Most people assume SpaceX began because Elon Musk wanted to build rockets, but the original idea was smaller. Around 2001 he looked for the date of NASA's Mars mission, discovered there were no plans to send people at all, and came up with Mars Oasis, a little greenhouse with seeds in dehydrated gel that would land on Mars and send back an image of green plants against red soil, just to get people excited about space again and help NASA get a bigger budget. Then he realized the real obstacle was the cost of rockets: "I was wrong… there actually was plenty of will if people thought there was a way. So then I decided, okay, well, I need to work on the way." SpaceX was born to serve the dream of exploration, not to compete with it 🩵

When Elon Musk talks about abundance, I think about people having more room to breathe because the things they need become less expensive to provide. That is the possibility I find compelling in Terafab. Its planned chips are meant to support AI and robots, and if those systems help us produce goods and deliver services more efficiently, the benefits could reach far beyond the technology industry, into the cost of everyday life. For me, that is what makes a chip factory worth caring about. The meaningful version of abundance is not simply having more impressive machines, but building a future in which meeting ordinary needs puts less pressure on ordinary people.

In 1989, a 17-year-old Elon Musk landed in Montreal with about $4,000, half from his mom, Maye, who cashed out a stock account she had opened with money she'd won in a beauty contest as a teenager, and a list of relatives he had never met. The uncle he planned to call had already left town, so he checked into a youth hostel, shared a room with five strangers, and after a week bought a $100 Greyhound pass to cross Canada to a cousin's farm in Saskatchewan. Somewhere along the way the driver unloaded his suitcase with his traveler's checks and clothes, and all he had left was a backpack full of books, while getting the checks replaced took weeks. Elon called his cousin with the coins in his pocket and spent weeks cleaning grain bins and helping raise a barn, celebrating his 18th birthday with a homemade cake on his cousin’s farm. Then he rode on to Vancouver and chose the hardest job on the board, cleaning lumber mill boilers for $18 an hour. Elon has always been strong-willed and never shied away from the most challenging work to achieve his goals. That is true determination! I admire him for that 🩵

Long before Passionflix existed, Tosca Musk was a 26-year-old filmmaker with a script, a dream of directing, and a big brother who believed in her. When she wrote and directed her first feature, Puzzled, in 2001, a warm little comedy about five friends opening a café in Venice Beach, Elon signed on as an executive producer, with Kimbal and their mom Maye right beside him, a whole family showing up. The film became the first step on the road that led Tosca to co-found Passionflix years later. It is so cool, that behind all the rockets and cars, there's a brother who keeps showing up for his family ❤️

After SpaceX's very first Falcon 1 rocket failed in March 2006, the team was exhausted and heartbroken. Elon Musk instead of only pushing harder, spent more than $100,000 to book a private Zero-G flight, so his engineers could finally float weightless and get a real taste of the spaceflight they were working so hard to make possible. Many of them had joined SpaceX dreaming of becoming astronauts one day, and I love that in one of the hardest moments for the young company, Elon reminded them why they had started in the first place. Elon understood that people building the future also need to feel it, even if only for a few seconds at a time.

Movistar and Orange turned to SpaceX's Starlink satellites to keep phones connected at the site of Wednesday's deadly high-speed train crash near Urda, Toledo, Spain 🇪🇸 According to an ADSLZone exclusive, both carriers switched on Starlink-based coverage around the crash, where a Renfe AVE and an Iryo train collided on the Madrid to Seville high-speed line. Orange separately confirmed it moved mobile units into the area and reinforced its network to support emergency crews.

In the summer of 1994, a 23-year-old Elon Musk spent his days in Los Gatos at Pinnacle Research Institute, dreaming up how ultracapacitors could power electric cars and even Star Wars–style laser guns. Then, around 5 p.m. every evening, he drove to Palo Alto for his second job at Rocket Science Games, a startup full of future legends, from Tony Fadell, who would later build the iPod, to the people behind Apple's QuickTime and engineers from Industrial Light & Magic. They hired him to write the most boring code imaginable, drivers so joysticks and mice would work with games, but Elon quietly gave himself a much harder problem 😂: figuring out how a computer could run a game and stream video from a CD at the same time, something the machines of that era simply couldn't do. Peter Barrett, one of the company's founders, remembered him as "completely unflappable," and said that after a while nobody was giving him directions at all, because he was just building what he wanted to build. Bruce Leak, who hired him, said: "He had boundless energy." So yeah, nobody handed Elon the big problem, he just went looking for it, at night, after a full day at another job. This is who Elon Musk is 💙

Not many people know that Elon Musk’s roots go back to the American Midwest. His grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was born in Minnesota, and his mother, Maye, was born in Canada before the family packed up and moved to South Africa when she was still a little girl. Even Elon’s name, which so many people assume is exotic, is a family name. He was named after his great-grandfather, John Elon Haldeman, who around 1900 was a school superintendent and a part-time sheriff in Minnesota. So, yeah, the most futuristic name in the world actually came from a small-town lawman more than a century ago 🤷🏼‍♀️😄

Jordan's central bank just built a Starlink backup for the entire banking system 🇯🇴🛰️ The Central Bank of Jordan says it has finished building and switching on a satellite internet gateway supplied by Starlink. It sits at the Aqaba Digital Hub and is run through the financial sector's cyber incident response team. The bank says it will keep the banking system online if the cables that connect Jordan to the internet fail because of natural disasters, major outages, cyberattacks, war or sabotage. Banks have been told to finish setting up so they can switch over when needed.

In early 2002, Elon was preparing to launch SpaceX and searching for the people who could help him build a rocket from scratch. One Sunday in January 2002, he walked into a friend's rented warehouse in Huntington Beach and found Tom Mueller holding an 80-pound rocket engine on his shoulder, trying to bolt it to a frame. It was the largest liquid-fuel engine any amateur had ever built, with 13,000 pounds of thrust, made in Tom's spare time. Elon asked the main question “Could you build something bigger?” The next Sunday Elon came to his house. It was Super Bowl Sunday; they watched maybe one play, because they were too busy sketching the first SpaceX rocket. Tom became SpaceX employee #1#, and the man who built engines on weekends went on to build Merlin, Kestrel and Draco. Elon saw a person, not a résumé, someone who built rockets with his own hands simply because he loved them.

When Elon Musk was a young guy living in Vancouver with almost no money, he walked into the employment office and asked for the best-paying job they had. It turned out to be $18 an hour to put on a hazmat suit, crawl through a narrow tunnel into a lumber mill boiler, and shovel out the hot, steaming sludge left inside. He later called it "a Dickensian steampunk nightmare," and honestly, that sounds about right. Around 30 people started that week, and by the end of it only 3 were still showing up. Elon was one of those 3. When people look at him today, they see the billionaire, but I see someone who was never too proud for the hardest, dirtiest work, and I think that says more about him than any number ever could.

Jensen Huang once admitted that when NVIDIA unveiled its first AI supercomputer, nobody wanted it. Not a single purchase order. Except for Elon Musk. "He goes, 'You know what? I have a company that could really use this.'" But then came the twist: it was a nonprofit😂😂 The machine cost $300,000, and Jensen thought the odds of getting paid were "approximately zero." He delivered it anyway, driving it to San Francisco himself in 2016 to a room full of researchers who turned out to be OpenAI. Elon saw the value of AI computing when the whole world couldn't understand it. He's done it again and again, spotting the future years before everyone else, then backing it with action instead of words.

🚢 The first shipment of Russian diesel is already approaching US shores — the deal was likely struck long before it was announced A tanker carrying nearly 230,000 barrels of diesel fuel left the port of St. Petersburg on September 22. This could indicate that an agreement on Russian fuel supplies was reached several weeks before Trump publicly announced his deal with Putin. So while Washington was talking about putting pressure on Moscow, Russian diesel was already on its way to American shores.

Canada already sells America diesel. We’re right fucking here. Trump picks a trade fight with us, then lifts sanctions so Putin can sell diesel while bombing Ukraine. An ally gets punished. An aggressor gets a paying customer. The Kremlin must love “America First.”

🤡 “If you want to win, don't buy oil from Russia,” — Donald Trump The US president has spent years criticizing countries that buy Russian oil. And yesterday, he decided to join them himself 👏

Listen up MAGA yokels☝️🇺🇸 Russia attacked Ukraine 4.5 years ago. Russian oil was sanctioned since then. Prices of diesel were fine in America. Prices went up only after the war in Iran started. Stop blaming Ukraine, Blame Trump and Corporations.

Let me explain Russia and Ukraine to MAGA in a language you might actually understand.🇺🇸🇷🇺🇺🇦 Imagine you have a neighbor you don’t like and he doesn’t like you. One morning he doesn’t knock on your door. He kicks the fucking door down with a bunch of armed friends, shoots whoever tries to stop him, moves into your house, takes over half of it, abuses your family, kidnaps one of your kids and starts teaching that kid that your family never really existed and that the house actually belongs to him. You fight back. You manage to push him out of some rooms, but he still occupies half of your house. Your friends start bringing you guns and ammunition because otherwise this motherfucker is going to take the rest of it too. Then suddenly some guy from across town shows up and says, “Why are you so pro war? Why don’t you negotiate? People are dying. We need peace.” So your neighbor offers you his brilliant peace plan: “I keep the rooms I already stole. I keep whatever I took from your family. You promise never to join the neighborhood security organization that might protect you from me. Your friends stop giving you weapons. And then I promise I won’t take the rest of your house.” Would you call that peace? Would you hand him half of your fucking house? Would you tell your wife and children that sacrificing them is necessary because fighting back is “pro war”? Or would you load every fucking weapon you own and tell him to get the hell out of your house? That is the part I cannot understand about MAGA. The same people who tell me they would shoot somebody for stepping onto their property suddenly become fucking Gandhi when Russia crosses an international border with tanks, occupies Ukrainian cities, kills civilians, kidnaps children and then demands Ukrainian territory as the price of “peace.” Russia can invent whatever excuses it wants about NATO, Nazis or Russian speakers. None of those excuses gave Russia ownership of Ukraine. Peace is not the victim giving the attacker whatever he managed to steal. That is cowardice and surrender. And if you wouldn’t accept it in your own fucking house, stop demanding that Ukrainians accept it in theirs.

NEWS: Starlink brings robotics within reach for rural Iowa 4-H clubs 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 Iowa received 10 of 100 Starlink kits from a program with the National 4-H Council, funded by Tractor Supply, going to rural communities with broadband gaps. Many clubs meet at fairgrounds and community buildings without reliable internet, so robotics for middle and high schoolers never got started. A dish solves that without waiting years for fiber.