Elon Musk

SpaceX said it expected Starship Flight 15 to occur in November 2026. The company said it would attempt to catch both the booster and the ship on that flight.

Reuters, confirming an earlier Financial Times report, said SpaceX was in talks with banks and asset managers to raise $40 billion for an order of Nvidia AI chips, with PIMCO among the managers in talks. The Reuters copy puts the structure at about $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade debt, with Apollo expected to lead the deal and place the paper. Bloomberg described the discussions as early and said they could end without a deal; none of the companies confirmed it.

Elon Musk said Tesla was trying to ensure that its vehicles did not run over pets that are hard to see at night. Not a Tesla App reported that identifying and avoiding animals on the road was Tesla's main nighttime-driving issue.

Tesla extended the Austin Robotaxi service's nightly operating window to 11 p.m. The Robotaxi account announced the change on X at 8:52 p.m. Pacific Time, and Elon Musk confirmed that closing had moved from the previous 10 p.m.

AT&T Chief Executive Officer John Stankey told Axios that SpaceX's proposed Starlink-based mobile strategy was not viable. He challenged the economics and technical practicality of adding small cellular base stations alongside Starlink dishes.

Hours before the launch event Tesla published a robotaxi interest form inviting businesses to register for Cybercab fleet purchasing, mobility hubs and infrastructure, or event collaboration, the first sign that it may sell the vehicle to third-party operators rather than run every car itself. Musk's earlier vision had relied on owners adding their personal cars to a Tesla network; fleet managers such as Moove already operate Waymo vehicles in several cities.

On the day of its invitation-only launch event Tesla updated its robotaxi site to say Cybercab rides were available in limited areas of Austin, released a video in which Musk called it the first car built specifically for unsupervised full self-driving, and let attendees ride in the gold two-seaters. NHTSA said it was in contact with Tesla and evaluating the situation, since federal rules cap sales of vehicles without steering wheels and pedals. Texas records showed 45 Cybercabs among 420 Tesla vehicles registered for driverless operation.

The day before its launch event Tesla ran driverless Cybercabs, with no steering wheel and nobody on board, on public streets in Austin; video clips circulated on X and Musk posted A storm of Cybercabs. Texas DMV records that night showed 45 Cybercabs among 420 Tesla vehicles authorised for driverless operation in the state, and a tracker counted about 200 unsupervised vehicles across Tesla's U.S. fleet in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa.

Tesla posted a flyer for a September 3 Cybercab launch event and chose attendees through a Robotaxi rider sweepstakes and direct invitations. Musk had warned that the early production rate would be agonisingly slow; Texas transport officials said the car would dramatically scale the service.

Ship 41 completed a single-engine burn simulating a deorbit and a 60-second six-engine static fire at Massey's, clearing the way for Flight 14 in September, the first mission meant to put Starship into orbit and carry operational Starlink V3 satellites. Musk said a return-to-tower catch of the ship would now come in a few months, so both stages were expected to splash down. A V3 booster catch had not yet been tried. Booster 21 followed with a full-duration 33-engine static fire on the pad on August 28.

Elon Musk filed a Schedule 13G reporting beneficial ownership of 6,418,547,515 SpaceX shares. The reported position included Class A shares, Class B shares, restricted Class B shares, and options.

Two weeks after splashdown SpaceX was still trying to guide the 52-metre ship to port in Western Australia when Musk said recovery was not looking good; the team had already photographed critical parts of the heatshield and engines up close. The ship's survival of the splashdown prompted talk of catching a ship at the tower on a coming flight.

Second-quarter revenue rose 92 percent to $7.8 billion, with Connectivity (Starlink) at $4.3 billion, AI at $2.6 billion and Space at $962 million; the net loss narrowed to $541 million and adjusted EBITDA reached $3.5 billion. SpaceX cited two Starship V3 flights in the quarter and $14.1 billion of contracted cloud-services agreements, but capital spending above $10 billion sent the shares down about 8 percent after hours.

SpaceX signed a merger agreement to acquire Anysphere, the company behind the Cursor AI coding tool, with each Cursor share converting into SpaceX Class A stock at a ratio set by SpaceX's average price in the seven trading days before closing. Reports put the value at about $60 billion, the largest purchase of a venture-backed startup, exercising an option SpaceX had taken in April.

The offering closed on June 15 with the underwriters exercising their full option for another 83.3 million shares, taking the total sold to 638,888,888 at $135, about $86 billion. Over the weekend Musk posted that SpaceX 'might be able to reach approximately' $1 trillion in revenue in 2030, against $18.7 billion in 2025, and the stock rose another 20 percent in its first full session.

SpaceX priced its offering at a fixed $135 a share with no bookbuilding range, selling 555,555,555 Class A shares for $75 billion before the underwriters' option, and listing on both Nasdaq and the new Nasdaq Texas exchange. The final prospectus reserved up to five percent of the shares for employees and people named by executives, and kept board control with Musk.

SpaceX's public registration statement set up a Nasdaq listing under SPCX with Goldman Sachs as lead-left underwriter followed by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan, and for the first time showed the company's financials: 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion, billions in losses driven by Starship and the xAI business, and Musk's control through Class B shares carrying more than 80 percent of the voting power.

Newly unredacted crash reports released by NHTSA gave narrative descriptions for all 17 crashes Tesla had logged on the Robotaxi network since launch; Tesla had previously blacked out every description as confidential. Two of the crashes, in July 2025 and January 2026 in Austin, happened while a remote operator was driving the car at under 10 mph after the safety monitor asked for help: one mounted a curb into a metal fence, the other scraped a construction barricade. Other cases included an unprotected left turn into a parking-lot chain and a dog that ran into the road. Most of the rest were other vehicles hitting the Teslas. Musk had said the month before that making sure things are completely safe was the biggest limit on expansion.

Elon Musk said Terafab planned to use Intel's 14A process. Tom’s Hardware reported that the plan was for use when Terafab had production capacity and the process had matured.

The first-quarter deck listed Cybercab in pilot production at Giga Texas, said Tesla expected volume production of Cybercab and Semi in 2026 and that Cybercab would over time replace the Model Y fleet, and reported unsupervised rides in Dallas and Houston in April along with a larger Austin area. On the call Musk said production had begun but would be very slow before ramping late in the year, with little revenue before 2027; Tesla said the car meets federal safety standards and needs no NHTSA exemption.

Four months before listing, Musk folded his AI company xAI, with the Grok models and the X social network, into SpaceX in what CNBC called the largest private merger ever, at $1 trillion for SpaceX and $250 billion for xAI. The deal put an AI business, and its losses and data-center spending, into the company that would go public.

Musk posted that Tesla had started Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car, seven months after launch. Tesla had begun driverless testing in December; AI chief Ashok Elluswamy said a few unsupervised vehicles would be mixed into the monitored fleet with the ratio rising over time. Riders reported being charged, and chase cars were seen following the driverless vehicles.

Five months before the IPO, SpaceX granted Elon Musk 1 billion performance-based restricted Class B shares as long-term incentive pay. According to Musk's later Schedule 13G, they vest in 15 equal tranches as SpaceX's market capitalization rises from $500 billion to $7.5 trillion in $500 billion steps, and on the company establishing a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, subject to his continued employment. SEC staff questioned the disclosure during the IPO review.

An insider share sale at $421 a share valued SpaceX at about $800 billion, past OpenAI's $500 billion record for a private company, and a company message seen by Bloomberg said SpaceX was preparing for a possible 2026 offering to fund an 'insane flight rate' for Starship, AI data centers in space and a moon base.

The first detailed report of an IPO plan said SpaceX aimed to list in mid-to-late 2026 and raise well above $30 billion at a valuation near $1.5 trillion, which would make it the largest listing ever. Musk had long said Starlink might be spun out instead; the plan now covered the whole company.

At the annual meeting in Austin, Tesla said 75 percent of votes cast backed the 2025 CEO Performance Award, a stock grant of up to 423.7 million shares paid in twelve tranches as market value climbs from $2 trillion to $8.5 trillion and operational goals are met. Alongside 20 million vehicles, 10 million active FSD subscriptions and a million Optimus robots, the goals include one million robotaxis in commercial operation.

Tesla's Robotaxi service began on a Sunday afternoon in a fenced area of Austin with roughly ten modified Model Ys, invited riders, mostly influencers and investors, a Tesla employee in the front passenger seat as safety monitor, daytime-only hours and a flat $4.20 fare announced by Musk on X. It was the first time Tesla carried paying passengers in cars with no one in the driver's seat.

Bloomberg reported that SpaceX was discussing an insider share sale at roughly $350 billion, up from $210 billion a year earlier, making it the most valuable private company in the United States. The periodic tender offers, which let employees and early investors sell to outside funds, were how SpaceX's price was set before it went public.

At the We, Robot event on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Tesla showed 20 Cybercab prototypes with butterfly doors, inductive charging and no steering wheel or pedals, plus a 20-passenger Robovan and Optimus robots. Musk said the Cybercab would cost under $30,000 to buy and about 20 cents a mile to run, promised unsupervised FSD for Model 3 and Model Y in Texas and California in 2025, and said Cybercab production would start in 2026 or before 2027.

Musk confirmed a Bloomberg report that the August 8 event was being delayed to October, saying he had requested an important design change to the front of the vehicle and that the extra time would let Tesla show off a few other things. Shares had fallen more than 6 percent on the initial report.

After Reuters reported that Tesla had dropped its low-cost EV to concentrate on a robotaxi built on the same platform, Musk called the report a lie and then posted that a Tesla Robotaxi would be unveiled on August 8. Weeks later he cut more than a tenth of the workforce and said the company was going all in on autonomy.

On the first-quarter 2022 earnings call Musk said Tesla would bring a dedicated robotaxi, optimised for autonomy and without a steering wheel or pedals, to volume production in 2024, and that rides would cost less than a subsidised bus ticket. He conceded that full self-driving had produced more false dawns than any technology he had worked on.

At Tesla's Autonomy Investor Day, Elon Musk said the company would launch a ride-hailing network in 2020 in which owners could add their cars and Tesla would run its own dedicated fleet, taking 25 to 30 percent of fares. He predicted over a million robotaxis on the road within about a year, enabled by an over-the-air update to cars carrying Tesla's new self-driving computer. None of that happened on that schedule.