Elon Musk’s SpaceX won a $149 million contract to build missile-tracking satellites for the Pentagon, the U.S. Space Development Agency (SDA) said on Monday, in the company’s first government contract to build satellites.

SpaceX, known for its reusable rockets and astronaut capsules, is ramping up satellite production for Starlink, a growing constellation of hundreds of internet-beaming satellites that chief executive Elon Musk hopes will generate enough revenue to help fund SpaceX’s interplanetary goals.

Under the SDA contract, SpaceX will use its Starlink assembly plant in Redmond, Washington, to build four satellites fitted with a wide-angle infrared missile-tracking sensor supplied by a subcontractor, an SDA official said.

Technology company L3 Harris Technologies Inc., formerly Harris Corporation, received $193 million to build another four satellites. Both companies are expected to deliver the satellites for launch by fall 2022.

The awards are part of the SDA’s first phase to procure satellites to detect and track missiles like intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which can travel long distances and are challenging to track and intercept.

SpaceX in 2019 received $28 million from the Air Force to use the fledgling Starlink satellite network to test encrypted internet services with a number of military planes, though the Air Force has not ordered any Starlink satellites of its own.

Source: Reuters

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Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX has raised $1.9 billion in new funding, according to a regulatory filing on Tuesday.

This would be the largest single fundraising round to date by SpaceX, according to PitchBook data.

Bloomberg, which reported about the funding round last week, said the private rocket company will have an equity value of $46 billion after the transaction, citing people familiar with the matter.

The funding comes as SpaceX races to build out its Starlink satellite constellation to offer broadband internet commercially by the end of 2020. The company launched its eleventh batch of satellites on Tuesday and operates over 600 satellites in low-Earth orbit.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule completed its first two-month mission carrying astronauts for NASA in early August, with plans to start routine crewed missions to the International Space Station in late October.

Source: Reuters

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Elon Musk's neuroscience startup Neuralink on Friday unveiled a pig named Gertrude that has had a coin-sized computer chip in its brain for two months, showing off an early step toward the goal of curing human diseases with the same type of implant.

Co-founded by Tesla Inc and SpaceX CEO Musk in 2016, San Francisco Bay Area-based Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain-computer interfaces that include thousands of electrodes in the most complex human organ to help cure neurological conditions like Alzheimer's, dementia and spinal cord injuries and ultimately fuse humankind with artificial intelligence.

"An implantable device can actually solve these problems," Musk said on a webcast Friday, mentioning ailments such as memory loss, hearing loss, depression and insomnia.

Musk did not provide a timeline for those treatments, appearing to retreat from earlier statements that human trials would begin by the end of this year. Neuralink's first clinical trials with a small number of human patients would be aimed at treating paralysis or paraplegia, the company's head surgeon Dr Matthew MacDougall said.

Neuroscientists unaffiliated with the company said the presentation indicated that Neuralink had made great strides but cautioned that longer studies were needed.

Musk presented what he described as the "three little pigs demo." Gertrude, the pig with a Neuralink implant in the part of its brain that controls the snout, required some coaxing by Musk to appear on camera, but eventually began eating off of a stool and sniffing straw, triggering spikes on a graph tracking the animal's neural activity.

Musk said the company had three pigs with two implants each and also revealed a pig that previously had an implant. They were "healthy, happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig," Musk said. Musk said the company predicted a pig's limb movement during a treadmill run at "high accuracy" using implant data.

Musk described Neuralink's chip, which is roughly 23 millimeters (0.9 inch) in diameter, as "a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires."

"I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldn't know," Musk said. "... Maybe I do."

One comment from a webcast viewer described the animals as "Cypork."

Graeme Moffat, a University of Toronto neuroscience research fellow, said Neuralink's advancements were "order of magnitude leaps" beyond current science thanks to the novel chip's size, portability, power management and wireless capabilities.

Stanford University neuroscientist Sergey Stavisky said the company had made substantial and impressive progress since an initial demonstration of an earlier chip in July 2019.

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Elon Musk is now the third-richest person in the world.

Musk passed Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg Monday as shares of Tesla Inc. continued their unrelenting rally after undergoing a forward stock split. Musk is now worth $115.4 billion compared with $110.8 billion for Zuckerberg, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Also Monday, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife MacKenzie Scott became the world’s richest woman, passing L’Oreal SA heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers. Scott, 50, who received a 4% stake in Amazon.com Inc. as part of her divorce from founder Bezos, is now worth $66.4 billion.

Musk, 49, has seen a meteoric rise in his wealth, with his net worth growing by $87.8 billion this year as Tesla shares surged almost 500%. Also helpful: an audacious pay package -- the largest corporate pay deal ever struck between a chief executive officer and a board of directors -- that could yield him more than $50 billion if all goals are met.

Tesla’s $464 billion market value now exceeds that of retail behemoth Walmart Inc, the largest company in the US by revenue.

Last week, Musk joined Zuckerberg, Bezos and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates in the rarefied centibillionaire club as tech stocks rose.

The heady pace of wealth accumulation in recent months is in stark contrast to the state of the global economy. Growth has slumped sharply since the pandemic began with companies laying off millions of workers and consumer demand cratering. The brunt of economic pain has been borne by young and lower-wage workers, whose jobs are typically more vulnerable to COVID-related layoffs.

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