News
NYC subway closure canceled, Elon Musk’s Boring Company tapped for ideas to improve other systems
The Governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, announced on Thursday evening that the current plan to shut down the 225,000 commuter-strong L-train tunnel in the New York City public transportation system for a 15-month-long repair process will no longer be necessary due to a plan implementing new reconstruction techniques. After consulting with a panel of expert engineers from Columbia and Cornell Universities, a new design was proposed to be used in the tunnel which would streamline the repair process and require closures during nights and weekends with partial train tunnel service still available. When asked in a conference call Friday whether other innovators such as Elon Musk of Tesla and The Boring Company were consulted, the governor said Musk had not advised on this specific issue, but was consulted on improvements to the subway’s signaling system. The Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA), New York’s transportation network, accepted the Governor’s panel recommendations following the announcement.
The L train tunnel under the East River connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan in New York, known as the Canarsie Tunnel, was damaged during Hurricane Sandy, the Category 3 major hurricane which affected the entire eastern seaboard of the United States in 2012. Its storm surge hit NYC on October 29, flooding huge portions of the island, including 9 of the 14 underwater tunnels in the city’s transport system. Of these, 6 have already been repaired. According to the MTA, the damage to the Canarsie Tunnel is comparable to tunnel damage experienced on 9/11, underlining the extent of the repairs needed and the reason behind the original required shutdown.
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- Governor Andrew Cuomo with engineering consultants surveying the Canarsie Tunnel. | Credit: New York State Governor’s Office
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- Governor Andrew Cuomo with engineering consultants surveying the Canarsie Tunnel. | Credit: New York State Governor’s Office
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- A graphic representation of the duct banks damaged in the Canarsie Tunnel during Hurricane Sandy. | Credit: MTA
Saltwater flooding in from the East River during Sandy significantly damaged the infrastructure of the 7,100-foot-long tunnel, including tracks, signals, switches, cables, and lighting. The flood waters additionally filled protected cable tube pathways called “duct banks” throughout the tunnel, and once dry, the silt hardened to a cement-like consistency inside them, making it impossible to rip out and restore the damaged components. Canarsie Tunnel also opened in 1924, adding age to the brewing number of problems being amplified by the lingering effects of corrosive saltwater remnants from Sandy.
In 2016, residents were informed the tunnel was possibly going to be shut down for 15 months to address the extensive repairs, causing significant commute challenges for the approximately 225,000 riders depending on the service. The date for service closure was scheduled to begin April 27, 2019, but the impending deadline motivated Governor Cuomo to seek out alternative solutions. “I can’t tell you the number of people in Brooklyn who have looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Are you sure that there is nothing else that can be done and there’s no way you can possibly shorten this?’,” Cuomo stated in a recent press conference announcing the new subway repair plan.
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- Damage sustained by the Canarsie Tunnel during Hurricane Sandy. | Credit: MTA
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- Damage sustained by the Canarsie Tunnel during Hurricane Sandy. | Credit: MTA
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- Damage sustained by the Canarsie Tunnel during Hurricane Sandy. | Credit: MTA
The repair announcement was the end result of a review process Governor Cuomo began on December 14, 2018, wherein he and a consulting team walked through the damaged tunnel to assess the repairs needed first hand. While the plan will take longer than the original project’s timeline – 20 months instead of 15 – the ability to remain open during the repairs is a welcome relief for city residents. The technology that will enable the tunnel to remain open includes wire wrapping along with ultrasound and laser measurement (LIDAR) tools to assess and monitor damage. Engineers from Cornell University’s College of Engineering and Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science with expertise in the type of construction involved were the primary sources for the solutions chosen.
Similar to the innovations that came from Musk’s Boring Company tunneling project, the governor has hopes that the unique system planned for the Canarsie Tunnel will inspire other similar repair projects. “This could be a national model because it is a totally different way to reconstruct a tunnel,” Governor Cuomo touted at the press conference. Also, according to the governor, the techniques in the new plan have been implemented in projects in Europe before for bridge repair, but not in tunnel reconstruction. He hopes to bring more out-of-the-box innovations to the city’s transportation as well. In reference to Elon Musk’s companies, he said, “I don’t believe a time where they’re talking about flying cars and you can get into a car and drive 100 miles on the LIE and never touch the steering wheel, that there’s not a better technology that can regulate the trains!”
For more about the announcement and repair plan, watch Governor Cuomo’s press conference below:
Elon Musk
Elon Musk shuts down talk of TSMC taking over Terafab
Musk says Tesla and SpaceX will build and run Terafab, with TSMC limited to renting.
Elon Musk has drawn a firm line around who will be in charge of Terafab, the giant chip factory Tesla and SpaceX are planning in Texas.
Musk replied to a post on X arguing that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) would most likely end up owning and operating the plant. “No, we will build and run the fab. Let there be ZERO doubt about that,” Musk wrote. “Maybe TSMC subleases part of the Terafab if they want, but nothing more than that.”
In plain terms, a sublease means TSMC could rent a section of the complex to make chips, similar to a tenant renting one floor of an office tower. The building, the equipment decisions and the daily operation would stay with Tesla and SpaceX.
@herbertong @thejefflutz No, we will build and run the fab. Let there be ZERO doubt about that.
Maybe TSMC subleases part of the Terafab if they want, but nothing more than that.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 7, 2026
The comment shuts down speculation that started last week. On October 2, tech journalist Tim Culpan reported that TSMC was exploring ways to help run Terafab’s factories. Musk responded the next day that it was “just discussions, but something may come of it,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That left room for a scenario where the world’s largest contract chipmaker took the wheel. Musk’s latest post closes that door.
Some background helps explain why this matters. Tesla designs its own AI chips today but pays outside companies like TSMC and Samsung to manufacture them. Musk unveiled Terafab in March as a joint project between Tesla, SpaceX and xAI, arguing that existing suppliers cannot expand fast enough to meet his companies’ future demand. The goal is to produce enough chips each year to supply one terawatt of computing power, roughly 50 times what the entire global AI chip industry produces now.
Those chips are meant for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, the Cybercab and Full Self-Driving computers, along with chips for SpaceX’s planned data centers in orbit. Owning the factory means Musk’s companies would not have to compete with every other chip customer for time on someone else’s production lines.
Intel is still part of the picture. The company signed on in April to help design, build and package chips for the project, and CEO Lip-Bu Tan told Bloomberg this week that Intel will keep working on Terafab despite the TSMC chatter.
The project moved from concept to construction planning over the summer. In August, SpaceX confirmed the Grimes County site about an hour from Houston, sent the county a $10 million payment under its tax abatement deal and said civil work would begin shortly. The first phase carries a $16.8 billion price tag, and total spending across all phases could reach as much as $119 billion.
TSMC chairman C.C. Wei has said a new fab typically takes two to three years to build and another one to two years to reach full output. Tesla and SpaceX have never run one, which is why TSMC’s expertise drew so much attention. Musk’s answer suggests he would rather learn that process in house than hand control of a project this central to Tesla’s robotics and autonomy plans to an outside company.
Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.
And it will be stunningly beautiful. https://t.co/4NweOqTL7y
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2026
Elon Musk
Trump to hand Elon Musk a top honor that traces back to JFK
Trump will award Elon Musk the National Medal of Science at Thursday’s White House summit.
Elon Musk is set to receive the highest honor the U.S. government gives to scientists and engineers.
President Donald Trump will present Musk with the National Medal of Science on Thursday at the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age Summit, Fox News Digital first reported on Wednesday. Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su will receive the same medal, while Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. A White House official later confirmed the list to Reuters.
“The Trump administration is grateful for the contributions of these incredible leaders in science and technology. These recipients are helping ensure America keeps leading the world in innovation,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Fox News.
FIRST ON FOX: Trump will award Elon Musk the National Medal of Science at the White House Thursday.
Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su will also receive the science medal, while Michael Dell and Satya Nadella will receive the technology medal.
It marks Trump’s first time presenting the awards across either administration.
Full story here https://t.co/omnrLV0EwS
— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) October 7, 2026
It will be the first time Trump has presented either medal in his two terms. Congress created the National Medal of Science in 1959, and the National Science Foundation, which administers it, says 529 scientists and engineers have received it since. A presidential committee reviews nominees, but the president makes the final call.
Thursday’s group of medalists run or founded companies, and three of them sit at the center of the Super Intelligence hardware race that Musk competes in. Huang’s Nvidia supplies the GB300 chips filling SpaceX’s Colossus 2 cluster, while Su’s AMD is Nvidia’s biggest rival in data center GPUs.
Worth noting that Trump’s uncle, MIT physicist John G. Trump, received the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan for his work on ionizing radiation and its uses in medicine and industry.
The Pentagon taps Elon Musk to design the battlefield of the future
For Musk, the medal is the latest sign of how far his relationship with Trump has come since their 2025 split over the “Big Beautiful Bill” and his exit from DOGE. Last week, he sat at Trump’s left during a White House lunch where AI executives signed a voluntary safety accord, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named him to help lead the Pentagon’s Project Meridian study on the future of warfare. Musk has also adopted the administration’s new vocabulary, saying on Sunday that SpaceXAI will be renamed SpaceXSI after Trump ordered federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence.”
Musk has collected science honors before, including the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in 2019.
Lifestyle
Tesla FSD changed its mind mid-intersection, and it may have saved a life
Tesla shares dashcam footage of FSD Supervised stopping mid intersection to avoid a T-bone crash.
Tesla is putting another Full Self-Driving save in front of its 24.8 million followers on X.
On Tuesday morning, Tesla’s main account shared a dashcam clip with the caption “FSD Supervised preventing T-bone crash.” The footage came from an owner posting as TheNewGrid, who described what happened at a stop sign: “I looked at the car coming to the stop sign figured they would stop, my car went, then came to a stop mid intersection as they flew by. Had I been manually driving this would have resulted in a crash.”
The sequence is the notable part. FSD had already started crossing when the other driver ran the stop sign. Instead of pressing on, the car braked hard in the middle of the intersection and let the crossing vehicle pass in front of it. By the owner’s own account, they had made the same assumption the software initially made, that the other car would stop, and would not have corrected in time.
FSD Supervised preventing T-bone crash
— Tesla (@Tesla) October 6, 2026
The clip is the latest in a run of safety posts Tesla has amplified over the past several days. On Saturday, the company shared a video from Selling Sunset star Jason Oppenheim, who sold his Bentley for a Model Y and said he was buying Teslas with FSD for 10 of his employees. Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla AI, followed up by writing that Tesla self-driving “reacts to other people cutting into your path with super-human response times.” On Monday, a Cybertruck owner posted footage of FSD moving across three lanes from a red light to clear a path for an ambulance approaching from behind.
This recent clip also lands a few weeks after Tesla began shipping Automatic Collision Evasion with FSD v14.3.9, a feature that can activate FSD on the driver’s behalf when a frontal collision is imminent or the driver appears distracted. Elluswamy said in September that “even earlier prediction of hazards, even faster reaction time and overall significantly better safety and collision avoidance” are coming with v15, the release Tesla has tied to round the clock Robotaxi operation.
The safety messaging matters beyond social media. Tesla has said FSD Supervised was 4.1 times less likely to crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on European roads, and it has been putting those figures in front of regulators. Eight EU countries have now approved FSD Supervised, with Croatia the most recent, but the EU’s bloc-wide vote originally set for October 6 has been pushed to December at the earliest.
FSD Supervised is still a Level 2 system, and the driver remains responsible at all times. Even heavy users find reasons to step in. Teslarati’s Joey Klender, who uses FSD for about 76 percent of his driving, laid out five recurring issues on Tuesday that still prompt him to intervene. Clips like this one show the other column of that ledger: moments where the software caught a mistake a human was about to make.
Elon Musk shuts down talk of TSMC taking over Terafab
Trump to hand Elon Musk a top honor that traces back to JFK
Tesla FSD changed its mind mid-intersection, and it may have saved a life
The Pentagon taps Elon Musk to design the battlefield of the future
Tesla Roadster’s new patent preps white-knuckle speeds, keeping it grounded
