Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) has unveiled a dramatic demonstration of its long-awaited Roadster, showcasing technology borrowed directly from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket program.
The vehicle performed a series of jaw-dropping maneuvers, including driving upside down on a ramp, launching itself into the air, and landing without damage, at a pre-launch event last week.
Three distinct engineering systems make the feat possible: a powerful underbelly fan suction system generating up to 4,700 kilograms of downward force, SpaceX-derived compressed gas thrusters, and deployable aerodynamic wings.
The car is fitted with approximately 10 thrusters containing highly pressurized compressed gas stored in spherical tanks, the same thruster design used on SpaceX’s Falcon 9, with zero fuel or petroleum involved.
The suction system alone produces roughly 4.7 tons of force, equivalent to two G’s, enough to keep the vehicle adhered to any surface even when positioned perpendicular to the ground.
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster’s commercial release is expected sometime in 2028, with pricing structured around a $50,000 deposit for the performance version and a $250,000 deposit for the thrust version.
The demonstration has intensified speculation that Tesla and SpaceX could formally merge, with the rumor mill pointing to a possible announcement as early as December, which would create the fifth largest company in the world by combined valuation.
The most likely deal structure being discussed has SpaceX acquiring Tesla in an all-stock transaction, with Tesla shareholders receiving approximately 0.7 SpaceX shares per Tesla share plus a premium, according to circulating reports.
Barclays has noted that under such a structure, Musk would own roughly 37% of the combined entity with approximately 56% voting power.
Separately, Anthropic reported third-quarter revenue of $16.8 billion, a 45% increase from the prior quarter’s $11.5 billion, though some investors have interpreted the sequential slowdown as a bearish signal heading into the company’s anticipated IPO.
Anthropic is targeting an IPO roadshow beginning November 1st at a projected $2.2 trillion valuation, a figure that dwarfs Dario Anthropic’s earlier annual revenue prediction of $10 billion made at the start of the year.
Critics have attributed some of Anthropic’s slowing growth to enterprise customers migrating toward OpenAI’s Codex coding model, which has improved significantly over the past six months.
On the open-source front, Meta (NASDAQ: META) has released its Muse Spark 1.3 model to the public, an 816 billion parameter agentic reasoning and coding model built in partnership with Apple and capable of running on the latest Mac Studio.
Alexander Wang noted the model’s impressive scale, with benchmarks showing particular strength in general knowledge tasks and long-horizon agentic work, with a 40 to 50% success rate on multi-day tasks.
Meta has now released seven new models in the past three months, roughly one every 11 to 13 days, a remarkable pace for a lab that was considered significantly behind frontier competitors just a year ago.
Google’s Gemini 4 model, named Argan, has also launched to generally positive reviews, with Ethan Molech describing it as “a big jump over previous Gemini models” and “the first non-OpenAI Anthropic model to pass the fable Mythos Astrobar.”
Justine Moore of A16Z highlighted Gemini 4’s strong visual intelligence capabilities as a standout feature of the new release.
The convergence of Tesla’s rocket-inspired engineering, Anthropic’s explosive revenue growth, Meta’s open-source resurgence, and Google’s model comeback marks a defining period across both the automotive and artificial intelligence industries.
