In this week's issue:

- OpenAI just bought a two-person tech talk show for a rumored $100M+ — and the person it reports to is not an editor

- Why small Texas towns banking on data center taxes are making a bet that might blow up in their faces

- California grew its bureaucracy 60x faster than its population over the last decade — Joe Lonsdale has the numbers

- Jelly Roll, Willie Nelson, and psychedelic rock: Austin's spring and summer event calendar is stacked

Let's get into it.

In this week's issue:

- Stargate just got a street address in Austin — a SoftBank-linked entity quietly bought the old 3M campus, and the "Cosmos" codename in state filings tells you everything you need to know

- An Austin company closed a $90M round where its own customers wrote the checks — and turned 0% AI-assisted code to 50%+ in one year at a global PE firm

- Texas is about to dethrone Northern Virginia as the world's largest data center market, and Austin's vacancy rate is basically zero

In this week's issue:

- Austin's largest funding round in history — $1.75B for autonomous warships, and the Palantir co-founder at the center of it

- Downtown Austin's brawl video went nationally viral, and the city's $31M homelessness plan has zero targets for getting anyone off the street

- Jason Calacanis: move your 50-250 person company here, give your team a 35% raise — and the math actually checks out

- Justice Clarence Thomas coming to UT, 1,200 drones at COTA, and the most important SXS

In this week's issue:

- Travis County blocked a developer who offered to pay $30M to clean up a landfill — without reading a single engineering document and without legal authority — while hiding a $200M taxpayer liability through 30+ executive sessions since the 1980s

- John Deere is quietly running one of the most consequential autonomous vehicle operations in the entire Austin metro on 360 acres east of the city — and almost nobody is talking about it

- Tesla shipped robotaxi-grade code to e

In this week's issue:

- SpaceX is filing its S-1 this week for a $75B raise at $1.75T — the largest IPO in history, and the Austin angle is bigger than anyone has written about yet

- Fort Worth is ranked #1 in the nation for permitting speed; Austin is ranked 219th — same state, same laws, completely different governments

- Downtown Austin's dumpster contract doubled to $4M/year, with two bids that came in $2,000 apart on a $20 million deal — no council member asked a single question

- Tesla's

In this week's issue:

- All 11 of xAI's original co-founders are gone — Musk admitted the company "was not built right" and is rebuilding it as a hardware empire with Austin at its center

- Taylor City Council unanimously approved a $2.5B data center next to Samsung's chip fab, where the first 2nm silicon in U.S. history is already being produced

- A Waymo robotaxi froze and blocked an ambulance during the March 1 mass shooting — and the remote operators in the Philippines couldn't do a thing a

In this week's issue:

- $7.5 billion in AI infrastructure landed in Texas this week — Google, Anthropic, and a $2.5B Taylor data center prove the compute race is over

- Austin startups raised a record $7.19B in venture capital last year, beating the 2021 peak

- City hall voted to spend $1.8M on art for a maintenance garage while pushing max tax increases and botching payroll for 675 employees

- Jon Dee Graham — the only musician inducted into the Austin Music Hall of Fame three times — dead at

In today's issue:

- Two Austin developers getting sabotaged by bureaucracy — one by the Parks Department, one threatening to yank land out of city limits entirely

- CBS Evening News heading for worst Q1 of the 21st century under Bari Weiss

- Austin's startup ecosystem grew 13.9x to $2T — nearly double the Bay Area's pace

- Waymo operating fully driverless commercial rides in Austin via Uber, while Tesla has 94 vehicles with only 8 unsupervised

Let's ride.

In today's issue:

- Elon Musk just announced the most ambitious semiconductor project in history — but what's actually under construction versus what's 20 years out

- Austin is now the only city in America with three competing robotaxi operators running simultaneously

- TPPF sues Austin over a $126M annual "fee" the city's been collecting for 30 years while sitting on a $2B road backlog

- A cookie company that will legally marry you alongside your order

Let's get into it.

In this week's issue:

- Terafab's power requirements are the actual bottleneck—and they're cracked, not catastrophic.

- Prediction markets face bipartisan siege, but the real story is Don Jr.'s naked conflicts of interest.

- TOMO Mags: Austin analog collectors reject the algorithm; print shops are building community infrastructure.

- AI automation is bifurcating labor: experienced workers rise, entry-level workers disappear.

Let's go.