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SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition underway: Badgerloop unveils pod design

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Day 1 of SpaceX’s long awaited Hyperloop Pod Competition is underway in Hawthorne, California. Approximately thirty teams competing in the SpaceX-sponsored event including the winner from last year’s Hyperloop Design Weekend, MIT, will be judged on four categories ranging from safest and most reliable pod to best performing while in flight.

We had a chance to go behind the scenes with University of Wisconsin-Madison’s BadgerLoop team to witness what it takes to prepare for the high speed competition. Those following Hyperloop developments may recall that Teslarati interviewed BadgerLoop after the team won the Pod Technical Excellence award last year and qualified for this weekend’s Pod Competition.

For the select thirty-plus members of BadgerLoop out of a total of one hundred and sixty team members contributing to the project, many of whom are undergraduates at University of Wisconsin-Madison, the experience of traveling 2,000 miles to the home of SpaceX to compete hasn’t really sunk in. “The entire team just went crazy as we rounded the corner on Rocket Road and saw SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket resting there. It was surreal.” says Claire Holesovsky, third year Junior and Operations Director for Badgerloop.

Kali Kinziger, third year Junior and Industry Relations Lead at Badgerloop tells us that the team has been working around the clock all week out of SpaceX’s testing facility during the day, where Hyperloop pods from competing teams undergo a series of structural and mechanical inspections conducted by SpaceX employees, and from nearby Unplugged Performance during the evenings, leading up to Friday’s start of competition.

Duncan Adams, BadgerLoop’s Technical Director and fifth year Senior in Mechanical Engineering who interned at SpaceX last year, gave us a tour of their award-winning pod concept. The core of the pod is an aluminum chassis outfitted with four 90 horsepower electric motors – two in the front and two in the back – that leverage Halbach arrays to create a magnetic field that passes over Hyperloop’s I-beam sub track . It’s enough to keep the 2,100 pound pod (second largest pod amongst all teams competing) traveling near 200 mph and smoothly along the track. Duncan tells us that the pod was designed for a person six-foot two inches. Why? “We just want to see Elon in the pod”, says Claire.

The carbon fiber skinned pods will be propelled by a 140V, 1000 AMP battery. Duncan tells us that SpaceX will utilize a pusher to initiate movement of the pod before team’s are expected to self-propel their pods. Demonstration of pods will take place over three days and BadgerLoop is expected to demonstrate their Hyperloop pod on Sunday.

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For the BadgerLoop team, this weekend’s pod competition will be an invaluable learning experience that can’t be taught. “The learning experiences we have gained are far greater than the curriculum we receive in the classroom. We are able to build off our classroom knowledge by getting hands-on experience with the outside world.” says Kali.

Updated: Previous video showing the BadgerLoop team going through a pod fitment test on SpaceX property was removed by request.

 

Gene has been obsessed with cars since before he could legally sit in the front seat. Writer, researcher, unofficial CS support, accountant, native suit guy when needed, and overall stick poker. He approaches every story the way he approaches a road trip: with too much enthusiasm, not enough planning, and a surprisingly good outcome. gene@teslarati.com

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Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley

Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.

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Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.

Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.

Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:

“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”

Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.

The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.

Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.

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Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming

Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.

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Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.

In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”

The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”

Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner

SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.

Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.

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The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.

It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”

The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.

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Starlink launches Communities Program for passive income through internet sharing

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(Credit: Starlink | X)

Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.

Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.

Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.

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The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.

A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.

Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.

Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.

Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.

The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.

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Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration

Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.

The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.

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