Tesla Unveils Roadster With Rocket Thrusters as SpaceX and Nvidia Deepen AI Infrastructure Ties

Key Takeaways

1. Tesla's new Roadster claims 0.81s 0-60 mph, Mach 0.5 top speed, and flight capability via cold-gas thrusters, with Musk acknowledging regulatory uncertainty.
2. SpaceX and Nvidia co-designed a "Star Mind" computer for space and Earth, with Nvidia reclassifying Musk's AI business as a cloud service provider.
3. Perplexity open-sourced SPACE, its Firecracker microVM sandbox platform, under Apache 2.0, and added Nvidia's Nemotron 3.5 Super VL and Gemini 4 Argon.
4. Vercel expanded its backend with Python, containers, Daemons, and Drives for stateful agents.
5. Basecamp has paid over $24M in profit sharing since 2020 without stock options, per Jason Fried.
6. United Airlines reported over 5.4M passengers used Starlink last month, with satisfaction scores 40+ points higher than other Wi-Fi.
7. Muse Spark Open weights were released, with Zuckerberg reporting it runs well on a Mac Studio.

1. Tesla Roadster and SpaceX-Nvidia Infrastructure

1. Tesla unveiled the new Roadster with a claimed 0-60 mph time of 0.81 seconds using thrusters and suction-enhanced grip, a top speed of Mach 0.5, and flight capability. Musk said it features attitude-control thrusters and a rear main thruster, can tumble, and uses self-inflating air tanks without special propellant; he added it is not safety-optimized and he is unsure it is legal in all jurisdictions. In Track Mode, the aero package provides the best passive downforce of any road car, close to F1 levels, with wing actuation handled by Tesla's Optimus actuator system. The new high-voltage battery and drive unit deliver 1MW output with one-third more power and half the mass of Model S Plaid. 1 2 3 4 5
2. SpaceX and Nvidia co-designed a computer called "Star Mind" that Musk said performs far beyond expectations and will enter mass production next year, calling the collaboration with Nvidia's engineering team "pure joy." Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia has moved Musk's AI business from the enterprise category to cloud service provider, describing its scale as "huge," and that the two engineering teams are co-designing new server architectures for space and Earth. 1 2 3
3. Tesla's Cybercab Robotaxi reported zero collisions or incidents in its first two weeks of public passenger service, according to the latest NHTSA data. Tesla currently operates about half of U.S. public DC fast-charging ports with over 40,000 ports, while the $7.5B federal NEVI program had only opened 384 ports as of April 2025. Musk said Tesla's supervised self-driving has been approved in Slovakia and will begin rollout soon. 1 2 3

2. AI Models, Agents, and Developer Platforms

1. Perplexity open-sourced SPACE, the sandbox platform powering all Perplexity Computer tasks, under Apache 2.0. Each agent task runs in its own Firecracker microVM with credentials and outbound traffic controlled outside the VM. Aravind Srinivas said sandboxing itself is commoditized, but serving millions of sandboxes under production traffic requires significant engineering, and that Neoclouds need a full agent inference platform including open-weight models (SGLang), fine-tuned models (Miles, River), and secure sandboxes (SPACE). Perplexity also added Nvidia's Nemotron 3.5 Super VL for Pro and Max subscribers and Agent API, and made Gemini 4 Argon available to all users after it set a new SoTA on the WANDR benchmark. 1 2 3 4 5
2. Vercel expanded its backend capabilities: Python is now generally available, along with containers supporting other runtimes and system libraries, and Daemons for async tasks and background workers. Daemons entered public beta for workers pulling from queues, databases, or third-party systems. Vercel Drives became generally available for running stateful agents, which Rauch previously described as "brain, hands, files." 1 2 3
3. Muse Spark Open weights were released, with Mark Zuckerberg saying it runs well on a new Mac Studio, crediting @johnternus and Apple. Garry Tan commented that open-weight models are rising, citing a post describing Muse Spark Open as the strongest U.S. open-weight model with 816B total parameters, 42B active, 1M token context, native multimodality, and targeting coding, long-horizon tasks, hard software engineering, and multi-step reasoning. Yohei Nakajima said it was available on Wally on day one at 370 tok/s, about twice as fast as any provider on OpenRouter. 1 2 3
4. Greg Isenberg said he has used Gemini 4 Argon for seven days with early access from Google and sponsorship, calling it possibly the best AI copywriting tool and his default writing tool. He rebuilt a 3D version of a website with driving cars, sound, and a playable basketball game that originally took a team 40,000 hours, noted the model needs references for good creative output, and said it handled SaaS engineering tasks and physical AI tasks like designing product customizers and exporting STL files for Bambu printers. He recommended using /plan before the model touches any files. 1

3. Business, Markets, and Industry Observations

1. Basecamp has paid over $24 million to employees through profit sharing since 2020 and has never offered stock options, according to Jason Fried, who said he prefers "real money" over future promises and that sharing success does not require investors, options, or complex equity structures. 1
2. United Airlines said over 5.4 million passengers, about one-third of its customers, used Starlink on flights last month, and planes equipped with Starlink scored 40+ points higher in satisfaction than other Wi-Fi services. Southwest Airlines announced it will extend Starlink to its entire fleet by fall 2027, expecting to be the first major U.S. airline to complete a full-fleet Starlink deployment. A seven-year Delta top-tier loyalty member wrote that after experiencing United's Starlink, he decided to switch, calling the speed "like home internet," while Delta chose Amazon Leo, which is not due until 2028. 1 2 3
3. Musk said China's oil dependence is falling rapidly, citing data that in September, gasoline car sales fell to one-third of the market for the first time, pure EVs approached half at 47.3%, and plug-in hybrids took another 19.7%, down from over 90% five years ago to 33%. 1
4. Musk announced that all advertising on X will be subject to "reasonable aesthetic standards," and advertisers with ugly, jarring, or exaggerated product promotions will be banned. X is piloting an invite-only Video Kickstart Bonus creator incentive program: videos must be vertical, under 3 minutes, original, may include watermark-free cross-platform content, and require at least 15 videos posted on 15 different days within 30 days; sign-ups close October 30. 1 2 3
5. Musk cited data that Rockstar Games posted the GTA 6 trailer simultaneously on YouTube and X, and after 90 minutes X had 7.5 million views versus YouTube's 1.6 million, about 4.7x more on X. 1

4. Open Source, Tools, and Community

1. Shopify's developer community launched an app security check tool to scan apps for potential security issues and protect merchants and buyers. 1
2. GBrain Tools launched: after spending too much time connecting apps to each new AI and open-source toolchain, teams now integrate GBrain once to connect ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, and the terminal. 1
3. Garry Tan highlighted a company developing a reusable heavy-lift rocket to compete with SpaceX, with an engine design using 90% fewer parts, a first engine hot-fired from a basement in 4 months for under $30,000, and $400 million in launch bookings signed. 1
4. Yohei Nakajima's paper "Soft-to-Rigid: Shape Continuation as an Alternative Search for Packing Congruent Shapes" went live on arXiv; he said the method generalizes as a packing approach, is not the best overall, but finds packings on squares and cubes that other methods miss, and he does not fully understand why. 1
5. Jack Mallers said he discovered Strike's new Stacks feature for separating and organizing Bitcoin holdings, created a dedicated Bitcoin stack for his 5-year-old daughter, transferred the first small amount of sats, and set up a $2/day DCA for 16 years, planning to hand over the full stack on her 21st birthday. 1