It’s no secret that Elon Musk is hiding plenty of skeletons in his closet.

The mercurial billionaire has made an extensive list of enemies through his offensive commentary, led the gutting of humanitarian aid, exploited workers at his companies, and meddled with the democratic process — all the while alienating investors with his chronic overpromising and underdelivering.

Simply put, documentarian and investigative journalist Alex Gibney had a very rich source of material to draw from for his upcoming documentary “Musk,” which had its world premiere today at the ongoing Venice Film Festival.

According to journalist David Sirota, Musk is “freaking out” about the film because Gibney “doesn’t pull punches, doesn’t cower and won’t be bullied.”

“And so the bully is mad,” Sirota tweeted.

By all accounts, the four-hour epic will be a doozy. The documentarian “crafted a movie that, while not new in its specifics, is often damning in its totality, standing apart from anything the media entertainment complex has recently turned out — a portrait of power with the cinematic scope of ‘All the King’s Men’ and the potential social impact of ‘The Pentagon Papers,'” the Hollywood Reporter gushed.

Musk has reportedly gone to extreme — and sometimes unsuccessful — lengths to silence those involved in Gibney’s latest work. Musk’s ex and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, who is “prominently featured” in the documentary, told reporters at the Venice Film Festival that she was “offered the opportunity not to speak for $40 million,” as quoted by People.

“When you’re offered something like that [to stay quiet], it really causes a debate in your head about what your speech means and how valuable that is and why do they want to offer me this amount of money to not speak?” St. Clair said.

St. Clair is one of four women who have had a total of 14 children with Musk, at least that we know about so far. The 26-year-old had a major falling out with the entrepreneur, going as far as to allege that the billionaire “financially retaliated” against her for filing a custody petition by reducing child support payments.

We’re likely to hear more commentary from Musk about the film. Last week, Musk tweeted that Gibney was “obviously going to make the most convincingly terrible hit piece on me that he can possibly think of,” calling him a “douchebag to his core.”

But considering the staggering amount of material Musk has gifted the world, Gibney had plenty of material to work with.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Is Insisting He Knows More About Chess Than Chess.com

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An Amazon Prime Air cargo jet ripped right past the landing zone at the Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, struggling to stop itself in time before overrunning the runway and crashing into a cleaning crew and a nearby SUV.

It was a tragic incident, killing five innocent people.

The Boeing 767-300 also barreled right through a chain-link fence that was protecting a highly unusual lot of vehicles: photographs of the scene show the dented nose of the airliner just a few dozen feet away from a kennel of parked Tesla Cybercabs.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has banked the future success of his EV maker on the gold-colored self-driving vehicles, which are too small to fit more than two passengers and lack both steering wheels or pedals. Their sudden appearance in a story about a deadly airliner disaster had the billionaire taken aback. However, instead of offering his condolences after the tragedy, Musk simply tweeted the word “Weird” in response.

The peculiar cameo also led to plenty of questions over Tesla’s plans to roll out the cars outside of Austin. Just last week, the Cybercabs were deployed for the first time in the Texas city, but the company has yet to announce any imminent launches in Miami.

Regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration watched closely following last week’s deployment, which comes just shy of two years after Tesla first showed off its Cybercab. As Bloomberg notes, the light on details event was “uncharacteristically low-key,” offering no livestream or media coverage.

The “Cybercab event was largely a bust,” tweeted Future Fund Advisors co-founder Gary Black. “The launch offered little detail and key questions remained unanswered.”

Indeed, regulatory approval is hazy for vehicles without any traditional driver controls, a topic that’s especially pertinent to Tesla. Musk has bet the company’s entire future on the success of its Cybercabs and its humanoid robot, dubbed Optimus.

With neither showing any signs of a significant public rollout any time soon, Wall Street is bound to keep asking some tough questions.

More on the Cybercab: Tesla Loses Trademark to “Cybercab” Due to Its Own Staggering Incompetence

The post Amazon Cargo Jet Crashes Just Feet From Parking Lot Full of Tesla Cybercabs, Killing Five appeared first on Futurism.

Venice film festival: Alex Gibney interviews former colleagues, wives, the trillionaire’s father and a CG avatar in this absorbing documentary

‘Elon is a nuke.” The speaker is Ashley St Clair, a former conservative Maga influencer and one of Elon Musk’s former girlfriends-slash-baby mommas.

She is a fascinating expert witness in Alex Gibney’s four-hour epic study of the world’s richest and dullest man: the overgrown brattish South-African-born trillionaire plutocrat, ersatz visionary and Trump courtier who owns Tesla cars, SpaceX rocket ships, Starlink satellites on which nation states’ military capabilities are increasingly reliant, X (formerly Twitter) which shapes the collective incel id of billions and GrokAI whose vast server farms daily guzzle oceans of precious water.

Is being the world’s richest man not enough for Elon Musk?

He must also have us all believe that he’s a genius, sui generis, with a mind so mighty that it’s wasted on supposedly intellectual pastimes like “chess.”

He’s so convinced that the board game is beneath him, in fact, that he’s begun arguing about it with… Chess.com, a leading source of expertise and chess AI. 

The inane saga kicked off yesterday on X — where else — when Musk responded to a post about all the possible moves you can make in chess. To a mind as omniscient as Musk’s, the number — a mere 40 orders of magnitude more than all the atoms in the observable universe — wasn’t sufficiently large enough to be interesting.

“The actual number of moves that are not utterly stupid in chess is tiny,” he claimed, “and chess will be fully solved one day.”

Here, Chess.com entered the fray by responding with a succinct rejoinder: “skill issue.”

The bait worked.

“Chess is hard for humans, but not for computers. One day, it will be fully solved like checkers,” Musk wrote, essentially repeating himself. “Between now and then, or even after, have fun. People enjoy many games/sports where machines are vastly better.”

Indeed, humans who aren’t intelligent as Musk, in their feeble-mindedness and fleeting time on this planet, may enjoy activities such as games and sports, blissfully unaware that a hypothetical machine may hypothetically make mince meat of those activities one day. And yet, as Musk admitted, he’s choosing to waste his time “arguing with some random intern.” (“I’m a full-time employee,” the Chess.com account clarified.)

Musk also went on about how an artificial superintelligence — something we don’t even know is possible to build — will “figure out ways to solve and compress that are far beyond what we could possibly comprehend.” Then he cited some conversations he had with his personal AI chatbot, Grok, as if that put matters to bed.

There’s certainly an interesting intellectual debate to be had about “solving” chess — something that actual mathematicians have explored and tried to tackle — but Musk’s arguments seem to be driven solely by contempt. The board game is a long-held bugbear of his.

Back in 2022, in a now infamous tweet, Musk wrote about how he stopped playing chess as a child because he “found it to be too simple to be useful in real life,” before extolling how Polytopia, a mobile game, was the superior activity of choice for the cognoscenti.

He had something similar to say amid his battle with Chess.com. Responding to another account, Musk wrote that he “felt diminishing returns from chess in terms of transfer learning to understand reality.” Next time your opponent destroys you at chess, you might try deploying that excuse, too.

More on Elon Musk: Elon Musk Is Having One of His All-Time Meltdowns

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Tesla has settled a wrongful death lawsuit over a 2023 crash in which a Model S on Autopilot slammed into a parked fire truck, killing the driver and seriously injuring his brother.

The confidential settlement, filed in California federal court, lets Tesla avoid a jury trial that would have put Elon Musk’s own Autopilot claims in front of jurors.

It’s simple, says the SpaceX boss – according to something called the ‘Kardashev scale’, we just have to move energy production ‘off-planet’

Next time the weather gives the UK 61 days without rain and we wonder idly if this is the end, there is a term we may whistle up to soothe us. Like murmuring the rosary, or putting our fingers in our ears and humming, this phrase is to be mumbled on repeat – “the Kardashev scale, the Kardashev scale” – a buzzy concept in tech, much favoured by Elon Musk, and precisely the thing we’ve been waiting for. The Kardashev scale is the answer both to our impending doom and our anxiety around it – and if we decide to believe in it, we won’t have to give the climate crisis a single thought until the last drip falls from the tap.

This is the idea and it’s a familiar one to anyone who has watched tech billionaires take intractable, commonplace crises and decide that, among the measures and proposals in play, the vital missing ingredient so far has been them. Do you remember when Jeff Bezos, rather than doing something quotidian and loserish like funding public education by ensuring Amazon pays the same tax rate as regular Americans, decided instead to reinvent preschools?

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

On today’s super simple episode of Quick Charge, we talk about GM’s new Energy Pass, SpaceX’s big bet on fossil fuels, and Tesla’s long-promised Roadster set to arrive “real soon.” Again. For what is nearly the tenth year in a row.

Tesla’s chief designer says the new Roadster is coming “very soon.” We are talking about the same car Tesla revealed in 2017 and promised to build by 2020.

Franz von Holzhausen said it on the latest episode of Jay Leno’s Garage. When Leno pressed him on it, he doubled down: “very soon.” Leno’s deadpan reply, “10 years… just shy of 10 years,” said the rest.

SpaceX confirmed it will power Terafab, its $16.8 billion chip megafactory in Texas, with its own natural gas power plants and “very large battery arrays.” Tesla solar isn’t in the plan.

That’s despite Tesla being a partner on the project, and despite Tesla selling solar panels, Powerwalls, and grid-scale batteries built for exactly this kind of load.

As Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and their peers have grown richer and more influential, Gil Durán argues they have all but abandoned democracy – and found the perfect government to enable them

In April, Gil Durán was permanently banned from Elon Musk’s X for posting just two words. Durán was responding to a post from the tech company Palantir outlining its 22‑point “technological manifesto”, which praised American “hard power”, western culture and AI weapons, denounced inclusivity and called for compulsory national service. Durán responded: “TLDR: Fascism” (TLDR is short for “too long, didn’t read”).

Durán didn’t break any of X’s written rules, he points out over a video call from San Francisco – so much for Musk’s “free-speech absolutism”. His ban might just have had something to do with his preceding tweet, showing the cover of his new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. The book’s central argument is that big tech is no longer our friend, as many of its billionaire owners have seized economic and political control and are steering the fate of the planet towards their own bizarre, apocalyptic visions.

In terms of demoralizing the federal workforce and demolishing the public sector, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was a success.

In terms of actually saving money, though — its ostensible raison d’être — it was a dismal failure.

Musk vowed to slash $2 trillion in government “waste and fraud.” Then he lowered that target to $1 trillion, and behind the scenes reportedly promised Trump to save just a tenth of that figure. In the end, DOGE boasted on its website’s “Wall of Receipts” that it had saved around $215 billion — peanuts compared to its original promise.

But the actual amount of spending it slashed may be even lower than that. In a sweeping audit, the Government Accountability Office looked through the $110 billion that DOGE claimed it saved between January and July 2025, and found a trail of staggering incompetency that let loads of supposedly saved money fall through the cracks. That framing, though, could be too generous to Musk and his pimple-faced lackeys. You could also take the view that DOGE, in all likelihood, was deliberately cooking the books.

Per the GAO’s new report, released this month, DOGE claimed it terminated 13,476 contracts, but nearly 2,000 of them weren’t actually terminated. Spending-wise, about $27.4 billion of the purported savings came from these contracts that DOGE botched the terminations of.

The clumsy — or deceptive — bookkeeping didn’t end there. The receipts “includes leases identified for termination before [the group] was established,” the report states, as quoted by The Washington Post. And 108 of 264 of the leases it claimed it nixed “were already in process for termination.”

In all, the GAO found that over half of DOGE’s claimed $61 billion in contract savings couldn’t be verified or came from contracts that weren’t actually terminated. Similarly, 96 percent of the savings that it claimed came from grants couldn’t be verified by the accountability office, either.

Last August, an investigation by Politico found that of the $52.8 billion that DOGE had claimed to save by cancelling contracts at the time, its actual savings were closer to just $1.4 billion. To calculate how it saved money, DOGE dubiously used the maximum spending limit listed on the contracts it axed, figures that in practice are much higher than what the government ends up spending.

At the time, government procurement expert Jessica Tillipman told the outlet that the practice was akin to “taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, cancelling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000.'”

More on Elon Musk: Columbia Economist Baffled as to Why the Masses Aren’t Rising Up Against Elon Musk

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It won't come as a surprise that Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) didn't save taxpayers nearly as much as it claimed. Analysis from outside the government showed savings claims were heavily inflated, and now the government's own watchdog has said it wasn't able to confirm savings claims made in DOGE's so-called "Wall of Receipts."

For example, DOGE reported savings of $49.2 billion from cutting grants, but almost none of it could be verified, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its report yesterday. The GAO is the auditing and investigating arm of Congress and issued the DOGE report in response to a June 2025 request from Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

"The Wall of Receipts did not provide sufficient information to verify the method DOGE used to calculate savings, or what the savings consisted of, for 13,553 of the 15,887 grants it reported as terminated. This corresponds to about 96 percent of the DOGE-reported grant savings," the GAO report said.

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We certainly wouldn’t blame you for having completely forgotten that last year, Elon Musk tried to reinvent Wikipedia because he thought it was too woke.

In October, his AI startup xAI launched Grokipedia, named after its AI chatbot. The encyclopedia stole human-written and edited pages from Wikipedia wholesale and ran them through a large language model, which also fielded user-submitted edits, to better reflect Musk’s contorted worldviews.

The site was hardly an exemplary of objectivity. It was quickly found to heavily cite an infamous neo-Nazi forum as a source of information, desperately tried to paint Tesla’s Cybertruck as a successful and desirable electric pickup truck, and validated Musk’s favorite conspiracy theories. But it was a major cultural moment, garnering countless stories in the media and discussions on podcasts over Musk’s attempt to control the spread of information.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the desperate attempt to twist the largest online encyclopedia in human history into an extension of an almost-trillionaire’s bigoted mind appears to have ground to a screeching halt — and, damningly, barely anybody seems to have noticed.

According to a new investigation by Lawfare, Grokipedia appears to have entirely stopped updating itself sometime earlier this year. Reviewing suggested edits from humans has also ground to a halt.

“As far as we can tell, no entry has changed in more than three months,” Lawfare concluded of the site, which is now owned by SpaceX since it merged with Musk’s AI efforts.

Worse yet, the site’s edit log appears to have broken completely as well, making it impossible to track which user-suggested changes were “accepted” or “rejected” by the AI.

By January, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism had already observed that xAI’s Grok was making more edits to its own articles than acting on human-suggested ones, suggesting a bottoming out of interest for the project.

Since then, it has turned into a ghost town, a completely redundant and misinformation-filled copy of Wikipedia, which remains one of the last bastions of human-edited and verified sources of information on the internet.

Even when Lawfare submitted an “uncomplicated factual update” about SpaceX having launched its IPO in June — an irrefutable fact that any allegedly “open source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge” should probably include — the Grokipedia entry remained stagnant.

Even pages that are purportedly drawing millions of views aren’t updating. The most recent approved update Lawfare could locate — to the entry about OpenAI’s ChatGPT — dates back to April 24.

As of today, Lawfare found that that there are 13,002 suggestions that “sit unresolved, trapped ‘in review.'”

“Altogether, what we found was that the ‘live’ change feed is gone, past decisions were retroactively reverted without explanation, new decisions are not being issued, and article text appears frozen (and, in some cases, outdated),” the publication concluded. “We do not know whether xAI is preparing a major revision or has altogether abandoned active development of the project.”

It’s a precarious situation. Despite having been abandoned, Similarweb data suggests Grokipedia received over six million visits in June alone. Hundreds of thousands of sites are also still citing Musk’s encyclopedia, which could spread misinformation even further.

Futurism has reached out to SpaceX for an update on the project, but considering the reputation of Musk’s companies and their refusal to interact with the media, we’re not holding our breath for a response.

More on Grokipedia: Elon Musk Is Not Beating the Allegations: Grokipedia Cites a Hardcore Nazi Website 42 Times

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Tesla and SpaceX have confirmed where they’ll build Terafab, the semiconductor megafactory Elon Musk first teased in March. It’s going to Grimes County, Texas, about an hour northwest of Houston.

The companies put the initial phase at roughly $16.8 billion and said the finished site will span more than 100 million square feet, which they’re calling the largest chip manufacturing facility on the planet.

Investors were not impressed by SpaceX’s first-ever earnings report earlier this week. Shares dropped by more than ten percent, even after the company reported higher than expected revenue — comforting financial news which, unfortunately for CEO Elon Musk, was overshadowed by the venture’s massive AI spending.

The same day, SpaceX insiders, including employees and executives, got their first real opportunity to turn their holdings into cash after the total shares available for trading grew from around 639 million to 1.55 billion, a chunk of the stock valued at just over $100 billion being unlocked.

As Reuters put it, investors now faces an “irresistible opportunity to cash out.”

“This has to be the most talked-about lockup in the history of IPO lockups,” institutional ​brokerage firm R.F. Lafferty & Co CEO Robert Hackel told the agency. “You are going to see a lot of exits.”

It’s no wonder Musk’s rocket company is facing massive pressure this week. Shares are down more than 28 percent over the past month, currently hovering around $114, which is miles below its mid-June record high of $225.

SpaceX’s massive volatility briefly made Musk the world’s first trillionaire — only for him to lose that title once his rocket company’s stock came crashing back to Earth.

Its current share price is also low enough to keep an additional 455 million shares locked up, since it’s still south of its $135 IPO price, setting the stage for even more volatility if it were to claw itself back to that point.

Musk remaind steadfast in his ambitious vision for the company, from orbital data centers to a fleet of humanoid robots that would enable large scale manufacturing on the surface of the Moon.

During Tuesday’s earnings call, he admitted that his plans sound “totally nuts” and “super sci-fi right now,” but maintained that “it’s going to happen.”

Whether investors continue to buy into his vision, though, is anything but guaranteed. SpaceX’s success so far this year has largely been built on hype surrounding AI. The company was merged with Musk’s AI startup, xAI, bringing in plenty of new investors — but saddling it with billions of dollars in additional debt.

Its space ambitions hinge almost entirely on the success of Starship, a super-heavy launch platform that has yet to complete a single successful flight and landing.

SpaceX’s revenues, meanwhile, are heavily dependent on its Starlink satellite internet service. There’s certainly good news there, but the program also saw its average revenue per user drop over the last quarter, rattling investors.

In short, SpaceX’s path to profitability is inextricably linked to the belief that Musk’s sci-fi dreams can be turned into reality in a short enough time period that the dream won’t collapse in on itself.

“SpaceX wants to tell the story they’re the market leader,” The Westly Group founder Steve Westly told CNBC. “But people still have these questions: how quickly can they grow? How big are the costs going to be before this thing gets to profitability?”

More on SpaceX: SpaceX Achieves Its First Moon Landing by Accidentally Crashing Into It at 5,400 Miles Per Hour, Causing Huge Explosion and 60-Foot Crater

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Being unbelievably wealthy comes with powerful perks — like getting away with being too cheap to pay people the money they’re owed.

This, allegedly, is what Elon Musk is doing with one of the contractors who helped build his sprawling Colossus data centers near Memphis. 

The contractor, Ohio-based Darana Hybrid, has filed two liens against SpaceXAI — formerly known as xAI, before being merged into SpaceX — demanding that Musk’s firm pay more than $136 million for the work it’s done since 2024, the Memphis Business Journal first reported.

“The contractors are alleging they haven’t been paid for years of construction work,” Dima Amro, the reporter who broke the story, told Action 5 News.

Musk’s rapid construction of the two Colossus data centers in the Greater Memphis area has been the center of controversy. To quickly get the facilities online, the company brought in heavily polluting gas turbines that residents complain is making the air hard to breathe. Laggardly payments could be further evidence of the expedient means SpaceXAI took to get the data centers operational as quickly as possible.

According to the Shelby County Register of Deeds website, Darana Hybrid has filed two liens against SpaceXAI, one demanding $18 million for construction at the first Colossus facility near Boxtown, and another for more than $118 million for work at the second facility in Whitehaven.

And that could be just the start. Darryl Cuttell, Darana Hybrid’s owner, is reportedly expected to file more liens, bringing the total money owed to over half a billion dollars.

“So it looks like more liens are going to be coming to the surface,” Amro told Action 5 News. “About $400 million more worth of liens. I was told that that would be filed in Mississippi for the SpaceXAI facilities there.”

According to the reporting, two other companies, USW-Menard Inc and TorcSill Foundations, have also filed liens totalling more than $2.2 million for work done at SpaceXAI’s data center facilities.

The alleged hundreds of millions of dollars in missing money is upending Cuttell’s life, Amro says.

“He said he hasn’t slept in over four months. He’s lost a lot of weight. And he feels like there’s no future right now after filing those liens,” she told Action 5 News.

This isn’t the first time Musk has been accused of ripping off the smaller companies that helped build his business empire. A 2025 investigation by CNN found that contractors for Musk’s automaker Tesla had filed liens for more than $110 million of unpaid money in the past five years, with many of the contractors being small mom-and-pop operations.

More on Elon Musk: Columbia Economist Baffled as to Why the Masses Aren’t Rising Up Against Elon Musk

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