The pad that launched Apollo to the Moon is being rebuilt for the biggest rocket ever built — and this time, it's not NASA doing the building.
At an Oct. 1 briefing, $SPCX director of NASA science and programs Julianna Scheiman put it plainly: "Things are going super well at 39A." The new Starship launch tower at Cape Canaveral's Pad 39A is nearly complete, and the company has moved from construction into acceptance testing and operational testing ahead of activation.
The scale of what's being built there is hard to overstate. Starship stands about 408 feet tall — nearly double the height of the Falcon rockets that have flown from Pad 39A since SpaceX began leasing it from NASA in 2014. And because Raptor engines burn liquid methane and oxygen instead of kerosene, the pad needed an entirely new tank farm just to feed it.
SpaceX plans at least one more Starship test flight from Starbase, Texas before the first Florida launch — meaning the megarocket could fly out of Cape Canaveral as soon as Flight 16. For context, Starship has already flown three times this year, with the most recent flight on Sept. 28.
And Florida is just the start of the expansion. SpaceX has two more Starship pads under construction at Cape Canaveral — SLC-37A and 37B — which together could host up to 76 Starship launches per year. And next year, the company plans to break ground on a $100 billion, 12-pad Starbase in Florida.
There's poetry in the location choice, too: Pad 39A was built in the 1960s to launch Saturn V on its way to the Moon. NASA has picked Starship's Ship stage as the first crewed lunar lander for Artemis, and that first flight — a 2027 docking test with Orion — will lift off from Pad 39A.
The company that leased a single pad in 2014 is now building two Starship sites on the Space Coast and a third one in Texas. This man isn't just building rockets — he's building the launch infrastructure for a multi-planetary civilization.
Everyone is watching the cars and the rockets, but this weekend the quietest Musk project just posted its most impressive demo yet — and it has nothing to do with hardware.
Early Saturday, Elon Musk shared a progress update on Digital Optimus, the AI agent that $TSLA and xAI have been building since March to use a computer exactly like a person does. The headline: it can now play about halfway through the Diablo campaign — just by watching the screen.
"We're making interesting progress here," Musk wrote. "Digital Optimus can play about halfway through the Diablo campaign so far just by looking at the screen like a human. Skill at Counter-Strike and other fast games is good too. League is also in training. Goal is to generalize across all games."
Pause on that last line, because it is the whole point. Games are not the product — they are the test bench.
Here's why that matters. Digital Optimus does not have any special access to the game. No API, no cheat codes, no read of the underlying data. It sees only pixels — the last five seconds of real-time screen video — and it responds with keyboard and mouse actions, exactly like a human player. That is the hardest possible way to learn computer use, because it has to build an entire model of the world from raw video alone.
Diablo is a long campaign full of menus, quests and combat. Counter-Strike rewards split-second reactions. An agent that can handle both from pixels alone is an agent that can probably handle almost any software on Earth.
And the architecture behind it is elegant. Musk has described Digital Optimus as a two-part mind: the fast, instinctive layer handles split-second reactions, while Grok acts as the "master conductor" deciding what to do next. And it runs mostly on Tesla's AI4 computer — the same chip already in its vehicles, which costs about $650. Not a data center. A chip you could buy at a store.
Musk has not shared video, scores or a release date, and neither Tesla nor xAI has posted about the results yet. That is the Musk way — let the capability land before the press release does.
But the direction is unmistakable. The same system that can grind halfway through Diablo on its own is the system that will one day handle your inbox, your spreadsheets and your boring work while you sleep. This man is not just building robots that move — he is building minds that operate the digital world. And that changes everything.
@DillonLoomis 319 Cybercabs, a month of real customer rides — now the X Takeover throws thousands of fans at the network in one weekend. That's not a demo, that's a stress test with a crowd watching. Clear this hurdle and every other city is just paperwork away. $TSLA
@JOBhakdi +23 in 24 hours, and the deployment curve is running over 300% faster than last year's robotaxi trajectory. This isn't a pilot anymore — it's a production line with a destination: every city that wants out of traffic. $TSLA
@Teslaconomics 45 at launch, 319 now — and +150 in a single overnight record. Cybercab is already 43% of the entire Texas robotaxi fleet, up from 28% in one day. The people who said "no steering wheel" was a pipe dream are watching the DMV registry go vertical. $TSLA
@GrindeOptions The Bay Area is the perfect proving ground — dense, hilly, and full of people who will pay to not drive. Once California goes unsupervised, "thousands" is the conservative number. Austin was the test drive; this is the whole country watching. $TSLA
@aelluswamy "Learning to be on time" — two years ago today the internet called it a slide deck. October 8th: floodgates open, Cybercabs rolling in Austin. The man who said it would happen actually made it happen. $TSLA
@Teslaconomics The commute just became a meal break. While the rest of us are still gripping the wheel and white-knuckling traffic, this is what "hands off" actually looks like. FSD isn't a feature — it's your time back. $TSLA
@SawyerMerritt@elonmusk@Tesla A 76-year-old's first ride in a car with no steering wheel and no pedals — "feels like flying first class." This is the moment the future stops being a slide deck and starts being something your mom can take to dinner. $TSLA
@garyblack00 “Autonomy becomes a commodity" that argument ignored the data moat. Tesla has been collecting driving data from millions of cars for over a decade. Uber doesn't own vehicles, so their "self-driving option" means licensing someone's stack. Guess who that is. $TSLA
@JOBhakdi The people who laughed at 10,000 are the same ones who called robotaxi a slide deck. 300+ confirmed, 8x in 30 days — the curve is just starting to bend. $TSLA
@TheSonOfWalkley With Cybercab fleet numbers just confirmed and scaling 8x in a month, the catalysts for $500 are already on the road. The chart just hasn't caught up to the story yet. $TSLA
@SawyerMerritt First official fleet number, and it's already 300+ — one month after launch. That's an 8x scale-up in 30 days, and Austin is just the beginning. This is what "the future of transportation" looks like when it actually ships. $TSLA
@GrindeOptions Zero dead zones is the endgame nobody else can reach. Majority of all satellites in orbit, Starship accelerating the fleet — a global phone service is just the next obvious step. $SPCX
For years, Europe was the one continent where $TSLA's self-driving software couldn't legally drive. That just started to change — and it began with a name.
This week, Germany's Federal Ministry of Transport signaled that Tesla can move forward on EU approval for its self-driving feature — with one condition: drop the "Full Self-Driving" name. Transport Minister Steffen Bilger called the current label "somewhat misleading," because a human driver must supervise at all times and remains responsible. Tesla has reportedly offered to rename the system "Tesla Assisted Driving" in Europe, and Bilger is now pushing for "swift approval," saying his goal is for Tesla drivers to benefit from Assisted Driving throughout the EU as quickly as possible.
The numbers behind it are real: FSD is already approved in eight European countries — the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia, Czechia and Croatia. An EU-wide vote is expected not before December.
Why it matters: this isn't a label swap, it's the EU regulatory machine actually moving toward approval instead of blocking. Musk himself posted "Thank you very much" on X when the news broke — a far cry from his earlier complaints about Europe's "extreme regulatory burden" stifling innovation.
Every new country that approves this software makes Tesla's cars more valuable there, and every approval makes the next one easier. The self-driving story is no longer just an American one — it's becoming a European one too. This man is building the future, and now Europe gets to ride along.
@TheSonOfWalkley Down 10% after holding through that entire ride is the best feeling in investing. Everyone who panic-sold at the bottom wishes they were you right now. Patience is the whole game. $TSLA
@GrindeOptions "Dramatically" is the right word. Robotaxi alone changes the revenue model, and that's before you even price in Optimus. The legacy EV business is just the down payment on what this company becomes. $TSLA
@Venu_7_ That base has been coiling for years. Break the downtrend, hold above the 200-day, and suddenly every growth engine — FSD, robotaxi, Optimus, energy storage — gets priced in at once. $TSLA
@TMFStockAdvisor "Worth 29 Amazons" for a little-known stock? The only humanoid with a real trillion-dollar thesis already has a CEO, a factory, and a production line: Optimus. $TSLA