ROCKET MAN 🚀

BREAKING: Elon Musk’s Terafab aims to produce 1 million chip wafers a month in Texas by 2032. Nikkei reports that the Terafab team visited Japan and showed local suppliers what chipmaking equipment it plans to buy. • 700,000 wafers a month for memory chips, which store data. • 300,000 wafers a month for logic chips, which do the computing. That’s about 40 times the planned monthly wafer output of Japan’s Rapidus. "The biggest topic in the semiconductor industry right now is neither Kioxia nor Rapidus. It's Elon Musk." The supplier executive speaks excitedly. Tesla and SpaceX plan to make both types of chips under one roof in Texas.

Elon Musk obtained a private pilot’s license in 2002. He personally flew several aircraft in the early-to-mid 2000s, including: • A Piper Meridian single-engine turboprop • A Cessna Citation CJ2 • Most notably, an Aero L-39 Albatros (a Czechoslovak military jet trainer) He described the L-39 as “probably the most fun plane I’ve ever flown.” He logged around 600 flight hours before stopping around 2008 because of work.

BREAKING: Elon Musk’s Terafab has already started ordering machines from Japan for its chip factory in Texas, according to Nikkei. • One supplier was asked to deliver equipment in just a few months. • Elon is aiming for a working test chip in Austin by mid-2027 and mass production in the second half of 2028. • Terafab is aiming for 1,000,000 silicon wafers a month from 2032 onward. That would be 40 times the planned capacity of Japan’s Rapidus plant. • About 700,000 wafers a month would go toward memory chips and over 300,000 toward chips that handle computing. With Intel on board, Tesla and SpaceX are taking chipmaking into their own hands in Texas. The goal is to make the chips for Tesla’s self-driving cars and Optimus robots, and even for SpaceX’s planned AI data centers in orbit.

BREAKING: Grok is helping @SpaceX inspect rocket parts. In a test for debris inside a tube, Grok scored 99.9%, compared with about 94% for human inspectors. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s VP of Launch, shared a lot of new updates at UP Summit: • SpaceX sees itself as an infrastructure company. It’s already building on Earth and in low Earth orbit, with the Moon next and Mars farther down the road. • AI adoption took off at SpaceX this year. Dontchev says it’s the biggest jump in engineering speed he’s seen in 16 years at the company. Some tasks that took hours or days now take seconds or minutes. • Grok is checking rocket hardware for debris. In one example, human inspectors spotted debris inside tubes about 94% of the time. Grok reached 99.9% on the same inspection footage. • SpaceX has also automated visual checks on Starlink dishes. Technicians and team leads now use AI in their daily work, and Dontchev says it’s helping people build skills faster. • Settling Mars remains a core SpaceX goal. Dontchev believes AI can help the company get to both the Moon and Mars faster. • Falcon 9 still needs a fresh upper stage every flight. That works at around 100 launches a year. To reach thousands of launches a year, potentially even 10,000 someday, SpaceX wants to catch and reuse both stages of Starship. • Starship’s first orbital flight in September deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites. Together, they represented about 10× the network capacity of a typical Falcon 9 Starlink launch. • From Florida, a single Starship launch could put up to 20× the Starlink capacity of a Falcon 9 launch into orbit. Florida offers a more direct path to some orbits, saving fuel and letting Starship carry more satellites. • Starship’s launch pad at Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39A is nearly ready. SpaceX hopes to send the first boosters and ships from Texas by barge in December. The first Florida launch could happen before the end of 2026.

BREAKING: Elon Musk is expected to join President Trump’s delegation to China for the APEC summit in Shenzhen on Nov. 18–19. Elon also accompanied President Trump on his state visit to Beijing in May.

The U.S. Marine Corps turns 251 years old today. 🇺🇸 Here is a picture of Elon Musk during his visit to the 1st Marine Raider Battalion Ball, a special operations unit of the Marine Corps. He was presented with a ceremonial paddle by a Marine Raider in 2017.

BREAKING: SpaceX is targeting November 13th for Starship Flight 15. SpaceX VP of Launch Kiko Dontchev shared the date at the UP.Summit today.

ELON MUSK: “Buy stock in companies where you think the products that company makes will be better in the future. Like, is that company going to make more and better products? Or like, do you love the products that company makes? And are they going to keep doing that? And, like, I think Tesla has a track record of having made many great products, and we're going to make many more future great products. We've demonstrated a level of innovation that is extremely rare. I mean, certainly by far, the most innovative company in the car industry, like not even close type of thing. I think long-term with Optimus and self-driving, Tesla will probably be the most valuable company in the world.”

ELON MUSK: “The stock market is a very strange thing. It's kind of like Warren Buffett's sort of analogy, is the stock market's like having someone stand at the edge of your house and yell prices to buy or sell your house every day. And sometimes they take their meds and sometimes they don't. So sometimes the person yelling the price of your house is having a good day and sometimes it's having a bad day. But it's still the same house. You're like, it's literally still the same house. So Tesla stock goes up and it goes down, but actually it's still the same company. It's just people's perception of the future. I guess it's just very emotional.”

Investment advice from Elon Musk: Buy Low, Sell High.

The world needs more love 🫶

Elon’s companies win government contracts because their products are much better than others. "We do useful essential work for the government that we compete for & win contracts because our product is much better and costs less. That's why we get government contracts."

People and businesses are leaving California. About 77,000 people moved to Texas in 2024. At least 110 companies have made the same move since 2020. That includes Tesla, SpaceX, and 𝕏. Texas now has 57 Fortune 500 headquarters, the most of any state.