Today’s launch represents our 700th successful Falcon mission. Rapid reusability is what makes Falcon 9 the most reliable and prolific launch vehicle in history and @SpaceX the world’s leading launch service provider. Starship will soon take us to the next level with full and rapid reuse. Incredible work by the SpaceX Falcon team! 👏

“Success isn't about being better than someone else. It's about becoming the best version of yourself.” …and when you focus on becoming the best version of yourself, in earnest, you will often find after lots of hard work and showing up everyday, that you are in fact one of the best.

We’re excited to work with 4iG Group to bring Starlink Mobile’s resilient direct-to-device connectivity to millions of people in Europe.  This collaboration will deliver our next-gen technology using SpaceX’s global 2GHz priority rights. We look forward to partnering with many other European operators to ensure everyone has access to this important technology !

Not a good day. I woke up to a phone call from Joe Kenahan telling me that “the rocket is gone.” We had no idea what happened for a few weeks. We had a war room set up in HT01 where we had high speed plots and video frame stills taped to the wall in chronological order, zoomed in to the order of milliseconds. We used accelerometer data to triangulate the origin of the failure, similar to what we did for the CRS-7 investigation. To our surprise it pointed to a similar location near the lox tank COPVs. It took weeks of testing to replicate the failure and when we did, it was a strange mix of feeling overjoyed that we figured it out and extremely sad that we didn’t prevent the failure in the first place. That said, shooting COPVs from a mile away with a long-range .50-caliber rifle was pretty cool. Thankfully we were able to close that branch of the fault tree 😂

Falcon Heavy sent Psyche toward a metal-rich asteroid, Europa Clipper to Jupiter’s Moon, and GOES-U into transfer orbit to improve NOAA’s weather forecasting. Falcon 9 launched NASA’s PACE mission to study Earth’s ocean and atmosphere and SPHEREx to map the history of the universe. The Falcon family has enabled NASA to reach farther and explore more of the universe, and missions like Roman continue that work

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday. What I should have said: There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this. On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way. On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project. On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns. On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians. On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers. 
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries. On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land. Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged. When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America. I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw. Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

We successfully launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope today about 9 months ahead of its formal readiness date. Today’s Falcon Heavy mission was what we call a RXR mission (return-expendable-return), which signifies that the side boosters are to be recovered by returning to the launch site. The center core had to be expended today in order to achieve the proper delta-v for the 10 ton telescope to reach L2 - the second Sun–Earth Lagrange point, a spot in space about 1.5 million km from Earth on the far side of our planet from the Sun.

But we do need to act much faster than that if people still want to live where the beach is today. We have about 50 years or so to take action, which should be more than enough time for the space satellites to solve any heating problems.

Extremely severe extinction events happen every 100M years or so and just switching to sustainable energy will not be enough to stop them. Space satellites to control temperature and massive geo-engineering will be needed or it will be game over.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket passes over lower Manhattan and One World Trade Center in New York City about 15 minutes after launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Tuesday morning.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on mission Starlink Group 10-49 passes over lower Manhattan and One World Trade Center in New York City about 15 after launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, Tuesday morning before sunrise #newyorkcity# #nyc# #newyork# @SpaceX #sunrise#

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope was encapsulated into Falcon Heavy’s fairing this past week ahead of launch on Sunday, August 30 from pad 39A in Florida → 

Grok Bot's App Store listing names the developer as Anysphere. That's Cursor. xAI closed the $60B Cursor acquisition this week and shipped Grok Bot alongside it. The "product launch of the year" chatter is really the first public look at what that deal bought. Claude Code's unlock was handing the model an actual computer. Grok Bot runs the same play at fleet scale. Every bot gets a persistent cloud VM with a browser, a filesystem, and a terminal. It logs into your apps, keeps working while your laptop is shut, and only surfaces for approvals. I ran a fleet for a week and wrote up the setup plus 100 jobs to hand your bots → Two features carry the product. Skills self-correct as they run, so a task you teach once keeps improving without you touching it. And bots route work to each other, which means you stop being the middleware between your own agents. That second part explains the 100x usage jumps people are reporting. Chat usage was capped by how fast you could type. A fleet on its own computers is capped by how much finished work you can approve. Different ceiling entirely. Cursor spent years learning to build agent harnesses. xAI spent $60B to skip the line.