Elon Musk is no longer part of Donald Trump’s advisory team. He was in charge of this thing called the Department of Government Efficiency — or DOGE for short — but after 130 days, he decided to walk away. The reason? Honestly, it sounds like he didn’t agree with a big federal spending bill that just came out. Musk wasn’t shy about it either. He said the bill was way too bloated and went against everything he was trying to do — like cutting down waste and making government work better. Even though things didn’t work out, he still thanked Trump and said DOGE would keep moving forward in its own way.
Another Starship Test... Another Failure
It’s been a tough stretch for Musk on the SpaceX side too. Their latest Starship test flight didn’t go as planned — again. Apparently, there was a leak in the propellant system, which caused the rocket to spin out of control. It ended up breaking apart when it tried to come back down through the atmosphere. That makes it the third failed test this year, and the ninth one overall. Still, Musk isn’t giving up. He’s said they’ll keep launching new tests every few weeks. And yeah, he’s still aiming to send a robot to Mars by 2026. It’s a big dream, and clearly not an easy one to pull off.
xAI Drops Grok-3 — A New AI That’s Pretty Smart
Meanwhile, Musk’s AI company, xAI, just launched something new — it’s called Grok-3. They trained it on a crazy number of GPUs — around 200,000 of them — using a system they’ve built at their Colossus data center. People are saying Grok-3 actually does better than OpenAI’s GPT-4o when it comes to stuff like science and math. There’s also this new feature called “Big Brain” mode that’s supposed to help it handle really hard problems. Right now, only users who have Premium+ on X or subscribe to xAI’s SuperGrok plan can use it. They might let more people in later, but nothing confirmed yet.
Protests and Criticism Keep Building
Even outside of tech and politics, Musk’s name keeps making headlines — and not always for good reasons. There’s a growing movement called “Tesla Takedown” that’s been organizing protests and boycotts. It’s mostly about Musk’s political involvement and the kind of influence he has. People are calling him out, and it’s not just on social media. Things really heated up after he made a hand gesture at a rally back in January that a lot of people found offensive. Some say it was misunderstood, others say it crossed a line. Either way, it’s added more fuel to the fire that’s been building around him.
