Elon Musk
Tesla preps for a Cybercab takeover of the Robotaxi platform after pilot program
Tesla looks to be preparing the Cybercab for Robotaxi operation as castings pile up at Gigafactory Texas.
Tesla is evidently preparing for the Cybercab to take over the Robotaxi platform after the pilot program in Austin, Texas, is launched.
That claim is made based on new drone footage from Gigafactory Texas captured by Joe Tegtmeyer, who found hundreds of Cybercab castings that have accumulated on property in Austin.
🚨 The Drone GOAT @JoeTegtmeyer has captured images of “several hundred” Cybercab castings outside of Giga Texas
The Model Y will handle the initial Robotaxi pilot program in Austin, but it looks like Cybercab could be introduced later this year as well! https://t.co/PkPXjuR5Tc pic.twitter.com/iSohkSZcIZ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 30, 2025
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated Robotaxi vehicle that was unveiled last October. It features just two seats and is minimalistic, aimed toward allowing the Full Self-Driving suite to chauffeur passengers from Point A to Point B without ever having to deal with human interaction or any responsibilities within the vehicle.
In June, Tesla plans to launch its first Robotaxi rides in Texas. Although employees in Austin and in the Bay Area of San Francisco have already had access to over 1,500 trips and 15,000 miles of autonomous (but supervised) travel, Tesla plans to launch a driverless version in a limited fashion in June.
However, this initial pilot program, while presumably operating on an Unsupervised version of the FSD, will only utilize Model Ys, at least at first.
The drone footage captured by Tegtmeyer today seems to tell a story of a quick transition to the Cybercab for the Robotaxi responsibilities, especially as Tesla gets its feet wet with the early Unsupervised FSD rides and gains confidence in the fleet’s ability to navigate passengers:
Many more @Tesla Cybercab Castings at Giga Texas today! Looks like around 75 or so in the racks waiting for production line testing (or more than that?) 😎 pic.twitter.com/0zUdH6BKLx
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) April 30, 2025
It appears that between 400 and 500 Cybercab castings can be seen in the images Joe captured, a very respectable number considering the company said it will not launch the Robotaxi with the initial rides it gives in Austin.
The images seem to paint a picture that Tesla is truly ready to get things moving in terms of the Cybercab project. While it does not plan to use the vehicle initially, its manufacturing efforts for the car are being prepared by stacking these castings so they’re ready to be expanded upon into the real thing.
On the most recent Earnings Call, Tesla’s VP of Vehicle Engineering, Lars Moravy, said the Cybercab’s engineering has progressed over the last several months to “derisk things like corrosion, the ceiling across the seams of the vehicle, and when you marry several components,” and even things like early crash testing have already taken place.
Moravy continued, “As with all that combined, we kind of go into the builds that we have in this quarter for the Cybercab product, and that’s the next real big test of full-scale integration with the unboxed process. And that’s kind of where we are. So you’ll see them on the test roads in a couple of months.”
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship Flight 13 aborted at Zero and Musk just told us what broke
Four Raptor engines failed to ignite at T-zero, forcing SpaceX to scrub Starship Flight 13 Thursday.
SpaceX scrubbed the Starship Flight 13 launch attempt Thursday evening at the last possible moment, after four of the Super Heavy booster’s 33 Raptor 3 engines failed to ignite during the startup sequence. The 90-minute window had opened at 6:45 p.m. EDT from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, and the countdown had proceeded without issue all day, with more than 11.5 million pounds of liquid methane and liquid oxygen being fully loaded into the rocket before the automated abort triggered. SpaceX’s launch directors posted on X, “Standing down from today’s flight test attempt,” and shut down the livestream shortly after.
Musk confirmed the root cause within hours. “Some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort,” he wrote on X. “To be confident of a good flight, 2 Raptors will be removed and replaced. Most probable launch timing is early next week.” SpaceX engineers began draining propellant tanks immediately and Booster 20 was rolled back to its hangar for inspection.
The timing adds a layer of significance that did not exist during any of the previous 12 Starship flights. This is the first time SpaceX has attempted to launch Starship since the company made its stock market debut in June, listing under ticker SPCX at $135 per share. Public investors are now watching every Starship outcome in real time, and a last-second abort carries more visibility than it would have six months ago.
Flight 13 was designed to be one of the most consequential tests in the program’s history. It was set to carry 20 Starlink V3 satellites, the first operational payload Starship has ever attempted to deploy. Six of those satellites carried external cameras to photograph Starship’s heat shield from the outside during flight, which would act as a self-inspection approach SpaceX has never attempted before. The mission also needed to complete a Raptor engine relight in space, a step SpaceX skipped on Flight 12 in May after losing an engine during ascent. That Flight 12 booster also flipped 90 degrees off course during its boostback burn when five engines failed to reignite.
SpaceX has not announced an official next launch date. Musk’s “early next week” window points to July 21 or 22 at the earliest, pending the engine swap and a return to the pad.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s Texas ranch to showcase the lifelong work that changed the world
Elon Musk is building a product gallery at his Texas ranch spanning his lifelong inventions.
Elon Musk took to X earlier today, noting “Am putting together a product gallery at my ranch in Texas.” in response to a resurfaced famous quote from JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s wherein he draw parallels of the Tesla CEO to legendary physicist Albert Einstein.
Dimon made the remark at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland back in January 2025, telling CNBC at the time, “SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, I mean, the guy is our Einstein.” The remark seemingly ended a long-time feud between the two high profile execs.
While details are thin about the exact location of Elon Musk’s Texas ranch and any pending projects that would serve as a gallery and homage to his portfolio of revolutionary product inventions spanning from 1984 to 2025, land acquisition records point to roughly a location of several thousand acres in Bastrop County, east of Austin near the Colorado River and held through an LLC called Horse Ranch LLC that’s managed by Musk’s longtime personal friend and family wealth manager Jared Birchall. Birchall also serves as the CEO of Neuralink.
Tesla’s “ecological paradise” in Giga Texas may be larger than expected
The broader Bastrop County footprint surrounding the ranch has grown significantly. Entities tied to Musk have accumulated approximately 2,000 acres in Bastrop County as of mid-2026, up from 700 acres earlier in the year, with possibly as much as 6,000 acres acquired in total across Bastrop and Travis counties based on deed records.
No completion date for the gallery has been announced and Musk has not confirmed whether it will be open to the public. As Teslarati has reported, SpaceX just completed the largest IPO in history raising $75 billion, a milestone that makes this particular moment in Musk’s career a natural inflection point for looking back at what he has built through the years.
Am putting together a product gallery at my ranch in Texas https://t.co/xQf5FRy4uz
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 15, 2026
Starting with Blastar, a simple space shooter game Musk coded at 12 years old and sold to a South African magazine for $500. From there the timeline moves through a commercial career that started with Zip2 in 1995, a city guide software company sold to Compaq for roughly $300 million in 1999. That was followed by X.com in 1999, which merged with Confinity to become PayPal, acquired by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. SpaceX came in 2002, Tesla in 2003, SolarCity in 2006, the Supercharger network in 2012, Neuralink in 2016, The Boring Company in 2016, OpenAI co-founded in 2015, X acquired in 2022, xAI in 2023, Optimus in 2024, the Cybercab in 2026, and most recently SpaceXAI following the SpaceX and xAI merger. The gallery will also likely include items that blur the line between product and cultural artifact, among them The Boring Company’s Not-a-Flamethrower from 2018, Tesla Short Shorts from 2020, and Burnt Hair perfume released under X in 2022.
SpaceX is gearing up for the 13th Starship integrated flight test, which is currently scheduled for Thursday, July 16, with the launch window opening up at 6:30 PM E.T. from Starbase in South Texas.
This mission, the second with the V3 Starship and Super Heavy vehicles, builds directly on the foundation of Flight 12 while introducing ambitious new objectives, including the debut deployment of next-generation Starlink V3 satellites.
The rapid iteration between flights underscores SpaceX’s “fail fast, learn faster” philosophy, with engineers addressing specific anomalies from the previous test to push reusability and payload capabilities further.
Starship’s thirteenth flight test is preparing to launch as early as Thursday, July 16 → https://t.co/Rp7VwBzpWx pic.twitter.com/jdpFlQUEpF
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 11, 2026
Flight 12 occurred earlier in 2026 and encountered notable challenges that became catalysts for Flight 13’s improvements. Issues included booster course deviations during the flip maneuver after stage separation, reusability problems with Super Heavy’s Raptor engine relights for the boostback burn, and an engine-out event on the Starship upper stage during its propulsion phase.
These hiccups, while they did not prevent overall mission success, highlighted areas needing refinement for more consistent performance and higher safety margins in future operational flights.
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
In response, SpaceX implemented a comprehensive suite of both hardware and software upgrades.
For the booster, engineers developed a more robust stage separation flip sequence to maintain stable orientation and prevent off-course rotation. Hardware modifications have enhanced Raptor re-light reliability during the boostback burn, complemented by updated engine alarms and abort logic tailored for multi-engine operations. On the Starship side, propulsion system changes directly tackle the Flight 12 engine-out scenario, improving redundancy and operational resilience.
Another major focus of SpaceX for Flight 13 was the advancements in the heat shield. New tile designs and attachment mechanisms, including tests of aft flaps and skirts, aim to boost durability.
Load-sensing tiles will measure real-time stresses during atmospheric entry, while white-painted tiles simulate missing ones as imaging targets. Six of the 20 Starlink V3 satellites carried aboard will feature specialized cameras to scan and transmit heat shield imagery back to ground teams, providing critical data for future return-to-launch-site attempts.
The mission profile also includes a higher dynamic pressure ascent to stress-test the thermal protection system and increase payload potential, alongside a planned in-space Raptor engine relight demonstration.
The V3 Starlink satellites themselves mark a leap forward, equipped with laser links, deployable solar arrays, and improved antennas to expand network capacity and speeds.
The company wrote:
“For the first time, Starship will carry V3 Starlink satellites to space, which aim to greatly expand the network’s capacity and user speeds. As part of this initial test, Starship is planned to deploy 20 satellites which will extend solar arrays and antennas and will attempt to connect with ground stations in South Africa and the larger Starlink constellation via high-capacity lasers. Six of the satellites have been modified with a suite of cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to continue testing methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions. Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test.”
This dual-purpose flight tests both vehicle reliability and satellite tech in one integrated operation.
These iterative changes, catalyzed by Flight 12’s data, position Starship closer to rapid reusability goals essential for ambitious programs like Artemis lunar missions and global Starlink coverage.
As SpaceX continues its aggressive test cadence, Flight 13 exemplifies how targeted engineering responses to real-flight anomalies accelerate progress toward fully operational, high-cadence launches. Success here could mark another milestone in the Starship program for SpaceX.
SpaceX Starship Flight 13 aborted at Zero and Musk just told us what broke
Elon Musk secretly acquires $1B energy company to power the AI future
