I organized an intervention to stop Elon from starting SpaceX. Here is the story... Twenty five years ago, Elon and I sat in a car on a dark stretch of Long Island highway, two neurodiverse geeks staring at the night sky and wondering what came next. We had both experienced substantial exits and felt the weight of possibility ahead of us. When I joked about 'space' while gazing upward, neither of us imagined we were planting the seed for what would become the largest IPO in history. We spent the next two hours debating why space was so hard. In the end, rockets are fuel and metal. We also debated where to go, and it was crystal clear that Mars was the only real destination. Upon returning to NYC, we embarked on a global tour of space, meeting space agencies and luminaries worldwide. This opened our eyes to an industry stuck in bureaucratic thinking. If things continued at that pace, it was clear that we would never explore space in our lifetime. So, we launched Life to Mars to show the world that two ambitious young men (29 and 30 years old), could send life to Mars without any government backing or support. We planned to send and grow plants on Mars, though some were pushing us to send mice. We had a $50 MM budget that rested on our purchase of two Russian ICBMs for $7 MM each. We assumed one ICBM would fail, and we would learn and fix everything before launching again. When Elon went back to actually buy the ICBMs, the Russians tripled the price, bringing out launch costs from a total of $14 MM to $42 MM. Our ambitious Life to Mars plan was no longer viable. As you might imagine, Elon was not pleased. So, he decided to start SpaceX and create his own Mars rockets. Now, this is a crazy idea, both now and at the time, so I organized a large panel of top space experts, and we ambushed him at the Georgian Hotel one morning. It was set up like an intervention for an alcoholic, but for space. Elon looked me in the eye when leaving the room and said, "I am going to do this." The intervention failed. Elon was committed. The rest is history. I am excited to see this IPO after 25 years of hard work. What SpaceX has done is a testament to human will and overcoming insurmountable obstacles. It's nothing short of amazing. Congratulations, E. Amazing.

De eerste rit van Hasselt naar Antwerpen met FSD Supervised, dadelijk bij VTMnieuws. ;-)

De @Tesla community houdt hier al geruime tijd de vinger aan de pols over de toelating voor de FSD-technologie op onze Vlaamse en Belgische wegen. Uit waardering voor jullie niet-aflatende interesse (en aanmoediging 😉), krijgen jullie hierbij de primeur: ik heb net de toelating getekend! 🚘 Deze beslissing gaat nu naar onze dienst homologatie, zij zullen @RDWnl op de hoogte brengen van de goedkeuring. Vlaanderen omarmt innovatie!

NASA Artemis passing close to the Moon

I was fired from Anthropic today. This was my first software engineering job. The Claude Code team put me in charge of the maps. I tried to push a change to add better navigation and accidentally leaked our entire Claude Code source code even after Claude told me my updates had no mistakes. Anyways, off to Mercor to go look for open engineering roles!

China is using folding mobile photovoltaic power stations, long strips of solar panels that unfold to quickly generate electricity, bringing clean power to construction sites, disaster zones, and remote areas.

The last few years have been wild 😅

Users on TikTok realizing they can just copy and paste the "redacted" text from Epstein file PDFs to read what it says

This is Prime Minister De Wever’s @Bart_DeWever finest hour. The Belgian people should be immensely proud to be represented by a man who won’t compromise an inch on Belgium’s sovereign interests.

A woman is going viral for claiming that fur hoods are often worn incorrectly because people don’t fold them inward.

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

Here's why I think SpaceX is going public soon. arstechnica.com/space/2025/1…

Tesla has been working hard toward shipping Full Self-Driving (Supervised) in Europe for over 12 months now. We have given FSD demos to regulators of almost every EU country. We have requested early access, pilot release programs or exemptions where possible. We have developed & shared detailed safety evidence for FSD, now public in our latest Safety Report. And we have driven over 1 million kilometers safely on EU roads across 17 different countries (internal testing).  Our main path to success is partnering with the Dutch approval authority RDW to gain exemption for the feature. This involves proving compliance with existing regulations (UN-R-171 DCAS) filing an exemption (EU Article 39) for yet-to-be-regulated behaviors like Level 2 systems off-highway, system-initiated lane changes with hands-off the wheel etc.  Some of these regulations are outdated and rules-based, which makes FSD illegal in its current form. Changing FSD to be compliant with these rules would make it unsafe and unusable in many cases. While we have changed FSD to be maximally compliant where it is logical and reasonable, we won't sacrifice the safety of a proven system or materially deteriorate customer usability.  As a result, we are gathering evidence to get exemptions on a specific rule-by-rule basis. Unfortunately, the real world fleet-proven safety wins alone are considered insufficient.  Currently, RDW has committed to granting Netherlands National approval in February 2026. Please contact them via link below to express your excitement & thank them for making this happen as soon as possible. Upon NL National approval, other EU countries can immediately recognize the exemption and also allow rollout within their country. Then we will bring it to a TCMV vote for official EU-wide approval.  We're excited to bring FSD to our owners in Europe soon! rdw.nl/en/contact/our-contac…

Live availability of Superchargers now in Google Maps

Steve Jobs passed away 14 years ago today. What do you think Apple would look like today if he was still CEO?

Summary of @elonmusk’s 44 minute interview at the @allinsummit: Government: • Elon hasn’t been back to DC since May, “The Government is basically unfixable.” • “If AI & Robots don’t solve the National Debt, we’re toast.” Optimus: • Tesla is finalizing the design of Optimus Gen 3. “It’s going to be a very remarkable robot.” • Optimus Gen 3 will have the manual dexterity of a human. • Optimus Gen 3 will have an AI mind that can navigate, and comprehend reality. • There is no supply chain for humanoid robots, Tesla is making everything from scratch. It requires a lot of vertical integration. • All of Optimus’ actuators are made in-house by Tesla. There are 26 actuators, per arm. • Elon reiterates: “If Optimus is successful, it will be the biggest product, ever.” • Production Cost of Optimus, once 1M units/year are achieved is around the $20,000 range. • The AI chip for Optimus will be expensive, potentially $5-6K , maybe more. • Price of Optimus will be a function of demand. • Tesla had to design Optimus’ every electric motor, gearbox, and the controlling electronics from scratch. • Creating Optimus is harder than making Model S/3/X/Y/CT, but not harder than Starship. • The forearms and hands of Optimus are majoirty of engineering difficulties of the entire robot. • Optimus LLM will be included, no added subscription. AI4, AI5, AI6 & FSD: • Tesla is currently finalizing the design for AI5. It will be an immense jump from AI4. • AI5 will be 40x better than AI4 in some metrics. • Tesla is working so closely on the AI Hardware, and Software this time around. Both teams are co-designing the chip. • AI5 has 8x more commute than AI4. • AI5 has 10x more memory than AI4. • AI5 has 5x more memory-bandwidth than AI4. • Elon is confident AI4 chips will still be able to achieve self-driving safety that is at least 2-3x of a human, maybe even 10x. • FSD 14 will be released in a few months. • V14 will be the biggest upgrade to Tesla’s software since V12. • FSD 14 will make the car feel sentient, by the end of the year. Starlink: • New spectrum deal will allow SpaceX to deliver high-bandwidth connectivity directly from the satellites, to the phone. • Current frequencies aren’t supported in current phones. Hardware changes are needed. • Chipsets need to be modified to add the new frequencies. • The phones capable of using this new frequency will ship in two years. • You will be able to watch videos anywhere in the world. • These frequencies required will work inside a building, it won’t cut off. • You will be able to have a Starlink Account instead of a Verizon/At&T account, but it won’t put other carriers out of business. • SpaceX may buy carriers to gain more spectrum. “It’s not out the question, it may happen.” Starship: • SpaceX will recover Starship starting next year. • There is only one V2 Starship left. • V3 is a radical re-design, initially it might go through some teething pains. • V3 is capable of over 100T to orbit, fully reusable. • Starting in 2026, SpaceX will demonstrate fully reusability next year, catching both booster and ship. • Elon thinks a self-sustaining life on Mars can be achieved within roughly 25 years. AI: • A rough rule of thumb is 10x more compute will double the intelligence. • Elon thinks we will continue to see intelligence scale all the way up to where most of the power of the sun is harnessed for compute. • Human Intelligence is currently plateauing due to low birth-rates and population declines. It will eventually start declining. • Elon guesses AI will be smarter than absolutely everything starting next year. • By 2030, Elon guesses AI will be smarter than the sum of ALL humans.

We’re accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable abundance

I keep coming back to this comparison.

📊 Y'all seem to like these charts, here $TSLA. Ask me any other ones, and I'll hang them in the comments.