Stories by Sarah Lee-Jones

SpaceX completed Falcon's 700th overall mission on Sunday, September 13, 2026, when a Falcon 9 lifted the final three SES O3b mPOWER satellites from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:49 p.m. ET. https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2099208971022152061 The company confirmed deployment of all three Boeing-built O3b mPOWER satellites into medium Earth...

Hyundai Motor Group believes it can catch and eventually overtake Tesla in autonomous driving within five years, but the company claims it is deliberately taking a slower path to get there. According to the Korea JoongAng Daily, Hyundai is building its strategy around a self-driving system called Atria AI, which the company plans to bring […]

SpaceX is getting closer to attempting something it has never done before with Starship: catching the upper-stage spacecraft with the launch tower. At Starbase in Texas, SpaceX has been testing its second orbital launch tower this week, using the Mechazilla chopstick arms to lift Flight 15’s Ship 42 into a full catch-style position. The rehearsal […]

[caption id="attachment_72625" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Tesla Electric Powerwall backup lease offer. Source: Tesla Energy / X[/caption] Tesla Energy said on September 11, 2026, that eligible customers in Texas can lease two Powerwall home batteries with Tesla Electric for about $35 a month after credits, pitching whole-home backup without a traditional generator. https://twitter.com/teslaenergy/status/2098516043711086641 “Stay powered during outages....

Korean Air said on September 11, 2026, that free high-speed in-flight Wi-Fi powered by Starlink will begin on September 15, making the carrier the first full-service airline in East Asia to put SpaceX’s low-Earth-orbit network in the cabin for passengers. The service opens on four retrofitted jets — three Airbus A350-900s and one Boeing 777-300ER...

Elon Musk said on September 11, 2026, that Grok 4.7 needs a few more days to cook, arguing that reinforcement-learning choices may have over-penalized response length so the model still gives up too early on hard tasks it can actually solve and is not yet rigorous enough about checking its own work. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/2098462085973741960 “Grok 4.7...

Tesla Semi. Source: Tesla Europe / X Tesla Europe said on September 11, 2026, that the company’s electric Semi is coming to Europe, publishing regional specs that put up to 550 kilometres of range on a fully loaded 40-tonne truck and pointing fleets to a fresh German Semi page on tesla.com. “Semi is coming to...

[caption id="attachment_72595" align="alignnone" width="1024"] #image_title[/caption]Tesla Europe said on September 11, 2026, that the company has logged nearly a year of Full Self-Driving Supervised testing in Sweden, covering complex city streets and rural roads at the appropriate speed across the full range of Nordic weather, in a fresh official clip posted to X. https://twitter.com/teslaeurope/status/2098366703285506550 “Nearly a...

Tesla opened Model Y Performance ordering in China on September 11, 2026, listing the high-performance all-wheel-drive Juniper at 369,000 yuan (about USD $54,450) on its Chinese Model Y site with an estimated delivery window of two to six weeks. Official specs on Tesla China’s Model Y page put the Performance at 3.5 seconds for 0–100...

SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen told investors at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference on September 10, 2026, that the company closed another terrestrial AI compute hosting deal earlier this month worth about $1.11 billion a month starting December 1 — roughly $13 billion in annualized recurring revenue that sharpens conviction in a $100 billion...

xAI is staging Grok Bot Galaxy across three days from September 15 to September 17, 2026, with in-person sessions at The Howard, 661 Howard Street in San Francisco, and a parallel livestream anyone can follow from elsewhere, the company said on its Galaxy event page. The pitch is practical: put Grok Bot on real work,...

[caption id="attachment_72280" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Tesla Cybercab[/caption] Tesla’s Robotaxi account said on September 10, 2026, that anyone can try Cybercab in Austin by downloading the Robotaxi app and hailing a ride, quoting a Cybercab experience clip from journalist Dave Lee as the public invitation goes wider. https://twitter.com/robotaxi/status/2098099999888593064 The short post — “Anyone can try Cybercab in...

Grok Bot quality-of-life improvements. Source: Grok Bot / X Grok Bot outlined a fresh quality-of-life package on September 9, 2026, highlighting inline message drafting that lets users ask their Bot to compose outbound messages for approval before anything is sent, and Elon Musk amplified the thread the next morning. https://twitter.com/bot/status/2097759948189106686 Alongside the draft-before-send flow, the...

Update (September 10, 2026): We got this wrong in the original headline and framing. SpaceX is not suing Texas to hide that Terafab received a tax deal. That Grimes County abatement is already public. What is in court is the supporting application and negotiation file after Attorney General Ken Paxton ordered most of those records...

Tesla amplified a video of 98-year-old Larry driving his new Model Y on FSD Supervised for everyday trips, sharing the clip on September 9, 2026, after the interview showed how far supervised autonomy has come for an owner whose first car was a 1931 Ford Model A. In the clip Tesla pushed out, Larry says...