SpaceX conducted its fourth high-altitude test flight of Starship prototype spacecraft. The test flight took off from SpaceX’s Texas development facility – which was recently renamed ‘Starbase’ by CEO Elon Musk. The SN11 prototype, unfortunately, was lost during the descent as reports suggest a large explosion that scattered debris around the landing site. SpaceX’s aim is to fly Starship to a 40,000 feet height to execute a ‘belly flop’ manoeuvre and then bring it back.
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Tesla’s Elon Musk tweeted “You can now buy a Tesla with bitcoin” and added that the bitcoin earned though sales will not be converted into traditional currency. The buying option will be available outside the USA later this year. Tesla, last month, had bought $1.5 bn of bitcoin and said that it would soon accept it as a form of payment for cars. Musk, last month, had criticised conventional cash, saying when it “has a negative real interest, only a fool wouldn’t look elsewhere.”
USA space agency NASA and Elon Musk’s private aerospace company SpaceX has entered into an agreement for maintaining and improving space safety. The key focus of the agreement is conjunction avoidance and launch collision avoidance between NASA spacecraft and SpaceX Starlink satellites, as well as related rideshare missions. Conjunction is referred to as a close approach between two objects in space at a very high speed.
Mastercard is planning to offer support for some cryptocurrencies on its network in 2021. It is worth noting that Mastercard offers cards that allow users to transact using cryptocurrencies, although without going through its network. This has come after Elon Musk’s Tesla said that it had purchased $1.5 bn of bitcoin and would soon accept it as payment. BlackRock, Square and PayPal have also recently backed cryptocurrencies.
Elon Musk is now the wealthiest person on the planet. Tesla’s 4.8% rise in share price on Thursday let Musk past Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, who has held the top position since Oct 2017. The South Africa-born engineer’s net worth was $188.5 bn at 10:15 a.m. in New York, $1.5 bn higher than Bezos. Musk’s net worth, over the past 12 months, rose by more than $150 bn, the fastest bout of wealth creation in history, possibly.
Elon Musk, reacting on a news story on Apple’s plan of manufacturing electric vehicles, tweeted that in “the darkest days” of scaling Model 3 production, he reached out to Tim Cook for Tesla’s acquisition. But the Apple CEO Cook refused to meet. Timelines were not given, but media reports suggest it was likely anytime between 2017 and 2019. Tesla is now worth more than $600 bn on the public markets after joining the S&P 500 this week.
Oracle is leaving Silicon Valley for Texas as it embraces a WFH model made common by the pandemic. The Business computing giant is moving its HQ from Redwood Shores in Northern California to Austin, which has been luring tech companies for long and is home to the South by Southwest Festival which has an “interactive” part devoted to internet innovations. Elon Musk, this week, confirmed his move to Texas, which offers a low-cost living and zero state income tax.
Elon Musk, earlier this year, teased that he’d be showing the latest developments from Neuralink – his brain-computer start-up that aims to connect human brains to computers; expected to be much more “awesome” than its first presser in 2019. The virtual show, as per to his tweet, will be on Friday, Aug 28 at 3 p.m. PT. Musk’s Neuralink devices place electrodes under a patient’s skin and connect to a device behind the ear, becoming a revolutionary innovation.
The infamous Twitter-bitcoin scam filled $100k worth of cryptocurrency into scammers pockets. 130 accounts including those of Elon Musk and former US president Barack Obama were used to carry out this attack. Twitter, in its blog post, said that hackers used ‘spear-phishing’ technique to trap employees into leaking confidential information. Until last week, approx. 1500 of Twitter’s employees had access to its control settings. This has now been restricted.