Listen to a podcast that explains why Elon Musk is creating a 'company town' in Texas

How Elon Musk's businesses have shaped Texas' Bastrop County

After deadly wildfires in 2011 burned a significant portion of the county, the tech boom in Austin pushed development eastward. Elon Musk has since made the region a key hub of his businesses, including a Tesla gigafactory considered one of the largest factories in the world by volume. Watch this reporter visit the town to hear the pros and cons of the transformation.

Elon Musk's will to launch: the early days of SpaceX

Radically reducing the cost of rockets and innovating totally new space vehicles originated in the singular force of Elon Musk's vision. In this podcast, Founders creator David Senra shares what he learned reading a book about SpaceX's beginnings, highlighting Musk's audacious refusal to follow industry conventions and promotion of a culture of action and speed. Learn more insights from the founder here.

The Boring Company was created by Elon Musk in 2017

While it started out as a subsidiary of SpaceX, the Boring Company became an independent entity in 2018. Musk started it with the aim of helping reduce city traffic via underground tunnels.

The 'Strong Towns' podcast explores how American cities can become financially resilient

This weekly podcast examines why the way America has built its cities since World War II has left some communities financially fragile—and what local governments can do differently moving forward.

See a timeline of all of Elon Musk's business ventures

From the software company Zip2 in the 1990s to Musk's Twitter acquisition (which he later renamed X), Elon Musk has run, founded, and invested in many different businesses over the past three decades.

Elon Musk is known to sleep under his desk during intense periods of work

The tech company founder and CEO has a wide variety of leadership principles he has kept consistent while building multiple different companies, including eschewing middle management and using the "idiot index," a formula he uses to identify manufacturing inefficiencies.

Starbase is SpaceX's testing ground for their most powerful rocket, Starship

Located near the southernmost part of Texas, the complex includes rocket bays, test pads, the "Rocket Garden" where flown, cancelled, or retired spacecraft are kept. The outdoor seating area of the site's private restaurant is covered in Mk1 Starship prototype flaps.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

Nonstop posting by Elon Musk provides calculated political and brand messaging

For a week in August 2024, Musk posted 650 times, including reactions to far-right influencers; promotion of his AI tool, Grok; and support for controversial political takes. He livestreamed himself playing Diablo IV for hours during that same week.

Why can't we just turn the empty offices into apartments?

As both rent prices and mortgage rates rise across the US, many companies have simultaneously continued operating hybrid or remote workforces post-pandemic. A podcast episode dives into why city dwellers aren't all living in their prepandemic break rooms just yet.

California startup Rivian has attracted disillusioned Tesla owners

Some electric vehicle buyers frustrated by Elon Musk's antics have been won over by the adventure-focused company, which has received a $5B investment from the Volkswagen Group to develop crossover and hatchback models with solid-state batteries.

Billionaires are racing to space to control future markets

Although different companies have described focuses ranging from luxury tourism to Martian space colonies, all are building infrastructure to capitalize on the shift away from government-only control and betting big on reusability and scale. By securing public contracts and subsidies, they aim to develop strategic partnerships toward dominance in low Earth orbit.

Take a drone tour of a Tesla factory

The first of Tesla's large-scale European manufacturing plants for its electric vehicles was opened in Berlin in 2022. It—along with other facilities in Nevada, New York, Texas, and Shanghai—collectively manufactures solar panels, batteries, and other energy collection and storage products.

The crypto city home to biohacking experiments

The DIY nature of biohacking gives the work an entrepreneurial feel, as seen by the emergence of community labs, at-home testing kits, and corporation-backed cities that don't necessarily require government-approved testing standards. Próspera, Honduras, created by a business of the same (first) name, was born from legislation that allowed international businesses to shave off a slice of the country to establish their own micronations.

The history and success of the mysterious Mars Inc.

Mars, Incorporated manufactures some of the world’s favorite treats, including M&M’s, Snickers, and Milky Way bars. Despite their success, you’ve probably not heard of them. The privately held company is largely unknown to the world despite being owned by the second-richest family in the US. This podcast discusses the mysterious Mars family and their remarkable entrepreneurial feat. Listen to uncover more.

One office park had an outsized role in the birth of Silicon Valley

Developed in 1951, Stanford Research Park was more than just a pioneering suburban office park. It would go on to catalyze Silicon Valley's tech ecosystem as a whole.

Massive 3D printers have been used to build homes by stacking layers of 'concrete toothpaste,' a fire-resistant material that effectively insulates against outside noise.

'Ghost towns' are rarely known for ghost sightings

Instead, they're places an industry has abandoned, leaving many of the town's buildings decrepit and abandoned. That doesn't mean they're completely empty; some folks prefer the pace and look of ghost towns, which often lean into their Old West aesthetics. The Vox documentary explores ghost towns in Nevada, which is home to more than 600.

What’s up with the new Texas Stock Exchange?

The two biggest stock exchanges in the U.S. are both based in New York—the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq. But a potential new “Texas Stock Exchange”—which would be based in, you guessed it, Texas—could change that. To find out more about the project, backed by enormous companies such as BlackRock and Citadel, watch this video.

Indian Creek Village: the exclusive billionaire island

Off the coast of Miami lies an island called Indian Creek Village. Spanning around 300 acres, the island is home to a few dozen homes owned by celebrities, sports stars, and tech founders. Only residents and verified visitors can enter this private space, protected by its own police force. Listen to this podcast episode for more information about the private island and why the wealthy love it.

Larry Harvey wanted an authentic, creative community when he founded Burning Man

Larry Harvey, the co-founder of Burning Man, wanted to create a bohemian retreat from everyday society by offering a break from commercialization while providing time to focus on autonomy, shared experience, and "transcendence."

New York artist Donald Judd turned Marfa, Texas, into an artists' haven

In 1971, Judd arrived in the West Texas hamlet in the brutal high desert, not far from Big Bend National Park. He acquired 22 buildings, repurposing them and inviting other artists to create on-site installations. Today, the Donald Judd Historic District is part of the National Register of Historic Places.

Should companies be owned by their workers?

In the last half-century, so-called private equity has transformed industries by purchasing private companies, cutting costs, loading up debt, and then selling the business at a premium—all at a huge profit to the investors. Workers, on the other hand, are often left with nothing. Listen to how both pro-worker economists and a private equity stalwart are trying to shift ownership to workers—a growing tactic proven to improve worker satisfaction and company value.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

Imagining the best places to live on Mars

Because conditions on Mars are pretty extreme for humanity, we tend not to think about living there, since everywhere on Mars feels a bit threatening. This imaginative essay uses current geographical knowledge of Mars to visualize what it would look like if humanity could alter its climate to make it widely habitable, a process known to sci-fi readers as terraforming. Given that transformation, where would the hottest neighborhoods be located?

Massive 3D printers have been used to build homes by stacking layers of 'concrete toothpaste,' a fire-resistant material that effectively insulates against outside noise.

Watch a video about Greenfield Village, Henry Ford's recreation of an ideal American town

Henry Ford designed Greenfield Village, an open-air museum with restorations of historic buildings, that represented Ford's idealization of what a simple American life should look like. Among the most notable buildings in the village are Ford's childhood home and a recreation of the one-room country schoolhouse Ford attended through the sixth grade.

Tour Tencent's sprawling headquarters focused on tech and health

Tencent has a massive headquarters in China to match its sizable market capitalization. Featuring 40% less carbon consumption and emissions, the building features facial recognition for security, swimming pools and a fitness track, time management apps, and more.

Watch this video that uses Lego bricks to explain how venture capital works.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley' is infamous for having some of the highest industrial pollution, toxic air emissions, and cancer risks in the US.

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

Discover the catastrophic consequences of a failure of the US electrical grid—something that is more likely than many Americans think.

See how Budweiser's famous Clydesdales spend their days at Warm Springs Ranch, where roughly 70 to 80 of the beer brand's giant horses can be found at any given time.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital that was home to an estimated population of 200,000 to 400,000.

Planeterrellas create artificial auroras that mimic the atmospheric displays of light by setting up an electric field between two metal balls in a jar filled with a small amount of air.

Some Pokémon have been named after real and fictional organisms, while some real-world species have been named after Pokémon, such as Chilicola charizard and Binburrum zapdos.

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

Read a deep dive on the 'all-purpose healing' peptide BPC-157.

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

For centuries, it was common to sleep in two shifts: a few hours at the beginning of the night, and a longer period beginning around midnight

Quincy Jones' 'Big Band Bossa Nova' helped introduce bossa nova—a jazz-influenced Brazilian genre—to the US