• 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.