The Austin Daily News

By Justin Murphy

A daily update on tech, culture, and society in and around Austin, Texas.... more

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FAQs about The Austin Daily News:

How many episodes does The Austin Daily News have?

The podcast currently has 75 episodes available.

The Austin Daily News episodes:

May 24, 2026The Austin Daily News - May 24, 2026
In this week's issue:
The Austin teen shooting suspect was an undocumented immigrant — previously arrested for stealing the same gun, released without an ICE hold — and the city had deliberately turned off the cameras that could have stopped him eleven months earlier
SpaceX's S-1 filing just revealed that xAI is burning $30.8 billion per year on AI infrastructure, more than 60% of SpaceX's total capital spending, and almost all of it is in Texas
A city auditor found Austin blew $279 million on consultants over two years, and 82% of those contracts never evaluated whether a city employee could have done the job
Manor is building a mini-Mueller and Austin is losing an H-E-B, which means the suburbs are winning and the north side is in mourning
Let's get into it.
...more
14min
May 23, 2026The Austin Daily News - May 23, 2026
In this week's issue:
Austin just annexed 2,614 acres east of downtown — twice the size of downtown itself — in a 45-year deal with a mystery Fortune 100 tenant who's building something big and isn't allowed to tell you what it is
The same council session that did the annexation also green-lit $1 billion in new gas peaker plants — voted on in secret, announced in confusion, confirmed only by one Statesman reporter
Texas Supreme Court ruled 8-0 today, calling out a trial judge's "deliberate effort to frustrate the State's appellate rights" — and the $8.2B Project Connect light rail just got a lot cloudier
Waymo suspended all Austin service yesterday — flooding incidents, a robotaxi chased by police through traffic cones, and now eight cities down in a single week
Tom Brady is opening a sports card store downtown next Tuesday and that's just a sentence that exists
Let's get into it.
...more
15min
May 19, 2026The Austin Daily News - May 19, 2026
In this week's issue:
Three Austin teens with an active warrant for prior gun theft turned 28 hours into 12 shootings, two fire station attacks, and one South Austin shelter-in-place — because the DA already had his shot and didn't take it
A 29-year-old Dell heir just raised $1.3 billion, hit a $4 billion valuation, and signed a 40-megawatt deal with Austin Energy to rewire the Texas grid from the living room out
Elon Musk confirms Tesla robotaxis are now running in Austin, Dallas, and Houston — with nationwide expansion on the way this year
Austin City Council wants to regulate data center water use; the city has 80 facilities and counting, and the people trying to manage the boom have absolutely no idea what's already inside their own service area
ACL turns 25 and goes global — Disney+ and Hulu are streaming it live for the first time
Let's get into it.
...more
14min
May 17, 2026The Austin Daily News - May 17, 2026
In this week's issue:
The world's most profitable trading firm just let cameras inside its Texas AI data center — 4,032 GPUs, liquid-cooled racks, 8,000 km of fiber, and a $6 billion bet on what comes next
Travis County ranked 7th in the nation for housing stock growth — 16,197 new units in one year — and Austin's median price is finally falling
Austin's "low crime" numbers may be a fiction built on 311 call routing and a DA who just doesn't prosecute
Nine years of Defense Innovation Unit presence in Austin, and the city is quietly becoming America's second defense tech hub after El Segundo
A Kansas City wrestling fan heard about Interstellar BBQ on an Undertaker podcast, waited 90 minutes in line, and has no regrets
Let's get into it.
...more
14min
May 16, 2026The Austin Daily News - May 16, 2026
In this week's issue:
The tallest building in Texas is about to open — in Austin, not Houston, ending a 45-year streak
Texas deployed AI to kill its own regulations — 435 rules flagged, $100M projected impact, 69,000 words of administrative code on the chopping block
A production Tesla Cybercab with no steering wheel, built at Giga Texas, spotted operating on South Austin streets
DA Garza told a reporter he's "not familiar" with a murder case his own office issued a public statement on 10 days earlier
Let's get into it.
...more
15min
May 15, 2026The Austin Daily News - May 15, 2026
In this week's issue:
Abbott bypassing Austin's DA entirely — the state task force now operating in Austin and the murder case that made it necessary
Austin officially a million-person city, and the AI system it just deployed to fix its decades-long permitting disaster
Voters approved 27 miles of light rail — what they're actually getting, and who's suing over it
A man caught on his own Nest camera saying "Homicide will be in this hoe" — and what Austin's DA decided to do about it
Let's get into it.
...more
16min
May 14, 2026The Austin Daily News - May 14, 2026
In this week's issue:
Hill County just became the first Texas county to block data centers — and the state's own lawyers say they probably can't do that
Austin's 911 system is six months past its own consolidation deadline, no road map in sight, while Abbott sends a task force to do what the city won't
An Austin drone company went public and immediately reported an 80%+ revenue collapse and a $4.5M net loss
One Austin dinner table: a humanoid robot builder, a brain-computer interface founder, and someone who scanned a fruit fly brain into a computer simulation
Texas is building the future faster than anyone can govern it. Let's get into it.
...more
15min
May 13, 2026The Austin Daily News - May 13, 2026
In this week's issue:
Blue Origin is targeting a 1.3 million square foot aerospace manufacturing campus 25 miles northeast of Austin — $650M+, 2,000 jobs, and it turns Williamson County into the most concentrated aerospace corridor in Texas
Austin just agreed to borrow money to pay $35 million for a wrongful conviction case from 1991 — the largest settlement in city history, and the actual killer died in 1999
Waymo recalled 3,791 robotaxis for a flooded-road software defect — and if you read our May 10 puddle story, this is not a coincidence
Austin hit homicide number 24 this year, and we're barely into May
The city wants $36 million for a broadcasting studio, and the people asking the questions are not impressed
Let's get into it.
...more
13min
May 12, 2026The Austin Daily News - May 12, 2026
In this week's issue:
Tesla is turning Giga Texas into the world's largest robotics and AI manufacturing complex — 5.2 million square feet of new north campus construction, 230,000+ AI training GPUs on-site, and a 10-million-units-per-year robot target that would make southeast Austin the most consequential manufacturing address on earth
The Texas Legislature is coming for Austin's $50M utility bill shell game — and a city already running a $26M deficit has nowhere to hide
Abbott is recruiting Wall Street firms spooked by NYC's socialist mayor, and Texas just quietly passed New York in total financial sector jobs
GM is laying off hundreds of Austin IT workers and simultaneously posting AI-native roles — the Austin tech labor market is splitting in real time
A man from Oregon came to Austin for a Grateful Dead tribute band and accidentally experienced the future of transportation
Let's do this.
...more
16min
May 11, 2026The Austin Daily News - May 11, 2026
In this week's issue:
A man smoking crack and lunging at a park worker with scissors — at a children's playground directly adjacent to Barton Springs, while 100+ kids played and 911 calls went unanswered for 30 minutes
Three separate companies committed billions to Texas AI infrastructure in a single week — chips, fiber, and compute — and why that combination is something no other state can claim
Tesla's Austin robotaxi fleet hit 39 vehicles and expanded to night operations, but the real clock is ticking: a Texas regulatory deadline lands in 17 days
Texas legislators wrote a summer camp safety law so technically unhinged that one Hill Country camp permanently closed — and only 9 of 300 camps had licenses three weeks before summer
Today is Day 1 of Austin's expanded APD encampment sweeps. Let's get into it.
...more
16min

FAQs about The Austin Daily News:

How many episodes does The Austin Daily News have?

The podcast currently has 75 episodes available.