• Elon Musk is too rich for the rich list.
• The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, worth $1.1 trillion, is wealthier than the next four richest people combined.
• Musk lost more than Warren Buffett's entire net worth on Monday.

Elon Musk is now so wealthy that he's making a mockery of the rich list.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO was worth $1.08 trillion as of Monday's market close, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The next-richest person in the world, Alphabet cofounder Larry Page, was less than a third as wealthy with a net worth of $299 billion.

In fact, Musk is richer than the next four people in the billionaire rankings: Page, his cofounder Sergey Brin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, who were together worth $1.06 trillion as of Monday's close.

The sheer scale of Musk's fortune means shifts in others' fortunes now pale in comparison. For example, Page, Brin, and Bezos each lost more than $10 billion in Monday's tech rout.

Those losses look paltry compared to Musk's $152 billion wealth decline on the same day, fueled by a 16% plunge in SpaceX's stock just days after its blockbuster IPO.

Put differently, Musk lost in one day a sum that exceeds Warren Buffett's entire fortune. The 95-year-old investor and Berkshire Hathaway chairman ranked 10th on Bloomberg's list with a $146 billion net worth at Monday's close.

Given Musk has a $700 billion-plus lead over anyone else, he simply looks out of place on a mere billionaires list. He's started a trillionaire club with only one member.

The wealth gap between Musk and his rich-list peers has only grown truly stark in the past few months. In fact, Ellison briefly leapfrogged him in September to become the world's richest person despite being worth less than $400 billion.

The key reason for Musk's net worth skyrocketing has been SpaceX's soaring valuation, which has boosted his fortune by $456 billion in less than six months, per Bloomberg's list.

That wealth gain has catapulted Musk into a league of his own and given him a seemingly insurmountable lead over the rest of the billionaire pack.

The yawning divide reflects Musk's large stakes in two companies valued at over $1 trillion: Tesla and SpaceX. It's hard to see anyone catching up to him, barring a massive crash in either company's stock price, given nobody else has two horses of that size in the wealth race.

• Elon Musk sounded the alarm about Taiwan's vulnerability to a Chinese invasion, per a new book.
• He told Trump and tech CEOs that the US was "headed for disaster" in the event of a Chinese invasion.
• Musk was in a meeting where the CEOs discussed the possibility of bringing chipmaking to US shores.

Elon Musk expressed grave concern about Taiwan's dominance in the chip market — and the possibility of a Chinese invasion — in a tech CEO meeting at the White House last year, according to a book published on Tuesday about President Donald Trump's second term.

The book, "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump," by The New York Times' Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, reported that the SpaceX owner had met with Trump and the CEOs of firms such as Dell, Qualcomm, and Intel on March 10, 2025.

Haberman and Swan wrote that Musk told the gathering in the Roosevelt Room that he was "shitting bricks about our vulnerability to China."

But Musk had grown increasingly alarmed in recent years, especially over the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which would jeopardize the supply of high-end chips that Musk's companies depended on.

And now, with these CEOs as his audience, Musk was frantically sounding the alarm about the fact that an island country roughly the size of Maryland, floating eighty-one miles off mainland China, produced around 70 percent of all the semiconductors on earth and 90 percent of the most advanced chips. He was lecturing a gathering more familiar with this problem than perhaps any other group of people in the world. But Musk kept banging away.

"If we don't start building chips outside the zone of confrontation," he said, "we are headed for disaster." He reiterated the point: "Somebody's got to build the damn fabs [fabrication plants] outside the battle zone!"

According to the book, Trump said China's leader, Xi Jinping, had given assurances that Beijing would not launch an invasion of Taiwan while the former sat in the White House.

But Haberman and Swan reported that Trump added a caveat: "Could be lying. Taiwan is the apple of Xi's eye, just like Ukraine was for Putin."

The group of CEOs, alongside Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, then discussed how the US might claw back some of the world's semiconductor supply chain and shift factories from Asia to American soil.

"The United States will only have thirty percent of TSMC's capacity in 2029. If China invades Taiwan, the entire economy crashes," Musk said, per the book.

In May, Musk and other American tech CEOs, including Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Apple's Tim Cook, accompanied Trump on an official visit to China.

Musk was widely regarded as a figure who could help stabilize Beijing and Washington's economic ties.

Tesla operates a major factory, Gigafactory 3, in Shanghai that employs roughly 20,000 workers. The American automaker enjoys the rare arrangement of wholly owning the factory without needing a joint venture with a Chinese firm.

The White House and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

"Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump" is available for purchase on Amazon.

• Josh Giegel joined SpaceX in 2009 and worked there for 3 years. He says the equity he received has been "liberating."
• Giegel's SpaceX equity has allowed him to put a down payment on a house and help pay off his wife's student loans.
• "The equity also allows me to take a lower salary at my startup," Gambit, he said, and that means he can hire more people.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Josh Giegel, the 41-year-old cofounder of the AI startup Gambit, who lives in Los Angeles. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I was in grad school at Stanford, finishing my master's and wanting to do a Ph.D.

I had worked at NASA the previous summer, and one of the women I worked with was also a Stanford graduate, and was like: "You're going to be so bored at NASA. Why don't you check out this small space company in Los Angeles called SpaceX?"

I applied and interviewed in the two weeks between flight three and flight four of Falcon 1. I interviewed with Elon; he was still interviewing pretty much everyone at the time. I remember going back to my advisor and saying, "There's nothing I'd rather do on the planet than what he just described."

My Master's ended at the end of 2008, and I began in 2009.

I was on what's called the propulsion analysis team, which was four or five people. Our responsibility was: How do you design the first reusable rocket engine? A very small group of us was responsible for the initial stuff that was on Falcon 9.

I started there when I was 23, and I left when I was 27. It was a little bit of naive immaturity. I knew I wanted to start a company one day, and SpaceX was growing like crazy. I wanted to be on a founding team. I still love the company; I almost went back two or three years later before I ended up starting a company of my own.

The IPO is pretty cool. I'm on a bunch of text threads with guys who were there around the same time, and a couple of them are still there. It's cool to see just how big it became.

When I got there, and they gave the offer, there was an equity component. I remember the HR woman who was going over it with me saying, "We think some day, in 10 or 15 years, this might be worth $250,000-300,000." I distinctly remember her saying, "It might get you a nice down payment on a house in Los Angeles."

We all laugh about it now. But, at the time, the saying was: the fastest way to become a millionaire in space is to start as a billionaire.

Buybacks have been really regular for the last 10 years. Every now and then, we'd take a little bit out. For example, we paid off my wife's student loans a number of years ago. We put down a down payment on a house.

I joke: We did actually get a down payment on a house! She wasn't lying when she said that. It's a house that, on our normal salaries at startups, we wouldn't have been able to afford without that additional windfall.

We also love traveling. We've got a seven-year-old and a one-year-old. We're going to go on slightly more adventurous trips because of it.

My wife is also thinking of doing a larger career change that would come with a decent salary reduction, which she probably wouldn't have been able to do without something like SpaceX.

Professionally, I've always been risky. If the majority of your net worth is tied up in a rocket company, you must be a risk-tolerant individual.

Gambit is a VC-backed company. We've raised about $15 million to date, and there are a couple more investment rounds that are coming. The IPO puts you in a position where folks with a substantial amount of equity could be interested in becoming investors.

At least ten of the people I worked with intimately have started their own company. There was a band that I played in with five SpaceX people; four of us started our own companies. I played guitar.

That whole ecosystem can fund its own endeavors and each other. The quantum of capital that they can put in is not like your typical family and friends round. That's typically $20,000, $50,000, maybe $100,000. Here, that could be on the order of $1 million, maybe $2 million per check.

You also become a bit of a mercenary, asking, "I don't need a paycheck from what I'm going to go do, so what am I going to go do?" It's liberating.

The equity also allows me to take a lower salary at my startup, so that I can go out and hire more people to make my company more successful.

• Tesla discontinued the Model S and Model X this year to focus on autonomy and robotics.
• Lars Moravy, Tesla's vice president of vehicle engineering, said, "Never say never" about a comeback.
• There's also a fresh teaser for the long-awaited Roadster.

BTS. The Pussycat Dolls. "Scrubs." It's en vogue these days to make a comeback.

Could Tesla's recently discontinued electric cars — the Model S and Model X — eventually join the trend?

Lars Moravy, Tesla's vice president of vehicle engineering, left the door open for the luxury sedan and SUV model revivals in an interview with the "Ride the Lightning" podcast released this weekend.

"It was just like: now is not the right time to keep this one going," he said about the decision to ax the cars. "That doesn't mean it goes away forever. Never say never."

To be clear, Moravy did not say Tesla is actively working on a new Model S or Model X — but he also did not rule it out.

He also offered a fresh reason for the car's discontinuation: global crash-test requirements.

"Every five years or so, Euro NCAP updates their protocols," Moravy said, adding that Tesla wants to make "the safest cars on the road," which requires structural updates.

The platform "was never designed for" some newer crash cases, he said, including small-overlap and offset tests. Tesla had made "band-aids along the way," but he said keeping the vehicles compliant would require "a massive overhaul."

Tesla has previously said the cars were discontinued because of new business goals. During a January earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said the automaker was giving the vehicles an "honorable discharge" as it shifted its focus toward autonomous vehicles and robotics.

The final Model S and Model X units rolled off the Fremont, California, production line in mid-May as the plant began transforming into an assembly line for Tesla's Optimus robot.

On the podcast, Moravy said Tesla sold about 750,000 Model S and Model X cars during their lifetime. When asked directly if the Model S and Model X could make a comeback, he said the vehicles "have done a great job for us in what they needed to do."

The podcast also included an update on Tesla's long-awaited second-generation Roadster. Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla's chief designer, said the company plans to build the two-door sports car in Texas.

"We've made, you know, first plans on that, and I think you'll see a lot of things start to unfold in the next months," von Holzhausen said.

Tesla didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• The newly public SpaceX S-1 reveals how closely Elon Musk's companies are connected.
• Last year, SpaceX was involved in more than $660 million worth of payments, goods, and services with the ventures.
• Here's a look at how SpaceX is intertwined with Tesla, The Boring Company, and more.

Step right up to Elon Musk's financial merry-go-round.

Tucked more than 200 pages into SpaceX's S-1 paperwork, which the company filed on Wednesday, is an outline of how interconnected Musk's various companies are, including through more than $660 million in payments, goods, and services involving SpaceX and his other ventures last year.

Musk has his hands in many pots. In addition to being the CEO of aerospace company SpaceX, he's the CEO (and "Technoking") of electric carmaker Tesla, the founder of tunneling business The Boring Company, the cofounder of brain chip firm Neuralink, and was the CEO of xAI, until it merged with SpaceX in February. In various ways, the companies are all intermingled.

SpaceX said in the filing that there may be "conflicts of interest," but ultimately, they benefit investors.

It's not uncommon for companies with certain ties to do business with one another and to spell out these relationships in a prospectus filing when they plan to go public. The breakdown in SpaceX's S-1 is the first look we're getting at some of its connections, including SpaceX's deals with The Boring Company or its purchase of Tesla Cybertrucks.

The biggest expenses between the companies fell under the banner of "commercial, licensing, and support."

Last year, SpaceX paid Tesla $144 million under such agreements, a figure significantly higher than in years past. xAI, then a separate entity, spent more, paying Tesla $506 million last year. xAI, then a separate entity, spent more, paying Tesla $506 million last year, while also bringing in $2 millon in revenue from Tesla.

The majority of SpaceX's cumulative $650 million in spending with Tesla was for Megapack products, Tesla's battery storage system. SpaceX also bought $131 million worth of Cybertrucks, which, at a starting retail price of $69,990 a pop, would be as many as 1,871 vehicles.

Additionally, Tesla paid $4 million last year to advertise on X.

Some expenses were driven by pure practicality: Tesla paid SpaceX $2 million to use its aircraft, X leased office space from The Boring Company for $1 million, and xAI rented space from the billionaire's umbrella company, Musk Industries LLC, for $2 million last year. SpaceX also spent $4 million on a security company owned by Musk for his personal security, as Tesla has done, per its filings.

Other expenses were mind-scratchers. SpaceX paid The Boring Company $1 million in connection with the construction of tunnels in Bastrop, Texas. These could be the tunnels connecting his facilities reported by local outlets, or they could be related to the chip facility SpaceX is building there.

Tesla and SpaceX's relationship is more than transactional

Musk's companies plan to continue doing business together, particularly Tesla and SpaceX, which, the company said, have a "strong and constructive partnership."

Tesla owns nearly 19 million shares of SpaceX stock. While that represents less than 1% of the company, at a target valuation of $1.5 trillion, those shares would be worth about $4.1 billion.

SpaceX and Tesla also have major projects in the works. The pair is developing Macrohard, an agentic AI platform, and, along with Intel, has partnered on Terafab, a manufacturing initiative that creates chips for Tesla's robots and vehicles, as well as SpaceX's orbital compute infrastructure.

The projects are set to be the beginning of a long relationship.

"We plan to explore other areas of strategic collaboration with Tesla in the future," the document says.

• Elon Musk has had a rocky relationship with advertisers since acquiring Twitter in 2022.
• Musk's X sued advertisers for allegedly violating antitrust law by boycotting the app.
• New SEC filings show that X's efforts to win back advertisers haven't led to a bonanza.

Elon Musk's attempts to win over advertisers have yet to spark a major recovery in ad revenue for X.

In 2025, ad revenue for X (formerly Twitter) reached $1.8 billion, up around 7% from 2024. That said, revenue was down 21% from 2023 and about 59% from 2021, the year before Musk took over Twitter and began alienating some brands with looser content moderation.

Here were the stats:

X's ad revenue figures were revealed in an S-1 filing by SpaceX, X's parent company.

Since buying Twitter, Musk's relationship with advertisers has been rocky.

In 2023, he told marketers who were skipping out on X ads that they could "go fuck yourself."

Musk hired an ad industry veteran, Linda Yaccarino, in 2023 to help woo marketers. Yaccarino previously ran ad sales at NBCUniversal.

The drama with the ad industry didn't stop, though.

A year later, X sued an advertising trade group, The World Federation of Advertisers, and some members, including CVS, Unilever, and Mars, alleging they violated antitrust law by collectively withholding ad spend. A judge later tossed out the suit, citing a lack of jurisdiction and X's failure to state a claim under the antitrust laws.

Yaccarino left the company in July 2025.

Last year, there was industry chatter that Musk's entry into politics may have helped X's ad prospects. As Musk took on a high-profile role in the US government, some advertisers began spending on X again. Ad industry insiders previously told Business Insider that they felt buying ads on the app had become a cost of doing business to appease Musk and his allies in President Donald Trump's White House. Musk left his role, and his relationship with the Trump administration has since become more muddled.

Advertising's centrality as a revenue source for X diminished in March 2025 after Musk decided to merge the app into his artificial intelligence company, xAI. The company's AI revenue is growing much faster than its advertising revenue, reaching around $1.35 billion in 2025, a 52% increase from the previous year.

With the decision to merge xAI into SpaceX earlier this year, advertising now accounts for just a fraction of the combined company's $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue.

That doesn't mean X has stopped trying to improve its ad products.

Last month, X announced it had revamped its ads business to integrate more AI tools. This month, X rolled out a new tool that uses AI to connect brands with creators that might be a good fit for their campaigns.

• Elon Musk boosted a New Yorker profile questioning OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's trustworthiness on X.
• The article appeared on X feeds on Monday, the same day Musk and Altman's trial kicked off in Oakland.
• Musk's lawsuit claims Altman deceived him on OpenAI's mission as a nonprofit.

A New Yorker magazine investigation detailing concerns about Sam Altman's leadership resurfaced on X feeds on Monday, at the behest of the social media platform's billionaire owner.

A post from Ronan Farrow, an investigative reporter, linking to his New Yorker profile of the OpenAI CEO titled "Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?" showed up on the X "For You" page for some users on Monday, three weeks after it was initially posted on April 6.

The post was labeled as "Boosted" and said, "This organic post was boosted by @elonmusk."

It's unclear how many people were served the post on Monday, but several Business Insider reporters saw it in their feeds.

The profile was boosted as a high-stakes trial between Musk and Altman kicked off in Oakland, California, on Monday. Altman made an unexpected appearance in court as jury selection began. Musk was not in attendance.

Musk sued Altman and OpenAI in 2024, alleging he was deceived when he cofounded the company in 2015 and invested tens of millions of dollars, only for it to abandon its mission as a public benefit nonprofit. The case could cost billions for OpenAI, which is preparing for an IPO.

Musk went after Altman directly on Monday in a critical post on X.

"Scam Altman and Greg Stockman stole a charity. Full stop," he wrote, referring to Altman and OpenAI's president, who is also named in the lawsuit.

OpenAI said Monday the lawsuit was "a baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor."

X did not respond to a request for comment or questions about the "boosted" feature, including how it works and how it compares to an advertising post, which is typically labeled "Ad."

The New Yorker declined to comment.

• Sam Altman showed up in court as jury selection began in a civil trial between him and Elon Musk.
• Some potential jurors offered unfavorable views about AI — and Musk.
• Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman two years ago.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made an unexpected appearance in a California courtroom Monday as jury selection in his high-stakes legal feud with Elon Musk kicked off.

Altman, who wore a dark-colored suit and white shirt, was spotted inside the Oakland courtroom, where some potential jurors in the federal civil trial shared unfavorable views about artificial intelligence — and Musk, the world's richest man.

"Elon doesn't care about people, just like our president," one prospective juror told US District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

The man, who works in construction and described himself as a "meme junky" and a "dying breed" who still gets print newspaper subscriptions, added that he thinks Musk only cares about money.

Another prospective juror who works for the city of Oakland said he has a strong opinion about Musk. He said that he would do his "best" to approach the case without bias, even though he called Musk a "jerk" in a pre-trial jury questionnaire.

Musk was not in attendance for day one of the trial between two of the tech industry's most powerful billionaires. Since it is a civil trial, the parties are not required to appear unless they are testifying. Up until now, Musk and Altman have largely left the matter to their lawyers, aside from the occasional online jab.

The Tesla CEO sued OpenAI, Altman, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman two years ago, alleging that they intentionally "deceived" him into cofounding the company with them in 2015.

Musk alleges in his lawsuit that he poured tens of millions into OpenAI to support its founding mission as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the public's benefit, only for that mission to later be abandoned, in part, through the company's partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft is also named as a defendant in Musk's lawsuit.

The lawsuit seeks more than $100 billion in damages, along with sweeping changes to the structure of the $850 billion company behind ChatGPT. The case comes as OpenAI is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering.

Earlier Monday, Musk and OpenAI traded barbs on Musk's X platform about the case, with Musk referring to Altman as "Scam Altman" and OpenAI ripping Musk's lawsuit as a "baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor."

Musk is expected to testify in the weeks-long trial, along with Altman and other tech execs like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Some potential jurors questioned on Monday told the court that they had reservations surrounding AI.

A registered nurse said she doesn't trust AI and isn't a fan of how the rapidly advancing technology is being used in the workplace.

"It's just giving me more work to do," said the woman who explained that her employer uses AI tools to process patient records that she still has to review for errors.

One woman who works in the psychiatric patient care unit at Stanford University said she had some concerns about AI but could approach the case with an open mind.

"I personally don't use it much because I do find that I have to double check everything, and at this point, I might as well do it myself," said the woman, who was ultimately chosen to sit on the jury.

A different juror prospect, a PhD student in genetics, said she has a ChatGPT subscription and uses it, along with Anthropic's Claude, to write code and emails.

Concerns of the juror prospects were also reflected outside the courthouse, where protesters gathered to demonstrate against AI. A person in a robot suit wore a sign that said, "Altman's AI enslaver." A giant inflatable tube figure read: "Elon sucks."

By the end of Monday, nine jurors were selected for the trial. Opening arguments are set to begin Tuesday.

At one point, Musk's attorney, Steven Molo, asked the judge to dismiss a juror prospect who called Musk a "greedy, racist, homophobic piece of garbage" in her questionnaire and another who wrote that Musk is a "world-class jerk."

"Look, the reality is that people don't like him," the judge told Musk's legal team about their client. "But that doesn't mean that Americans, nevertheless, can't have integrity for the judicial process."

• Donald Trump owns his own social media company.
• But Truth Social isn't where to go if you want a lot of people to see you attack Jimmy Kimmel.
• So Melania Trump made sure her demand that ABC do something about Kimmel appeared on Elon Musk's X, too.

Melania Trump says ABC should "take a stand" over Jimmy Kimmel, because she doesn't like a joke the talk show host made last week.

First things first: The first lady calling on a media company to do something about its employee because she doesn't like what that employee said is a bad thing. It's an attempt to use the power of the White House to silence speech that the White House doesn't like.

And it's just as worrisome as it was last September, when Brendan Carr, Trump's pick to head the Federal Communications Commission, told ABC owner Disney to "take action, frankly, on Kimmel" because Kimmel had made a joke about Trump supporters and Charlie Kirk. Disney suspended Kimmel for a few days and then reinstated him after public outcry.

There is a difference between Carr's demand and Melania Trump's demand on Monday, since Carr is a regulator with direct oversight over parts of Disney's business, and Melania Trump doesn't have any formal power over … anything. But she's still using the power of the White House to try to control speech, and that should alarm anyone with any common sense. (I've asked her office for comment.)

Let's see how new Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro responds to this one.

Much less important, but still interesting to me: The first lady's choice of platform to make her demand/threat. Melania Trump used Elon Musk's X, the site formally known as Twitter, to post her thoughts on Monday, using both her official First Lady of the United States account and her own personal account.

Trump also posted the same statement on Truth Social, the social media site owned by her husband. But that one seemed obligatory. Not in the way it's literally obligatory for Donald Trump to post at least some of his thoughts on his own social platform before he puts them anywhere else. But in the way you're supposed to tell your significant other you think they make the best pasta, when what you really crave is Olive Garden.

The numbers make it clear why Melania Trump chose to use X to make a splash: Her post on that platform has 230,000 likes, and that number is skyrocketing. Her Truth Social post has 6,500 likes and is traveling at a much more leisurely pace.

All of which is a reminder that while Truth Social is the Trump-owned Twitter alternative Donald Trump uses, it remains a minor-at-best platform. One that won't tell you how many users it has, and one that managed to lose more than $700 million on revenue of $3.7 million in 2025.

None of that is news, nor does it seem to matter to Trump, who still owns a company worth nearly $3 billion, even after a stock plunge and the departure of its CEO — perhaps because the company's current plan is to merge with a nuclear fusion company.

It also doesn't matter where Donald Trump truths or posts or spouts off — he's the president of the United States, so just about anything he says that's noteworthy gets instantly transmitted through the global media ecosystem. Like what happened on Monday afternoon, where he piggybacked on his wife's post and explicitly called on Disney and ABC to fire Kimmel.

But for the rest of us — including the first lady of the United States — where you post a message matters. Which is why she's using the one that helped her husband get into the White House in the first place.

• Bought a Tesla before 2023? Bad news: your car won't be able to drive itself.
• Elon Musk said last week that vehicles with previous-gen tech can't support full autonomy.
• Longtime Tesla owners told Business Insider they felt let down by the company's announcement.

For years, Tesla sold its EVs with the promise of an autonomous future. Now, some owners face being left behind.

On Tesla's earnings call last Wednesday, Elon Musk said that Tesla vehicles shipped before 2023 — which are equipped with a previous-gen Hardware 3 computer — would not be able to achieve fully unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD).

"I wish it were otherwise, but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD," said Musk.

The billionaire said that Tesla would offer Hardware 3 owners the choice of a "discounted trade-in" or a physical replacement of their car's computer and cameras at "micro factories" in major cities.

The announcement is a major blow for longtime Tesla owners, who paid thousands of dollars and have been waiting for years under the impression that their vehicles have the tech necessary to achieve fully autonomous driving.

As far back as 2016, Tesla stated in marketing materials that all its vehicles had the necessary hardware for "full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."

In a 2019 tweet, Musk said that all Tesla vehicles produced since 2016 had the right hardware for FSD or were "trivially upgradeable."

"It feels like a bait and switch at this point," Andrew Apperley, who bought a used 2018 Model 3 with FSD for $53,000 in 2023, told Business Insider.

"They kind of shot themselves in the foot by saying that this is going to come, and then it never does," Apperley said, adding that he felt like Hardware 3 customers would find it hard to trust Tesla and Musk's promises in the future after waiting in vain for unsupervised FSD.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Autonomy angst

Rick Flashman, who paid $10,000 for FSD when he bought his Model 3 in 2022, told Business Insider that, despite receiving increasingly generous trade-in offers from Tesla, he was not interested in swapping out his EV for a vehicle with up-to-date hardware.

"My car's in great shape. It's got 73,000 miles, it's driving perfectly, so I have no reason to upgrade it," Flashman said.

The Florida resident said that FSD was one of the main reasons he bought a Tesla, adding that he uses it for "over 90%" of his driving.

Hardware 3 vehicles in the US run a more limited version of FSD, with Tesla planning to release a "lite" variant of FSD version 14 for older vehicles in June.

Despite his car's limited capabilities, Flashman said he was well satisfied with the tech and is happy to wait for the overhaul Musk promised on Wednesday.

"It might take another year, but I'm one of the ones who's just waiting it out," he said.

"I wish it were sooner, obviously. But I don't feel like I was ripped off," Flashman added.

Matt Simmons, a Tesla owner who bought his Model 3 Performance in 2019, told Business Insider he added FSD for an extra $6,000 because he was curious about the hype. Seven years later, he says he rarely uses the feature.

"It kind of sucks, if I'm being honest," said Simmons, who said he doesn't use FSD on highway trips because of issues with the software's speed control.

Simmons said that he was not surprised by Musk's comments, pointing to the Tesla CEO's track record of making ambitious predictions for self-driving cars have often failed to fully pan out.

"We realize we're being strung along at this point," Simmons said.

The Pittsburgh resident described his Tesla as "long paid for" and said he had no intention of trading it in for a more advanced model.

"That would mean I'd have to buy another Tesla," said Simmons, who said he was hoping that rival EV maker Rivian would offer a similar deal for disenfranchised FSD owners.

Backlash goes global

Some Hardware 3 owners are done waiting for the software they paid thousands of dollars for years ago.

Tesla is already facing several lawsuits in the US from owners who say they were misled by the company's FSD marketing, and the backlash is starting to go global.

Earlier this month, Tesla finally received the green light to launch FSD in the Netherlands, marking the tech's debut in Europe after a yearlong campaign to woo regulators.

However, the rollout in the Netherlands excluded Hardware 3 owners, prompting Mischa Sigtermans, an executive at Amsterdam-based Ryde Ventures, to start a website to gather European Tesla owners for potential legal action.

Nearly 4,000 verified Tesla owners have now signed up to Sigtermans' website.

The Model 3 owner, who paid 6,400 euros ($7,530) for FSD in 2019, told Business Insider that Musk's comments confirmed many owners' worst fears, and said that the proposed solution of a discounted trade-in would simply make owners "pay for the same broken promise twice."

"Musk said out loud what many of us have been saying for months, if not years," said Sigtermans. "The admission is there, the solution isn't."

• Elon Musk shared a video that shows Cybercabs rolling out of the factory.
• The Cybercab is Telsa's upcoming two-seat, fully autonomous vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals.
• It's a huge part of Tesla's multibillion-dollar bet that it can become an AI and autonomy brand.

Tesla says its dedicated robotaxi model is finally in production.

On Friday, Tesla and its CEO, Elon Musk, shared a video on X showing several Cybercab units rolling off the production line in Austin.

The footage was filmed from inside the vehicles as they moved through the factory campus — and suggests Tesla is moving the Cybercab closer to reality.

Tesla is making a multibillion-dollar bet that the company can pivot from traditional car sales to an AI-driven robotaxi and robotics business.

The two-door, two-seat Cybercab — which does not feature a steering wheel or pedals — is one of the major pillars of that bet.

Just over a month ago, the automaker said it had just built its first production Cybercab. Now, the videos suggest Tesla has built multiple units, with Musk also reposting footage of Cybercabs seemingly turning onto a public street.

Starting production is only one step in a much larger challenge.

Tesla has yet to deliver fully autonomous driving at scale. During Wednesday's earnings call, the company removed specific timelines for robotaxi launches in five new cities.

Meanwhile, competitors like Waymo already operate driverless ride-hailing services in several cities.

Still, the videos suggest progress for a vehicle Musk has said would ramp "agonizingly slow."

The company didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• A court dismissed a lawsuit by Elon Musk's X that had accused advertisers of illegally boycotting the platform.
• The Texas federal judge cited a lack of jurisdiction and X's failure to state a claim.
• The defendants included Mars, Lego, and Nestlé.

A court tossed out a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk's X that accused big advertisers like Mars, Lego, and Nestlé of illegally boycotting the platform.

A US District Court judge in Texas dismissed the case, citing a lack of jurisdiction and X's failure to state an antitrust claim.

X sued several major brands in August 2024, alleging their participation in an ad industry initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, GARM, was tantamount to a conspiracy to "collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising" from X after Musk's takeover of the company, then known as Twitter. It later added other brands to the suit.

X claimed the alleged boycott made it less competitive than other platforms in winning advertisers and user engagement.

Other plaintiffs named in the suit were the World Federation of Advertisers, CVS Health, Ørsted, Twitch, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate-Palmolive, Pinterest, Tyson, and Shell.

WFA shut down GARM, its initiative, after the suit was filed, citing limited resources.

The suit was partly spurred by an investigation by the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, into whether advertisers were illegally banding together to demonetize conservative platforms and voices in violation of antitrust law.

The plaintiffs fought back, calling the lawsuit "an attempt to use the courthouse to win back the business X lost in the free market when it disrupted its own business and alienated many of its customers."

X's relationship with advertisers has been fraught since Musk bought the platform in 2022. Advertisers left en masse as X loosened moderation and account-verification rules and reinstated the banned accounts of some provocative figures.

EMARKETER, Business Insider's sister company, estimated its revenue would reach $2.2 billion in 2026, below its pre-acquisition level of $4.5 billion.

X has tried to win back advertisers by underscoring its commitment to brand safety and promoting its use of block lists that let advertisers avoid showing up around certain topics.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Elon Musk said that Tesla and SpaceX would collaborate on a moonshot Terafab chip-building project.
• Tesla has posted its first Terafab roles in California and Texas, and is offering a wide salary range.
• SpaceX is also ramping up hiring at its silicon division as it looks to bring chip production in-house.

Tesla and SpaceX are ramping up semiconductor hiring as Elon Musk's ambitious plans for a Terafab take shape.

Tesla is hiring Terafab engineers in Palo Alto and Austin, according to job listings on the company's website, after Musk said the company would collaborate with SpaceX to build what could be the largest chip manufacturing plant in history.

In California, the EV giant is looking for module process engineers with expertise in lithography, the highly technical discipline that uses ultraviolet light to etch chip designs onto silicon wafers at a molecular scale. It is offering a base salary of $88,000 to $240,000, depending on experience and other factors.

Applicants need to have at least 10 years of experience in cutting-edge semiconductor development.

The job listing suggests they would also need to be comfortable with Tesla's famously intense work culture, with expectations including a willingness to be on-call to "support 24/7 manufacturing operations" and respond rapidly to "critical production issues."

At the Terafab announcement on Saturday, Musk said the facility would create lithography masks — the quartz or glass template that contains the chip design imprinted onto the wafer — in-house, allowing Tesla and SpaceX to quickly iterate and improve chip designs.

"To the best of my knowledge, this doesn't exist anywhere in the world," said Musk, who added that the companies were exploring "some very interesting new physics" to make the project work.

Tesla's Terafab division is also hiring process integration engineers to build advanced logic chips, with base salaries ranging from $88,000 to $338,280. Musk has said Terafab will combine logic and memory chip production under a single roof, something that is highly unusual in the chipmaking industry.

The wide salary range is in line with Tesla's approach to compensation. Business Insider previously reported that the company offers lower base salaries than its tech giant rivals, but includes substantial stock grants.

Tesla is also advertising open roles for silicon engineers in Austin, and is looking to recruit a technical program manager with a proven track record of running "$100 million-plus capex projects" to oversee the design and construction of the fabs. Neither job listing includes base salaries.

Tesla faces talent scramble over Terafab

Recruitment will be one of the biggest challenges facing Musk's ambitious goal of building one of the world's largest semiconductor manufacturers from scratch. The industry relies on specialized knowledge that is carefully cultivated within leading companies like TSMC. It's also facing a global shortage of skilled workers.

SpaceX is scaling up its semiconductor hiring as the rocket maker prepares to launch up to one million orbital data centers, powered by AI chips built by Terafab that are specially adapted for the icy wastes of space.

The company has around 60 open positions in its Silicon division, according to SpaceX's website, though it's unclear which of these roles — if any — are directly related to Terafab.

They include assembly and packaging engineers at its Starlink factory in Bastrop, Texas, where the company invested $280 million last year to expand its semiconductor R&D and packaging facilities, as well as engineers in Washington and California to develop "cutting-edge" specialist chips for deployment in space and on Earth.

"In true SpaceX fashion, Starlink is taking the next step in vertical integration by bringing integrated circuit packaging and assembly in-house for development and manufacturing," read the descriptions on the Bastrop job listings, which do not include salaries.

SpaceX and Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

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• TSA agents are working without pay amid the partial government shutdown.
• Elon Musk on Saturday said on social media that he'd like to cover the workers' salaries.
• The White House said that it poses "legal challenges" due to Musk's involvement with federal contracts.

The White House turned down Elon Musk's offer to cover TSA agents' salaries as they continue to work without pay amid the partial government shutdown.

"We greatly appreciate Elon's generous offer," Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told Business Insider. "This would pose great legal challenges due to his involvement with federal government contracts. The fastest way to ensure TSA employees — and all DHS employees — get paid is for Democrats to fund the Department of Homeland Security."

CBS News first reported the White House's rejection. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The billionaire CEO on Saturday wrote in a social media post that he'd like to cover the salaries of TSA workers "during this funding impasse that is negatively affecting the lives of so many Americans at airports throughout the country."

As of Wednesday, TSA workers missed at least one paycheck as Congress remains at an impasse over funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

The funding lapse has led to staffing shortages and hourslong lines at airports across the country.

As a countermeasure, the Trump administration deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to address airport disruptions.

• Another xAI cofounder, Manuel Kroiss, has told people he is leaving Elon Musk's company.
• Just one cofounder out of 11 remains besides Musk.
• The company has been in flux ahead of a widely anticipated IPO at SpaceX, which recently acquired xAI.

And then there was one.

XAI cofounder Manuel Kroiss has told people he is leaving the company, according to insiders with knowledge of his exit.

Kroiss, who is also known as "Makro," is one of 11 engineers who helped launch the company alongside Elon Musk in 2023. With his exit, the number of cofounder departures now sits at 10.

Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang have all stepped away since January.

XAI and Kroiss did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Kroiss led pretraining, which helps train the company's AI models on large datasets, and reported directly to Musk. He also worked on improving xAI's coding models alongside Zhang, who left earlier in March. Musk said at the Abundance Summit earlier this month that xAI is "behind in coding," but the company is working to "exceed our competitors on coding."

Before joining xAI, Kroiss worked at Google and DeepMind.

Ross Nordeen, who came to xAI from Tesla, is the only remaining cofounder aside from Musk.

The company's organizational structure has been in flux over the past few weeks, according to people with knowledge of the changes. Musk has taken over managing dozens of direct reports and has brought in workers from Tesla and SpaceX. It has also shed dozens of employees, the people said.

Earlier this month, Musk said on X that "xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up."

He has also said that the company is resifting through old xAI candidates to bring in new people.

"Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI," Musk wrote on X.

Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, acquired xAI earlier this year. The company is expected to file an initial public offering this year, which could value it at $1.5 trillion.

Do you work for xAI or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at gkay@businessinsider.com or Signal at 248-894-6012. Use a personal email address, a nonwork device, and nonwork WiFi; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Elon Musk is about to unveil his most challenging project yet: a giant semiconductor factory.
• The billionaire has said Tesla needs to build a "Terafab" to churn out chips for its robotaxis and Optimus robot.
• One analyst said to never rule Musk out, but that building a Terafab could be harder than sending rockets to Mars.

Self-driving cars, cyborgs, and catching rockets in midair: Elon Musk can't resist the lure of the impossible.

The world's richest man has made a habit of taking on the world's most difficult engineering challenges at Tesla and SpaceX — and has often proved the doubters wrong. His latest target is a tall order even by his standards.

For several months, Musk has been talking about building a "Terafab," a mammoth factory that would churn out semiconductors critical for Tesla's ambitious rollout of robotaxis and humanoid robots.

On Saturday, he teased that an announcement was imminent. "Terafab Project launches in 7 days," Musk wrote in an X post, without providing further details.

In a January earnings call, the billionaire cited chip production as the major long-term headwind to the company's growth, suggesting that output from suppliers Samsung, TSMC, and Micron would be nowhere near enough to meet Tesla's targets as the EV giant scales its robotaxi and humanoid robot programs.

"This is definitely going to be sort of a controversial thing, but I think Tesla needs to build a Terafab," Musk told investors, adding that such a facility would also protect Tesla against geopolitical upheaval.

The Tesla CEO suggested that the company would pursue the hardest possible version of that vision, a "very big fab" that would produce and package logic and memory chips entirely in the US.

Speaking at Tesla's annual shareholder meeting last November, Musk estimated the Terafab would aim to initially produce 100,000 silicon wafers a month and could eventually grow to 1 million.

Ahead of the Terafab announcement, Tesla has begun laying the groundwork for Musk's grand plan. The tech giant is hiring a semiconductor infrastructure manager to oversee factory design and construction, per a recent job posting. The role is based in Austin, suggesting the Terafab could be built near Tesla's gigafactory on the outskirts of the city.

However, analysts told Business Insider that Tesla would face enormous challenges — and a huge bill — as it tries to master one of the most complex technologies on the planet.

"It's Musk, so I would never count it out. But I suspect this is actually harder than sending rockets to Mars," Stacy Rasgon, managing director and senior semiconductor analyst at Bernstein, told Business Insider.

Semi-impossible?

The global supply of semiconductors is almost entirely produced by a small handful of companies, many of them based in East Asia.

Manufacturing them is an expensive, complicated, and time-consuming process. Deep within hermetically sealed factories, chip designs are etched onto thin silicon wafers at the molecular level by specialist lithography machines, which are almost entirely made by one company in the Netherlands and can have a waitlist of over a year.

Rasgon said that procuring these in-demand ASML-built machines was a critical roadblock for any would-be chipmaker.

"If you're a brand new customer, you're probably waiting a couple of years before getting your hand on one of those," he said.

Rasgon added that chipmakers usually split up production of logic and memory chips and semiconductor packaging across different factories.

Musk's suggestion that Tesla could integrate them all into one facility would make scaling the Terafab even more complicated, Rasgon said, as each product has wildly different processes and economics.

Musk is not alone in fearing geopolitical disruption. The threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which would plunge global chip supply into chaos, has prompted companies, including TSMC, to build new chip fabs in the US.

But the road to US-produced semiconductors has been far from smooth. TSMC's Arizona expansion has faced years of delays and a total price tag of around $165 billion across multiple facilities.

The industry runs on technical knowledge that is deeply embedded within leading companies. TSMC flew employees out from Taiwan to help the Arizona facility ramp production and brought US workers to its home country to train them.

The need for specialized knowledge will make recruitment critical for Tesla's Terafab hopes, Rasgon said, adding that the semiconductor industry is already facing a worker shortage.

"These guys don't grow on trees," he said.

A 'Herculean' challenge

Analysts warned that overcoming these challenges would add to the severe cash burn Tesla is set to face in the coming years.

The company said in January it would spend $20 billion on building out its robotaxi and Optimus production lines this year, a figure which does not include the Terafab project.

Ben Kallo, a senior research analyst at Baird, told Business Insider that investors would have questions about how Tesla plans to fund such an ambitious project — especially considering Musk has also said Tesla will build around 100 gigawatts of solar panel manufacturing.

"Where's the money coming from? I think that's going to be a question," said Kallo, who added that he wouldn't rule out Tesla raising outside capital for the first time since 2020 to fulfill Musk's ambitious targets.

Musk hasn't given a specific timeline for building the Terafab and producing chips, but he said in the January earnings call that he was building it to "remove a probable constraint in three or four years."

In a Tuesday note, Morgan Stanley analysts led by Andrew Percoco pointed to Micron's factory in Boise — which began construction in late 2022 but isn't expected to begin shipping chips until mid-2027 — as evidence of how long it can take to build semiconductor infrastructure in the US.

They estimated that building a factory capable of producing 100,000 wafers for cutting-edge logic chips a month could cost as much as $45 billion. A note from UBS analysts in January estimated that just getting to Musk's initial production target of 100,000 silicon wafers a month would cost $30 billion.

"Even understanding Elon Musk's history of doing difficult things, this seems like a Herculean task," the Morgan Stanley analysts wrote.