Elon Musk's company is quietly becoming even more important to the future of electric cars in America. When the stainless-steel pickup hit the road in 2023, Tesla was the world's biggest electric-car company. At the time, Elon Musk predicted that he'd eventually sell 250,000 Cybertrucks a year. In the first half of 2026, according to one estimate, Tesla sold roughly 7,000. Tesla has faced several self-inflicted wounds.

'Let's enjoy the ride' says Elon Musk, as AI fears mount As AI continues to evolve at breakneck speed, and developers warn of models going rogue, Elon Musk says people should simply enjoy the ride. The boss of SpaceX told The Economist, external while he remains concerned about risks posed by advancements in AI and robotics, the most likely outcome is incredible abundance for all. Musk said his philosophical conclusion after fearing for AI's threat to humanity was to look on the bright side. He said progress has come so quickly even if I wanted to stop it, I couldn't. The interview was recorded the day before OpenAI's revelation on Tuesday that some of its most advanced AI models hacked a start-up after it lost control of them during a security test .

Tesla reported its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, disclosing far lower profits than expected. The company's already beleaguered stock, which had fallen about 14% this year to date, dipped further following the earnings report. Elon Musk's automaker, once the pinnacle of his tech empire, has taken a back seat to SpaceX. Musk's rocket and AI company held the largest stock market debut in history last month, turning the richest man on Earth into the world's first trillionaire, though his net worth has since fallen from its peak. Tesla revealed earnings of 31 cents per share, a measurement of profits divided by the number of outstanding shares, less than the 51 cents per share Wall Street predicted.

'Our cast is representative of the world' (from left) Jimmy Gonzales, Matt Damon and Himesh Patel in The Odyssey. 'Our cast is representative of the world' (from left) Jimmy Gonzales, Matt Damon and Himesh Patel in The Odyssey. Elon Musk says Grok Imagine will make'historically accurate' AI adaptation of Homer's Odyssey The billionaire says the AI-generated film will stay true to Homer's original, after repeatedly criticising Christopher Nolan's blockbuster over its casting choices Elon Musk has said his AI platform Grok Imagine will make a "historically accurate" adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, after the success of Christopher Nolan's blockbusting treatment which the SpaceX founder has regularly criticised over its casting. In a post on X, Musk said: "Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer." Musk also linked to a post containing a three-minute clip of footage that the user said had been generated from Grok Imagine, showing a scene between Odysseus and the nymph Calypso.

Elon Musk's xAI has filed a lawsuit against a South Carolina man who was arrested earlier this year on charges of sexually exploiting minors, alleging that he misused the company's AI tool to create sexually explicit content involving a child. The lawsuit, filed in a Texas federal court on Tuesday, alleges that Terry Harwood knowingly violated the company's terms of service to create the material. Despite expressly agreeing to abide by the xAI Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy, Defendant designed misleading prompts to circumvent Grok's built-in safeguards and then abused the tool to convert non-sexual photographs into sexually explicit images without the photograph subjects' knowledge or consent," the 12-page complaint said. The suit alleges that Harwood uploaded images of both adults and minors that were not sexual in nature and then tried to create so-called "deepfakes" that sexualised them. "A review of Defendant's xAI accounts further shows that on numerous occasions during the Relevant Period, Defendant submitted prompts to Grok to alter such images to sexualize the subjects of the images, which Grok responded to by refusing to follow the prompts on the basis that such material violated Grok's content moderation guardrails," the complaint added. "In response, Defendant repeatedly submitted further prompts, with alterations, in an effort to circumvent Grok's moderation efforts." The suit is the first brought by an AI company against one of its users and comes amid intense scrutiny of xAI around the world for allowing users to create this kind of content on the platform in the first place. Grok has been under the spotlight in Washington, been in the crosshairs of European regulators, and faced bans in both Malaysia and Indonesia regarding sexually explicit content that can be created on the platform. Earlier this year, Musk pushed back on allegations that Grok produced AI-generated sexualised images of children, especially nude images. "I [am] not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok.

The SpaceX IPO made history. Is the excitement still there? SpaceX investors have swung from celebration to apparent concern in its first month as a publicly traded company. When shares in the firm, co-founded and led by Elon Musk, first became available for individuals to buy on the public stock market on 12 June, there was an investor frenzy . Although the company had decided to price its shares at $135 each, the price immediately shot up to $150 that first day, climbing to $176, before closing at $160.95.

SpaceX's swift addition to the Nasdaq-100 index is expected to unleash billions in passive buying, as brokerages kicked off coverage of the $2 trillion rocket and satellite company with largely bullish views. The Elon Musk-led company joined the index on Tuesday, less than a month after its stock market debut on June 12 - among the fastest inclusions ever - thanks to the Nasdaq's revised rules for newly listed companies looking to enter widely tracked benchmarks. However, shares of SpaceX fell 5.4 percent, reflecting a slide in high-momentum tech stocks, including Micron Technology, on concerns about the longevity of the AI boom. "There's nervousness about expectations being too high," said Mark Hackett, chief market strategist for Nationwide. "I expect that to continue until we get some earnings out."

For decades, the senator has argued that concentrated wealth threatened American democracy. Now he's betting that frustration with Big Tech, billionaires, and unchecked AI is reaching a tipping point. It's hard to believe Bernie Sanders . Not because the longtime Vermont senator bears the hallmarks of a liar. Yes, he's a career politician, but the 84-year-old progressive torchbearer counts more viral memes than scandals to his name. Rather, it's hard to believe Bernie Sanders because, for decades, he's told Americans that this country can radically change, while championing ideas too far afield from the status quo to really have a chance. He wants to bring billionaires to heel, for one. And implement universal, government-run health care. If Sanders had his way, it wouldn't even exist. I believe it, and WIRED champions it. Sanders, though, is now hard at work adding one more big, improbable change to the pile: Since 2023, he's been advocating for firm and decisive regulation of the AI industry . In March of this year, Sanders and his frequent collaborator, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, proposed legislation that would halt data center construction until a series of safeguards are implemented. In June, Sanders announced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would essentially tax AI's richest companies and result in direct payments to American citizens. I wanted to talk to Sanders about those bills, and his perspective on AI more broadly. On a deeper level, though, I was curious about how Sanders sees the barriers to regulation--from tech oligarchs and deep-pocketed super PACs, to a federal administration happier to enrich itself via technology than actually govern it--and whether he thinks those seemingly intractable obstacles can be overcome. After a few months of haranguing, Sanders agreed to sit down, which is how I found myself in his modest DC campaign office watching the senator--thoughtful, genuine, vociferous as ever--grapple in real time with what he describes as "the most consequential, transformational technology in the history of humanity." Sanders and I spoke on Tuesday, June 23, as the New York Democratic primary was underway. I woke up the next day, our conversation echoing in my head, to find that a coalition of democratic socialists had swept their respective elections and sent party stalwarts into an existential tailspin. A few hours later, New Jersey representative Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, became the most mainstream member of the party to publicly support an AI data center moratorium .

Image caption, Elon Musk has repeatedly boasted of Tesla's self-driving capabilities. Jennifer Barbour filed her lawsuit in a local court on Tuesday, just days after her 76-year-old mother Martha Avila died from injuries she sustained after a Tesla Model 3 sped into their shared home . The Tesla driver told police that he was using the car's autonomous or full self-driving technology at the time of the crash. In the lawsuit Barbour accuses Elon Musk's electric vehicle company of defective design and negligence by promoting technology that is unsafe, while Musk on social media denied the technology was to blame. Tesla was approached for comment.

'AI cannot and will never render us obsolete' Cory Doctorow at home in Los Angeles. 'AI cannot and will never render us obsolete' Cory Doctorow at home in Los Angeles. The writer who coined the word'enshittification' tells us why AI will never deliver what it promises - and why it still appeals so much to those in power A "centaur", in automation theory, is a person assisted by a machine, and a "reverse centaur", hero of Cory Doctorow's new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, is a "human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant a machine". Every warehouse worker who ever had to urinate in a water bottle because they couldn't otherwise meet the fulfilment targets set by an algorithm is a reverse centaur. Reaching into the future, everyone who has to sit in a self-driving truck to make sure it doesn't crash, presumably on minimum rather than truck-driver wages, is a reverse centaur; as is every lawyer no longer on lawyer's money checking Gemini's command of precedent, every indie band scraping a living doing covers of AI-generated hits, and so on. That, anyway, is the promise: AI is coming for your job, and it is coming for your kids' jobs, and there is no point fighting it because the future's already here.