Shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX took another beating when trading resumed on Monday, sliding to an all-time low of just under $139, well below its IPO opening price of $150.
It’s now over 38 percent down from its all-time high of $225 three weeks ago, illustrating how rapidly the hype has inverted into widespread skepticism over Musk’s vision.
Following a blockbuster Wall Street debut, the space company has struggled to maintain any degree of momentum as investors continue to ask some very hard questions, including over its major pivot to orbital data centers and its near-term profitability. Despite being valued at almost two trillion dollars, the company lost nearly $5 billion last year.
Beyond some steepening international space launch competition, experts believe SpaceX’s transformation into an “AI play” may be closely related to its Wall Street woes, as the BBC reports.
“Everyone saw SpaceX as an AI story,” CFRA investment research analyst Keith Snyder told the broadcaster.
“With Elon Musk, any company he touches gets people excited,” he added. “But this was also the first time people felt like they were able to invest in something that was being marketed as an AI play.”
In short, the initial enthusiasm surrounding SpaceX’s IPO is firmly behind us.
“If you bought around the first tick you’re definitely underwater,” Snyder told the BBC. “It started to look a lot like a meme stock.”
“If you’re an IPO investor, you’re ok,” Mergermarket analyst Samuel Kerr added. “If you bought in the first few days, you’re not very happy right now.”
Investors remain sharply divided on where SpaceX shares are headed next. Many analysts from major investment banks remain bullish, expecting the stock to make massive gains. Case in point, Morgan Stanley believes the company will reach a price tag of $300 — far more than double its current stock price.
Snyder has a far more muted outlook, expecting SpaceX to fall down to just $115 a share.
Meanwhile, Musk has said he thinks “SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals,” a characteristically ambitious and perhaps delusional argument that assumes a lot of things will go right for the company.
Whether investors will buy into this lofty vision remains to be seen. Given its recent stock performance, it’s far from a guarantee.
“If SpaceX can do all the things it says it will do, yes, investors are sitting on the most valuable company ever,” Kerr told the BBC. “But it’s got a lot of work to do to get there.”
As tech companies go, the surveillance giant Palantir plays it looser than most. Specializing in deadly military targeting software and domestic police technology, Palantir isn’t afraid to lean into the reactionary, dystopian schtick.
That’s not an exaggeration. In a since-deleted post on X-formerly-Twitter, Palantir’s head of “strategic engagement” Eliano Younes shared an AI-generated propaganda video depicting the company logo surrounded by cult imagery, bloody crosses, and the grim reaper.
While the edgy ragebait is part-and-parcel of Palantir’s favored type of marketing material, the video evidently ruffled some feathers, exposing a deep cultural rift within one of the largest military tech firms in the world.
Speaking to the Financial Times, one former staffer explained that the incident caused the company to have an “absolute internal meltdown.”
Per the employee, a debate quickly overtook the company’s internal messaging channels, where workers reportedly expressed their outrage out in the open.
“You had people being like: ‘my customer is a children’s hospital — how am I supposed to explain this to them?'” the staffer recalled.
It’s not the first time the company’s leadership has alienated its rank and file. Earlier this year, Palantir workers registered their disgust with the company’s collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
After the murder of anti-ICE activists Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, one employee took to Palantir’s message boards to declare that “in my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this.”
Politically, it all reads a bit like Mordor’s orcs registering HR complaints about Sauron’s management style. The objection is noted, but you’re still helping the guy conquer Middle Earth; Palantir, after all, is named after a fictional orb in JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” that corrupts anyone foolish enough to peer into it.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has long heavily relied on selling science fiction to investors.
He wants to pollute our planet’s orbit — already brimming with junk — with gigantic orbital data centers. Then, he wants to settle on the surface of the Moon. Ultimately, he wants to make humanity an interplanetary species by building a city on Mars with the help of an enormous fleet of Starship spacecraft, leaving a planet reeling from a climate crisis behind.
It’s the kind of lofty — and, according to his many critics, delusional — thinking that turned him into an (almost) trillionaire. And, as SpaceX continues to struggle selling investors on Musk’s lofty imagination, the mercurial CEO is already conjuring new visions to keep the hype train chugging. According to a recent tweet, he believes that “SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals.”
To Musk, it all comes down to our ability to fully harness the power of the Sun. As illustrated by the Kardashev scale — a method devised by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev that measures a civilization’s level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it can channel — Musk believes we’re not even close to unlocking our full potential as a species.
By utilizing all that untapped solar energy, Musk thinks SpaceX could eclipse the Earth’s entire GDP of around 100 trillion dollars — if you’re willing to entertain his outrageously lofty vision, that is.
Back in January, Musk argued that “space-based industries will vastly exceed the value of all of Earth, given that you could harness roughly 100,000 times more energy than Earth and still be using less than a millionth of the Sun’s energy!”
Skeptics will differ. He also claimed that “due to autonomy, Tesla is worth more than the rest of the auto industry,” while his EV maker’s struggling Optimus robot will increase “Earth GDP by an order of magnitude.”
It’s the kind of wishful thinking his entire business empire is teetering on top of lately. For years now, tech leaders have been trying to sell us on a utopian “age of abundance,” in which manual labor is a thing of the past and everybody enjoys a high standard of living.
However, reality tells a dramatically different story. Despite Musk’s repeated promises for over a decade, in one telling example, Tesla vehicles are still far from reliably driving themselves without constant oversight.
Even investors are having trouble buying into his dreams of training AI models from space. SpaceX’s shares initially rallied following a blockbuster IPO last month, but have been in decline ever since. The muted enthusiasm highlights persistent doubts over a multitrillion dollar valuation for a company that lost a staggering $5 billion last year.
In short, his claim that SpaceX will somehow become worth more than the entire global economy should be taken with an astronomical amount of salt.
During a speech commemorating the 250th anniversary of American independence last week, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani took aim at the richest person in the world to make a salient point about growing inequality.
“We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry, while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more,” he said.
Elon Musk, who temporarily became a trillionaire following his company SpaceX’s IPO last month, didn’t take kindly to the slight.
“Mamdani has built nothing,” he tweeted angrily in response. “He is a taker, never a maker.”
But his knee-jerk retort didn’t exactly land. The most-liked reply pointed out that Musk’s empire had been built on tens of billions of dollars of government handouts. One user called him out for being the “biggest single recipient of US taxpayer dollars of all time.”
One particularly scorching takedown came from grassroots political organizer Jay Ponti, who pointed out that many of Musk’s business successes were built on the shoulders of others.
“[Martin] Eberhard and [Marc] Tarpenning founded Tesla,” he wrote, referring to the EV maker’s original CEO and CFO before Musk joined in 2004. “You didn’t invent eBay or Twitter.”
“Your wealth is from acquisitions, hostile takeovers, and stealing credit,” Ponti added. “Everything you have was built by workers and you fight to keep from unionizing while you receive [government] welfare.”
“You are a parasite,” the political organizer concluded.
The scathing remarks highlight Musk’s more-than-rocky rise to fame and how his companies, Tesla and SpaceX in particular, have massively benefited from government contracts over the years. According to an eye-opening Washington Post investigation last year, Musk’s businesses have sucked up at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits.
If Musk himself hadn’t been a “taker,” his companies could’ve easily flatlined without regular taxpayer-funded cash infusions.
Meanwhile, Mamdani has done little to earn such a title. On the contrary, his administration has been built on giving — from plans to expand low-cost childcare, fighting wage theft affecting gig workers, setting up city-run grocery stores, and adding a second homes tax for wealthy New York City residents.
After SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO last month made Musk the world’s first trillionaire, Mamdani had some choice words.
“Reason #1,000,000,000,000 why we should tax the rich,” he tweeted at the time.
Inbreeding depression, a genetic phenomenon where offspring result from the mating of related individuals, has long been understood to compromise individual fitness and elevate the risks of population decline or extinction. However, the depth and nuances of these effects remain largely unexplored in many non-model species, especially those facing dire conservation challenges. A groundbreaking new study investigates this complex relationship in a threatened songbird species, the aquatic warbler (Acrocephalus paludicola), unveiling how inbreeding depression manifests in a phenotype-dependent manner, particularly emphasizing body size as a critical factor in male fitness outcomes.
The aquatic warbler, a habitat specialist bird known for its recent precipitous population decline, poses a unique opportunity to study the genetic intricacies and their ecological consequences. Unlike widely studied model species, this bird’s depleted genetic diversity coupled with habitat specificity creates an ideal system to understand how inbreeding depression impacts survival and reproduction under real-world environmental pressures. Employing cutting-edge genomic tools such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), researchers could quantify inbreeding at an unprecedented resolution, offering new insights into the genetic health and viability of this endangered population.
One of the pivotal breakthroughs of this research lies in demonstrating that inbreeding depression is not a uniform or straightforward process but is intricately moderated by the physical and ecological context of the individual. For male aquatic warblers, the genomic markers revealed a pronounced negative effect of inbreeding on breeding success—but only among males characterized by smaller body size, denoted by tarsus length, an established morphological proxy. This finding highlights how phenotypic traits can mediate the severity of inbreeding effects, suggesting that smaller-bodied males experience disproportionately harsh fitness reductions as a consequence of their genetic relatedness.
Equally compelling is the study’s exploration of wing length as another morphological trait potentially influencing inbreeding depression. While the results here were more subtle, a notable weak interaction was found between the degree of inbreeding and shorter wing length in males, correlating with decreased survival probabilities. This interaction suggests that even relatively minor morphological differences may buffer or exacerbate the impacts of genetic relatedness on survival outcomes, adding another layer of complexity to how we understand inbreeding depression in natural populations.
Importantly, the research also reveals a stark contrast between sexes. Female aquatic warblers showed scant evidence of inbreeding depression affecting key fitness components such as clutch size, hatching success, nestling survival, or the number of fledged fledglings. Moreover, no interactions emerged between female fitness measures and phenotypic or environmental variables examined. This asymmetry in inbreeding effects underscores sex-specific pathways in evolutionary and ecological responses to genetic challenges, warranting further inquiry into the mechanistic underpinnings driving such differences.
Prior studies investigating inbreeding depression often relied on relatively simplistic models that did not incorporate potential interactions with individual phenotype or environmental heterogeneity. This omission might explain why many previous estimates of inbreeding load—reflecting the cumulative fitness consequences of deleterious recessive alleles—have been inconsistent or highly uncertain. By integrating detailed phenotypic data with high-resolution genomic analyses, this study advances the field by showing that accounting for individual variation unveils clearer, biologically meaningful patterns of inbreeding depression.
The implications for conservation biology are profound. Small-bodied males, disproportionately burdened by inbreeding loads, might represent a critical demographic subgroup whose reproductive success most strongly influences population trajectories. This insight challenges conventional approaches that treat all individuals as homogenous units within populations, advocating instead for conservation strategies that are finely tuned to the nuanced genetic and phenotypic architectures of endangered species.
The environmental factors considered—timing of breeding and brood size—proved less influential in mediating inbreeding depression compared to phenotypic variables, at least in this particular system. While breeding timing and brood size have been previously hypothesized to influence fitness by affecting resource allocation or offspring survival probabilities, their interaction with genomic inbreeding proved minimal. This result refines our understanding of the complex ecological determinants of fitness and suggests that underlying genetic and phenotypic factors can overshadow the modifying effects of certain environmental variables.
Methodologically, the use of SNP-based genomic inbreeding coefficients represents a significant step forward from traditional pedigree-based measures. Genetic markers enable more precise estimates of genome-wide relatedness and inbreeding, which is especially crucial for populations like the aquatic warbler, where pedigree data are incomplete or unavailable due to logistical challenges in tracking individuals across generations. This technological advance paves the way for more accurate assessments of inbreeding consequences in conservation genetics.
Another noteworthy contribution is the nuanced interpretation of inbreeding load estimates. The study found that models omitting phenotypic interactions yielded highly uncertain inbreeding load figures for both survival and breeding success in males, whereas incorporating body size interactions produced more robust and meaningful estimates. This methodological insight calls for revisiting traditional models that treat inbreeding load as a fixed entity, promoting dynamic frameworks that integrate individual heterogeneity.
The study also contributes to evolutionary theory by demonstrating how inbreeding depression may exert selective pressure that maintains or increases body size in male aquatic warblers. Since smaller males suffer more pronounced fitness detriments due to inbreeding, natural selection may favor larger males, which effectively buffer against the genetic disadvantages. This dynamic adds a rich dimension to sexual selection and life-history evolution, where morphology and genetic fitness interplay to shape population structure.
In broader ecological contexts, understanding conditional inbreeding depression helps elucidate population resilience amid environmental change. As habitats degrade or fragment, and populations become increasingly isolated, the compounding effects of genetic bottlenecks and reduced phenotypic diversity could spell catastrophic declines if certain phenotypic groups disproportionately suffer. This research underscores the urgent need to consider phenotype-genotype-environment interactions in any assessment of vulnerable species.
Moreover, the findings raise compelling questions about the management of breeding programs aiming to mitigate inbreeding effects. Conservation initiatives often emphasize genetic diversity restoration in general terms, yet this study advocates for precision strategies that recognize differential vulnerabilities among phenotypic classes. For the aquatic warbler and similar threatened species, such targeted approaches could optimize reproductive success and survival rates, substantially enhancing recovery prospects.
Overall, this study reshapes scientific paradigms surrounding inbreeding depression by foregrounding the conditionality of its effects. It insists that blanket statements about the genetic risks of inbreeding are oversimplifications. Instead, fitness consequences emerge as a complex tapestry woven from genomic architecture, individual morphology, and ecological context, challenging researchers and conservationists alike to embrace multidimensional models.
Future research inspired by these findings will likely delve deeper into the mechanistic bases for the observed interactions, exploring, for instance, how developmental pathways link body size and genetic load expressions. Additionally, cross-species comparisons incorporating habitat specialists versus generalists may reveal whether this pattern of phenotype-dependent inbreeding depression is widely applicable or highly species-specific.
In conclusion, this landmark study presents a compelling case that it is indeed “hard to be small” for male aquatic warblers facing the genetic drawbacks of inbreeding. Such a phenotype-dependent dimension to inbreeding depression not only enhances scientific understanding but also provides invaluable practical guidance for conserving one of Europe’s most threatened songbirds. As the world grapples with biodiversity loss and climate challenges, integrating genomic, phenotypic, and ecological data remains paramount in crafting effective conservation blueprints.
Subject of Research: Inbreeding depression and its phenotypic and environmental conditionality in a threatened songbird species, the aquatic warbler (Acrocephalus paludicola).
Article Title: It is hard to be small: Inbreeding depression on male breeding success depends on body size in a threatened songbird.
Article References:
Kubacka, J., Arantes, L.S., Herdegen-Radwan, M. et al. It is hard to be small: Inbreeding depression on male breeding success depends on body size in a threatened songbird. Heredity (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-026-00859-0
Long before humans built cities, made tools, or even appeared on Earth, the planet was already leaving behind clues to its earliest history. Some are tiny crystals almost as old as Earth itself.
Others are fossils, ancient rocks, mountain ranges, and tools that reveal when life began, how early humans evolved, and how our world changed over billions of years. These seven discoveries are among the oldest things ever found on Earth.
The UR 501 jawbone is considered one of the oldest known human fossils. Found in Malawi, it is estimated to be around 2.5 to 2.3 million years old. The fossil belongs to the Homo rudolfensis group, an early human relative.
Its discovery was important because early Homo fossils had not been found in Central Africa before. The jawbone suggests that early humans or their close relatives may have moved through the East African rift system, offering clues about how early Homo spread across the continent.
2. Lomekwi stone tools
The Lomekwi stone tools, discovered in West Turkana, Kenya, are around 3.3 million years old. They are considered the oldest known tools ever found. Archaeologists uncovered anvils, cores, and flakes at the site.
What makes these tools remarkable is that they are older than the earliest known humans by about 500,000 years.
This means they may have been made by early human relatives such as Australopithecus or Kenyanthropus. Their discovery changed the idea that toolmaking was only a human trait.
Lake Zaysan in Kazakhstan is believed to be around 65 million years old. While Lake Baikal is often called the world’s oldest lake, Lake Zaysan may be even older.
The lake is thought to have formed during the Cretaceous period, though its exact age is difficult to confirm. Today, it is located near artificial reservoirs and the Bukhtarma dam. The dam raised the lake’s water level, increasing its area and causing some sources to group it with nearby reservoirs.
4. Makhonjwa Mountains
The Makhonjwa Mountains, located in South Africa and Eswatini, are about 3.6 billion years old. They are widely known as the oldest mountain range in the world.
The mountains are part of the Barberton Greenstone Belt, one of Earth’s oldest geological structures. They also contain some of the oldest known signs of life and ancient gold deposits. In 2018, the Makhonjwa Mountains were added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List.
Stromatolites are layered rock structures formed by ancient cyanobacteria. Some of the oldest stromatolites are about 3.5 billion years old, making them among the earliest visible evidence of life on Earth.
These organisms once existed in large numbers around the planet. Although they became less common in the fossil record about a billion years ago, stromatolites still grow in some places today. They remain one of the clearest records of early life.
6. Hematite tubes
Hematite tubes found in Quebec, Canada, may be between 3.7 and 4.2 billion years old. Researchers have suggested that these tiny structures could be some of the oldest fossils ever discovered.
The tubes resemble structures made by modern microbes near hydrothermal vents. They also contain chemical signs often linked with life, including carbon and phosphorus.
However, some scientists remain cautious, arguing that the structures may have been misread or may not be as old as claimed.
The Jack Hills zircon crystals from Australia are believed to be the oldest known material found on Earth. They have been dated to about 4.375 billion years old.
These tiny crystals formed only around 165 million years after Earth itself. Their chemistry suggests that early Earth may have cooled quickly enough to have surface water and continental-type rocks. That means the young planet may not have been as hostile as once believed.
The UK has initiated a digital ID system required for employment, paralleling increased online censorship through the Online "Safety" Act. Protests against these authoritarian measures are suppressed, warning of potential totalitarianism in Europe. The U.S. must resist similar oppression to safeguard free speech. Australia faces similar controls starting December 10, 2025.
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