As Elon Musk tries to save face by claiming he’ll give every American child a chunk of SpaceX stock, here’s a chilling reminder of what he did that affected millions of children the second he had a whiff of federal power.

In a new interview, the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, who directed a just-released four-hour look at the billionaire’s life titled “Musk,” discussed the staggering death toll of Musk’s cuts to USAID, calling it a “crime against humanity.”

“There was an estimate that what [Musk] did by so suddenly cutting USAID would cost through disease and starvation as many as 14 million lives,” he told journalist Katie Couric. “Even if you discount that by an enormous amount, we know that within about a year of those summary cuts — where they were literally burning food that had already been paid for that was going to starving children — 500,000 children died.”

Musk, to Gibney’s astonishment, even joked about the cuts by saying he’d “put USAID into the woodchipper.” 

“What he put into the woodchipper,” Gibney said, “were children.”

Gibney, whose documentary Musk called a “hit piece,” is drawing from a 2025 study published in The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals. It estimated the impact of Musk effectively neutering USAID by implementing a freeze on its foreign aid funding — which went to programs to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and to address food insecurities — and slashing nearly 10,000 employees. 

In sum, the researchers found that the “steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 million additional all-age deaths, including 4.5 million in children younger than age five, by 2030.”

Even conservative estimates concurred that the number of deaths would be staggering. A tracker created by Brooke Nichols, a professor and infectious disease mathematical modeler at Boston University, projects the 1-year death toll caused by the USAID cuts at 518,000 children.

It’s a touchy subject for Musk, who continues to bristle at accusations that his actions could’ve caused harm. This summer, he challenged his critics to “cite a single name of someone who died” as a result of him gutting USAID. Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, took him up on it and gave him a list of the specific children who had died directly from his policies, many of whom were in South Sudan and Liberia — places he had visited in person to talk to locals and healthcare workers.

Musk, rather than countering his arguments, called Kristof “evil.”

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A 94-year-old electronics mogul is in hot water with Chicago authorities, who claim that his hare-brained plan to feed hungry squirrels is instead sustaining a massive plague of rats.

As previous owner of the billion-dollar electrical manufacturing company Tripp Lite, businessman Barre Seid has been putting his largess to use by paying a small army of workers to sprinkle an assortment of tree nuts across Chicago-area parks, Fortune reports.

As local resident Caroline Novak told Chicago WGN, it’s “like a luxury mélange of really nice nuts: I’m talking Brazil nuts and walnuts… these are not acorns.”

Though Seid’s target audience seems to be local squirrels, residents and city officials note that rats have quickly grown to depend on the regular feedings. As Novak’s husband told WGN, he counted over 40 rats digging holes near nut piles during a recent walk through Lincoln Park.

The bizarre operation has evidently been underway for years at this point, earning the billionaire heaps of civil violations carrying relatively small fines. Wealthy as he is, Seid has reportedly had no problem paying those fees and carrying on — the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, as the old saying goes.

“When you’re a billionaire and you have a weird hobby and someone tries to stop you, you have complete impunity,” Novak told Block Club Chicago in a separate interview. “You just triple down because why not? You’ll pay $40,000 in fines. You don’t care.”

Now in 2026, authorities in Chicago are reaching their breaking point. Alderman Timmy Knudsen — whose jurisdiction covers the area of Lincoln Park Seid’s workers are active in — is now pushing the Chicago Park District to sue Seid in order to stop the nuttiness once and for all.

“For years, a billionaire family has carried out a paid operation to feed local wildlife, disrupting our rat abatement efforts and causing an infestation that has made parts of the park unusable for other residents,” Knudsen’s office told Fortune in a statement. “We’re hopeful that raising awareness and drawing attention to the issue will ultimately lead to better behavior and a safer park for our community.”

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In early 2022, not long after Russia’s invasion began, SpaceX made good on CEO Elon Musk’s promise by shipping thousands of Starlink broadband internet terminals to the front lines of Ukraine.

The terminals quickly turned into a vital lifeline as many parts of the embattled region were plunged into the dark and cut off from the rest of the world.

But Musk has been accused of playing both sides, with biographer Walter Isaacson claiming the billionaire had secretly ordered SpaceX engineers not to turn on the Starlink satellite network near the Crimean coast in 2022 to disrupt what Musk called a “mini-Pearl Harbor.”

And as the war rages on some four years later, SpaceX’s terminals are once again making headlines. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky accused the space company of restricting access to its Starshield service, a military version of the service specifically developed for the Pentagon.

Yet neither Musk nor the White House are willing to take any blame for the disruption, with both sides pointing fingers at each other. In fact, Musk has now thrown president Donald Trump under the bus as the scandal deepens.

“Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government,” he tweeted on Wednesday. “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”

“Starlink is a commercial service owned and controlled by SpaceX,” he added. “Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defensive activities and cannot be used for offensive military action, as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company.”

It’s a bizarre missive, especially considering what Ukraine’s actions could easily be characterized as “defensive activities,” as many users of Musk’s social media network pointed out. Besides, there’s no question Musk has an enormous amount of sway in Washington, DC, meaning he easily could’ve had a say in the matter.

The timing was also suspicious, to say the least. As The Hill reports, Zelensky made his announcement just days after Trump announced a deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin to buy millions of tons of diesel to lower prices in the US ahead of the rapidly approaching midterm elections.

Lawmakers were appalled at the US seemingly dropping the ball on coming to Ukraine’s aid.

“Reports of Starlink failing in Ukraine are deeply alarming— potentially crippling air defense against Russia’s murderous missiles & drones,” tweeted senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Wednesday, hours before Musk chimed in on the subject. “Trump & Musk must be held accountable.”

Meanwhile, a subdued Zelensky mourned the loss of US support.

“Really, yes… but it’s a little bit more complicated ⁠than just my emotions or my feelings,” he said when asked if he feel betrayed by Trump on Wednesday. “It’s a pity that we are losing, we are losing a strong partner.”

By Thursday, the situation changed once more, with Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries resuming as Starlink and Starshield services had been restored to full capacity, as an unnamed Ukrainian official told Axios.

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Can you believe it? Elon Musk — a man known for posting AI slop glorifying himself, who believes his “maximum truth-seeking AI” Grok will unlock the secrets of the universe, and believes multiple conspiracy theories divorced from reality — has apparently been struggling with AI psychosis.

The centibillionaire admitted as much, seemingly as a badge of honor, in a rant during the X Takeover event on Saturday that was spotted by Business Insider.

 “I’ve got a little bit of cyber psychosis,” Musk said. “Maybe a lot actually.”

“At various points this year,” he continued, “I’ve had AI or SI psychosis probably like half a dozen times.” (The “SI” there was referring to “superintelligence,” the term that president Donald Trump just passed an executive order to rename artificial intelligence; taking this edict seriously as the tech remains so obviously flawed may itself be a sign of some sort of disordered thinking.)

AI psychosis is the term that some experts are using to describe how AI chatbots can drive and exacerbate a user’s delusions, sometimes causing them to break with reality. In extreme cases, these can cause extreme mental health spirals that upend someone’s personal and professional life, sometimes ending in self harm or suicide.

More generally, AI psychosis is also used to mock tech figures — CEOs especially — who are a little too obsessed with AI and fully buy into every ludicrous claim about its capabilities, such as those peddled by Musk. Sometimes, techies will embrace the accusations in ironic fashion, sending a proud middle finger to the luddites who’ve declined partaking in the industry hysteria.

Or maybe not so ironic. Musk’s baby mama Claire “Grimes” Boucher not too long ago bragged about the upsides of having your mind melted by an AI model, in a rant that unfortunately appeared to be completely sincere.

“The thing about AI psychosis is that it’s more fun than not having AI psychosis,” she wrote in a tweet in December, before adding: “I’ve had it (might still have it).”

It certainly wouldn’t be unprecedented for a tech figure to weather allegations of actual AI psychosis — the non-“fun” kind — either, such as the infamous case of OpenAI investor Geoff Lewis.

Musk, it goes without saying, has been chugging the AI Kool-Aid. Moments before the admission, he talked about how stunned he’s been by AI music.

“Calling it slop-core is a misnomer, frankly it’s awesome-core,” he said. “AI music is really good.”

“It just shows taste,” he further asserted. “And youre like, ‘wow, AI can do good taste? That’s pretty wild.'”

With takes like those, we’d almost be more worried if he didn’t have AI psychosis.

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Let Elon Musk never be accused of not leading by example.

Last week, the world’s richest man sung the praises of his new Grok Bot AI agent, encouraging his followers to let it control their credit cards and shop for them.

“To buy stuff, you can just take a picture of your credit card, drop it in the chat and Grok @Bot will scour the Internet for the best deal on the item you want and order it,” he wrote.

The next day, he posted a screenshot of how he’d used Grok do exactly that, telling it “to research the most fun Lego Star Wars kits for young kids and order them.” If it wasn’t a testament to how much of a thoughtful dad he was, it at least showed that Grok could, in fact, use your credit card.

But almost as if provoking pranksters, Musk didn’t censor his screenshot at all. There, on proud display, was his order number, his email, and even the last four numbers of his credit card.

Immediately, a user named Enderman posted screenshots showing how he supposedly tricked a LEGO customer service bot into canceling Musk’s order. The post went mega viral, and an outraged Musk, taking the bait, fumed in the replies and insisted his order wasn’t canceled.

Just canceled your order, don’t share your info online guys https://t.co/n4GLXBPWWP pic.twitter.com/GoE8he0PCT

— Enderman (@Enderman) October 11, 2026

True or not — Musk certainly isn’t above a little lying — imitators followed. Another jokester showed how they used the LEGO support bot to un-cancel Musk’s order and place 400 more orders of the same product. To top things off, he also claimed to change the shipping address to Little St James, the infamous island owned by Jeffrey Epstein, which Musk discussed visiting in emails with the deceased sex trafficker.

LEGO passed up on providing a surreal statement for the ages, declining Wired’s request for comment.

Anyway, it’s probably not a good idea to let an AI agent, Grok included, control your financial information. Scammers have been targeting AI chatbots to manipulate them into recommending — or buying — scam products, such as by propping up entire fake storefronts to phish for your information or imitate defunct businesses. And the more permissions you give an AI, the more chances it has to make a terrible mistake.

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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on Monday that the country’s three strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex’s data centers last week had been a resounding success.

Zelensky told reporters that social media platforms had seen a notable drop in Russian bot activity. Following the strikes, “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” he said.

“A lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots,” he added. “And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.”

The news once again highlights how data centers have become a major target during ongoing geopolitical conflict. Inexpensive drone attacks are hitting a nerve, setting back major AI data center expansion efforts across the Middle East as Iran targets the facilities amid hostilities with the United States.

The phenomenon may even be hitting close to home for certain billionaires. On Elon Musk’s Twitter-turned-X, users quickly noticed that the number of interactions the site’s owner was getting on his posts seemed to plummet in the wake of the strikes.

“Woah, Elon Musk out here getting less than 5k likes on his tweets after the bot farm got exploded,” YouTuber Zack “Jerry Rig Everything” Nelson tweeted. A screenshot appended to the post shows Musk receiving 4,900 likes after responding “Wow” to a racist conspiracy theory that claims Brussels, Belgium, is “only 10.5 percent white.”

On its face, the theory sounds pretty far-fetched. Could the destruction of a few Russian data centers really be tanking Musk’s engagement on his own platform?

But looking at the average number of likes his posts have been receiving does raise eyebrows. Throughout October, his posts garnered an average of between 17,000 and 81,000 likes per day — until the past two days, the averages slid to a dismal 11,000 and 8,000, respectively.

We certainly can’t determine a causal relationship, but the numbers are striking. And experts are paying attention.

An analysis by Cloudflare showed that traffic from Yandex had dropped by 99 percent last week following the strikes. Not all of the traffic was “necessarily bot behaviour on social media platforms,” the company clarified, pointing out that its figures included all automated internet requests, such as search engine crawlers or monitoring tools.

Other rumors that online activity surrounding Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) had plummeted also circulated, but as Euronews points out, there hasn’t been any independent verification of these claims.

Amid it all, Zelensky’s office walked back the Ukrainian president’s announcement, telling the BBC that he was “talking about the atmosphere on social media” instead of a concrete fall in bot activity.

It’s an extremely volatile moment in history as the United States is headed to the polls less than a month from now for the midterm elections. The subject of Russian interference, particularly during the 2016 presidential elections, has fueled plenty of heated discussion over the years. And Musk, one of president Donald Trump’s biggest supporters, has turned into an influential figure in these debates, most recently accusing Zelensky of having gone “too far” by striking Russian oil refineries.

Others celebrated the latest strikes.

“As someone harassed daily by armies of Russian bots, my deepest thanks!” former US ambassador to Russia and political science professor Michael McFaul tweeted.

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To see Local Lists in Apple Maps on iOS 27, type “Local Lists” into the search field, tap Guides, then pick a collection such as restaurants or kid-friendly spots. The feature works only in select U.S. cities, and Apple doesn’t say which ones. Apple describes Local Lists as “relevant collections of locations trending in your […]

The post iOS 27 Maps Local Lists: How to find trending spots in select U.S. cities appeared first on The Mac Observer.

O fim de ano já está batendo à porta, o que significa que logo veremos nossas redes sociais serem inundadas por retrospectivas de serviços de streaming como o Spotify, que anunciou hoje uma novidade que deverá agradar pais e responsáveis com crianças pequenas em casa.

Mais precisamente, a plataforma sueca começou a liberar uma nova opção nos seus ajustes que, quando ativada, impede que músicas infantis, cantigas de ninar e outras canções tradicionalmente associadas aos pequenos apareçam no Wrapped, a famosa retrospectiva de final de ano do Spotify.

Disponível tanto para usuários gratuitos quanto para assinantes do Premium, a novidade afeta o algoritmo de recomendação do serviço como um todo, o que significa que essas músicas também deixarão de aparecer em playlists como “Descobertas da Semana” e “Daily Mix”, só para citar alguns exemplos.

Ainda segundo as informações, esse ajuste também funciona retroativamente, o que significa que músicas infantis reproduzidas antes da sua ativação também serão ignoradas pelo serviço de streaming.

Fazendo isso, você elimina rapidamente a influência de músicas infantis e familiares nas suas recomendações, mantendo o foco no seu gosto musical. Assim, você pode tocar músicas infantis quando seus filhos estiverem por perto, como em uma viagem de carro ou na hora de dormir, sem deixar que essas músicas influenciem o que você ouvirá em seguida.

Para crianças e adolescentes que desejam conferir suas próprias retrospectivas, o Spotify oferece as chamadas Managed accounts, as quais foram expandidas recentemente e dão aos pais/responsáveis controle sobre a experiência de seus filhos na plataforma. Disponíveis em 16 países (incluindo Brasil e Portugal), essas contas podem ser configuradas por usuários com qualquer tipo de assinatura.

Para ativar o ajuste supracitado, basta abrir o app do Spotify, tocar na sua foto de perfil e selecionar “Configurações e Privacidade”. Feito isso, vá até “Conteúdo e tela” e, depois, desative o ajuste “Include kids and family music in taste profile” (algo como “Inclua músicas infantis e familiares no perfil de gosto”).

De acordo com o Spotify, as alterações podem levar até 48 horas para serem refletidas em suas recomendações. Também é possível que a novidade demore um pouco para aparecer para todos.

Apple, é a sua vez!

In a whiplash-inducing turn away from the mythical quest to build human-level artificial intelligence, Western tech billionaires like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk are now joining hands to call for a massive slowdown of the tech’s development.

The commentariat is divided on what exactly this means — for some, it’s proof-positive of a genuine threat that AI could spin out of control and exterminate everybody. To others it’s a smokescreen, a thin cover provided by AI CEOs who are desperate for a government bailout to avoid popping the AI investment bubble.

If you ask lawmakers in Beijing, the whole thing is a bunch of nonsense.

In a routine press scrum hosted by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, government spokesperson Guo Jiakun addressed a laundry list of topics, from President Xi Jinping’s recent trip to New Delhi to recovery efforts around the devastating mudslides in Nepal. One of the questions, posed by a Reuters journalist, concerned whether the ministry had any comment on calls from American tech billionaires to slow down AI development.

“AI is a consequential technology for the wellbeing of all humanity,” Guo replied. “All parties should jointly promote the open and inclusive development of AI for good and for all. Fear-mongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only hamper efforts toward sound global AI governance, which serves no one’s interest.”

Compared to the weight given to other topics, the ministry’s statement on the Western AI debacle was decidedly terse. While talk of an AI slowdown is roiling US markets and trending on social media, it seems like it’s barely a blip on Beijing’s radar.

The virtual hand-waving follows the decidedly disinterested stance Chinese policymakers have taken toward the US approach to AI development, which for years has hinged on building toward human-level artificial general intelligence.

As research fellow at the partially US-funded Brookings Institute Kyle Chan wrote in February, Beijing’s concept of “AGI” is wildly different from the one used across the pond. While US policymakers and industry leaders treat the tech as a race to AGI where one winner takes all, their Chinese counterparts aren’t in any rush. The US might get there first, the idea goes, but like electric vehicles, cancer treatments, and smartphones, Chinese industry can quickly make up the difference.

“Let’s look at the history of the internet. It started in the US, but China quickly caught up and led in consumer applications — WeChat is a world-class example,” professor emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Yang Qiang said during a panel at the AGI Next Summit in January. “AI is similar — it’s a tool, and Chinese ingenuity will push it to the limit.”

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After over two decades of operation, Amazon Prime has become the backbone of American commerce, more akin to a public utility than a private company. Its logistics network has blown past the US Postal Service in parcel volume, delivering crucial goods to small business owners, trade workers, and teachers at record speed.

And like any public utility, Amazon Prime comes with a public price tag — a massive state subsidy paid by taxpayers around the country.

Blistering new reporting by Fortune revealed that the number of Amazon workers receiving government assistance via Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid has nearly tripled between 2020 and 2025, a stunning rise for any group, let alone workers employed at one of the wealthiest companies in the world. It comes as the megacorporation posted a massive rise in annual profit over the same period, from $11.6 billion in 2020 to $77.7 billion in 2025.

Those federal assistance numbers, obtained by the independent US Government Accountability Office, found that 12,346 Amazon workers across 11 states were getting help affording basic groceries through SNAP. A further 11,338 in those states rely on Medicaid.

The federal assistant amounts to a de facto subsidy of Amazon’s labor force, allowing the company executives to rake in record profits while paying its workers starvation wages. If it weren’t for these government programs, in other words, thousands of Amazon’s lowest-paid workers wouldn’t be able to afford to make ends meet.

Though Amazon was far from the only company whose full time employees are struggling, the GAO survey found that Amazon was consistently among the very top employers of adult SNAP and Medicaid enrollees. Other top offenders include Walmart, ride-share platform companies like Uber, and chain stores like McDonald’s and Dollar General.

Beyond Amazon, the survey observes the grim reality of working class life in the wealthiest nation on Earth. Overall, the report points to the fact that nearly 14 million working adults were enrolled in Medicaid in 2024, while 10.6 million received SNAP benefits. Of those receiving government aid for groceries, some 71.3 percent — about 7.5 million people — worked 35 hours or more per week.

“What this analysis really points to is the large number of people who have very low incomes and continue to have very low income,” GAO director for education, workforce, and income security issues Kathryn Larin told Fortune. “I mean, these are families that are really barely able to make ends meet, and yet they are working, and they are working a lot.”

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Remember how Elon Musk vowed that his AI Grok would make an anti-woke, “historically accurate” version of the Odyssey? 

Well, he ended up throwing together a whole contest around it — and the winner of the first place prize of $100,000 is, as you probably expected, laughable nonsense.

The problems run deep. The Cyclops Polyphemus is depicted with three eyes, which feels disqualifying. And just a few cuts later, the famously monocular giant is at least four times as large as he was before. The other creatures and gods look like something out of a mobile game; Poseidon emerges from the sea appearing conspicuously cartoonish and impossibly muscled, before smashing Odysseus’s ship and his crew of photorealistic, ripped men.

Half the dialog is delivered in dramatic whispers with the same cadence. The fight scenes are cut to disguise the actual moments of impact, in the same way real B-movies do with aging action stars.

There are some shots here and there that look convincing enough, if you can overlook their bland aesthetic. But this AI “film” suffers the same tragic flaw that all AI films do: their component clips fail to coalesce into a coherent whole. It doesn’t do much on the “historically accurate” front, either; some of the Greek soldiers are clearly wearing the armor donned by Roman legionnaires.

Nonetheless, its creator Nem Perez declared that “this is ‘The Odyssey’ as Homer intended,” before calling it his “most intricate work to date.” He also labeled the video, in oxymoronic fashion, a “5-minute epic.”

This is "The Odyssey" as Homer intended. My longest, most intricate work to date. I pushed @grok @imagine to its absolute limits to create this 5-minute epic.

What bothered me most about the recent adaptation was the omission of the Phaeacians and Princess Nausicaa, whom… https://t.co/awYW6Hu4W8 pic.twitter.com/hJHOgdkEec

— Nem Perez (@NemPerez) August 31, 2026

It’s unclear if Musk actually watched the winner; as far as we can tell, he hasn’t replied or retweeted it, something he’s done for other AI Odyssey adaptations.

For those blissfully out of the loop, the centibillionaire and culture war crusader spent this summer raging against Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Greek epic, attacking it for its diverse cast, which included several Black women and a trans actor. 

Nolan, Musk accused, “desecrated Homer and groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar.” As such, he vowed that his AI “Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”

We’re still waiting for that full-length adaptation. But the short films that the contest has produced already make it painfully clear that AI video generators, and the “filmmakers” that embrace them, simply aren’t up to snuff. In all of the top three entries, Odysseus looks more or less like the same guy — some weird, looksmaxxer’s fantasy of a buff Antonio Banderas. Is this a fault of Grok or Grok users? At this point, the distinction may be moot.

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Armed with sordid tales of rogue AI agents escaping containment, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has found plenty of success using scare tactics to call for friendly regulation in the name of AI safety.

Now, it seems Altman is riding the wave of AI fearmongering to gin up some new business partners: the electric utility executives whose companies make up the US power grid.

As first reported by Politico, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT held a series of clandestine meetings with leaders from top electric utility companies including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co, and NextEra Energy, starting in July.

One of the most recent discussions took place on Wednesday in Colorado, during an annual meeting hosted by the Edison Electric Institute. Dominating the agenda, Politico notes, were discussions on electrical grid security, evidently spurred by the OpenAI-Hugging Face debacle, in which rogue AI agents allegedly broke free of their research environment, accessed the internet, and hacked into another AI company.

Though the incident spawned plenty of commentary around the pace of AI development and the advanced state of OpenAI’s models, the flow of information has been decidedly one-sided, with most of the details coming from OpenAI itself. As the New York Times reported, third-party safety researchers investigating the incident after the fact were only given a few days to access the reams of data generated by the hack, severely limiting their findings.

That said, OpenAI has an obvious incentive to play up its own AI’s supposedly terrifying capabilities, while suppressing or ignoring evidence that contradicts its own narrative: that of rogue AI agents capable of threatening the US energy grid.

To give just one example, OpenAI’s narration of the Hugging Face incident relies almost entirely on its agents’ “chains-of-thought,” where an AI model essentially generates statements explaining how it rationalized certain decisions. That sounds fine in theory, but researchers have found plenty of evidence showing that chains-of-thought aren’t reliable at narrating the actual moves made by natural language processors.

Despite the unanswered question around chain-of-thought reasoning, OpenAI is using the incident to lobby for regulatory safeguards that would cement its role as the authority around AI development.

This being the case, the timing of OpenAI’s energy security meetings is hard to overlook. As Politico notes in its reporting on these meetings, Altman has been hawking his company’s own cybersecurity services to top utility executives — conveniently riding the hype of the Hugging Face incident to secure a seat at one of the most important tables in the country.

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Elon Musk’s Tesla has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to its Robotaxi autonomous ride-hailing network.

The company is currently operating a fleet of just 45 of its cramped Cybercabs in Austin, Texas, still falling well short of investor and Tesla bull Dan Ives’ lofty expectations of the company adding “$1 trillion of value” for Tesla “over the coming years” with the service.

And unlike their counterparts in Texas and Florida, the Cybercabs that were recently spotted on the streets of New York City are featuring an unusual relic of a supposedly soon-to-be-bygone era: a steering wheel.

As Gothamist reports, the golden-hued cabs in the Big Apple are being overseen — and perhaps even operated — by a human in the driver’s seat with an old-fashioned steering wheel. It’s a significant departure from the original, steering wheel- and pedal-less Cybercabs Musk unveiled in 2024.

Officials confirmed the drivers are testing a “supervised” self-driving system, which still requires them to be able to take over control at any point. But Tesla refuses to say how many Cybercabs there are in the city or for how long they will be testing.

There’s likely a good reason Tesla has opted to go with more traditional controls. After all, it hasn’t even started the permit application process for autonomous vehicle testing with the New York Department of Motor Vehicles, as the Gothamist confirmed.

The EV maker is looking to collect driving data, not imminently launch a robotaxi service in the city.

In short, Tesla has a very long road ahead of it before it could ever roll out its Cybercabs nationally, let alone in other major urban areas. Other companies, however, have a massive head start, with Waymo claiming that it has already completed over half a million paid rides a week throughout the first quarter of this year. While Tesla has remained notably quiet on the matter, its numbers likely fall far short of that, considering it’s only operating with a fleet of a few dozen vehicles.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s Zoox vehicles received approval from regulators in late July to begin charging for rides in cars that don’t have a steering wheel. The company has been operating services free of charge in Las Vegas and San Francisco since 2025, according to the Associated Press.

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Tesla’s mawkishly sleek new Cybercab has begun rolling out to Austin, Texas this week, with more sighted in cities like New York, Washington DC, and San Diego. It’s the latest development in the world of self-driving taxi cabs — and in one dubious economic indicator, the nation’s personal injury attorneys are on high alert.

Case in point, the New Jersey based law firm Sarofiem and Antoun already has a blog post up courting customers wronged by Cybercab accidents. Billing himself as a “Tesla Cybercab accident lawyer,” Kerollos Antoun poses an important question: “if a driverless Tesla Robotaxi causes an accident, who is responsible when there is no human driver behind the wheel?”

Though Antoun concedes that Cybercabs don’t appear to currently be active in New Jersey, his blog registers a laundry list of considerations considering who can be held liable in accidents involving the autonomous vehicles — each highly theoretical and short on concrete answers.

“Could autonomous-driving software cause an accident,” for example? “Potentially,” Antoun writes. “If an accident occurs, attorneys may need to determine whether the autonomous system perceived the environment correctly and whether the vehicle’s response contributed to the crash.”

Other firms, like Funes Law in Miami and Angel Reyes and Associates in Austin, offer similar pitches: if you’re in an accident with a Cybercab, they want to litigate your case.

Though the tailor-made Cybercab blogs follow a familiar pattern of opportunism by corporate law firms, their point is fair enough. The technology behind Cybercabs is in a very early stage, and the legal precedent is even younger.

Whichever firm happens to scoop up the first Cybercab injury case would be making legal history — a chance to litigate a brand new product made by one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Though self-driving cars are only a few years old at this point, they’ve already resulted in startling legal firsts. In August of 2025, a jury in Miami handed down a landmark verdict against Tesla over a fatal crash involving a Model S being driven on the company’s “Autopilot” mode.

In that case, the total damages came out to a whopping $243 million — a landmark verdict that the nation’s accident attorneys are eager to replicate as Tesla’s gold-tinted coupe hits the pavement.

More on Tesla: Deranged Stalker Seizes Control of Woman’s Tesla Software to Terrorize Her While Driving

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Does Elon Musk, who claims to be so smart that chess bores him, understand what the Streisand effect is? We’re skeptical, because he’s now threatening to sue the Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney over his new documentary about the controversial business magnate — which Musk has been fuming is a “hit piece.”

The film, simply titled “Musk,” is a four hour examination of the centibillionaire’s life, from his upbringing in South Africa to his start during the dot-com boom to his foray into politics. But it’s a documentary, not a hagiography, and Musk can’t stand that it’s taking a critical eye to his character.

In a letter sent to Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro accused the director of defamation, alleging that his film spreads false claims about Musk supposedly rigging the 2024 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. (“Rigging” probably goes too far, but Musk did shell out nearly $300 million to back Trump’s election campaign.)

The complaint stems from a scene showing Ashley St. Clair — a former right-wing influencer who secretly had a child with Musk but fell out with him after going public about their affair — describing texts she received from Musk in which he cryptically says he’s “optimistic” about Trump winning because “tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.” Musk, attempting to clarify, added in a follow up message that he has “over 10 thousand lasers in space.” (NPR reported that it obtained and authenticated the texts in question.)

Spiro argues that this amounts to defamation, because it promotes a debunked conspiracy theory that Musk used his Starlink satellites to beam in votes for Trump.

“You are therefore on notice, before release, that the insinuation is false, that the material refuting it is public, and that you chose not to be told the rest,” he wrote in the strongly-worded letter.

Musk has had a bone to pick with Gibney ever since the film was announced in 2023, when he instinctively called it a “hit piece” despite there barely being any details about it at the time. Gibney retorted to Musk: “How would you know?”

Evidently, Musk still hasn’t gotten over it. As the documentary neared its world premier at Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, Musk reignited his attacks, making at least five different posts on X deriding it.

“Alex Gibney is obviously going to make the most convincingly terrible hit piece on me that he can possibly think of,” he wrote in one of his paranoid rants. “He’s a douchebag to his core and, in his own words, incredibly biased against me.”

Musk has a well known proclivity for trying to silence his critics, but the odds of his lawsuit working out aren’t spectacular. Defamation, in the US, is infamously difficult to prove.

St. Clair certainly doesn’t appeared to be rattled either, calling Musk’s legal threats “a joke.”

“They are more likely to colonize Mars than win a defamation case against Alex Gibney,” she told NPR in a statement. “Alex Spiro is sending fairy dust letters with obtuse legalese.”

More on industrialists: Elon Musk Has Been Calling Women “Breeders” Since His First Marriage, His First Wife Says

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Elon Musk is reportedly “freaking out” over a new documentary by documentarian and investigative journalist Alex Gibney.

And by all accounts, there might be a good reason for why Musk is lashing out at Gibney, calling his work a “hit piece” and “boring af.”

The four-hour documentary, which had its world premiere today at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week, featured interviews with Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk, who has had five of his (known) 14 children.

As Agence France Presse reports after attending the premiere, an emotional Justine Musk recalled the billionaire mistakenly claim that he was holding their first child Nevada when he died due to sudden infant death syndrome, when it was actually her.

“I learned the term gaslighting through my relationship with Elon,” she said in the documentary.

She also claimed that Musk refers to the mothers of his many children as “breeders” who “are interchangeable,” a vile descriptor perfectly highlighting the entrepreneur’s deep-rooted misogyny and bizarre obsession with procreation.

Musk has often argued that falling birth rates are humanity’s biggest threat and a major obstacle in his quest to become a multiplanetary species. He has reportedly even gone as far as to offer his sperm to SpaceX employees to seed a Mars colony.

The term “breeder” also highlights his troubled relationship with the at least four known women he has had children with. During the documentary’s premiere this week, Musk’s ex and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, who is featured in the movie, told reporters that she was “offered the opportunity not to speak for $40 million.”

In the documentary, Justine Musk also recalled Musk whispering into her ear that he’s the “alpha in this relationship” — during their first dance at their wedding in January 2000, per AFP.

Her remarks aren’t exactly hard to believe, as we’ve seen plenty of behavior that perfectly aligns with her harrowing comments. Case in point, Musk share a shockingly sexist tweet last year claiming that women were designed to be captured or bartered as property. He has also made revolting tweets in an apparent effort to hit on the singer Taylor Swift.

Musk has also treated his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, with utter disdain and unbelievable cruelty, going on intentionally hurtful anti-trans tirades and pronouncing her “dead.”

More about the documentary: Elon Musk Seems Legitimately Shaken Over This New Documentary

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Tesla’s flashy unveiling of its Cybercab robotaxi in 2024 left some glaring questions unanswered.

The sleek, gold-colored coupé impressed with a futuristic design, but baffled onlookers with its cramped two-seat interior, lack of a charging port, and a dubious, far-too-good-to-be-true $30,000 price tag.

Just under two years later, the first Cybercabs are starting to hit the streets in Austin, Texas — and Tesla is just itching to sell you one. Last week, the EV maker started handing out a “Robotaxi interest form,” as Electrek reported at the time, in an apparent effort attract would-be entrepreneurs willing to buy an entire fleet of the unusual vehicles.

Put simply, the idea is to share revenue from ride income with Tesla while the vehicles operate on the carmaker’s network, using its self-driving tech.

It’s part of a much broader plan. For many years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised that its Full Self-Driving-enabled vehicles, including the Cybercab, could effectively turn into an appreciating money-printing machine, allowing owners to sit on their couch and magically watch the money roll in.

As early as 2018, Musk promised investors that he saw the “future as kind of a shared electric autonomy, so that you’d be able to do ride-hailing or share the car any way,” likening it to “some combination of like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb.”

But there are plenty of reasons businesspeople should hesitate before takeing Tesla up on the offer of operating a Robotaxi fleet, as Electrek‘s Fred Lambert argued in a compelling essay this week.

Basically, he pointed out, “if running a fleet of Cybercabs were actually profitable, Tesla wouldn’t sell you a single one.” It’s like claiming you’ve found an infinite money glitch — and then instead of quietly profiting off it, selling a get-rich-quick book on how to do it yourself.

There are also looming technical questions. Musk’s lofty promises of a vehicle that completes ride-hailing requests autonomously while also appreciating in value has little, if any, bearing with reality in 2026. To the contrary, the EV maker’s offerings are among some of the fastest depreciating vehicles on the market today.

Then there’s the questionable value proposition. Tesla controls the entire network, the self-driving software, and prices. It even “sets the split,” as Lambert argues. Instead, fleet owners are stuck eating the “capital cost and the depreciation, while Tesla keeps the software margin and its cut of every fare.”

In other words, “you don’t own a business in that arrangement. You own the downside.”

It’s a dubious business opportunity closely reminiscent of Tesla’s infamous FSD advanced driver assistance software. Owners once shelled out a massive $15,000 — before it became exclusively a $99 a month subscription — to access a feature that’s still a complete disaster, leading to fatal collisions and terrifying close calls even after many years of development.

Not only are they spending the equivalent of a small car on faulty software, they’re willing to shoulder the risk as well. Tesla has a long track record of trying to wriggle out of lawsuits arising from these accidents, arguing it was the driver’s fault for engaging the software and not paying attention.

Much like its regular lineup of FSD-enabled vehicles, Tesla’s Cybercab relies entirely on a camera-based autonomous driving system, an approach that experts say is fundamentally flawed.

Nonetheless, as the Austin American-Statesman reports, local investors in Austin are chomping at the opportunity to run their own Cybercab fleet.

Meanwhile, regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are watching closely. The agency opened a probe into the Tesla, questioning that its new Cybercab “meets all applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.”

More on the Cybercab: Tesla’s Glitchy Cybercab Accidentally Lets Passengers Access Controls to Manually Drive the Car Using Virtual Joystick on In-Vehicle Screen

The post There’s a Huge Economic Problem With Tesla’s Cybercabs appeared first on Futurism.

This week marks 25 years since the shocking attacks of September 11, 2001. Why did the civilized world respond as it did?

Source

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

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