In this week's issue:

• Joshua Baer, the man who quietly wired Austin's entire startup ecosystem, dead at 50 in a plane crash near Laredo — and what Capital Factory leaves behind
• Texas towns banning data centers outright while billions in AI infrastructure investment pour into the state — the political fracture nobody saw coming
• Cedar Park's Firefly Aerospace pockets a $75M NASA contract to send rocket-powered drones hopping across the Moon's south pole
• Senate Republicans and the SAVE Act: the real story behind the intra-party standoff on voter citizenship verification
• Leroy and Lewis — a Michelin-starred South Austin BBQ joint — is hiding a $10 brisket burger deal that only happens on Mondays

Let's get into it.

• Joshua Baer, the man who built Austin's startup machine from the ground up, gone at 50 — and what happens to Capital Factory now
• SpaceX just bought the world's most popular AI coding tool for $60 billion, and the entire infrastructure stack ties directly to Central Texas
• Waymo now has 200+ robotaxis roaming 133 square miles of Austin — the autonomous ride-hail race is officially on
• $90 million FAA grant, a SoftBank land buy outside Rockdale, and billions more flowing into the Central Texas infrastructure corridor
• West Campus business owners have stopped calling police on homeless — "What's the point?" — and what that tells you about how broken Austin's public safety response really is

Let's get into it.

• The $1 trillion Wall Street giant that just picked Austin over Miami — and why Miami lost on private schools
• Billions in data center investment flooding the Austin-SA corridor, but the jobs math is more complicated than either side admits
• Elon Musk: officially the first human being in history worth a trillion dollars
• Austin's nonprofit grifter class called out by name, publicly, on X

Let's get into it.

• An Austin drone boat just pulled two U.S. Army pilots out of the Strait of Hormuz — the first autonomous naval rescue in combat history
• Ken Paxton blew out John Cornyn by 28 points, but the actual story is 400,000 Cornyn voters who simply vanished
• Firefly Aerospace lands a NASA Moon Base contract, and it's the only publicly traded bet on the lunar south pole
• Open meth use at an Austin bus stop, a $5 Waymo, and the market quietly solving what the city refuses to

Let's ride.

• Abbott moving to kill $1.3 billion a year in data center tax breaks — and why that's more complicated than it sounds
• Joe Lonsdale's argument that AI can collapse permitting from weeks to hours — and the Austin companies already building it
• Tesla's Austin Robotaxi fleet nearly tripled in a week, and the number to watch isn't what you think
• Blue-green algae back at Red Bud Isle — with a neurotoxin, six dead dogs, and zero lake closures

Let's get into it.

• SpaceX announced a factory 10x larger than anything it's ever built — in Bastrop, Texas — to manufacture AI satellites that put data centers in orbit, two days before the largest IPO in human history
• Austin's robotics unicorn just tripled its own valuation to $5 billion with nearly $1 billion in total Series A capital, and it was born at UT
• A James Beard Award-winning restaurant that taught Austin what serious Mexican cooking looks like is closing after 15 years, while a bar that opened 18 months ago just landed on Esquire's national best-in-America list
• City Hall logged 404 ethics complaints last year and opened 11 investigations

Let's get into it.

• Austin just vaulted past every American city except four in venture capital — the hard number that ends the "is Austin for real?" debate
• The supply-side housing experiment that crashed prices 24% — and why the viral X discourse gets about half of the story right
• CrowdStrike is quietly climbing toward becoming Austin's fourth Fortune 500 company, and the recovery story behind it is wild
• One in eight Austin employer businesses is Asian-owned — a stat the city's boosters aren't talking about nearly enough

Let's get into it.

• The Texas grid's dirty secret: four groups of data centers already connected to ERCOT can each trigger a Boston-sized blackout — and just failed the test designed to prevent it
• An elderly man beaten unconscious on an Austin street in broad daylight, police called, police never came — and the state of Texas has had enough
• Flash flooding hit Cedar Park, Leander, and Georgetown overnight — nine rescues, dozens of roads closed, the San Gabriel River over flood stage
• Elon Musk built a 16-foot fence around his Austin property with zero permits, while normal Austinites can't get a permit to get a permit

Let's get into it.

• Texas's power grid has 410+ gigawatts of AI data center requests in the queue — five times the entire state's peak capacity
• Austin City Hall has 176 communications staffers across 28 departments — and they don't communicate with each other — while the city bleeds $26M in budget red ink
• Austin defense startup just hit a $2.2 billion valuation by making drone-killers that cost $10 per engagement
• Two prominent Austin hotels foreclosed and a homebuilder sold at auction — the real estate market is separating winners from wishful thinkers
• Texas just deregulated food trucks statewide, effective July 1 — one license to rule them all

Texas doesn't do things small. Let's get into it.

• Texas just blew past California on the Fortune 500 — 57 companies vs. 56, $2.8 trillion in revenue — the throne is back
• A cold case at Barton Springs Pool just cracked open: the same gun that killed a DoorDash driver in the parking lot in 2022 was used in a Houston murder one month later
• Four Seasons closing an $870 million construction loan for Lake Austin residences starting at $4.6M — capital voting loudly
• The city of Austin is trying to make a pushcart ice cream vendor get a Mobile Food Vendor permit

Let's get into it.

• Tesla just expanded its Robotaxi service to the entire Austin metro — with roughly 25 cars covering a city of 1 million people
• Austin ISD is cutting 558 positions and gutting benefits amid a $181 million deficit — while Tesla and SpaceX are building the future two hours away
• Grimes County just handed Elon Musk a 100% tax abatement on a $119 billion semiconductor factory — a county with an $11 billion tax base
• Project Connect was sold to Austin voters as 22 miles of light rail; it is now under 10 miles, costs $8.2 billion, and doesn't reach the airport

Let's get into it.

• Samsung just abandoned a brand-new New Jersey HQ after eight months — moving its entire U.S. operation to Texas, becoming the second major company to flee NJ for the Lone Star State in a single week
• Emo's is changing hands from Live Nation to AEG Presents in 2027 — full renovation, possible name change, and what it actually means for Austin's live music economy
• SaveAustinNow delivered 20,514 petition signatures demanding a mandatory independent audit of every dollar Austin City Hall spends
• Texas's new AV database dropped the first hard fleet numbers: Waymo has 577 robotaxis in Texas, Tesla has 42
• Elijah Wood went to Alamo Drafthouse and immediately became the internet's favorite film bro

Let's do this.

• Austin City Council just unlocked a pathway to 1,200-foot towers — taller than anything currently standing in Texas
• An Austin Energy employee ran a fake vendor scheme for six years, pocketed nearly $1 million, and his supervisors signed off on every single invoice
• Two major downtown hotels are hitting the Travis County foreclosure auction block on the same day
• The San Antonio-to-Austin corridor now has 3,500 acres and 5+ gigawatts of compute infrastructure under development — and that number keeps climbing

Let's get into it.

• The U.S. Secretary of Transportation inside Giga Texas with Elon Musk — calling for national AV standards that would blow open commercial robotaxi deployment everywhere
• A 428-room Lady Bird Lake hotel hits foreclosure auction tomorrow after defaulting on $172M in debt — and the debt is underwater
• Bar Peached on West 6th caught fire this morning, roof caved in, closed indefinitely
• A 200-person West Texas town quietly becoming one of America's largest data center nodes

Let's get into it.

• The $119 billion chip factory being built next to Giga Texas — and the Grimes County vote happening in three days that could greenlight the largest industrial construction project in American history
• "Six-gender Jimmy" vs. "the most corrupt politician in Texas" — the Texas Senate general election is live, and the fundraising gap is genuinely insane
• Austin ISD has 23 failing schools while Dallas and Houston have zero — and the state is three bad test scores away from seizing control of Austin's school board
• Texas's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve just got a real committee, a custody RFP, and a June 15 deadline

Let's get into it.

• Zach Dell's home battery startup just tripled to a $12B valuation in eight months — and the data center play is the whole story
• Dell Technologies posted the most spectacular quarter in its history, 757% AI server revenue growth, and is voting to move its legal home to Texas on June 25
• SpaceX drops $855M on Bastrop County to consolidate all Starlink kit production in Texas
• Austin City Council just created a path for towers taller than anything in the state — developer skepticism is real, but the policy architecture for supertall Austin is now on paper
• Willie Nelson, age 93, released his 79th solo studio album — and yes, the numbers get stranger from there

Let's get into it.

• A Cybercab drove itself off the Giga Texas production line on the exact same day Texas legalized commercial Level 4 autonomous deployment — not coincidence, coordination
• Bastrop County, population 115K, is quietly becoming one of the most consequential places on Earth for AI compute — EdgeConneX, Amazon, and the entire Musk universe are all converging on the same stretch of Texas highway
• SpaceX rewrote AI training from scratch in bare-metal C for 220,000 GPUs, claiming a 10x speed advantage over Google's best tool
• Austin's own city auditor just reported that more than two in five pedestrian deaths in Austin involve homeless individuals — and the city can't even reliably track where people are dying
• The Line hotel on Lady Bird Lake, once a symbol of Austin's hospitality boom, goes to foreclosure auction on June 2

Let's get into it.

• Cedar Park just won a $75 million NASA subcontract to deliver four drones to the Moon's south pole
• Tesla's Chief Designer and VP of Engineering confirmed on a podcast that the Roadster is being built in Texas — and there's already a test track going up at Giga Texas
• IREN closed a $1.6 billion deal with Dell for Blackwell GPU systems, and Hut 8 is building a power-dense AI compute campus co-designed with Nvidia — Texas is eating the AI infrastructure market
• McGuire Moorman Lambert is turning the old Sledd Nursery in Clarksville into a Greek restaurant, and a half-built ghost neighborhood near Georgetown is going to auction

Time to build.

• Austin outpermits the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts — and the rent data proves it worked
• A Cedar Park startup is building precision missiles at one-tenth the cost of a Javelin, next door to a rocket company
• Ken Paxton just ended John Cornyn's 24-year Senate career
• SpaceX is moving every single piece of Starlink hardware production on earth to Bastrop County

Let's get after it.

• Tesla Cybercabs — plural, fleet-level — flooding downtown Austin streets on Sunday, no side mirrors, Starlink terminals on the roof
• A Travis County jury just dropped a $116M verdict on a waste company CEO who allegedly turned a family business into a personal piggy bank
• An Austin-built nuclear reactor is racing to reach criticality by July 4 — first new reactor at Idaho National Lab in 50 years
• Cornyn vs. Paxton polls close at 7pm CT tonight — Paxton is the heavy favorite, and $109M was spent to get here

Let's ride.

• Austin's AI boom has a water problem — and the numbers are genuinely alarming
• City Council votes May 28 on land bought in 2006 for cops and firefighters, still unused, now going to a private developer
• Austin has more self-driving car brands than Tokyo. Not a metaphor — literally true
• Matt's El Rancho won the internet's Tex-Mex debate, and Fonda San Miguel got ethered in the process

Let's ride.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Austin council voted 9-1 to bulldoze the last neighborhood shields blocking housing density — and the council member who personally promised those shields would hold co-sponsored the resolution
• The city has spent $35 million on outside lawyers since 2020, including nearly a million dollars to fight — and then settle — a botched SWAT raid that caused $23,000 in actual damage
• The viral SpaceX IPO math: 160 Austin employees projected to clear $100 million each, 12 will become billionaires — the number Austin's money class can't stop talking about
• A Texas startup built 550 robotic telescopes on a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere and Ashlee Vance showed up

Let's ride.

• SpaceX filing for a June IPO at up to $2 trillion — and viral back-of-envelope math says hundreds of Austin employees are about to get generationally rich
• An Austin drone-defense startup that kills threats for $10 a pop just saw its valuation jump 14x to $2 billion, and Ted Cruz showed up at their office the day before
• A man barricaded under Highway 71 throwing debris at cars while SWAT scrambled — welcome to Austin infrastructure hour
• APD officers reportedly telling a resident not to film an aggressive homeless man yelling death threats, because filming is "provoking"

Let's get into it.

• Six APD teams launching daily encampment sweeps on May 11 — but only a few dozen shelter beds exist citywide
• SpaceX files the first hard site notice for TERAFAB: $55-119 billion, Grimes County, June 3 public hearing
• Amazon's data center subsidiary quietly closes on Bastrop County land while the city bonds $1.18 billion to nearly double airport capacity
• The IHOP at Cesar Chavez and I-35 finally sold — six years of legal theater, ending in a $5,000 margin bidding war

Let's get into it.

• 410 gigawatts of data center power requests queued up in Texas — and a radical private-capital fix that could cut the line entirely
• Tesla's Austin robotaxi fleet rolling unsupervised after dark for the first time, while the Cybercab comes off the Giga Texas line
• A Cinco de Mayo restaurant shooting that left one dead and four injured, and Austin's 28th fatal crash of 2026 on South Lamar
• Tom Segura opens an Italian bakery with a former Italian Navy SEAL, because this is Austin and nothing makes sense in the best way

Let's get into it.

• Dell's board just voted unanimously to bring the company's legal home back to Texas — the kid who started it in a UT dorm room is completing the circle
• A Cedar Park rocket company is now in the same room as Lockheed and Raytheon competing for Trump's $185 billion Golden Dome missile defense program
• Texas set a national record: 274,183 families applied for school choice vouchers in the program's very first year
• Austin's crime and public safety crisis is getting worse and harder to ignore — the numbers don't lie
• ACL Fest 2026 lineup drops this morning at 9 AM — 25 years of the best music festival in America

Rock and roll.

• The Texas AI data center gold rush is separating real money from vapor — one company just crashed 86% from a $12B+ valuation
• Austin Energy is a government monopoly hiding in your electric bill — and most residents have no idea
• ARM is reportedly in talks to join TERAFAB's R&D initiative, and the Austin Business Journal has sources
• ACL Fest 2026 drops its lineup tomorrow morning

Rock and roll.

• Austin's $5.3B humanoid robot company just hired the people who deployed self-driving cars at scale — and a new robot is coming
• Spirit Airlines is dead, 17,000 jobs gone, and the Biden DOJ killed it — here's what Austin travelers need to do right now
• Five people from Amarillo's pickleball club killed in a fiery plane crash near Wimberley, headed to a tournament in New Braunfels
• It's Gary Clark Jr. Day in Austin, the whole month of May at Antone's is sold out, and there's a free merch pop-up happening right now

Let's get into it.

• Elon Musk admitting under oath that xAI used OpenAI's own models to build Grok — while simultaneously suing OpenAI for $130 billion
• The U.S. Army proposing a 3-gigawatt data center at Fort Bliss that would consume more electricity than all of El Paso
• Five Austin council members lining up to kill $142 million in IT savings while the city stares at a $26 million deficit
• Infowars physically locked and dark after 27 years in Austin

Rock and roll.

• Elon Musk's $20-25 billion chip factory — the most audacious infrastructure bet in Austin's history
• The deregulation data is in: HOME-built homes selling at 53% below traditional new construction
• Samsung's Taylor fab installs EUV equipment — first chips rolling this year, with a $16.5B Tesla deal anchoring the line
• David Allan Coe, the outlaw's outlaw, is dead at 86 — and what he built without a single institution behind him

Rock and roll.

• A man with 33 prior Travis County charges — including 3 aggravated robberies — murdered a 35-year-old woman, and Jose Garza's office declined to prosecute him. He's free.
• Oracle executed the largest layoff in its 47-year history right here at its Lady Bird Lake campus — 20,000 to 30,000 jobs vaporized in a single 6 AM email — while simultaneously committing $156 billion to AI infrastructure
• A Meow Wolf co-founder is building a "neuroscience bathhouse" steps from Barton Springs, and guests will wear EKG monitors while soaking
• Tesla's unsupervised robotaxi count in Austin just hit 19 — and the community trackers are adding new vehicles faster than Tesla is announcing them

Let's get into it.

• Texas's $10 billion hemp industry just won a temporary courtroom reprieve — but the Friday enforcement deadline is still ticking, and the state's lawyers tried to kick the cameras out
• Two former Bitcoin mines in West Texas converting to AI data centers with a combined 3.1 gigawatts of planned capacity, and one just delivered its first live data hall to CoreWeave
• A physical altercation outside Sam's BBQ became East Austin's second six-person shooting in a single weekend — one suspect arrested, zero excuses left
• Kelly Slater's celebrity wave pool hit $4.6 million in contractor liens and construction has stopped — McConaughey, Tony Hawk, and Drew Brees each dropped $1.25M to get in
• $51 billion in state property tax relief and Austin homeowners somehow ended up with zero net relief

Let's get into it.

• The kid who built chips in his parents' garage is now moving a 120,000 sq ft semiconductor company — co-founded with the most important chip architect of the last 30 years — to Austin
• Waymo blocked an ambulance during a mass shooting, then declined to show up to a public safety meeting about it
• A congressional candidate's video of a Sunday night East Austin shooting went viral with 268,000 views — and the city's soft-on-crime leadership is getting the blame
• Austin has $90M worth of bridges falling apart and a city government budgeting $4M a year to fix them

Texas is moving. Let's go.

• An Austin startup suing a YC-backed San Francisco 21-year-old for faking credentials, infiltrating their product, and then marketing the stolen UI as "vibe coded"
• Over $1 billion in voter-approved Austin bond projects sitting unbuilt since 2006 — and Watson wants more money in November
• Congregation Beth Israel vandalized with a swastika for the second time in five years, while APD has no arrests
• Lammes Candies — Austin since 1885, five generations, the first neon sign in this city — is closing its stores
• Tesla's Austin robotaxi fleet: 15-20 cars, 10 months in — the number serious investors actually need

Let's get into it.

• A 26-year-old Duke dropout raised $20M at a $100M valuation from Bill Ackman, Josh Kushner, and the Coinbase co-founder — to build nuclear reactors and cargo drones in a Lockhart trailer park 40 miles from Austin
• Austin just posted record VC numbers and simultaneously landed at #24 on the best-cities-for-startups ranking — while Florida cities swept the entire top five
• Clarence Thomas walked into UT Austin and called progressivism an existential threat to the Declaration of Independence, to its face
• A viral 405K-view video shows Austin influencers paying a homeless man to drink until he cracked his head on the sidewalk — Reddit banned it, X didn't
• Aman — the world's most exclusive hotel brand — passed on Wyoming and Montana and chose Texas Hill Country instead

Let's ride.

• The Abbott/Austin ICE standoff is over — and Austin was the last Texas city to fold
• A nearly $1 billion hotel and convention center is coming to the COTA corridor
• A Pflugerville chip company just landed $4.83M in state money and is hiring 250 people
• Someone got arrested for climbing I-35 near Rainey Street and ripping stoplights off the infrastructure

Texas doesn't wait for anyone. Let's get into it.