News
Billionaire resigns CEO role to pay, train for SpaceX’s first crewed Starship Moon launch
Eccentric Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa — known for collecting modern art and founding online fashion retailer Zozo — has stepped down as CEO to free up time and money for his privately-chartered launch around the moon.
Set to launch no earlier than 2023 on what is expected to be SpaceX’s first crewed, circumlunar Starship launch, Maezawa stated in September 2018 that he had arranged to pay SpaceX a huge amount of money (likely several hundred million dollars) for that right. Along with resigning as CEO of Zozo, Maezawa will sell ~85% of his 36% stake to Yahoo Japan, giving the conglomerate a 50.1% ownership stake of Zozo and Maezawa a $2.3 billion cash windfall.
As noted by Business Insider, when asked by a follower if he had any money after an announcement that he would sell off a portion of his extensive art collection in a Sotheby’s auction, Maezawa admitted that he frequently has “no money” because he spends it “right away”, inadvisable but admittedly in-line with his eccentric reputation.
The resignation and sale comes just weeks after SpaceX successfully completed Starhopper’s second and final launch, reaching an altitude of ~150m (500 ft) with the power of a single Raptor engine. During a September 2018 SpaceX press event, Maezawa announced that he had come to an agreement with the company to buy the entirety of Starship’s first crewed mission around the Moon. The billionaire’s motivation: gifting the 8-10 available ‘seats’ to some of the best artists in the world in a project known as dearMoon.
At the same event, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk estimated that the company’s Starship program would cost anwhere from $2B- $10B and confirmed that the bulk of Maezawa’s contributions would go directly towards the rocket’s development costs. Business Insider also quotes Musk as stating that “[Maezawa is] paying a lot of money that would help with the ship and its booster – ultimately paying for the average citizen to travel to other planets.” Alongside Yusaku’s frank Twitter acknowledgment that he may not be the most financially responsible individual and repeated indications that he is extremely proud of Zozo, it’s safe to surmise that the decision to resign was not easily made.
More likely than not, now that SpaceX has completed its Starhopper flight program and is on the verge of its first Starship prototype flight tests, Maezawa simply needs money – and a huge amount of it – to continue fulfilling his contractual commitment to SpaceX. Even if a significant portion of the $2.2-2.3B cash payout he is set to receive goes to settling old debts, the Japanese billionaire should now have more than enough assets to fully fund his SpaceX contract.
At the time, SpaceX had partially completed pieces of the megarocket – then referred to as BFR – in a makeshift development facility at the Port of Los Angeles, pictured above with Maezawa. Since then, SpaceX has renamed the rocket to Starship, drastically redesigned it, and relocated all production operations to Hawthorne, CA, Boca Chica, Texas, and Cocoa, Florida.
Currently, SpaceX is developing twin Starship prototypes at launch and landing test facilities in Boca Chica, Texas (“Mk1”) and in Cocoa, FL (“Mk2”). Musk recently visited the facilities and announced that he is planning to present a technical Starship development update as early as September 28th.
According to an interview posted on WWDJapan.com as part of a September 12th Zozo press conference, Maezawa explained that he believes he made some missteps while serving as Zozo CEO, negatively affecting the company’s bottom line. He believes that more team-oriented business practices and a change of leadership could help to improve the company, which is currently holding its head well above water but still likely to far fall behind its FY2019 performance goals. It’s also hoped that selling an ownership stake in the company will give Yahoo Japan the flexibility to grow Zozo and improve its global reach.
The role of Zozo CEO now goes to Kotaro Sawada who accompanied Maezawa on stage at the announcement event along with Yahoo Japan’s president, Kentaro Kawamata. According to Forbes.com Maezawa stated that “Sawada is the exact opposite of my instinct-based management and adept at management based on logic, like crunching data and testing things out first.”
While Yahoo Japan will look to expand Zozo and the associated online shopping mall Zozotown to compete with other online retailers such as Amazon and Rakuten, Maezawa says that he will turn his attention to achieving his personal goal of a trip around the moon. He mentioned that he plans to fly to space prior to his circumlunar flight in 2023 and will spend much of his time training and learning foreign languages for spaceflight.
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He also plans to pursue building another company from the ground up. Whether his next company will be an endeavor focused around space tourism remains to be seen.
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Cybertruck
Tesla Cybertruck production snaps back after ugly supplier fight
Cybertrucks are piling up again at Giga Texas after Tesla’s court win against a parts supplier.
Cybertruck production at Giga Texas is showing its first visible recovery since Tesla sued a supplier last month over withheld manufacturing tooling.
Aerial observer Joe Tegtmeyer flew over the Austin factory Wednesday morning and counted roughly 100 or more Cybertrucks filling the outbound lot, a sharp jump from the thin numbers seen in recent weeks. The flyover came a day after a judge granted Tesla a temporary restraining order against Angstrom Automotive Group, the parts supplier at the center of the dispute.
Tesla filed an emergency lawsuit in late July after Angstrom told the automaker it planned to close the Troy, Texas facility where Tesla’s die-cast tools, trim dies and other Cybertruck stamping equipment were housed. According to Tesla’s complaint, a shipment of 700 finished parts never left the building, and when Tesla sent representatives to retrieve its equipment, accompanied by law enforcement, they were turned away. Angstrom allegedly then asked for an extra $250,000 a week to keep operating, which Tesla’s filing described as holding its own property for ransom.
TESLA: U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Wolfe of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division granted Tesla a Temporary Restraining Order and Writ of Replevin in its dispute with Angstrom Automotive (Case No. 6:26-cv-00477).
The order authorizes… https://t.co/E1DKcQSxMn pic.twitter.com/LR8aAiV2Og
— S.E. Robinson, Jr. (@SERobinsonJr) August 5, 2026
The restraining order gives Tesla immediate right of entry to Angstrom’s facility to recover the tooling. It is temporary, with a fuller hearing still to come, but the speed of Wednesday’s rebound suggests the Angstrom shortage was indeed the main bottleneck limiting Cybertruck output. Outbound lot counts are an imperfect measure of actual production, since finished trucks can sit for days before shipping, but a lot that full after a lean stretch is a meaningful signal.
Cybertruck output at Giga Texas has fluctuated all year as Tesla worked through supply issues and introduced new trims, including a cheaper Dual Motor AWD version that drew strong early demand.
Elon Musk
Space finally faced the people living next to its next Terafab mega-project
SpaceX confirmed Terafab’s Grimes County site is locked in, with construction starting within months.
SpaceX and Terafab representatives sat across from Grimes County residents for the first time on Wednesday, telling a packed Commissioners Court room that the $55 billion chip manufacturing project is now a done deal at the Gibbons Creek Reservoir site.
The meeting followed a $10 million check SpaceX sent the county earlier this week, satisfying a payment deadline built into the tax abatement agreement both sides signed in June. Elon Musk shared a post on X confirming the payment, and County Judge Joe Fauth told the San Antonio Express-News his office deposited the check after it beat its deadline.
Wednesday’s session, first reported by KBTX, moved the project from paperwork to construction. Terafab representative Riley Trennell told residents the JETI tax break agreements with Iola ISD and Anderson-Shiro CISD are signed and active, and that civil work and foundation prep are starting almost immediately. Renderings of the facility could be released within days, he said, with construction beginning within months.
The foundations for an exciting future are being built in Texas. Next up: Terafab → https://t.co/jGg52Zhn5I pic.twitter.com/SNfSXNr2tb
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 6, 2026
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
Musk first announced Terafab in March as a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and xAI aimed at producing over a terawatt of AI compute annually, an amount that dwarfs the roughly 20 gigawatts the entire global chip industry produces today. Intel joined as a manufacturing partner in April. Musk has said the project needed its own day in the spotlight rather than being squeezed into an earnings call, and for months the Grimes County site remained unconfirmed even as reporting pointed there.
SpaceX attorney Buck Brannon used Wednesday’s meeting to note that the company’s abatement is roughly 78 percent, not the 100 percent some earlier reports suggested. In exchange, SpaceX will pay Grimes County a fixed $20 million a year for 35 years, a total of $710 million, which Brannon said exceeds the $14 million Tesla paid Travis County in 2025.
SpaceX also addressed environmental concerns that have followed the project since Musk’s Terafab partnership with Intel was announced. Representatives said Terafab will not raise electric bills for other ratepayers, will not deplete local water supplies and will not draw down the Navasota River. SpaceX confirmed it owns the Navasota River pumping station, which it plans to use to divert stormwater into the Gibbons Creek Reservoir, and said it will build its own natural gas plants to power the facility rather than pulling from the ERCOT grid.
Grimes County commissioners also approved an addendum letting county employees use ten approved AI chatbots for work, including Grok.
Elon Musk has declared that SpaceX has effectively solved one of Starship’s most persistent engineering challenges: the reliability of its heat shield tiles.
During the company’s first-ever Earnings Call, the SpaceX CEO stated:
“I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but I think I would call the heat shield problem solved at this point. All indications from data and visual inspection is we have solved it. That doesn’t mean we won’t make improvements, but we do not see any technical obstacles to achieving rapid reusability at this point.”
Starship’s heat shield consists of roughly 18,000 hexagonal ceramic tiles covering the windward side of the upper stage. These tiles form the thermal protection system that shields the vehicle’s stainless-steel structure from the extreme heat of atmospheric reentry.
Elon says he believes the heat shield problem with Starship is currently solved.
He called it “arguably the single biggest problem” pic.twitter.com/eEE9vM5zlz
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 4, 2026
During descent, atmospheric friction generates temperatures exceeding several thousand degrees Celsius and creates plasma flows capable of melting unprotected metal. The tiles absorb, radiate, and insulate against this energy, allowing the vehicle to survive and potentially fly again. Without a durable heat shield, full and rapid reusability, the cornerstone of Starship’s design for frequent launches, satellite deployments, and deep-space missions, would remain impossible.
The tiles have long been a source of difficulty. On earlier test flights, a significant number of tiles detached during ascent due to vibration, aerodynamic loads, and imperfect attachment methods using pins and adhesives. Gaps between tiles allowed hot plasma to infiltrate, causing secondary damage and hot spots on the underlying structure.
These issues echoed challenges faced by NASA’s Space Shuttle, whose ceramic tiles required extensive, labor-intensive inspections and replacements between missions, preventing rapid turnaround. SpaceX has iteratively improved materials, standardized tile shapes, refined attachment techniques, added secondary ablative layers, and tested sealing methods such as “crunch wrap” felt to close gaps.
Progress was visible across Flights 10–12, with steadily better tile retention, yet questions remained about whether the system could support the minimal-refurbishment goal of rapid reuse.
Flight 13 on July 24 provided the decisive evidence. Ship 40 flew a deliberately more demanding profile with higher dynamic pressure to stress the heat shield beyond typical operational loads. It successfully deployed 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites, the first such payload on a Starship mission, performed an in-space Raptor engine relight, and executed a controlled reentry.
Elon Musk sheds two new bits of detail on Starship after 13th test launch
Cameras on six of the satellites and onboard sensors captured extensive imagery and data of the shield throughout the flight. The ship then achieved its softest splashdown to date in the Indian Ocean, remaining intact and floating rather than breaking apart or exploding as on prior missions. This allowed drone inspections and continuous telemetry of the heat shield in near-real time.
Post-flight analysis showed the majority of tiles remaining attached with only minor damage and limited plasma streaking at seams. Musk noted that the mission delivered “all the heat shield data we needed and then some.” Combined with visual inspections, these results underpinned his subsequent assessment that the core technical barriers to rapid reusability have been cleared. While refinements will continue, Flight 13 marked a pivotal step toward Starship’s operational future.
Tesla Cybertruck production snaps back after ugly supplier fight
Space finally faced the people living next to its next Terafab mega-project
