Lifestyle
Tesla Model 3 declared by 96-year old auto veteran as his favorite car ever
We loved reading the inspirational story about Wesley, age 83, driving his silver metallic Model 3 from California to Florida. My dad Walt Mordenti, age 96, lives in San Francisco. He picked up his red Model 3 (VIN 001388) at the Tesla Factory on December 23, 2017, which possibly makes him the oldest Model 3 owner.
Walt was born in 1921 and began working on cars in 1935 when he needed to help support his family. Since that time, Walt has driven nearly every make and model of American-made cars, and he tells everyone that his Model 3 is by far his favorite car.
Above: Walt picking up his Model 3 at the Tesla Factory (Photo courtesy of Joyce Mordenti)
Walt is a skilled car mechanic, renowned for his knowledge of Hudson automobiles. Some folks refer to him as Doc Hudson, and he was a racing legend in his own right. Walt lived in Connecticut and raced on the East Coast from the 1940s to the 1980s. He is probably best known as an owner/builder/mechanic, who also drove the tow truck and served as the pit crew, usually by himself.
In 1948, he bought a red Kurtis Kraft midget racer with a Ford V8-60 engine. On February 27, 1957, Walt’s #78 Kurtis Kraft midget racer set the fastest time in the Flying Mile on the sands of Daytona Beach with a speed of 118.421 mph, beating the Offenhausers!
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Above: Walt accepting the first-place trophy in 1957 with chauffeur Ronnie Evans at Thompson Speedway, CT; Walt on left, Ronnie on right (Photo courtesy of Ronnie’s son John Evans)
In the 1940s and 50s, he also wrenched on Hudson stock cars with other Waterbury friends: the Mordenti-Mordino-Mambrino trio. I remember the #12 Hudson stock car, affectionately known as The Tank!
Later, when Walt was in his 50s, he added “driver” to his resume at the 1/2-mile high-banked dirt track at Lebanon Valley Speedway, NY in his #36 open-wheel, big-block, AMC-powered, super modified stock car (he used Gremlin and Rambler American bodies, because the body had to match the motor). With great joy, he accepted trophies for rookie of the year and most improved driver!
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Above: Walt sharing a moment with Margaret during one of their cross-country Hudson adventures. Note the vanity plate on his Hudson, “OUR 53 HH.” The gentleman from New York who bought Walt’s Hudson also put a vanity plate on the car—“WALTS 53”—in honor of the famous Hudson mechanic Walt Mordenti (Photo courtesy of Joyce Mordenti)
Between 1992 and 2016, Walt and my mom Margaret made 19 trips across the USA in a 1953 Hudson Hornet that he restored. Walt told friends that he could not drive the Hudson after my mom, his co-pilot of 71 years, passed away in March 2017 at age 94.
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Above: Walt proudly displaying his Tesla vanity plate (Photo courtesy of Joyce Mordenti)
He sold his Hudson in November 2017 to make room in the garage for his Model 3.
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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com by Joyce Mordenti — Joyce contacted us to relay the remarkable story of her 96-year old father, Walt Mordenti, after seeing the story of 83-year old Wesley traveling cross-country in his Model 3.
Elon Musk
SpaceXAI just launched into your kitchen with their new app
SpaceXAI just powered its first consumer app and it predicts what you want to buy.
SpaceXAI just made its first move into consumer AI, and it involves your grocery cart. On June 3, 2026, Gopuff and SpaceXAI announced the launch of Go, a Grok-powered shopping assistant built directly into the Gopuff app that predicts what you need before you even start searching for it.
Gopuff is an instant delivery platform that operates more than 400 micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S., delivering everyday essentials, snacks, drinks, and household items in as little as 15 minutes. It is not a restaurant delivery app or a marketplace. It owns its inventory, controls its warehouses, and handles its own logistics, which means it has built one of the most detailed consumer behavior datasets in retail over its 13-year history.
Go combines SpaceXAI’s advanced reasoning, voice, and image generation models with Gopuff’s dataset of hundreds of millions of orders and real-time cultural signals from X to prepare a suggested cart the moment a customer opens the app. It learns each shopper’s habits and automatically builds a personalized cart based on time of day, location, order history, and real-time indicators. Returning customers can check out with a single tap.
Rather than searching for specific items, users can describe a situation like a game-day party or the desire for a healthy breakfast and Go will assemble a cart automatically. It can also predict when shoppers are running low on items like coffee or paper towels and have them packed and delivered in under 15 minutes. Grok voice integration lets users talk to the app in plain conversational language and check out completely hands-free.
Gopuff co-founder and co-CEO Yakir Gola said: “Today, we believe the greatest friction left in commerce is not delivery or instantaneous access to the essentials customers need. It’s the moment before: the thinking, the deciding, the remembering. We’re combining Gopuff’s demand intelligence with xAI’s frontier reasoning to create an everyday shopping experience that feels like a true extension of you.”
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
The timing carries context beyond the product launch. SpaceXAI was formed after SpaceX completed an all-stock merger with Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, folding one of the most advanced AI labs in the world into the same corporate structure as the company preparing what could be the largest IPO in history. SpaceXAI is dipping into consumer-focused AI just as it prepares for its public debut, and while Musk has openly discussed building an everything app, this launch uses Grok to power another company’s product rather than launching a standalone consumer platform. Every consumer-facing deployment of Grok ahead of the IPO roadshow adds tangible evidence that SpaceXAI is not just an infrastructure play but a direct competitor in the AI application layer where OpenAI and Google are already fighting for dominance.
Lifestyle
Tesla saves its passengers again – This time after a 300-foot cliff fall in Malibu
A Tesla Model 3 fell 300 feet off a Malibu cliff and both passengers survived.
A Tesla Model 3 plunged roughly 300 feet off a cliff on Mulholland Highway in Malibu on Friday morning, May 29, 2026, and both occupants survived. The crash was reported at approximately 7:30 a.m. near the 2500 block of Mulholland Highway, triggering a multi-agency rescue operation involving Malibu Search and Rescue, the Los Angeles County Fire Department, the California Highway Patrol, and McCormick Ambulance.
When first responders arrived, the male driver was outside the vehicle shouting for help while the female passenger remained pinned inside the Tesla. Rescue crews rappelled down the cliffside on ropes to reach the wreckage. A flight medic was lowered by helicopter to begin treating both victims, and the driver was hoisted up to the roadway before crews used the Jaws of Life to free the trapped passenger. Both were airlifted to a local trauma center with moderate injuries despite a remarkable result for a fall that steep.
The outcome is not surprising, considering Model 3 earned an overall 5-star rating from NHTSA in every category and sub-category, and recorded the lowest probability of injury of any car ever evaluated by the U.S. New Car Assessment Program. The absence of a traditional engine in the front of the vehicle creates a longer crumple zone that absorbs impact energy before it reaches occupants, and the battery pack running along the floor gives the car an unusually low center of gravity that reinforces structural rigidity.
This is not the first time a Tesla has kept passengers alive after going off a cliff. A Tesla Model Y carrying a family of four survived a plunge off a cliff at Devil’s Slide near San Francisco in January 2023, with two adults and two children walking away from a 250-foot fall. That incident drew widespread attention to how the structural integrity of Tesla’s electric platform performs in extreme crash scenarios that most vehicles would not survive.
Tesla Model Y driver who drove off cliff with family attempts to avoid criminal conviction
Elon Musk
NASA’s first human outpost on the Moon starts now – SpaceX on deck
NASA named the rovers, landers, and vendors that will build America’s first Moon Base.
NASA has laid out its most detailed Moon Base plan to date, describing a permanent outpost near the Moon’s south pole that the agency intends to build over the coming decade as a direct stepping stone to Mars. “The Moon Base will be America’s and humanity’s first outpost on another celestial world,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said, adding that every mission crewed and uncrewed “will be a learning opportunity as we return to the lunar surface, build the infrastructure to stay, and master the skills required to live and operate in one of the most demanding and dangerous environments imaginable.”
The plan is structured in three phases involving both uncrewed and crewed missions to deliver equipment, vehicles, and infrastructure to the surface, with the first three moon base missions targeted to launch before the end of 2026.
Moon Base I, targeting fall 2026, will use Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander to deliver scientific instruments to the Shackleton Connecting Ridge, the same region where Artemis astronauts will land. Moon Base II will send Astrobotic’s Griffin lander carrying more than 1,100 pounds of cargo including Astrolab’s FLIP rover to begin developing mobility systems on the surface. Moon Base III will carry the Lunar Vertex science mission on Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C Trinity lander to study lunar swirls near the south pole, with ESA and Korean science payloads aboard.
On the rover side, NASA awarded Astrolab $219 million and Lunar Outpost $220 million to build the first phase of Lunar Terrain Vehicles, with both rovers targeted for deployment to the lunar surface by 2028. Astrolab’s crewed rover weighs roughly 2,000 pounds and can reach over 6 mph. Lunar Outpost’s Pegasus rover can operate autonomously or via remote control at over 9 mph. Blue Origin separately received $188 million with an option worth $280.4 million to deliver cargo landers for rover transport.
NASA also confirmed that MoonFall, a mission deploying four survey drones to scout Artemis landing sites, has selected Firefly Aerospace to build the transport spacecraft, with a 2028 launch target.
SpaceX sits at the center of that commercial layer. SpaceX holds the NASA Human Landing System contract for the Starship-derived lander that will put astronauts on the surface under Artemis IV, currently targeting 2028. Before that can happen, SpaceX must demonstrate in-orbit propellant transfer at scale, a process requiring multiple Starship tanker launches to fuel a single mission. Water ice at the lunar south pole is central to the base’s long-term viability, as it can be converted into drinking water, breathable oxygen, and rocket fuel, directly reducing dependence on Earth resupply. That resource loop becomes far more practical if Starship can land and be refueled on or near the Moon itself.
Elon Musk has publicly stated that Starship V3, which recently completed its first flight, should be capable enough for initial Mars missions. The Moon Base plan announced Tuesday is the infrastructure layer that connects everything between those two ambitions, and SpaceX is the only American company currently contracted to build the rocket that gets humans to either destination.
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