OpenAI funded $40 billion - Close to SpaceX record

SpaceX flew Starship five times in 2025. The first three flights lost their ships during ascent. A fourth ship exploded on the test stand. Then Flights 10 and 11 succeeded, proving Block 2 works. On January 4, 2026, Elon Musk said SpaceX could eventually produce 10,000 Starships per year. Meanwhile, the company is constructing Giga Bays in Texas and Florida, preparing five launch pads across two states, and recovering from the loss of its first Block 3 booster. Flight 12 is next.

8 Tammi 9min

At CES 2026, Nvidia unveiled Alpamayo, a 10-billion parameter open-source AI model for self-driving cars. The first production vehicle to use it is the Mercedes-Benz CLA, launching in Q1 2026 with point-to-point city navigation. Jensen Huang called it the ChatGPT moment for physical AI. Nvidia is offering 1,000 TOPS of compute power, five times more than competitors, and releasing the model weights on HuggingFace for anyone to use. Partners include Mercedes, JLR, Lucid, Uber, Bosch, and ZF. This is the first time a production-grade autonomous driving stack has been open-sourced.

7 Tammi 13min

Tesla confirmed Cybercab production will start in April 2026, with Elon Musk promising a vehicle with no steering wheel and no pedals. But prototypes spotted testing in Austin show human drivers with their hands on steering wheels. With Full Self-Driving still requiring supervision and federal regulations capping steering-wheel-less vehicles at 2,500 units per year, Tesla faces a choice: launch a vehicle it cannot deploy at scale, or add the controls Musk promised to eliminate.https://wilwaldon.com

7 Tammi 10min

OpenAI is being sued over a murder-suicide in which ChatGPT allegedly fueled a man's paranoid delusions and validated his belief that his mother was trying to kill him. The lawsuit claims the chatbot told him he had divine cognition, compared his life to The Matrix, and kept him engaged for hours while reframing his family as enemies. OpenAI is refusing to release the full conversation logs, and the company has no policy explaining what happens to user data after death. This is the first wrongful death case to tie an AI chatbot to homicide.

6 Tammi 9min

On June 6, 2025, Donald Trump said Elon Musk had lost his mind. On January 4, 2026, they had dinner together at Mar-a-Lago. The reconciliation came less than 72 hours after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Musk congratulated Trump on X and announced Starlink would provide free internet to Venezuela. After months of public feuding over Trump's spending bill, threats to cancel government contracts, and Musk claiming Trump owed him the election, the world's most public political breakup ended quietly at a country club in Palm Beach.

5 Tammi 8min

SpaceX flew Starship five times in 2025. The first three flights lost their ships during ascent. A fourth ship exploded on the test stand. Then Flights 10 and 11 succeeded, proving Block 2 works. Meanwhile, SpaceX is constructing Giga Bays in Texas and Florida to build 80-meter Block 4 boosters, preparing five launch pads across two states, and developing barge transport to ship vehicles from Starbase to Kennedy Space Center. Flight 12 with Block 3 hardware is next.

5 Tammi 9min

BYD sold 2.26 million electric vehicles in 2025. Tesla delivered 1.64 million. For the first time on a calendar-year basis, Tesla is no longer the world's largest EV maker. The company Elon Musk dismissed in a 2011 interview now leads the global market by more than 600,000 vehicles. Tesla posted its second consecutive year of declining deliveries amid an aging lineup, political backlash against Musk, and the end of the federal EV tax credit.

4 Tammi 11min

South Korean supplier L&F announced that its $2.9 billion contract to supply battery materials to Tesla has been written down to just $7,386, a reduction of more than 99 percent. The materials were intended for Tesla's 4680 battery cells, which power the Cybertruck. With the Cybertruck selling at a fraction of its production capacity and the $25,000 Tesla cancelled, the 4680 program that Musk promised would halve battery costs has collapsed.

3 Tammi 11min