation discovered.
Then there is Tesla, which was hit with an enforcement action by California’s Department of Insurance for routinely denying or delaying customer claims despite years of warnings from the state regulator. Reminder: Tesla is an insurance provider in certain states.
Tesla also has the attention, once again, of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The agency opened an investigation into Tesla’s Full Self-Driving tech after receiving reports the software caused vehicles to run red lights or cross into wrong lanes.
The NHTSA has investigated Tesla before. But this one is notable because it specifically targets Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) driver-assistance software. And Musk, as well as Tesla shareholders, have pinned the company’s future on its ability to be a leader in autonomous vehicle technology, as well as robotics and AI.
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This single investigation likely won’t derail Tesla’s plans; the company just rolled out the newest version of FSD (v14). But it is another example of increased scrutiny on the technology that Tesla is trying to put front and center and raises questions about its robotaxis, which uses a version of its FSD software.
A little bird
Image Credits:Bryce Durbin
A Wired article from July discovered that General Motorsrepurposed a few Chevy Bolt EVs that had been part of the shuttered Cruise robotaxi program and was driving them on select highways in Michigan near Austin, Texas, and the San Francisco Bay Area to develop simulation models and new driver-assistance technology.
Now it seems that General Motors might be moving forward with its autonomous vehicle development but in potentially surprising ways. When GM absorbed Cruise in December 2024, it said it would combine Cruise’s tech with its own ADAS efforts to develop fully autonomous personal vehicles.
We’re hearing chatter here and there that GM is building out an AV team across Austin and Mountain View. This comes just a couple months after GM started rehiring laid-off Cruise employees, per Bloomberg.
We’re poking around and if you know anything, reach out.
Joby Aviation sold 30.5 million shares to raise about $514 million, money that the company said would be used to fund certification and manufacturing efforts and prepare for commercial operations, as well as for general working capital and other general corporate purposes. The company plans to start carrying passengers in its electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft in Dubai in 2026, followed by the United States.
Investors didn’t react too favorably, though, because shares went for a discount. Under the deal, they sold for $16.85 per share, nearly 11% lower than the previous close.
Other deals that got my attention this week …
I forgot this one last week. Futurail, a European startup developing an autonomy stack for self-driving trains, raised €7.5 million in seed funding co-led by Asterion Ventures and Leap435, joined by EIT Urban Mobility and U.S. investors Zero Infinity Partners and Heroic Ventures. Side note: The Autonocast, a podcast I co-host, recently had Alex Haag, CEO and co-founder of Futurail, on the show. Take a listen.
Nexcade, a London-based startup developing end-to-end automation for freight forwarders, raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Connect Ventures. MMC Ventures, Entropy Industrial Capital, and Inovia also participated.
Toyota and Metal Mining have struck a deal to work together on the mass production of cathode materials for all-solid-state batteries to be installed in battery electric vehicles.
Tycho AI, an autonomous drone navigation startup, raised $10 million in a Series A round led by FirstMark.
Utilimarc, a Minneapolis-based fleet analytics and benchmarking company, was acquired by Smith System. The terms were not disclosed.
Notable reads and other tidbits
Image Credits:Bryce Durbin
California governorGavin Newsom signed a bill that gives Uber and Lyft drivers in the state the right to unionize as independent contractors.
Just last week, we featured DoorDash’s efforts to build its own autonomous delivery robot. But that internal program isn’t stopping the company from outside partnerships. DoorDash and Serve Robotics announced a multi-year partnership that would see them using autonomous robots to make deliveries across the United States.
Lucid delivered a record number of EVs in the third quarter. While it’s still nowhere near the projections it shared back when it was going public, the recent sales report does show progress.
Lyft has locked in another AV partnership — this time with Tensor Auto. The plan, the companies said, is to deploy robotaxis in Europe and North America starting in 2027. Tensor Auto might not sound familiar, but Chinese robotaxi company AutoX might. Tensor Auto’s roots are from AutoX, although the San Jose-based company has told TechCrunch in the past that AutoX’s Chinese operations were fully divested.
Transportation includes infrastructure like bridges. Climate tech reporter Tim De Chant looked into Allium Engineering, a startup developing paper-thin stainless steel that could change how bridges are built.
Tesla revealed bare-bones versions of the Model 3 and Model Y, which start at $36,990 and $39,990, respectively. These “standard” versions are pretty stripped down. Senior reporter Sean O’Kane provides more detail here.
A few things jumped out at me. For one, I was surprised this standard version doesn’t include Autopilot. Also, Tesla is really known for innovating, from its manufacturing process and software-first approach to its business model. But this wasn’t an act of innovation or even cleverness. It was merely stripping away — and the end result wasn’t the deep discounts that had been previously touted. Remember, Elon Musk was once pushing a $25,000 vehicle, a program that was later scrapped.
Zero Motorcycleshas moved its key operations from California to a new European headquarters in the Netherlands. The company told TechCrunch the move is designed to accelerate growth and sharpen focus on global opportunities.
One more thing …
If you’re in San Francisco later this month, come say hello. I’ll be at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, which will be held October 27 to October 29 at Moscone West. And there are a few transportation-related talks you won’t want to miss.
For instance, TechCrunch will be interviewing Uber chief product officer Sachin Kansal and Nuro co-founder and president Dave Fergusonabout the evolving relationship between AI and mobility. The discussion is expected to cover how predictive models and computer vision are improving road safety, why last-mile delivery is an autonomy proving ground, and what it will take to bring AI-driven transportation to scale.
