Ray Blanco:

10th Time Lucky! SpaceX’s Starship Nails Successful Test Flight After String of Explosive Setbacks

SpaceX's Starship has finally pulled off a successful test flight in a stunning reversal of fortunes for Elon Musk's most ambitious rocket.

The uncrewed 403-foot-tall (123 meters) rocket, the largest ever built, blasted off from SpaceX's Starbase at Boca Chica, Texas, at 7:30 p.m. EST on Tuesday (Aug. 26).

Starship completed a nerve-wracking, hour-long flight, reaching a maximum altitude of 124 miles (200 kilometers) above Earth's surface, before its upper stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean. Earlier, after separation, the rocket's Super Heavy booster landed in the Gulf of Mexico. Unlike previous attempts, Starship was finally able to use its satellite deployment system to drop mock Starlink satellites into space for the first time.

But much more was riding on this 10th test launch than dummy satellites. The gargantuan rocket is key to SpaceX majority shareholder Elon Musk's ambitions to transport crewmembers, spacecraft, satellites and cargo into orbit around Earth — and eventually to the moon and Mars.

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Davis Wilson:

TONIGHT: Nvidia’s Big Earnings Announcement

Nvidia reports earnings tonight. Wall Street is calling this the single most important earnings event of the quarter. Maybe even the year. That’s because Nvidia has become the heartbeat of the AI trade.

It makes up about 7.5% of the S&P 500, and every hyperscaler (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta) is leaning on Nvidia’s chips to power their AI ambitions.

Wall Street is expecting another monster quarter, with revenue of $45.9 billion and earnings of $1.01/share. That’s still blistering 53% year-over-year growth stemming from Nvidia’s new Blackwell chips whose demand continues to far outstrip supply.

But here’s the thing: I don’t actually care what the headline numbers are tonight. Nvidia is the picks-and-shovels play of the AI gold rush. Demand is overwhelming, supply is constrained, and the company has no real competition at scale.

My advice is the same as it’s been every quarter for the past two years: Own Nvidia.

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James Altucher:

Astro Teller on Moonshots, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Innovation

What does it take to make a discovery that changes the world? Think about landing on the moon — a true moonshot. Along the way, countless technologies were invented that reshaped life back on Earth.

My guest today, Astro Teller, has been part of that same kind of world-changing work. At X — Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory — he’s led projects that gave us self-driving cars, Google Brain, drone delivery, augmented reality with Google Glass, and much more. We even talk about quantum computing, drones that bring your groceries to your backyard, and the mindset it takes to believe in something that once sounded like science fiction.

Astro and I first crossed paths when I visited Google X back in 2012 or 2013. He was on this podcast in 2015, and now, ten years later, he’s back to talk about his own show — The Moonshot Podcast — and the latest bold projects that could shape our future.

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