Doug Vining

@Afrihost What has happened to my 100mb fiber connection. No streaming services are working smoothly?

@herbertong @nextbigfuture @CernBasher People still think the hard part is making the car drive itself. The REAL hard part is about to begin: Can cities, regulators, unions, insurance companies, and competitors emotionally handle millions of humans becoming obsolete behind the wheel?

@elonmusk I got my drivers license over 50 years ago. I have driven cars and trucks on 5 continents and many countries and done long trips mainly off road in Africa. I am a big fan of BMW and Land Rover but also Tesla and now I am absolutely convinced that the Cybertruck is the ultimate.

@elonmusk Best vehicle I have ever driven and I am a long time Land Rover owner, like decades

Only when you drive the Cybertruck do you realize how incredible it is: a bulletproof tank that moves like a million dollar sports car! Reason for the angular shape is that the thick, ultra-hard stainless steel body panels cannot be stamped like the thin, feeble, paper-strength mild steel of other trucks. Cybertruck body panels would break 5000 ton stamping machines.

I have a BIG problem... I test drove a Cybertruck over the weekend and am having the recurring urge to sell all my assets and live life on the open road. It's that's good.

Once you know, you know.

@RogerPielkeJr RCP8.5 was always a fantasy in Fahrenheit

Has anyone on the "climate beat" covered the fact that RCP8.5 is no more? The biggest story in climate science in decades

my parents bought a tesla model 3 and there's nothing else like it. the most astonishing capability is self-driving. their tesla can drive them from their driveway to their destination, including parking in a busy parking lot, without disengaging once. comparing Tesla's self-driving to other automakers is like comparing an iPhone 17 to one of those grey brick phones from the 80s. it's kind of embarrassing. a week before they bought the tesla, my dad told me he didn't think he'd be driving much longer since he's pretty old. the tesla just extended his independence by years. feeling grateful for all tesla has done.

The future should look like the future

@SawyerMerritt I just took my first ride in a Cybertruck with FSD from Austin to San Antonio in the rain no issues. The tech is wild. Will be 500 miles per second very soon 😎

Tesla's fleet is now driving on average 333 miles every second on FSD (Supervised).

🚨Unedited SLOW MOTION 4k recording of the SpaceX Starship Booster 19 static fire! You can see the initial suction effect from the ignition, and the shockwaves propagate through the plume! Incredible stuff! 😍 📸@Jordanguidry6

The speed with which they filled the booster for the test made me realize that the goal of Starship is not just reusability but RAPID launch capability which will change the game- exponentially. Multiple daily launches really are possible in future.

So long Starbase at least I got to see the booster up close before they closed the road. @SpaceX

This sign was still upright when I was there, but not after the 33 engine static fire 🔥

Alien technology

The rocket in this video has already carried NASA astronauts to space. Yesterday it flew again. Seventh time. Refurbishing it between flights costs about $250,000, according to Musk, while building a new one from scratch runs $74 million. That bottom section of the rocket, the tall part you see landing in the clip, is the expensive piece. Nine engines, fuel tanks, landing legs, onboard computers, all of it used to be thrown away after every single launch. Like buying a brand-new 737 and scrapping it after one flight. SpaceX figured out how to land it and fly it again, and they've now done that 596 times out of 609 attempts. The current version of the rocket lands successfully 99% of the time. One single rocket has flown 34 separate missions. Guinness World Record. SpaceX has cleared each one for up to 40 flights. Launching a kilogram of cargo to space (about 2.2 pounds, roughly a bag of flour) on the old Space Shuttle cost $54,500. On a reused Falcon 9, that same kilogram costs $2,720. A 20x drop. Most of the $15 million SpaceX spends per reused launch goes to the top half of the rocket, which they still throw away every time. SpaceX launched 134 rockets in 2024. That broke every annual record in spaceflight history, including ones set by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In 2026, they've already flown 44 missions by April 11, averaging one launch every 2.2 days. About 20 rockets rotate through the active fleet, and the fastest a single rocket has turned around between flights is 9 days. This specific flight delivered 11,000 pounds of food, experiments, and supplies to astronauts on the Space Station. Northrop Grumman, a major defense contractor, hired SpaceX for the job because their own rocket got retired in 2023 after the Ukraine war cut off the Russian and Ukrainian parts it depended on. Their replacement rocket, being built with a smaller company called Firefly, still isn't ready. They had to buy this extra SpaceX flight last September. "Falcon has landed" is three words. Behind them: 596 landings, a cost per flight that would have been science fiction 15 years ago, and a launch pace no country or company on Earth comes close to matching.

Is this what is actually happening? I think it might be accurate…