Welcome to The Bunker News Without the Nonsense. I'm Zoe Grunewold. Has anyone checked in on everyone's

least favourite tech bro recently? Well, Elon Musk is back with a new plan to extend the light

of consciousness to the stars.

Yes, really.

The richest man in the world now wants to merge SpaceX, the rockets and satellite broadband giant

that already dominates low Earth orbit, with his AI lab, XAI, while simultaneously pivoting

Tesla away from traditional electric vehicles and towards

humanoid robots and self-driving taxis. It's ambitious, audacious and undeniably risky.

This isn't just another Musk side quest, but a gamble that ties together his space business,

his AI ambitions and the future of Tesla. In other words, much of his empire is

now riding on whether artificial intelligence turns out to be as transformative and profitable

as he believes. So how realistic is it? Could orbital data centers genuinely give Musk an edge

in the AI arms race? Will Tesla's robot taxis and humanoid machines ever

take to the roads? And what happens if regulators, all reality, decides to slam on the brakes?

Well, to help unpack all of this, we're joined by the Economist's US technology editor, Henry Tricks,

who wrote the recent deep dive on Musk's AI and Space Gambit.

Hello, Henry.

Hi, Zoe.

Okay, take our listeners through exactly what Musk is doing this time.

How is this merger between SpaceX and XAI supposed to work?

And what is the strategy behind it?

So in practice, what he's doing is trying to combine

...