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Elon Musk and Dogecoin: How the Billionaire Became the ‘Dogefather’

by admin September 28, 2025

With Dogecoin making a comeback late last year and early into 2025, some may be pondering: Where did the asset come from? What’s it for? And what’s Tesla CEO Elon Musk got to do with it?

The original meme coin’s boom largely has the world’s richest man to thank. Musk’s obsession with shitposting helped boost the coin to a top 10 cryptocurrency.

It’s been a wacky ride over the past few years, culminating in Musk’s appointment to lead a government agency called DOGE—yes, really. But we’ll explain it all.

2018: What the DOGE?

Dogecoin is the biggest and oldest meme coin and the second-biggest proof-of-work cryptocurrency. It was created in 2013 as a joke by developers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer.

The idea was to poke fun at the huge number of altcoins and crypto projects entering the market following Bitcoin’s rapid ascent, and the coin enjoyed relative obscurity and a low price during its early years.

But then along came Musk. The eccentric billionaire asked Palmer in a 2018 tweet to help with the Twitter bot problem. Scammers had created a number of fake high-profile accounts, including Musk’s, in order to push crypto cons. The scams typically posted fake Ethereum giveaways.

It was the first real interest Musk had shown in Dogecoin.

2019: The pump begins

Musk started to pump Dogecoin the next year. “Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency,” he wrote in April 2019, in response to a screenshot of a poll from the official Dogecoin account asking who should be the cryptocurrency’s CEO. “It’s pretty cool.”

The post would be the first of many to cause the asset’s value to rocket upwards. Soon after Musk’s first tweet about Dogecoin, the market cap of the coin hit $400 million and crypto exchange Huobi listed it.

Musk being Musk, however, didn’t stop there: He branded himself Dogecoin’s CEO—briefly—on Twitter before continuing to fire out tweets asking if the coin is “really a valid form of currency” or posting memes associated with the original dog-coin.

2020/2021: Bull run arrives

Musk continued to pump Dogecoin’s price here and there with his tweets, but things really got started during the 2021 bull run. Major exchanges like Coinbase Pro listed Dogecoin and the asset developed a bigger cult following, not to mention growing mainstream awareness.

DOGE gained a market cap bigger than many companies in the S&P 500. And developers exclusively told Decrypt that they had secretly been working with Musk since 2019 to make the coin a valid payment method and a greener, cheaper alternative to Bitcoin.

But things got stranger when Musk called himself the “Dogefather” ahead of a “Saturday Night Live” skit about the cryptocurrency—again sending the asset’s price roaring upwards. DOGE would jump to its all-time high price of about $0.73 at this time.

Musk’s “SNL” appearance ended up being underwhelming for Doge fans, with the SpaceX boss and his mother’s allusions to the coin ultimately pushing its price down. Still, it continued to bring the strange world of meme coins to the mainstream.

Later that year, Musk announced that his rocket company, SpaceX, would launch a satellite to the moon—completely funded by the cryptocurrency.

2022: Tesla/Twitter mania

The Doge mania continued into 2022 when Musk’s car company started accepting Dogecoin for merchandise.

Dogecoin continued to experience price bumps when Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it to X, hinting that it would also become a payments platform that might, eventually, integrate the O.G. meme coin.

Things came back to bite Musk later that year, though, when an American man hit the billionaire and Tesla and SpaceX with a $258 billion lawsuit for allegedly pumping Dogecoin—an asset with “no value at all,” according to the original filing.

But Musk and his lawyers scored a win in 2024 when a judge sided with them and dismissed the lawsuit, calling the tech entrepreneur’s tweets about Dogecoin “aspirational and puffery,” and noting that “no reasonable investor could rely upon them.”

2024-2025: Trump, Musk, and DOGE

Dogecoin had a relatively quiet 2023, but the meme coin has soared over the last year following Musk’s support of Republican Donald Trump’s campaign for the White House.

That’s mostly because Trump said that Musk would lead a government efficiency commission ahead of being voted back into the seat of power; Musk claimed that it would be called the Department of Government Efficiency—an acronym that matches Dogecoin’s ticker.

Whenever Musk mentioned his future political role with the so-called DOGE ahead of the election, the price of Dogecoin jumped.

But before Trump’s election win, Musk revealed what he has probably thought all along: that he isn’t seriously interested or involved in Bitcoin, Dogecoin, or any cryptocurrency. He just likes the meme coin.

“I’m actually not actively involved in crypto,” he said at a rally. “I make Dogecoin jokes and stuff because I just kind of like Dogecoin—because it’s got the best sense of humor and it has dogs and memes, and I love all those things.”

Still, the price of Dogecoin boomed higher, hitting a three-year high price of $0.48—though it’s fallen substantially since, as of this writing. Musk has recently praised Dogecoin’s rate of inflation and tweeted out a familiar meme image of a dust cloud with the Doge face engulfing a city.

And President-elect Trump made it official that Musk would lead the administration’s new department, though planned co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy bailed in January due to other political ambitions.

Trump even sold t-shirts showing himself and Musk alongside Doge-esque artwork. And the official DOGE website briefly featured the familiar DOGE meme imagery, boosting Dogecoin’s price in the process.

With Trump back in office, Musk’s DOGE started aggressively interrogating U.S. government spending, grabbing headlines as it accesses potentially sensitive citizen data while upending professional norms in the process.

But Musk departed the government role in May, and a public rift has formed between the two men. Musk made some shocking claims about Trump, and the president has in return said that DOGE should scrutinize Musk’s companies—and that he’d look into having Musk deported.

The public battle hasn’t done any favors for Dogecoin’s price, though it has briefly boosted meme coins inspired by the conflict.

Now Elon Musk is back to focusing on his companies, with recent moves reigniting speculation over whether X might integrate Dogecoin or other cryptocurrencies for payments.

And Musk has picked up another connection to Dogecoin of late, albeit unofficially.

Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro—who helped defend him in the $258 billion class action DOGE suit dismissed last year—is now chairman of CleanCore Solutions, a publicly traded firm billed as an “official” Dogecoin treasury company. That’s due to backing from House of Doge, the commercialization arm of the Dogecoin Foundation, which supports development around the coin.

Editor’s note: This story was originally published on November 13, 2024. It was last updated with new details on September 28, 2025.

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September 28, 2025 0 comments

GameFi Guides

Why Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Other Billionaires Are Betting On Brain-Computer Interfaces

by admin September 28, 2025

In brief

Elon Musk’s Neuralink and the Sam Altman-backed Merge Labs are driving a new wave of billionaire-backed brain-computer interface ventures.
Current BCI progress remains medical, with only five Neuralink patients implanted as of September 2025.
Experts warn BCIs are far from “thought reading,” and billionaire ambitions risk overshadowing real therapeutic potential.

Elon Musk already has rockets, cars, AI, and humanoid robots. Musk’s rival Sam Altman runs OpenAI, the company behind the leading AI chatbot, ChatGPT. Now, both men and other billionaires want a piece of the human brain.

Their latest bets on brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, reveal less about today’s medical breakthroughs and more about a looming contest over who owns the neural on-ramp to digital life. As founders and experts in the space told Decrypt, billionaire attention “elevates the whole industry” even as it distorts priorities.

For billionaires, brain-computer interfaces are not just medical devices—they represent the next potential platform shift, a way to control the gateway between human thought and digital systems.

Owning that interface could mean owning the future of computing. That is why some of the most powerful people in the world are pouring money into BCIs: They see them as a hedge against artificial intelligence, a new control point in the tech stack, and perhaps the ultimate frontier for profit and influence.

Musk and Altman make moves

Musk founded Neuralink in 2016 with the goal of merging with machines, which he claimed may be the only way to keep pace with artificial intelligence. The company recently raised a $650 million Series E, placing it among the best-funded players in the field. Neuralink’s first patient, Noland Arbaugh, has shown he can control a cursor and browse the internet by thought alone.

The results have been mixed, but so far, five patients have now been implanted, with trials expanding to speech impairment and vision restoration. Musk keeps framing BCIs as not just medical devices, but a safeguard for humanity in an AI-dominated future.

Meanwhile, Altman has surfaced as a co-founder of Merge Labs, a new venture aiming to raise around $250 million at a valuation that could reach $850 million. Early reports suggest Merge may pursue non-invasive interfaces, a different path than Neuralink’s brain implants.

For Altman, who already commands one of the most powerful AI companies, the move signals that the next battle is not only about who builds the smartest models but who controls the pipeline that connects them to humans.

Other major bets

The circle extends beyond Musk and Altman. Prominent biohacker Bryan Johnson, who made his fortune in payments, poured $100 million into Kernel in 2016. Kernel develops neurotech platforms for measuring brain activity, positioning itself as an infrastructure play rather than a flashy implant company.

Neuralink’s investors also include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, evidence that Silicon Valley’s venture elite is preparing for the possibility that brain-computer links become the next foundational layer of computing.

“For me, their involvement is a good sign,” Tetiana Aleksandrova, CEO and co-founder of neurotechnology startup Subsense, told Decrypt. “When billionaires step into BCI, they bring visibility and capital that elevate the whole industry. Suddenly, more funds are planning to allocate resources to neurotechnology, more companies are founded, and more engineers discover that this is an exciting space worth dedicating their careers to.”

But Aleksandrova cautioned that billionaire involvement cuts both ways.

“Their funding can accelerate progress at a pace public funding rarely allows,” she explained. “At the same time, the pressure to deliver at startup speed can lead to unrealistic promises that put trust at risk. And in science, trust is just as critical as capital.”

Andreas Melhede, co-founder of neuroscience DAO Elata Bioscience, told Decrypt that while billionaire involvement accelerates interest and funding, it also narrows the agenda.

“The priorities tend to reflect the vision of a single individual or a gatekept corporate agenda, rather than the broader scientific community,” he said. “That means research often skews toward ‘moonshot’ projects designed to capture attention, rather than significant collaborative advances that actually move the field forward.”

Melhede agreed that billionaire rhetoric can both be good for and do harm to the industry, risking overshadowing important but less glamorous work. The bigger risk, he said, is centralization of power over something as important as human brains.

“If one company owns the infrastructure, code, and data, they own the keys to an individual’s thoughts and intentions,” he said. “This discourages transparency [and] slows independent validation and scientific progress. Access to BCI technology—and cognitive autonomy—is subject to the business decisions of a handful of high-profile figures. That is too much risk in too few hands.”

Speculation vs. reality

That tension defines the field. The billionaire pitch is sweeping—control the neural interface, control the future. But the present reality is narrower: coarse signals, fragile hardware, and systems that cannot “read thoughts” in the way public rhetoric sometimes suggests.

Still, such a breakthrough could occur “conceivably some day,” Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University, told Decrypt. “For now, we just don’t understand the neural code well enough. Of course, there are already interventions that make sense for people who are paralyzed and with few other options.”

Companies like Synchron and Inbrain continue pilot trials, with Inbrain’s graphene-based BCI platform receiving FDA Breakthrough Device designation. But these remain early-stage efforts, far from mass-market enhancement.

The stakes

The question is less whether brain-computer interfaces will work at scale, and more whose vision defines them. Musk frames BCIs as an existential safeguard. Altman positions them as strategic control points. Johnson and Thiel treat them as infrastructure bets.

For patients, the technology is about restoring lost abilities. For billionaires, it is about shaping the next human-machine platform—one where whoever owns the gateway may one day set the rules for how thought itself becomes data.

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September 28, 2025 0 comments

NFT Gaming

Elon Musk’s xAI Sues OpenAI Again, This Time Over Alleged Trade Secret Theft

by admin September 26, 2025

In brief

Elon Musk’s xAI has sued OpenAI, alleging it induced former employees to steal source code and data center deployment strategies.
The AI company alleges OpenAI targeted employees with knowledge of its “secret sauce” data center operations, with one executive refusing to sign confidentiality documents after leaving for OpenAI.
One engineer allegedly admitted in a “handwritten confession” to misappropriating code after encrypted communications with an OpenAI recruiter.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday against OpenAI, accusing its rival of orchestrating a “coordinated, unfair, and unlawful campaign” to steal proprietary technology through targeted employee poaching.

The complaint, filed in California, alleges OpenAI “by hook or by crook” induced former xAI employees to misappropriate the company’s entire source code, training methods, and data center deployment strategies.

Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI alongside Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Illya Sutskever, and others in 2015, stepped down from the board in 2018, citing conflicts of interest with his company, Tesla, and its self-driving cars. Since then, the tech billionaire has assumed a combative stance against OpenAI, including filing a separate lawsuit last month.

OpenAI recruiter Tifa Chen simultaneously targeted multiple xAI employees, offering multi-million dollar packages to engineers who then stole source code and uploaded it to personal devices within hours of their communications, the lawsuit alleges.

Xuechen Li, an early xAI engineer, allegedly “uploaded the entire xAI source code base to a personal cloud account” in July 2025, and later “admitted in a handwritten confession” that he misappropriated xAI’s code and presentation materials on training techniques.

The lawsuit details timestamps showing Li’s code theft occurred within hours of encrypted Signal messages with Chen, who allegedly responded “no way!” after Li copied the files, before OpenAI extended its multi-million dollar offer.

Jimmy Fraiture, another early xAI engineer, allegedly “used the AirDrop feature to transfer” confidential source code “at least five times” after signing with OpenAI, stealing “the majority of xAI’s code” he oversaw, plus experimental folders from four co-founders.

An unnamed senior finance executive who left for OpenAI allegedly called these operations xAI’s “secret sauce,” saying, “The data center team. Their speed and precision blew me away. I would NEVER want to compete against them.”

The executive then took a lesser role at OpenAI, focused on data center spending strategy even though he had no prior AI experience, and when confronted about confidentiality obligations, allegedly “responded with crude sexual expletives” and refused to sign termination documents.

Navodaya Singh Rajpurohit, legal partner at Coinque Consulting, told Decrypt the case “leans heavily on employee poaching,” noting that whether it crosses from aggressive recruiting to unlawful misappropriation “will depend on evidence not included in the filing,” and that “hiring alone is rarely enough to prove trade-secret misuse.”

Ishita Sharma, managing partner at Fathom Legal, told Decrypt that xAI must define its “secret sauce” broadly, grouping GPU racking, vendor contracts, pricing curves, and orchestration playbooks, which, she noted, can be described “by the results they deliver — like faster deployment or cheaper scaling, without putting the exact technical diagrams or formulas on the record.”

Sharma said “the recruiter angle is trickier,” since liability depends on whether recruiters acted as agents of OpenAI with the company’s knowledge.

For OpenAI’s defense, she explained, the strongest approach would be to show independent creation through “time-stamped records: internal Git commits, R&D notes, supplier invoices, and emails,” with earlier documentation providing the most credibility.

xAI seeks damages, restitution, and injunctions requiring OpenAI to purge xAI material from its systems and even destroy models built with it.

The lawsuit adds to Musk’s ongoing legal battle with OpenAI, as last month, his companies filed an antitrust suit against Apple and OpenAI, claiming their exclusive iPhone integration creates unfair market dominance.

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September 26, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Elon Musk’s Favorite Game Is Getting Remastered 25 Years Later

by admin September 25, 2025

Classic sci-fi immersive sim Deus Ex is returning with a fresh coat of paint and updated features, compliments of Aspyr. The remaster about a futuristic society crumbling beneath the weight of feckless governments and wild conspiracy theories arrives at a hell of a time.

“Question Everything. Trust No One,” reads the tagline to a game with many fans, including billionaire Elon Musk. He called the original “one of the best games ever” in 2020. This new remaster promises visual upgrades and quality-of-life improvements similar to Aspyr’s existing HD remasters of the Tomb Raider games. Hopefully, Deus Ex Remastered will be the definitive way to replay one of the most important games of the century. At least it will make the PC version accessible on console. The PS2 version, Deus Ex: The Conspiracy, joined PS Plus earlier this year.

The irony of Elon Musk’s love for the game has haunted it in recent years. One of the game’s original writers, Austin Grossman, called it the immersive sim’s “worst legacy” in an interview earlier this month.

“That kind of political weight and social satire is a real common thread between Deus Ex and Dishonored,” Grossman, who co-wrote the Warren Spector-directed hit with Sheldon Pacotti and Chris Todd, recently told PC Gamer. “It is the thing that Elon Musk likes, creepily. It is creepily in Elon Musk’s worldview. So that may be its longest, worst legacy.”

Musk has been a lifelong gamer with a notorious career as an amateur Quake player back in college. Last year, however, he was caught cheating at games like Diablo 4 and Path of Exiles 2 by allegedly paying other people to boost his accounts. Trust no one, indeed.

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September 25, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Elon Musk Is Out to Rule Space. Can Anyone Stop Him?

by admin September 22, 2025

When the suit didn’t produce instant results, Musk went jingoistic. A few months earlier, in February 2014, Russia had invaded Ukraine, illegally annexing the Crimean Peninsula and triggering a global wave of condemnation against Moscow. Musk rode that wave in his successful push to get Congress and the Obama administration to wind down use of the United Launch Alliance’s signature rocket, the Atlas V, because it relied on Russian RD-180 engines. (The suit was eventually settled out of court.) The combination helped break ULA’s grip on government space launches.

Another big leap came in 2017. SpaceX started reusing its rocket cores, which dramatically brought down the price of getting to orbit. (Eight years later, its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are still the only rockets in their weight classes with reusable cores.) But nothing was more important than Mueller’s continued development of SpaceX’s Merlin engine. It became one of the most durable in aerospace history, even though, as a former employee told me, “performance-wise, it’s terrible.” Its power and efficiency are nothing special. “We didn’t have the resources to do a lot of design and analysis,” he adds. “And so we just tested the ever-loving shit out of the engine. We hot-fired it thousands of times. Now they have an engine that’s super robust.”

Today, thanks in part to its nine reusable Merlin engines, a Falcon 9 can take a kilogram to low Earth orbit for one-third the previous cost; the Falcon Heavy, which uses 27 Merlins, drops the cost nearly in half again. Some 85 percent of Falcon 9 missions go to space with previously used first stages. In 2022, SpaceX jumped from doing around 30 launches per year to more than 60, and last year it hit 138. NASA’s space launch and human exploration efforts are now almost entirely controlled by Musk. A whole new space economy has grown up around him, one that relies on his cheap space access to get networks of small spacecraft into low Earth orbit. Take Planet Labs, the satellite imaging company. Hundreds of its spacecraft were carried by Falcon 9.

Really, no one is even trying to catch up; they’re just trying to find niches in a Musk-dominated ecosystem. ULA is building rockets optimized to reach geostationary orbits, which are farther out, even as many of its customers follow Musk’s lead and keep their satellite constellations closer to Earth. Upstarts like Rocket Lab and Firefly are admired for their ingenuity. But their current operational rockets are tiny by comparison—capable of carrying, at most, a couple thousand pounds, versus 140,000 for the Falcon Heavy.

“SpaceX is a cornerstone in the space industry. And then there’s other cornerstones, like Firefly. We’re very complementary to SpaceX,” says Jason Kim, the CEO of Firefly Aerospace. “It’s kind of like air, land, and sea. There’s no one-size-fits-all kind of transportation method.” (Kim’s not alone in this thinking; Firefly just went public at a valuation of $8.5 billion; Rocket Lab’s market cap is about $21 billion.)

Jeff Bezos has the cash to compete with SpaceX. And he’s certainly been at it long enough—his rocket company, Blue Origin, started a quarter-century ago. But it has had, shall we say, competing priorities. It’s been hard at work on engines; its BE-4 engine is actually powering the first stage of ULA’s new rocket, confusingly enough. You may have seen that Blue Origin has a rocket for near-space tourism, the one that recently carried Bezos’ wife, Lauren Sánchez, and Katy Perry aloft. But the company’s big rocket, the one that’s supposed to compete with SpaceX, has flown exactly once. And when I ask Blue Origin’s rep what makes their rockets any better—or, at least, any different—from Musk’s, he tells me: “I don’t have a solid answer for you on that one.”

China, which once seemed poised to dominate global launch, has had trouble keeping up with Musk’s rising totals, successfully launching between 64 and 68 rockets annually over the past three years. SpaceX is not only launching twice as often, it’s carrying more than 10 times the reported mass to orbit. Stoke Space, founded by Blue Origin engineers, has aerospace geeks in a frenzy, but it has yet to put a rocket on the pad. United Launch Alliance, SpaceX’s OG competitor, has a powerful new rocket—more on that in a bit—but once again, Musk is ahead. He’s working on a truly massive launcher, arguably the biggest ever constructed. Both stages are supposed to be fully reusable (which means, of course, immense cost savings), while neither stage of ULA’s Vulcan will be fully reusable. And that, according to a new report from SpaceNews Intelligence, could relegate the one-time monopolist “to niche roles in government or regional and backup contracts, assuming they survive at all.”

II. SATELLITES

At the end of May, at his factory in Starbase, Texas, Musk was in full Mars evangelist mode. “This is where we’re going to develop the technology necessary to take humanity,” he told his employees, “to another planet for the first time in the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of Earth.”

But as he sketched out his soaring vision of this place cranking out 1,000 enormous Starships per year, Musk repeated a more mundane truth. No, not the part about the Starship’s uneven test record. The one about funding. “Starlink internet is what’s being used to pay for humanity getting to Mars.”

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September 22, 2025 0 comments

NFT Gaming

Crypto Scam Bribery Scheme Busted by Elon Musk’s X Platform

by admin September 19, 2025

Large-scale operation
X’s crypto scam problem

X, Elon Musk’s social media platform that was formerly known as Twitter, has uncovered a bribery network that was operating against it.

Some of the suspended accounts tied to cryptocurrency scams attempted to get reinstalled by attempting to bribe the social network’s employees.

Large-scale operation

While the warning was specifically issued by X, it is worth noting that the malicious actors were also targeting other social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

The attackers have been linked to larger criminal organizations, including “the Com,” which is a notorious cybercrime group.

X’s crypto scam problem

X (formerly Twitter) is no stranger to security incidents involving cryptocurrencies.

Back in July 2020, the popular social media sites suffered the so-called “Celebrity Bitcoin Hack.” Various high-profile individuals, including Musk himself, Bill Gates, and so on.

The hacker managed to gain control of employee access controls with the help of clever social engineering.

Of course, the platform also continues to be plagued by bots impersonating prominent personalities such as Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse.

Following the latest incident, X has stated that the team’s commitment to ensuring the platform’s integrity remains “absolute.”

That said, some users have complained that Elon Musk’s social media platform is not doing enough to combat rampant bot networks.

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September 19, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Elon Musk’s Neuralink plans a brain speech trial in October

by admin September 19, 2025

Neuralink plans to begin another US clinical trial in October, using the implant to translate thoughts into text. The study will be held through an FDA investigational device exemption. “If you’re imagining saying something, we would be able to pick that up,” Neuralink president DJ Seo said this week.

The idea is to help people with speech impairments communicate through thought. Neuralink is among the companies testing implants that help patients control a computer with their minds. That can include using virtual keyboards. Translating thought directly from the patient’s speech cortex could speed things up by cutting the middleman.

The company already has five other clinical trials underway. The first was in the US. It has since added studies in Canada, the UK and the United Arab Emirates.

Neuralink / Chey Institute for Advanced Studies / YouTube

Neuralink’s plans for people with severe impairments sound like utopian sci-fi. Regardless of anything else, success in this field could be beyond life-changing for them. Still, this is a commercial company in which Elon Musk owns a majority share. Neuralink’s long-term plans are where it’s hard not to worry a little.

“We’re currently envisioning a world where in about three to four years, there will be someone who’s otherwise healthy who’s going to get a Neuralink,” Seo said. The company president hinted at what that might look like. “We think that it’s actually possible to demonstrate abilities to speak to the latest AI model, or LLM models, at the speed of thought, even faster than how you’re speaking, and being able to potentially get that information back through your AirPods, effectively closing the loop,” he said.

Our world today has revealed where things can go wrong when we turn too much of our humanity over to technology. You can start with smartphone addiction and social media algorithms and quickly move on to (alleged) AI-enabled suicide. Consumer brain implants can conjure the darkest images painted by our great sci-fi works. Think Neuromancer, Star Trek’s Borg or Cyberpunk 2077‘s cyberware.

Add what we know about Musk’s ideas about politics, and it’s hard not to be at least a little cynical. Is it too much to hope that the technology will advance enough to help those in need, but not so much that it devours humanity?

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September 19, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

xAI’s new gas turbine facility gets halfway to Elon Musk’s 1-gigawatt ‘AI factory’ goal

by admin September 19, 2025

xAI is moving faster than anyone expected on its power strategy. According to a new report from SemiAnalysis, Elon Musk’s AI startup already has 460MW of natural gas generation either installed or under construction, split between its Memphis campus and a new site across the border in Southaven, Mississippi.

The numbers check out against state filings and local reporting. Shelby County granted xAI a permit in July for 15 stationary gas turbines at its Paul R. Lowry Road facility in Memphis after months of wrangling with environmental groups, which alleged that dozens of turbines had been running without proper approval. In Mississippi, regulators issued a 12-month authorization to operate gas turbines at 2875 Stanton Road, a property xAI acquired from Duke Energy this summer, while the company builds out a permanent plant.

Equipment lists emerging from legal disclosures align with SemiAnalysis’s reporting of 12 SMT-130 turbines, rated at roughly 16MW apiece, on the Memphis side, and seven Titan 350 units in Southaven, each capable of more than 35MW. Together, that brings xAI’s on-site capacity close to half a gigawatt, or roughly the output of a midsize utility plant, stood up in less than a year.

Everyone Thinks Elon Musk is Going to Build a SpaceX Mobile Network

by admin September 15, 2025

SpaceX’s has been partnering with mobile carriers like T-Mobile to offer its satellite internet service Starlink to extend the reach of cell networks. But, according to a report from the Washington Post, the company has ambitions to be more than just a partner. Following a major purchase of wireless spectrum earlier this week, it appears everyone is expecting Elon Musk’s company to get into the wireless network business for itself.

On Monday, it was reported that SpaceX was finalizing a deal with satellite communications company EchoStar, the parent company of Dish Network, to buy up $17 billion worth of wireless spectrum. All signs suggest that SpaceX is after that spectrum to help build out Starlink’s 5G network, with the rumored goal to move satellite connectivity for phones beyond just emergency services and access in remote locations to a full-blown mobile network.

Musk hasn’t exactly backed away from the rumors. In an appearance on the All-In Podcast, he claimed the newly acquired spectrum would allow the company to deliver “high-bandwidth connectivity” directly from satellites to connected devices, albeit with a two-year lead time to get everything set up. “The net effect is you should be able to watch videos anywhere on your phone,” he said. That’s a big jump from Starlink’s current network offerings, which is currently only used for sending and receiving texts. The company claims it’ll offer voice calls soon. And that two-year timeline? Take it with a grain of salt, given Musk’s longstanding history of overpromising, but it does at least give some clarity as to his company’s end goal.

As for starting up a network to compete with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, Musk didn’t rule it out when talking to the All-In guys, who are always more than happy to drink the Kool-Aid unprompted. Musk said that purchasing a mobile network provider like Verizon in the future is “not out of the question.” According to The Washington Post’s reporting, Starlink likely doesn’t have the spectrum to compete in urban environments where volume is massive and competitors have the infrastructure advantage when it comes to handling that traffic. So getting into those spaces may require an acquisition rather than building its own network.

If Musk and SpaceX were to go that route, it’s unlikely they would face regulatory hurdles under the current administration. As WaPo pointed out, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission appointed by Donald Trump, called SpaceX’s spectrum purchase a “potential game changer” for mobile networks. You’re probably not going to see an in-depth review of potential antitrust concerns when the top cop on the beat has pom-poms in his hands.

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September 15, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Elon Musk is trying to silence Microsoft employees who criticize Charlie Kirk

by admin September 14, 2025

Elon Musk is pressing Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to look into Blizzard employees who criticized Charlie Kirk after his death. Musk’s post quotes an X thread listing names and screenshots of the developers.

Musk’s direct question to Nadella follows a broader censorship crackdown from Republicans targeting individuals celebrating Kirk’s death or criticizing him. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) said he would use “Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk.”

Former Blizzard developer Mark Kern, who goes by “Grummz” online and frequently posts about right-wing issues on X, quoted the original thread, claiming that the screenshotted posts showed Blizzard employees “trashing” Kirk. Musk then quoted the post himself with his question to Nadella.

“We’re aware of the views expressed by a small subset of our employees regarding recent events,” Microsoft said in a post on X. The post is not a reply to Musk but was shared on its main @Microsoft page. “We take matters like this very seriously and we are currently reviewing each individual situation. Comments celebrating violence against anyone are unacceptable and do not align with our values.” (The screenshots in the thread shared by Musk do not celebrate the shooting against Kirk.) Nadella has not replied to Musk publicly as of this writing.

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September 14, 2025 0 comments