Elon Musk | Pakistan

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence tool Grok was used in strikes against Iran, the United States government revealed in a legal briefing seen Tuesday by AFP. The June 15 brief defends the gas turbines used by a giant data centre belonging to the trillionaire’s company xAI, which are the target of an environmental lawsuit. In the brief, the US Department of Justice argued that the lawsuit “threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations”. To support the argument, federal prosecutors presented testimony from Pentagon AI chief Cameron Stanley in which he states, under oath, that Grok is already in use within Project Maven, the US military’s AI-assisted targeting programme that was initially powered by Anthropic’s Claude model. The project’s Maven Smart Systems (MSS) “enabled US forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Op...

Few business leaders have been as deeply embedded in popular culture as Elon Musk, the ambitious entrepreneur who has become a central figure in internet culture and amassed a fortune that has made him the world’s first trillionaire. At a time when concerns about inequality are high and public attitudes toward the ultra-wealthy have soured, Musk has managed to retain a loyal following despite his stratospheric net worth and without the folksy persona that endeared other tycoons such as Warren Buffett to the masses. While admirers view Musk’s no-filter style as part of his appeal, critics have accused him of wielding oligarch-like power, raised concerns about governance at his companies and objected to his increasingly partisan political interventions. Still, SpaceX, the sprawling rocket, satellite and AI company that, together with electric-car maker Tesla, forms the centre of Musk’s empire, raised a record $75 billion in its initial public offering (IPO) on Thursday, highlighting investor enthusiasm for his ...

SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft splashed down into the Indian Ocean on Friday after the company performed a mostly successful test flight of the latest version of its enormous rocket. The voyage was not without a few glitches, but SpaceX employees shown on a livestream roared in delight following the trial flight that comes as the firm owned by Elon Musk prepares a potentially record initial public offering. The mammoth rocket blasted off into space at just after 5:30pm local time (2230 GMT). The company did not intend to recover the booster or the upper stage, and the final splashdown was fiery but controlled, as planned. “Splashdown confirmed!” the company wrote on X. SpaceX primarily aimed to demonstrate its redesigns in flight. The third-generation Starship spacecraft carried out a maneuver that saw it flip upright and reignite its engines for control, despite one being out of commission. It also deployed its 22 mock satellites, including two that attempted to photograph the spacecraft’s heat shield for anal...

SpaceX’s board approved a compensation plan for founder Elon Musk with goals as futuristic and celestial as the company’s ambitions: colonising Mars and running data centres in outer space. The details of Musk’s sweeping pay package were revealed in the company’s confidential registration statement filed in recent weeks with the Securities and Exchange Commission and have been reviewed by Reuters. The lofty rewards dangled for Musk by SpaceX show the challenge of holding the attention of the serial entrepreneur as he prepared to take the rocket maker public. They also potentially set up SpaceX investors for tensions with shareholders of Tesla, where Musk is chief executive officer (CEO), said corporate governance experts. Connecting science-fiction visions with accounting commitments, the SpaceX board in January approved a pay package for the world’s richest man that would award 200 million in super-voting restricted shares if the company hit a market value of $7.5 trillion and established a permanent human c...

A US federal jury found Elon Musk liable on Friday for claims he defrauded Twitter shareholders by trying to drive down the social media company’s stock price so he could renegotiate or back out of a $44 billion takeover in 2022. The verdict from a jury in San Francisco federal court came in a closely watched civil trial where Musk, the world’s richest person, was accused of falsely claiming on social media that Twitter underreported how many fake and spam accounts, known as bots, were on its platform. Damages have yet to be calculated but Francis Bottini, a lawyer for the shareholders, estimated they could total about $2.5 billion. “Musk’s status as the world’s richest man is not a free pass,” Bottini said in a statement. “If you’re able to move markets with your tweets, you’re responsible for the harm you cause to investors.” In a joint statement, Musk’s lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan called the verdict “a bump in the road. And we look forward to vindication on appeal”. The civil trial began o...

India’s Maharashtra state, home to the financial hub Mumbai, will be the first to roll out Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service in the world’s most populous country, the state’s chief minister said. The launch of Starlink, which provides high-speed internet to remote locations using low-orbit satellites, has sparked fierce debate in India over issues ranging from predatory pricing to spectrum allocation. India — projected to have more than 900 million internet users by year’s end — granted Starlink a licence in June. Maharashtra was “poised to become the first Indian state to formally collaborate with Starlink”, the state’s Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said on the Musk-owned platform X late Wednesday. “This collaboration … will ensure the state leads India in satellite-enabled digital infrastructure.” In March, India’s biggest telecom service providers — Jio Platforms and its rival Bharti Airtel — announced deals with SpaceX to offer Starlink internet to their customers. Starlink’s business operations Vi...

Elon Musk, an ex-ally of US President Donald Trump, said on Saturday he had launched a new political party in the United States to challenge what the tech billionaire described as the country’s “one-party system.” The world’s richest person — and Trump’s biggest political donor in the 2024 election — had a bitter falling out with the president after leading the Republican’s effort to slash spending and cut federal jobs as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has clashed with Trump over the president’s massive domestic spending plan, saying it would explode the US debt, and vowed to do everything in his power to defeat lawmakers who voted for it. Now he has created the so-called America Party, his own political framework, through which to try and achieve that. “When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” the SpaceX and Tesla boss posted on X, the social media platform that he owns. “Today, the America Party is f...

Elon Musk exits Trump administration role after calling the president’s ‘big beautiful bill’ a spending failure.