Elon Musk
Elon Musk proposes Grok 5 vs world’s best League of Legends team match
Musk’s proposal has received positive reception from professional players and Riot Games alike.
Elon Musk has proposed a high-profile gaming challenge for xAI’s upcoming Grok 5. As per Musk, it would be interesting to see if the large language model could beat the world’ best human League of Legends team with specific constraints.
Musk’s proposal has received positive reception from professional players and Riot Games alike, suggesting that the exciting exhibition match might indeed happen.
Musk outlines restrictions for Grok
In his post on X, Musk detailed constraints to keep the match competitive, including limiting Grok to human-level reaction times, human-speed clicking, and viewing the game only through a camera feed with standard 20/20 vision. The idea quickly circulated across the esports community, drawing commentary from former pros and AI researchers, as noted in a Dexerto report.
Former League pro Eugene “Pobelter” Park expressed enthusiasm, offering to help Musk’s team and noting the unique comparison to past AI-versus-human breakthroughs, such as OpenAI’s Dota 2 bots. AI researcher Oriol Vinyals, who previously reached Grandmaster rank in StarCraft, suggested testing Grok in RTS gameplay as well.
Musk welcomed the idea, even responding positively to Vinyals’ comment that it would be nice to see Optimus operate the mouse and keyboard.
Pros debate Grok’s chances, T1 and Riot show interest
Reactions weren’t universally optimistic. Former professional mid-laner Joedat “Voyboy” Esfahani argued that even with Grok’s rapid learning capabilities, League of Legends requires deep synergy, game-state interpretation, and team coordination that may be difficult for AI to master at top competitive levels. Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng was similarly skeptical, publicly stating he doubted Grok could beat T1, or even himself, and jokingly promised to shave his head if Grok managed to win.
T1, however, embraced the proposal, responding with a GIF of Faker and the message “We are ready,” signaling their willingness to participate. Riot Games itself also reacted, with co-founder Marc Merrill replying to Musk with “let’s discuss.” Needless to say, it appears that Riot Games in onboard with the idea.
Though no match has been confirmed, interest from players, teams, and Riot suggests the concept could materialize into a landmark AI-versus-human matchup, potentially becoming one of the most viewed League of Legends events in history. The fact that Grok 5 will be constrained to human limits would definitely add an interesting dimension to the matchup, as it could truly demonstrate how human-like the large language model could be like in real-time scenarios.
Tesla has passed a key milestone, and it was one that CEO Elon Musk initially mentioned more than nine years ago when he published Master Plan, Part Deux.
As per Tesla China in a post on its official Weibo account, the company’s Autopilot system has accumulated over 10 billion kilometers of real-world driving experience.
Tesla China’s subtle, but huge announcement
In its Weibo post, Tesla China announced that the company’s Autopilot system has accumulated 10 billion kilometers of driving experience. “In this respect, Tesla vehicles equipped with Autopilot technology can be considered to have the world’s most experienced and seasoned driver.”
Tesla AI’s handle on Weibo also highlighted a key advantage of the company’s self-driving system. “It will never drive under the influence of alcohol, be distracted, or be fatigued,” the team wrote. “We believe that advancements in Autopilot technology will save more lives.”
Tesla China did not clarify exactly what it meant by “Autopilot” in its Weibo post, though the company’s intense focus on FSD over the past years suggests that the term includes miles that were driven by FSD (Beta) and Full Self-Driving (Supervised). Either way, 10 billion cumulative miles of real-world data is something that few, if any, competitors could compete with.
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Elon Musk’s 10-billion-km estimate, way back in 2016
When Elon Musk published Master Plan Part Deux, he outlined his vision for the company’s autonomous driving system. At the time, Autopilot was still very new, though Musk was already envisioning how the system could get regulatory approval worldwide. He estimated that worldwide regulatory approval will probably require around 10 billion miles of real-world driving data, which was an impossible-sounding amount at the time.
“Even once the software is highly refined and far better than the average human driver, there will still be a significant time gap, varying widely by jurisdiction, before true self-driving is approved by regulators. We expect that worldwide regulatory approval will require something on the order of 6 billion miles (10 billion km). Current fleet learning is happening at just over 3 million miles (5 million km) per day,” Musk wrote.
It’s quite interesting but Tesla is indeed getting regulatory approval for FSD (Supervised) at a steady pace today, at a time when 10 billion miles of data has been achieved. The system has been active in the United States and has since been rolled out to other countries such as Australia, New Zealand, China, and, more recently, South Korea. Expectations are high that Tesla could secure FSD approval in Europe sometime next year as well.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Elon Musk says SpaceX will finally retire Falcon 9 once Starship flies reliably every week.
Elon Musk gave the clearest timeline yet for retiring Falcon 9, SpaceX’s workhorse rocket.
The comment came in a reply on X, where Musk wrote that “once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift super scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day, which means winding down Falcon.” He was responding to physicist Casey Handmer, who noted that NASA is reportedly uneasy about SpaceX phasing out Falcon after building what Handmer called the most successful launcher ever, with the fleet nearing 1,000 total launches.
Now @SciGuySpace reports NASA is in a tizzy because after running the most successful launcher ever for more than a decade and nearing 1000 launches, @SpaceX is planning to retire Falcon in favor of Starship in a few years.
Sorry, NASA, you’ve had 15 years to burn down the… https://t.co/uCNoMwK0v9
— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) August 22, 2026
Falcon 9 is still SpaceX’s busiest vehicle by far. The company is on pace for roughly 140 to 145 Falcon flights this year, following 165 in 2025, president Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier in 2026. She has already said Falcon flights would “tail off” as Starship comes online, while reports indicate that SpaceX has stopped booking new Falcon 9 launches past 2028 and halted production of some expendable Falcon hardware, according to Bloomberg.
It’s worth noting that Musk’s post is a condition, and not a countdown on when Falcon will retire. Starship has not yet flown weekly, let alone daily. Its most recent flight in July ended with a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, a milestone Musk pointed to earlier this month when he said the vehicle’s heat shield problem was effectively solved. SpaceX towed that ship to Christmas Island for inspection, and the next flight, Flight 14, is aimed at putting Starship into orbit for the first time. A tower catch attempt for the upper stage has been pushed back to what Musk has called “a few months” away.
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
The gap between Falcon’s role today and Starship’s promised role tomorrow matters most to NASA. Falcon and its Dragon capsule remain the only way the agency rotates astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and Starship is not certified to carry NASA crews. Musk’s post did not address how that handoff would work if Falcon winds down before a crew-rated Starship variant exists. The timing lines up with Musk’s other recent Starship comments. Two days before the Falcon post, he told a different X user that SpaceX is aiming for more than 30 Starship launches a day by 2030, or roughly 10,000 a year, a figure tied to the Trump administration’s new push for higher national launch cadence. Falcon, which took over a decade to reach its first 100 launches, was never built to approach that kind of volume.
For now, Falcon 9 keeps flying at a near-record pace while Starship works to prove it can do the job Musk has already picked out for it.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
TESLARATI Premium Membership
$19.99 USDStill tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced today that the company will likely attempt to catch the Starship upper stage with its launch tower arms “in a few months.”
In a post on X, Musk wrote, “Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months. If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught.” He added that the first reflight of a Starship vehicle is expected by the end of 2026 or early 2027, describing it as “a fork in the road of history for consciousness reaching the stars.”
Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months. If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught.
First reflight of the ship will be either end of this year or early next. That will be a fork in the… https://t.co/O5g9pqrzyo
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 20, 2026
Musk’s prediction comes amid ongoing progress toward full reusability of the Starship system, a two-stage rocket designed for rapid turnaround and dramatically lower launch costs. Catching the upper stage, known simply as “ship,” with the Mechazilla tower’s mechanical arms would mark a major milestone. It would allow both stages to return directly to the launch site for quick refurbishment and reuse, eliminating the need for ocean recovery.
Musk has previously signaled plans for a ship catch. In July, shortly after SpaceX’s wildly successful Starship 13 mission, he stated that the company would attempt to catch the ship with the tower on the next flight unless problems emerged in the mission data review. Earlier comments also outline conditions such as successful soft ocean landings before attempting a land recovery to minimize risk.
SpaceX has solved Starship’s biggest challenge, Elon Musk says
The latest update from Musk adjusts this timeline to a few months, reflecting the iterative nature of the test campaign.
SpaceX has already demonstrated the tower catch technique successfully with the Super Heavy booster on a couple of occasions. The first successful booster catch occurred during Flight 5 in October 2024, when the massive first stage returned to the Starbase pad in Texas and was plucked from the air by the tower arms.
Additional catches followed on later flights, including Flight 7, proving the concept for the booster and building confidence in the system as a whole.
Achieving a similar catch for the upper stage would represent a significant step forward. The ship returns from much higher speeds and greater heat loads after orbital or near-orbital flight. Success would advance SpaceX’s goal of full and rapid reusability, potentially reducing the cost of access to orbit by a factor of 100 or more and supporting ambitions for frequent satellite deployments, lunar missions, and eventual Mars flights.
Musk has long emphasized that true reusability, refueling rather than discarding hardware, is essential for making humanity a multi-planetary species.
As SpaceX continues refining Starship through successive test flights, the coming months will test whether the ambitious catch timeline can be met. The combination of prior booster successes and improving ship landing precision suggests the company is steadily closing in on this historic capability.
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Tesla will launch Cybercab on September 3
