SpaceX's Terafab chip push, Q3 revenue surge, and Tesla merger talks lead a busy week in tech

Key Takeaways

1. SpaceX's Terafab is negotiating with nearly every Korean chip supplier, targeting 1 million wafer starts per month within 10 years, while SpaceX posted Q3 revenue of $14.6B, up 161% year over year.
2. Musk said a SpaceX-Tesla merger "is a good idea," with independent special committees formed; he is not participating due to a conflict of interest, and no deal terms are agreed.
3. Perplexity's Decider V1.2 led decision models on Vals AI's Financial ClaimBench, and Perplexity's Computer can now run fully on a Mac, including offline.
4. A Stanford paper estimates California's billionaire wealth tax has a net present value of about -$38.9B, with 85% of simulations negative; Musk and Tobi Lutke both called it a net loss.
5. Replit is opening a Japan office with Tokyo events on Nov 5-6, and Vercel's Rauch is extending durable harness infrastructure to Pi, OpenCode, Codex, and Claude Code.
6. Blacksmith (W24) raised a $66M Series C at a $1B valuation, with CI jobs growing from 5M per week in January to over 90M per week now.
7. Patrick Collison is joining Works in Progress as executive editor next month as the publication expands into business and finance coverage.

1. SpaceX: Terafab, Revenue, and a Possible Tesla Merger

1. SpaceX's Terafab is in talks with nearly all Korean chip suppliers, from basic tubing parts to process materials and test components; Hanmi Semiconductor is discussing TC bonders, HPSP has agreed to supply one high-pressure hydrogen annealing tool to the R&D line, and MiCo's Komico signed a three-way NDA with Tesla and SpaceX about a month ago. The stated targets are 1 million wafer starts per month within 10 years, an initial $16.8B investment, over 3,000 jobs, and first-phase capacity of 100,000 wafers per month expected before 2030; logic chips are being pursued with Intel and in talks with TSMC, while memory will be built separately 1. Musk said Terafab's output value would put a single building among the top 20 national GDPs, and that "lack of power" is an oversimplification of the constraint, adding that doubling the timeline would make rapid large-scale compute deployment easier but reality does not allow it 2 3.
2. SpaceX reported Q3 2026 revenue of $14.6B, up 161% year over year, with net profit of $4.4B and AI at 52% of revenue; its first revenue-generating Starship mission deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites with downlink capacity about 10x a single Falcon 9 Starlink launch, and nominal compute reached 1.7 GW as of Sept 30 1 2. Musk said SpaceX reaching $1 trillion in revenue in 2028 is "no longer impossible," and relayed that SpaceX expects at least 13 GW of compute by end-2027, mainly using Nvidia Vera Rubin, with Grok Bot opening to enterprises in weeks; Jensen Huang said Nvidia has listed SpaceX as a cloud service provider customer, with engineers from both companies co-designing space servers 3 4 5.
3. Musk said a SpaceX-Tesla merger "is a good idea"; the two companies have formed independent director special committees at shareholder request to discuss it, and he is not participating due to a conflict of interest. He said claims the merger is a done deal are exaggerated, the committee has not agreed on terms, there is no guarantee, and the Tesla side would need 50% of all shares voting in favor 1.

2. AI Products and Infrastructure

1. Perplexity Decider V1.2 was pareto-optimal on Vals AI's Financial ClaimBench, which tests whether models can judge if financial documents support, refute, or do not address a claim, across 15 models and 1,960 claim/10-K excerpt pairs; Decider V1.2 led among decision models 1. Perplexity's Computer can now run fully on a Mac, including offline, and Macs with at least 36GB of memory can run Perplexity AI workflows locally 2 3.
2. Replit will open a Japan office, hosting four Tokyo events on Nov 5-6, including an enterprise data AI dashboard event with Microsoft, a build-apps-or-agents workshop and panel with Endeavor Japan, and an office opening night on Nov 6; spots are limited and registration requires review 1. Separately, Vercel's Guillermo Rauch said he is extending the durable infrastructure behind eve and Workflows to all harnesses such as Pi and OpenCode, offering an open-source, runtime-agnostic option deployable locally, on Vercel, or self-hosted; he noted Claude Code and Codex can also gain persistence and observability but are not designed for embedding, making them less efficient and portable and requiring an extra sandbox layer versus Pi or Fx 2. Rauch also said he has joined the Pi team, which lets developers and enterprises choose models while controlling runtime, data, skills, and plugins, with Vercel's support 3.
3. Blacksmith (W24) raised a $66M Series C at a $1B valuation; the company provides infrastructure purpose-built for code builds and tests, and its CI jobs grew from 5M per week in January to over 90M per week now, with more than 10,000 companies using it 1.

3. Policy, Markets, and Media

1. A Stanford paper estimates California's proposed 5% one-time billionaire wealth tax would see at least 28.6% of the taxable base leave the state, with known departures totaling $577B in net worth and $28.8B in potential tax loss; adding forgone future income tax present value of about $69B, the tax's net present value is about -$38.9B, negative in 85% of simulations 1. Musk and Shopify's Tobi Lutke both called it a net loss 2. A separate post relayed by Naval cited the same research, saying the tax would raise about $30B but have a mean net present value of -$39B after accounting for income tax losses from wealthy residents leaving 3.
2. Patrick Collison will join Works in Progress as executive editor next month; WIP is expanding to cover business and finance with more deep reporting and will hire more writers and reporters over the next year, while Collison plans to stay in the US to help build the local team. The print edition, less than 12 months old, expects to reach 10,000 paid print subscribers in about a week, with subscribers including senior government officials and heads of large global public companies, and could triple next year; it will enter Barnes & Noble, Hudson News, and independent newsstands next week. WIP plans weekly YouTube documentaries starting in January and an expanded North America events business, with columnists including Tyler Cowen, Dan Wang, and Stephen Kotkin 1.
3. Deel launched AI lab Emet and its first model family Pangaea; Deel said the best existing AI models fully solve only 49% of real payroll tasks, while Emet has local experts in each country define standards and build public benchmarks and training data, and Pangaea is trained on open-weight models with accuracy near top models, up to 3x faster speed, and lower cost 1.