Tesla's 2026 summer software release is just around the corner, and the company has shared details about what the update will bring to Tesla vehicles, including Grok improvements and more.
The post Tesla Releases Summer 2026 Software Update, Here’s What Is New first appeared on Redmond Pie.
Reference: Ir
Tesla’s upcoming Q2 earnings report is putting the company’s Bitcoin holdings back in focus, with investors watching whether the electric vehicle maker maintained its 11,509 BTC corporate treasury position through the quarter.
Tesla is scheduled to report Q2 2026 earnings on July 22. The company’s Bitcoin balance has remained unchanged in recent quarters, according to its last official disclosures, making the upcoming report another checkpoint for one of the most visible corporate Bitcoin holders outside the crypto industry.
The market should be careful here. There is no evidence in the validated materials that Tesla bought or sold Bitcoin during Q2. The story is about the disclosure window and whether the company confirms the treasury position again.
That still matters because Tesla remains one of the few major public operating companies with a meaningful Bitcoin balance.
Tesla’s Bitcoin position matters because the company is not a crypto-native firm.
When a miner, exchange, or Bitcoin treasury company holds BTC, the market expects it. When Tesla holds Bitcoin, the signal is broader. It shows that a major technology and manufacturing company has kept a digital asset on its corporate balance sheet.
That is why the number still attracts attention years after Tesla first entered the market.
The company has reduced its Bitcoin position in the past, but the remaining balance remains material. A confirmed unchanged position would suggest Tesla is continuing to treat Bitcoin as a reserve asset rather than a temporary experiment.
For Bitcoin supporters, that matters psychologically.
Corporate treasury adoption is one of Bitcoin’s strongest long-term narratives. It does not depend only on ETFs or crypto funds. It asks whether operating companies are willing to hold Bitcoin alongside cash, securities, and other balance-sheet assets.
Tesla remains a high-profile test case.
Corporate Bitcoin holdings are not always updated in real time.
Investors often have to wait for quarterly filings, earnings materials, or investor updates to confirm whether a company has bought, sold, or simply held its position. That makes earnings season important for companies with known crypto exposure.
Tesla’s Q2 report is one of those checkpoints.
If the company confirms an unchanged 11,509 BTC balance, the market will likely treat it as continuity rather than a new catalyst. If the balance changes, the reaction could be stronger because Tesla’s decisions are closely watched.
A sale could raise questions about treasury confidence or liquidity needs. A purchase would likely revive discussion around corporate Bitcoin adoption. No change would simply reinforce the current position.
For now, the responsible read is to wait for the filing.
Tesla’s Bitcoin strategy should not be confused with MicroStrategy’s.
MicroStrategy has built its entire market identity around Bitcoin accumulation. Tesla has not. Tesla’s core business remains electric vehicles, energy storage, software, and related technology. Bitcoin is a treasury position, not the centre of the company’s capital strategy.
That difference is important.
Tesla can hold Bitcoin without turning into a Bitcoin treasury company. It can also keep the position stable without making a major strategic statement every quarter.
For investors, the Bitcoin balance is one piece of the earnings picture. Margins, deliveries, AI spending, energy revenue, operating costs, and guidance are likely to matter more for Tesla’s stock.
For Bitcoin markets, though, the treasury line still matters because Tesla has symbolic weight.
A continued hold supports the idea that major corporations can keep Bitcoin exposure even when it is not their main business. That is useful for the broader adoption narrative.
The first thing to watch is whether the 11,509 BTC figure is confirmed again.
The second is whether Tesla provides any language around digital assets, impairment, fair-value accounting, or treasury strategy. Even a small wording change can attract attention because Tesla’s Bitcoin position has been so widely discussed.
The third is whether market conditions influence interpretation.
If Bitcoin is strong heading into the report, an unchanged Tesla balance may reinforce bullish sentiment. If Bitcoin is weak, the same unchanged balance may be seen as less important. Context matters.
Either way, the July 22 earnings report will give investors an official update point.
The main thing is not to overstate it before the documents arrive. Tesla has not confirmed a Q2 Bitcoin buy or sale in the current materials. The story is that one of the world’s most visible public companies is approaching another disclosure window with a major Bitcoin treasury still in focus.
That is enough to watch.
This article is based on Tesla investor relations materials.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
This report is based on information released by Ir. at Ir
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Silicon Valley legend Vinod Khosla’s family is leading a group that’s buying the Seattle Seahawks for a record $9.6 billion.
We dug into hours of his talks and interviews to answer the big questions: Who is this guy, why does he want an NFL team, and what does his track record tell us about the kind of owner he’ll be? Plus, the blind spot that could get him into trouble.
Featuring highlights from his 2015 talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Also: A mystery trove of aerospace artifacts is rescued from a Seattle-area electronics recycler, and we want to hear about your coolest tech history find. Send your comments, voice memos and photos to todd@geekwire.com.
Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
On Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released preliminary findings verifying Elon Musk’s and Tesla’s claims that a driver involved in a fatal Texas crash that killed a grandmother overrode Full Self Driving in the moments ahead of impact.
Last month, 44-year-old Michael Butler told police that the autopilot feature was engaged at the time of the crash. On X, Musk disputed the claim, writing that Butler must have overridden the feature because “FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets, and this was a high-speed crash!” Moving to back Musk’s claim, Tesla’s vice president of AI software, Ashok Elluswamy, said that internal data showed “the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100 percent of the accel pedal in this residential area.”
NTSB’s preliminary report, which does not yet determine what caused the crash, confirmed Tesla’s claims. Its probe found that FSD was engaged at the time of the crash, but electronic data showed “the driver manually overrode FSD (Supervised) by pressing the accelerator pedal to 100 percent.”
© via Jennifer Barbour's complaint
Vinod Khosla has spent four decades building and funding companies around a single idea: hire the right people and get out of their way. He’s one of the most respected and influential investors in Silicon Valley, with a track record of big bets and a habit of not backing down.
On Saturday, a group led by the billionaire venture capitalist and his family agreed to buy the Seattle Seahawks from the estate of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen for a reported $9.6 billion, which would be the highest price ever paid for an NFL team.
Khosla, 71, was born in Pune, India. He earned degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi and Carnegie Mellon before getting his MBA at Stanford, where he landed in Silicon Valley for good. After co-founding Sun in 1982, he spent nearly two decades as a partner at the legendary venture firm Kleiner Perkins before launching Khosla Ventures in 2004.
His firm now manages roughly $15 billion and has backed companies including DoorDash, Affirm, and Opendoor. Khosla was the first VC to invest in OpenAI, putting in $50 million in 2019. Forbes ranked him No. 1 on its Midas List of top tech investors this year and estimates his net worth at $15.6 billion.
But the Seahawks deal isn’t just about Vinod. The Allen estate’s public statement confirming the formal sale agreement described the buyer as “an ownership group led by the Khosla family,” and Vinod’s own quote in the statement was delivered “on behalf of the Khosla family.”
Estate of Paul G. Allen Reaches Agreement to Sell Seattle Seahawks pic.twitter.com/Pmv8i6FEp8
— Seattle Seahawks (@Seahawks) July 11, 2026
An NFL memo sent to all 32 teams Saturday, reported by ESPN’s Adam Schefter and others, identified his wife, Neeru Khosla, as the controlling owner, and said their son, Neal Khosla, “would be expected to have a significant leadership role in the ownership group.”
Neal may be the one to watch. He has described himself on his personal website as “an obsessive sports fan” who likes “bringing a quantitative and analytical lens to understanding the game within the game,” the Seattle Times reports.
He and his father have been San Francisco 49ers season ticket holders for 30 years, and Neal has consulted for both the 49ers and the Miami Heat. The Khosla family last year bought a 3.1% stake in the 49ers — the Seahawks’ NFC West division rivals — which they’ll now have to sell.
But Vinod Khosla’s track record is the clearest window into how the family will approach its Seahawks ownership. Here’s what we know about him based on his long career in tech.
He focuses on people and talent above all else. “A company becomes the people it hires, not the plan it makes,” Khosla said in a 2016 Startup Grind interview.
“Experience doesn’t matter. The rate of learning matters,” he told Sam Altman in a Y Combinator interview the same year, using a football analogy (fittingly as it now turns out): “Pick for the best athlete, not the person who’s the most established wide receiver who knows how to run one pattern.”
At Sun, Khosla spent an inordinate amount of his time on recruiting. He personally reconstructed the org chart of competitor DEC to identify talent that the company could poach.
Speaking at Seattle’s AI House in March 2025, Khosla’s main advice for startup founders was that their success will be driven by the people they hire and the questions they ask.
“The single most important decision by far you will make is the team you build,” he said at the time. “The more questions that get asked around your conference table, the better it will go, the faster you will learn, and the faster you will accumulate advantages.”
“Talent drives everything,” he said at another event in Seattle last summer, the Bloomberg Green Seattle conference on climate change.
For the record, the Seahawks’ current leadership is ostensibly locked in: general manager John Schneider is under contract through 2031, and head coach Mike Macdonald, who led the team to its Super Bowl win in February, is signed through 2029, according to The Seattle Times.
Whether the trademark Khosla obsession with talent will translate into getting involved with draft picks and player personnel will be an interesting question to watch.
He’s a Bay Area guy, not a Seattle guy. Khosla has lived and worked in Silicon Valley since earning his MBA at Stanford in 1980. Khosla Ventures is based in Menlo Park. The family’s 49ers ties underscore that this is not a homegrown owner.
Khosla has made a handful of appearances in the Seattle area over the years. His firm led a $11 million round for Seattle-based AI legal startup Lexion in 2021, and a $15 million round in Viome, the wellness startup co-founded by Seattle-area entrepreneur Naveen Jain, in 2017.
But he has no deep roots in the Pacific Northwest, which is a major difference from Seattle native Paul Allen and his family. How quickly the Khosla family builds a connection to the city and Seahawks fans may matter as much as anything they do on the football side.
He supports the people he picks, but tells it like it is. In more than 30 years on startup boards, Khosla says he has never once voted against a management team, even when he strongly disagrees.
“I’ll argue with them, I’ll debate with them, I’ll push them, but I will not vote against them,” he said in the Startup Grind interview. The Khosla Ventures website puts it more plainly: “Once we pick a management team, we back it and don’t second-guess it.”
For a Seahawks fan base that watched Paul Allen’s sister Jody Allen take a largely hands-off approach as chair of the Allen estate, the philosophy may sound familiar, although Khosla’s version would also come with a willingness to challenge leaders behind closed doors.
For example, Khosla has said he deliberately takes positions he doesn’t believe in when coaching founders — not to mislead them, but to force them to think through risks they haven’t considered.
The Khosla Ventures approach, as explained on its site, is “brutal honesty over hypocritical politeness.”
He’s not without controversy. In 2008, Khosla bought a 53-acre property south of Half Moon Bay, Calif., that included the only access road to Martins Beach, a stretch of coastline that surfers and families had used for decades. He locked the gate and blocked public access, setting off a legal battle that has lasted more than a decade and drawn widespread criticism.
The case has gone to the California Supreme Court and back.
“Every Generation Gets the Beach Villain It Deserves,” the New York Times headlined a 2018 story about the dispute. Khosla has argued it’s a private property rights issue. Critics see it as a billionaire putting his own interests above the public.
The takeaway: he doesn’t back down, even when public opinion is against him.
He’s persistent in business, as well. That habit of not backing down has been consistent throughout his tech and investing career.
When Sun was told it had lost a critical early deal to a rival, Khosla flew from San Francisco to Boston and camped out in the prospective customer’s office until the CEO agreed to see him. By the end of the day, the company had signed with Sun, according to The Generalist.
When defective Philips monitors nearly bankrupted Sun, Khosla went home at 3 a.m. and was back by 7 a.m. for months until the crisis passed, he said in the Y Combinator interview.
“Survive long enough in your field to have time to get lucky,” he told founders at one meetup.
During a 2011 appearance in Seattle, Khosla offered this take on betting big: “I don’t mind the low probability of success, but I better be impactful if we do succeed.” He was talking about startups, but the same idea no doubt applies to chasing another Lombardi Trophy.
Ever since its founding, SpaceX has fixed upon a single idea: Elon Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars. Everything the company does is geared to that foundational goal.
Two years ago, Musk posted on X that there could be a city on Mars within 20 years, “but for sure in 30.”
“Civilization secured,” he added, implying that even if our troubled lives here on Earth come to some catastrophic end in the coming decades, don’t worry, humans will endure on Mars.
Musk’s initial steps toward this ambition have produced awesome engineering successes. People have never seen the likes of the light displays that shower across night skies from SpaceX’s rockets and satellites. They watched astounded in late 2024 when the gigantic Starship’s booster rocket first descended gently to nestle into enclosing mechanical arms at the launch site in Texas.
Yet the work of scientists studying Mars suggests that it’s far-fetched, perhaps delusional, to think a human colony could be established there. You don’t need to be a billionaire or a rocket scientist to realize Musk’s timeframe is certainly a fantasy; there won’t be a city on Mars in his lifetime or that of his children or his grandchildren. Think many, many decades at best. But more likely, never.
Retail investors rushed to buy SpaceX stock after the IPO in June. Though the share price has already fallen back below where it was that day, many see it as a long-term investment. The reality is that the improbability of the Mars project shadows SpaceX’s long-term future.
While humans will at some point likely overcome the massively daunting engineering and logistics challenges of getting to Mars and even staying for some time, there’s no technology available to form a permanent settlement there.
Musk may be excused as being playful with his time scale.
“Oh, Elon is famously bad at giving time estimates,” said Erika DeBenedictis, a biological engineer and Mars scientist, founder of Pioneer Labs, which is researching how to grow plants on Mars. “Things always take longer than he says, but they do tend to happen.”
Musk has been quite specific. Last year, he said SpaceX had a 50:50 chance of sending its first uncrewed Starships toward Mars in 2026, with crewed landings to follow “as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely,” he posted on X.
Then, this February, he said SpaceX would build a city on the moon first and start building a Mars city “in about 5 to 7 years.”
While his targets and timing keep moving, the problems go deeper than that. The question is not when humanity will expand beyond Earth, but whether it ever will.
Establishing a city on Mars depends crucially on a concept called “terraforming,” which means physically transforming the planet’s surface environment into something resembling that of Earth, at least partially hospitable for humans.
To DeBenedictis, the sterile science fiction notion of people confined inside glass domes, looking out upon a forbiddingly bleak landscape and living off protein shakes and dried food, is deeply unappealing. “I wouldn’t want it and I wouldn’t want it for my daughter,” she said. “It just seems terrible.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” she adds. “I want the planet to be green.”
DeBenedictis concedes at the outset of an interview that this is “probably impossible,” though in the tone of someone who lives to chase the impossible.
In contrast, Musk glibly mentions terraforming as if it were within reach. In truth, science has only highly conjectural ideas about how it might be done. The hypothetical options scientists are researching now, if they work at all, will take many decades if not centuries to make Mars habitable. And they may never work.
Despite this, investment bankers and those with pre-IPO access were primed to ride the coattails of Musk’s colossal wealth for a big payout on SpaceX’s Wall Street launch day. Musk supercharged the June IPO by absorbing his xAI project into SpaceX. The IPO filing positioned xAI as a $26.5 trillion market opportunity, dwarfing all the other business segments of SpaceX, which the filing pegged at a mere $2 trillion. What’s an IPO without a transcendent AI promise these days?
The controversies around Musk’s politics and conduct — his embrace of President Trump and other authoritarian leaders, his incendiary rhetoric, his reposting on his X platform of right-wing influencers agitating around immigration and race, his eager wielding of a chainsaw to U.S. government services — were set aside by investors as they scrambled to buy in.
Wall Street weighed only Musk’s entrepreneurial success and his ability to conjure the future and spin financial dreams. The Economist in May called Musk’s risk-taking and mobilizing of resources “capitalism at its most remarkable.”
For Wall Street, that made the SpaceX IPO a surefire winner. The share price duly rocketed up and made Musk briefly a trillionaire. Though he lost that status when the share price subsequently slid, he’s still by far the richest man in the world with a net worth into the $900 billions.
That fortune is built upon the market perception that Musk can turn dreams into reality. Mass-producing all-electric, virtually self-driving cars was once a pipedream. Rockets landing on their tails graced the covers of 1950s science fiction novels. By force of will, Musk made both a reality. Whatever pipe he’s smoking now, shouldn’t we give his Mars dream some healthy respect?
That dream is specified precisely on the SpaceX website: “A permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.”
Musk designed the huge Starship rocket to go to Mars. And when Musk first unveiled his plan for the internet satellite venture that became Starlink in Seattle more than a decade ago — the satellites are made in Redmond — he told Bloomberg Businessweek he saw it as “a long-term revenue source for SpaceX to be able to fund a city on Mars.”
Nearer term, SpaceX is to provide the lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis project that should return humans to the moon within a few years and lay the groundwork for a permanent moonbase; Musk sees it as a stepping stone to the true goal.
The problem is, Mars is not even remotely habitable. It’s deathly cold. There’s nothing on the surface but dust and rocks, in places some deeply frozen CO2. Regular dust storms whip the surface. The planet has zero vegetation; not a tree, not a leaf, not a blade of grass. The oxygen-free Martian air is unbreathable.
Venture outside without a space suit and you’ll die within a minute in the poisonous, low-pressure atmosphere. During unpredictable solar flares, cosmic radiation is a separate threat to life.
Martian gravity, one-third of Earth’s, may deform the human body over time. Astronauts on the zero-gravity International Space Station must work out constantly to retain muscle strength. Even then, if they spend too long in space they must be carried from the space capsule after splashdown.
“I don’t see any prospect for there to be permanent settlements,” said senior NASA astrogeophysicist Chris McKay, who for more than 40 years has studied the possibility of supporting human life beyond Earth, and on Mars specifically. “Why would anybody want to live there?”
Bruce Jakosky, professor emeritus at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has studied Mars his entire career since he worked on the Mars rover Viking mission in the mid-1970s, says he thinks it will happen someday, but adds, “I have no idea when or how.”
“It’s far enough into the future that, once you get beyond, say, 30 years, you can’t tell the difference between that and infinity into the future,” Jakosky said.
That’s scientific realism. Buzz Lightyear talks about getting to infinity and beyond, but he’s a toy.
Despite the cold facts, Musk has so successfully sold the notion that if he put out a call for volunteers for the first Starship mission to Mars, hundreds of space scientists, enthusiasts, adventurers and Musk fanbros would eagerly sign up.
Indeed, he already has a Mars mission volunteer. On the launch webcast of SpaceX’s latest and largest Starship rocket in late May, a presenter introduced cryptocurrency billionaire and civilian astronaut Chun Wang, revealing that he’s been tapped to lead the first crewed flyby mission to Mars at some unspecified future date — a round trip of about two years, going there and back without landing on the surface.
And yes, it’s inevitable humans will get to Mars one day. Crewed spacecraft may land on Mars within a couple of decades.
The first astronauts to land will plan to explore the surface and hopefully return in triumph two years later, the next occasion when the Mars solar orbit again aligns with Earth. DeBenedictis dismissively describes this as the “expensive camping trip” phase of exploration, “mostly for the photo opp.”
Decades from now, humans may take a much harder, more substantive step: establishing a scientific base on Mars; we have such bases in Antarctica today. Researchers could rotate in and out every couple of years.
Creating a permanent colony on Mars is something far different. It implies lifetime commitments and subsequent generations growing up and building their lives there. As Elton John sang, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it’s cold as hell. And there’s no one there to raise them if you did.”
A child born on Mars — a Martian! — would likely adapt to the low gravity as it developed. We have zero data on the physical consequences. Such a child could grow up so different in muscular and skeletal strength that he or she would be unable to walk on Earth.
“The first mothers that give birth will be guinea pigs,” said NASA’s McKay.
And yet, Musk has laid out a plan he insists can establish a human colony on Mars within his lifetime. After Optimus humanoid robots designed by Tesla do some advance exploring on the Martian surface, eventually “a few thousand” Starship rockets will head off together from Earth orbit to Mars, loaded with people and more than a million tons of equipment, dried food and supplies.
The SpaceX website offers a few images envisioning life in the early days of a Mars colony. A mom and two kids look out from inside a glass dome as a Starship lands nearby. The accompanying text on the website glances over some of the most glaring problems.
The extreme temperature fluctuations, from 70°F to -225°F, with an average of about -85°F? “It is a little cold, but we can warm it up.”
The atmosphere of mostly unbreathable CO2? That’s good for plants; those don’t need oxygen. “We can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere.”
That one-third gravity compared to Earth? “You would be able to lift heavy things and bound around.”
In a speech a year ago to employees at the Texas rocket site — the video is on the SpaceX website — Musk conceded that Mars is inhospitable but said terraforming will provide the solution.
“You can’t really walk around on the surface of Mars, at least as yet until Mars is terraformed to be like Earth,” Musk told the employees. “You need to walk around with a Mars suit and be initially in kind of like glass domes.”
“But it would work,” he added. “And eventually we can make Mars into an Earthlike planet.”
Yes. Terraforming. How exactly could that be achieved? And how long would it take?
SpaceX did not respond to requests to grant an interview or to offer comment on the feasibility of Musk’s vision. But Mars scientists have studied the question. Edwin Kite, associate professor of planetary science at the University of Chicago, resident at the Berkeley-Calif.-based Astera Institute that funds futuristic science, is a leading researcher on terraforming Mars. In a paper published in April in collaboration with two dozen other Mars scientists, including DeBenedictis, he assessed the feasibility of the potential pathways currently being studied.
His paper begins with a bracing caveat: “It is unknown whether human civilization can thrive off-Earth.”
But if we want to try living on Mars, the paper says, the first requirement will be to warm the freezing planet or at least regions of the planet. It lays out three possible ways to do so.
Some local regions on Mars could hypothetically be warmed by spreading a translucent, high-tech blanket that would block harmful UV radiation but otherwise allow sunlight through to warm the Martian soil. The solar warmth trapped beneath the blanket, made from a plastic-like biomaterial, would melt ice under the ground. The heat and water would then potentially support primitive life forms, starting with microbes, bacteria and algae and, in time, plants.
However, even warmed, wet Martian soil is salty and laden with bleach-like chemicals hostile to life. No known micro-organism on Earth can survive in such conditions.
That’s where DeBenedictis’s research comes in. Her team — funded in large part by crypto billionaire and space entrepreneur Jed McCaleb, who founded the Astera Institute — is trying through selective breeding and genome modification to engineer new, hardier biological organisms that could get life started in the Martian soil. She is looking to microbes that could digest the bleach and others that could produce more of the bioplastic, allowing extension of the soil-heating blanket to a larger area.
The idea: as the soil improves with this microbial organic matter, more complex organisms could take hold. Eventually, she says, “you could actually do things like grow potatoes in the dirt.”
DeBenedictis is super optimistic about biology turning Mars green. It could have a cover of basic plants “in my lifetime,” she says.
Pioneer Labs has been going for just two years. Its early-stage research is developing lab-grown microbes inside enclosed, stirred, heated, radiation-shielded vessels, like high-tech Instant Pots. It’s a long way from growing potatoes.
DeBenedictis notes that although the lack of oxygen means humans still couldn’t breathe outside, plants grown under these bioplastic blankets would produce oxygen through photosynthesis. That might eventually build up a breathable atmosphere on Mars at some point in the far future. Kite said the timeframe for that would be centuries, at least — “much longer than your civilization-relevant time scales.”
The second warming method outlined in Kite’s paper: large reflecting mirrors in orbit around Mars, beaming down sunlight to warm a contained scientific base and the region immediately around it. The first reflectors would launch from Earth as solar sails, unfurling in space and flying themselves to Mars, propelled by sunlight.
Kite projects that doubling the sunlight reaching an area of less than half a square mile on Mars would require a large constellation of reflectors in sun-synchronous orbit, with a combined surface of nearly 300 square miles.
That’s a huge armada of solar sails heading off to Mars, all of which would have to be managed and maintained from Earth.
The third and most extravagant pathway being studied: warm the entire planet by forcing artificial global warming.
At one time, it was hoped that local warming on Mars would release frozen CO2 in the ground as a greenhouse gas that would thicken the atmosphere and gradually warm the whole planet, the same process now warming Earth. But a 2018 paper by Jakosky dashed that plan. Analysis of sensor data and imagery from the latest satellites orbiting Mars showed there’s not enough frozen CO2 on the surface to provide significant greenhouse warming.
That paper concluded that “terraforming Mars is not possible using present-day technology.”
Embed from Getty ImagesTo overcome that setback, scientists developed a new idea: pumping a few million tons of aerosol particles into the atmosphere, artificial dust manufactured on Mars from material in the soil. These clouds of dust, which would very slowly settle and have to be continuously spewed out, would warm Mars by trapping the solar heat.
But the time scale for this is the longest under consideration. NASA’s McKay, in a 1991 paper, analyzed the timeframe for a greenhouse effect on Mars, based on how much of the solar energy reaching its surface might be realistically trapped. He calculated that it would take 100 years to warm the surface to an Earth-like temperature, and “perhaps 100,000 years” to eventually produce an oxygen-rich atmosphere from plant photosynthesis.
Kite, in an interview, said it would take “decades, at least” just to build the robotically-operated factories on the Martian surface that would manufacture and disperse the aerosols across the planet. His paper projects the cost of the aerosol project at $1 trillion.
DeBenedictis said this enormous investment and the extended time scale of planetwide warming make the more local methods the only practical options.
Yet even if any of these planet-warming methods work, that still leaves the other major problems. While machines can extract oxygen from the CO2 in the atmosphere and pump it into sealed indoor living spaces, the air remains unbreathable outside. The extremely low pressure and potentially deadly cosmic rays remain unaddressed. Inside and out, the low gravity will still, over time, exert its unpredictable physical impact on human bodies.
In short, even if these wildly speculative, generations-long projects succeed somewhat in warming Mars, the result will fall disappointingly short of Earth-like. Dreams of colonizing Mars could still reach a dead end.
Concluding his summary of the various possible paths toward terraforming Mars, Kite notes that “no approach has been shown to be simultaneously affordable, safe, scalable, and to enable extending life beyond Earth.”
As one might expect from a group of Mars researchers, Kite’s paper urges that terraforming research continue, arguing that “a finding that no approach is viable” would at least curtail the vast expense and bring more realism to plans for large numbers of people to self-sustain anywhere beyond Earth.
SpaceX’s IPO prospectus relegated such downer conclusions to the “risk factors” section that offers legal cover in any such financial filing. The Mars mission and similar space endeavors, the filing said, “involve significant technical complexity, unproven technologies, or technologies that do not exist or may require significant advancement.”
Outside that CYA boilerplate, the prospectus offered investors a Musk-style sprinkling of high-flown stardust. The SpaceX “mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”
In case that was insufficiently inspiring, the prospectus added a dash of fear, stating that humanity needs to spread beyond Earth to survive a potential planetary catastrophe. “We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs,” it stated.
When Musk addressed employees in Texas as the IPO opened trading on June 12, he gushed enthusiasm for his vision: “There have to be things that make you excited about the future, that make you glad to wake up in the morning because you can’t wait to see what happens next.”
For Musk, maintaining such enthusiasm will be essential. For beyond the scientific and engineering challenges of the Mars enterprise, politics and economics could be showstoppers.
After the inspiration of the first human moon landing in 1969, the public quickly lost interest in subsequent Apollo missions. However scientifically interesting, the moon seemed to offer little but dust and rocks.
SpaceX’s stunning rocket launches and the recent Artemis mission that swung astronauts around the moon have reignited space travel enthusiasm in a new generation.
But interest could collapse again.
Kite’s paper notes that “If in the future crew were lost and there were no obvious short-term financial benefits to exploration, society might cease to pay the high costs of sending people to space.”
Orbiting space satellites — chiefly communications, navigation, imagery, surveillance, and missile detection — will continue to rake in cash for SpaceX, much of it from the government. And Musk is well-placed to grab lucrative Pentagon contracts to deploy weapons to kill enemy satellites and defenses to protect ours.
And leveraging the hot-buzz AI trend, SpaceX now plans to build satellites that will act as solar-powered AI data centers in space. The value of this is uncertain; why pay the enormous costs to put data computers into orbit when you can run them on Earth? Still, it seems less of a pipedream than a city on Mars.
But crewed space missions beyond Earth orbit produce no immediate applications. An investment sinkhole, they demand clear-eyed purpose, not delusion.
In an interview, Jakosky — who like McKay, Kite and DeBenedictis fervently wants humans to be interplanetary one day — said he doesn’t buy Musk’s idea that if, say, climate change makes Earth less habitable, Mars can be a “back-up planet.”
Terraforming Mars is just too far out, he believes.
“It’s an incredible amount of money and resources that would be better spent understanding our own climate here,” Jakosky said. “It’s always going to be easier to terraform the Earth, bring it back to the current conditions, than it is going to be to terraform Mars.”
If the Mars project fades in the years ahead, Musk may try pivoting entirely to AI as the new vision — and investment draw — for SpaceX.
In the meantime, the next big technical milestone, one needed just to reach the moon, never mind Mars, will be refueling rockets in space. If this and other hard-to-pull-off engineering challenges can be met, what’s realistically ahead for Mars exploration?
It would be much easier to build a city in Antarctica than on Mars but we haven’t done so. (Why? Oh yes, no one wants to live there.) Instead, we have scientific bases there, where researchers rotate in and out after a few months. Tourists visit Antarctica in the summer to see the penguins. At the largest U.S. base, McMurdo Station, there’s even a bar and a chapel.
NASA’s McKay foresees such a base as the future human footprint on Mars — at least for a century. Beyond that, who knows?
He has traveled to Antarctica for nearly 40 years, typically staying no more than two months, specifically to study the effects of the cold, dry environment for his Mars research.
But in the long, dark Antarctic winter, those scientific and military research bases largely empty out. There are no nurseries, no elementary schools, and no full-time residents.
“I go there for a season and contribute to the research and then come home,” McKay said. “I don’t want to take my family there.”
McKay, who grew up watching Star Trek, still hopes that the “long, long, long-term vision” of humans on other planets will one day materialize.
“The problem with some of the current thinking is that it jumps from zero, right now, from one or two robotic missions to, OK, let’s set up a million people on Mars, with nurseries and kids and everything,” he said. “That’s crazy.”
“Humans moving into space, I think that is inevitable,” McKay said. “But it might be that it takes thousands of years.”
Bitcoin Magazine
SpaceX Nasdaq-100 Entry Brings Bitcoin Exposure to Passive Index Investors
Today (July 7, 2026) SpaceX formally joins the Nasdaq-100 Index. The inclusion comes just weeks after the company’s public debut and follows its disclosure of 18,712 BTC on the balance sheet. JPMorgan estimates that index rebalancing will drive approximately $4.3 billion in passive inflows from Nasdaq-100-tracking funds and ETFs.
This development is more than headline news. It creates a structural, rules-based channel for institutional capital to gain exposure to Bitcoin through a corporate treasury vehicle, without requiring active allocation decisions, new mandates, or direct cryptocurrency purchases.
For corporate treasury teams, capital allocators, and institutional investors evaluating Bitcoin on balance sheets, the move provides a clear data point on how the strategy can intersect with mainstream equity infrastructure.
Passive index funds and ETFs must hold securities in proportion to their index weighting. When a new component is added, these vehicles buy shares mechanically. In SpaceX’s case, the estimated $4.3 billion in inflows represents capital that will flow into the stock regardless of short-term views on Bitcoin or the broader crypto market.
SpaceX’s Bitcoin holdings, disclosed in regulatory filings at approximately $1.2 billion in fair value, now sit within one of the most widely held equity indices globally. This is distinct from direct Bitcoin ETF flows or voluntary corporate purchases. It is demand generated by index rules rather than discretionary conviction.
Combined with Tesla and Strategy, the Nasdaq-100 now contains three companies with material Bitcoin treasuries. While SpaceX’s initial weighting will be modest, the precedent matters: high-growth, high-visibility companies can bring Bitcoin exposure into institutional equity portfolios through existing governance and allocation frameworks.
Corporate Bitcoin strategies have historically been evaluated on two primary dimensions: balance sheet optionality and long-term value preservation. SpaceX’s inclusion introduces a third dimension, potential for structural equity demand tied to index membership.
For treasury operators, this suggests that Bitcoin holdings, when paired with strong underlying business fundamentals, can contribute to broader market visibility and liquidity. Index inclusion often correlates with increased analyst coverage, improved trading volumes, and easier access to capital markets.
For institutional allocators, the development offers a form of Bitcoin beta that fits within traditional equity sleeves. Many large investors already maintain significant Nasdaq-100 exposure through passive mandates. SpaceX’s addition layers incremental Bitcoin exposure into those portfolios without requiring changes to investment policy statements or new product approvals.
This aligns with patterns observed across the corporate treasury landscape. Public companies now collectively hold more than 1.26 million BTC. The strategy is expanding beyond dedicated Bitcoin-focused entities into diversified operating businesses. SpaceX’s move illustrates how the approach can scale into the core of institutional equity markets.
To illustrate the mechanism, consider a simplified hypothetical involving a public company that adopts a Bitcoin treasury strategy and later gains meaningful index attention.
Assumptions (illustrative only):
Step-by-step impact:
While the numbers are simplified and depend on actual market cap, weighting, and Bitcoin valuation at the time of inclusion, the directional point is clear: index membership can create sustained, non-discretionary buying interest that benefits the Bitcoin component of the balance sheet proportionally.
Treasury teams evaluating this path should model similar scenarios using their own projected holdings, target market capitalization, and relevant index weighting assumptions. The exercise highlights how Bitcoin treasury decisions can interact with traditional equity market dynamics in ways that pure cryptocurrency allocations do not.
SpaceX’s Nasdaq-100 entry is one data point in a broader evolution. Corporate Bitcoin adoption is moving from early experimentation toward integration with established financial infrastructure. Passive flows, index rules, custody solutions, and regulatory clarity are all contributing to this shift.
For organizations actively building or evaluating Bitcoin treasury capabilities, developments like this reinforce the importance of treating Bitcoin as a strategic balance sheet asset with multiple potential transmission channels into institutional capital markets.Key questions for treasury and allocation teams to consider:
The corporate Bitcoin strategy continues to mature. Events that embed Bitcoin exposure within widely tracked equity indices represent one of the more durable forms of institutional adoption currently unfolding.
Disclaimer: This content was prepared on behalf of Bitcoin For Corporations for informational purposes only. It reflects the author’s own analysis and opinion and should not be relied upon as investment advice. Nothing in this article constitutes an offer, invitation, or solicitation to purchase, sell, or subscribe for any security or financial product.
This post SpaceX Nasdaq-100 Entry Brings Bitcoin Exposure to Passive Index Investors first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nick Ward.
On Tuesday in Shenzhen, the Chinese company UBTech unveiled the U1, a full-sized humanoid robot with silicone skin, blinking lashes, manicured nails, and an AI tuned to read your mood. It comes in male and female versions, and racked up more than 13,000 orders by the end of launch day, with deliveries beginning in September.
“It will never betray you, will always be loyal to you, and will love you unconditionally,” promised Michael Tam, the executive running UBTech’s consumer brand.
The sci-fi TV series “Humans” imagined lifelike android “synths” sold to ordinary families as helpers and companions, and it treated the idea as speculative fiction. A decade later, the fiction has a September ship date. What it does not have is an American logo.
Elon Musk announced the Tesla Bot in 2021 and has been re-announcing it ever since. He hoped for production readiness by 2023. Entering 2025 he targeted 10,000 units, then trimmed the goal to 5,000.
The unveiling of Optimus 3, promised for March of this year, slipped because the robot needed “finishing touches,” and as of Tesla’s April earnings call Optimus 3 is still MIA, with the reveal now promised for late July or August. Tesla is spending $20 billion in capital expenditure this year, with Fremont assembly lines converting from the Model S to Optimus. The robot is not vaporware; it’s merely years behind schedule.
Now look at what China shipped while Optimus was getting its finishing touches.
In April, a bright-red humanoid named Lightning, built by smartphone maker Honor, ran Beijing’s E-Town half marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, roughly seven minutes faster than the human world record. The remarkable number is not the 50 minutes. It is the comparison to last year’s inaugural race, when the winning robot needed 2 hours and 40 minutes and most of the field fell over, wandered off course, or lay down at the starting line. The machines cut their time by two-thirds in 12 months.
Meanwhile, UBTech won a $37 million contract to deploy its Walker S2 humanoids at the Fangchenggang border crossing with Vietnam, where they guide travelers, patrol corridors, and inspect cargo. Barclays estimates China accounted for 85% of the world’s humanoid robot installations last year, and Beijing counts more than 140 domestic companies selling over 330 models.
Why the gap? Talent is not the problem, and neither is money. The difference is the customer.
Optimus’s most important customer has always been the Tesla shareholder, and a Musk keynote serves that customer just fine. The Walker S2’s customer is a border authority with a delivery date and a cargo queue that does not pause for a reboot.
China’s supply chain proximity and its government’s decision to treat humanoids as a strategic industry help, but the deeper difference is that Chinese robot makers get paid for delivery while Optimus gets valued for anticipation. Only one of these incentive structures produces robots in a timely manner.
In fairness, the most useful robots in American homes and hospitals are not humanoid. Form follows task, and when the task is specific, the human form is expensive overhead. For instance, the da Vinci surgical system, which has operated on more than 20 million patients, is four arms bolted to a cart, because a surgeon needs wrists steadier than human wrists and has no use for a reassuring face. The most successful household robot in history is a disc that eats dust. No one wants their Roomba to watch the sunset with them.
The humanoid shape is a bet on generality, on a machine that can use our doorways, our staircases, and our tools. That bet makes sense at a border crossing built for human bodies. It is far less obvious in the operating room.
Companionship has never required human form; ask anyone with a dog. The New York Times recently told the story of Jan Worrell, an 85-year-old widow on a remote stretch of the Washington coast, and her companion robot ElliQ, which resembles a small reading lamp. It has no face, no legs, and no silicone anything, yet it shares her morning coffee, nudges her toward chair yoga, and has become, in her words, “me and my robot.”
Hundreds of ElliQ units deployed through New York State’s Office for the Aging show the same pattern of daily attachment. A machine does not need a body to keep you company, and the ElliQ price tag is much lower. (Full disclosure: I serve on the board of Intuition Robotics, the maker of ElliQ.)
So why did UBTech give the U1 lifelike skin, styled hair, and a face you can customize to resemble anyone you choose?
Every new medium in memory has been pulled toward intimacy by its early adopters: the VCR conquered the living room on the strength of what people watched in private; the early internet monetized romance and its rougher cousins before it monetized much else; and app stores learned that “companionship” is a category with remarkable elasticity.
A humanoid robot with a skin warm to the touch is heading in a certain direction, whatever its maker’s official positioning. The company states that the U1’s skills don’t extend to the bedroom, then adds “for now.”
Tesla Model Y L is launching in the US with six seats for $62,000. Here are all the details on this.
The post Tesla Model Y L Launches In US With Six Seats For $62,000 first appeared on Redmond Pie.
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