

News
SpaceX’s first orbital Starship engine just breathed fire
Less than three weeks after shipping to Texas, SpaceX says that Starship’s first Raptor Vacuum engine has completed a “full duration test fire” on the march towards orbital test flights.
Known as Raptor Vacuum or RVac, the engine is almost entirely based off of its sea level-optimized cousin, taking all of the complex turbomachinery and combustion chambers that represent the bulk of a rocket engine. Things start to diverge below the throat of the combustion chamber (the narrow part of the central hourglass-like curve), where SpaceX has expanded Raptor’s existing bell nozzle by a factor of five or more.
SpaceX’s reusable Starship spacecraft will use a mix of three sea level Raptors and three Raptor Vacuum engines to give it the thrust it needs to reach orbit and ensure efficient operations both in atmosphere and vacuum.
In simple terms, a rocket engine can benefit from a vacuum-optimized nozzle because the added surface area (more or less) gives the extremely high-pressure gases exiting its combustion chamber even more footholds to push against. Rocket nozzles are at their most efficient when the engine’s exhaust gas finishes expanding to match ambient pressure at the exact moment it exits the bell. Logically, at sea level on Earth, the ambient air pressure is quite high, meaning that rocket exhaust doesn’t have to expand as much to equalize.
In the vacuum of space, however, exhaust gases must expand far more to reach the same pressure as its surroundings. For rocket propulsion, that extra expansion can be exploited to make a more efficient engine, squeezing extra energy out of the same propellant and in a perfect vacuum, the most efficient nozzle would technically be infinite. Engineering and physical infinities don’t exactly get along, unfortunately, so vacuum rocket engineers are forced to settle on a nozzle size at a scale that humans can feasibly manufacture.
In theory, Starship doesn’t need Raptor Vacuum engines to be a functioning orbital spacecraft and CEO Elon Musk himself floated a design with seven sea-level engines just two years ago. Since then, the SpaceX CEO revealed that Raptor was making such good progress that the company undid the removal of vacuum-optimized engines from Starship’s baseline design.
It’s unclear exactly what SpaceX means when it says that Raptor Vacuum SN1 completed a “full duration test fire.” For Starship, a full-duration orbital insertion burn – beginning immediately after Super Heavy booster separate – would likely be no shorter than five or six minutes. Even for SpaceX, going from shipping the very first engine (Raptor Vacuum) produced to a successful several-minute static fire in less than three weeks’ time would be an almost inconceivable feat of engineering. The feat would imply that SpaceX is already extremely comfortable with several-minute Raptor burns – perhaps the single biggest hurdle standing between Starship and orbit.
More likely, “full duration test fire” simply refers to the fact that the pathfinder Raptor Vacuum engine managed to ignite, burn, and shut down on schedule – avoiding a premature shutdown, in other words. For an engine as large and complex as Raptor, even that downgraded interpretation would represent an impressive achievement.
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News
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang regrets not investing more in Elon Musk’s xAI
The CEO stated that Nvidia is already an investor in xAI, but he wished he had given the artificial intelligence startup more money.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed that one of his investment regrets is not putting more money into Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI.
Speaking in a CNBC interview, Huang said Nvidia is already an investor in xAI but wished he had given the artificial intelligence startup more money. This was due to Musk’s record of building transformative companies such as Tesla and SpaceX.
A new wave of transformative AI firms
Huang said he’s very excited about xAI’s latest financing round. He described Musk’s company as part of a powerful new generation of AI developers, alongside OpenAI and Anthropic. that are reshaping the computing landscape.
“I’m super excited about the financing opportunity they’re doing. The only regret I have about xAI, we’re an investor already, is that I didn’t give him more money. You know almost everything that Elon’s pat of, you really want to be part of as well,” the Nvidia CEO stated.
The CEO also clarified Nvidia’s investment in xAI, revealing that Elon Musk had offered the investment opportunity to the chipmaker. “He (Musk) gave us the opportunity to invest in xAI. I’m just delighted by that,” Huang stated.
AI investment boom
Huang contrasted today’s AI-driven economy with the early days of the internet. “Back then, all the internet companies combined were maybe $30 or $40 billion in size,” he said. “If you look at the hyperscalers now, that’s about $2.5 trillion of business already operating today.”
He also stated that the ongoing shift from CPU-based computing to GPU-powered generative AI represents a “multi-trillion-dollar buildout” that Nvidia is looking to support. Huang added that every Nvidia engineer now works with AI coding assistants such as Cursor, which he called his “favorite enterprise AI service,” and it has led to a major productivity boost across the company.
Watch Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s CNBC interview in the video below.
Investor's Corner
Stifel raises Tesla price target by 9.8% over FSD, Robotaxi advancements
Stifel also maintained a “Buy” rating for the electric vehicle maker.

Investment firm Stifel has raised its price target for Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) shares to $483 from $440 over increased confidence in the company’s self-driving and Robotaxi programs. The new price target suggests an 11.5% upside from Tesla’s closing price on Tuesday.
Stifel also maintained a “Buy” rating despite acknowledging that Tesla’s timeline for fully unsupervised driving may be ambitious.
Building confidence
In a note to clients, Stifel stated that it believes “Tesla is making progress with modest advancements in its Robotaxi network and FSD,” as noted in a report from Investing.com. The firm expects unsupervised FSD to become available for personal use in the U.S. by the end of 2025, with a wider ride-hailing rollout potentially covering half of the U.S. population by year-end.
Stifel also noted that Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet could expand from “tiny to gigantic” within a short time frame, possibly making a material financial impact to the company by late 2026. The firm views Tesla’s vision-based approach to autonomy as central to this long-term growth, suggesting that continued advancements could unlock new revenue streams across both consumer and mobility sectors.
Tesla’s FSD goals still ambitious
While Stifel’s tone remains optimistic, the firm’s analysts acknowledged that Tesla’s aggressive autonomy timeline may face execution challenges. The note described the 2025 unsupervised FSD target as “a stretch,” though still achievable in the medium term.
“We believe Tesla is making progress with modest advancements in its Robotaxi network and FSD. The company has high expectations for its camera-based approach including; 1) Unsupervised FSD to be available for personal use in the United States by year-end 2025, which appears to be a stretch but seems more likely in the medium term; 2) that it will ‘probably have ride hailing in probably half of the populations of the U.S. by the end of the year’,” the firm noted.
News
Tesla Cybertruck gets Full Self-Driving v14 release date, sort of

Tesla Cybertruck owners are wondering when they will get access to the company’s Full Self-Driving version 14.1 that rolled out to other owners today for the first time.
Cybertruck owners typically receive Full Self-Driving updates slightly later than other drivers, as the process for the all-electric pickup is different. It is a larger vehicle that requires some additional attention from Tesla before FSD versions are rolled out, so they will be slightly delayed. CEO Elon Musk said the all-wheel steering technically requires a bit more attention before rollout as well.
The all-wheel steering of Cybertruck requires a bit more Autopilot training
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 7, 2025
After some owners got access to the v14.1 Full Self-Driving suite this morning, Cybertruck owners sought out a potential timeframe for when they would be able to experience things for themselves.
Tesla owners show off improvements with new Full Self-Driving v14 rollout
They were able to get an answer from Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s Head of AI, who said:
“We got you. Coming soon.”
We got you. Coming soon.
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) October 7, 2025
The release of FSD v14.1 for Cybertruck will not be tempered, either. Elluswamy then confirmed that Tesla would be rolling out the full-featured FSD v14 for the pickup, meaning it would be able to reverse and park itself, among other features.
Elluswamy said it would be capable of these features, which were void in other FSD releases for Cybertruck in the past.
Tesla’s rollout of FSD v14.1 brings several extremely notable changes and improvements to the suite, including more refined operation in parking garages, a new ability to choose parking preferences upon arriving at your destination, a new driving mode called “Sloth,” which is even more reserved than “Chill,” and general operational improvements.
Those who were lucky enough to receive the suite have already started showing off the improvements, and they definitely seem to be a step up from what v13’s more recent versions were capable of.
CEO Elon Musk called v14 “sentient” a few weeks back, and it seems that it is moving toward that. However, he did state that additional releases with more capabilities would be available in the coming weeks, but many owners are still waiting for this first version.
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