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Tesla's larger cylindrical battery cell, measuring 46 millimeters wide and 80 millimeters tall, designed to store more energy while costing less to make than the smaller cells it replaces. Its size and tabless design let it deliver more power without overheating.
A low-voltage electrical system running at 48 volts instead of the traditional 12 volts, which lets wires be thinner and lighter while carrying the same power. Tesla adopted it in the Cybertruck to simplify wiring across the vehicle.
A way to protect a rocket engine from heat by letting an inner lining slowly char and burn away. Early Merlin engines used it before SpaceX switched to circulating cold propellant around the chamber instead.
The sharp, brief electrical pulse a neuron fires when it sends a signal, often called a spike. Neuralink's chip detects and counts these spikes to figure out what a person is trying to do.
A large, reliable buyer whose committed orders give a young company the steady revenue it needs to invest and scale. NASA served as this kind of customer for SpaceX through its cargo and crew contracts.
The negative electrode of a battery, the side that stores charge while the cell is full. Tesla's 4680 cell uses a silicon-rich anode because silicon holds more lithium than the usual graphite.
The high and low points of an orbit, where apogee is the farthest a spacecraft swings from Earth and perigee the closest. Raising the perigee is how a satellite parked in a stretched transfer orbit gradually circularizes into its final path.
A custom chip built to do one job extremely efficiently. Neuralink designs its own ASICs to amplify and digitize thousands of faint neural signals inside the implant while sipping very little power.
Tesla's software platform that automatically trades electricity from a fleet of batteries on wholesale power markets, deciding moment to moment when to charge or sell. It lets a Megapack installation earn revenue without a human trader.
The ability of a spacecraft to approach and connect to a space station on its own, without an astronaut flying it in by hand. Crew Dragon docks autonomously with the International Space Station, though the crew can take over if needed.
A robotic barge, such as Of Course I Still Love You, stationed far out at sea so a Falcon 9 booster can land on it when a mission has too little leftover fuel to fly back to land. Landing at sea preserves more of the rocket's speed for the payload while still recovering the stage.
An engineering scale, defined by the body SAE International, that rates how much a car drives on its own across six rungs from zero to full. Tesla's systems remain at Level 2, meaning the car assists but a human must stay ready to take over.
Tesla's 2020 investor event where it unveiled the 4680 cell, the structural pack, dry electrode plans, and a roadmap to cut battery cost per kilowatt-hour. It laid out the technologies meant to enable a cheaper mass-market car.
The electronics and software that watch over a battery pack, tracking each cell's voltage and temperature to keep it safe and balanced. It decides how fast a car or storage unit can charge and discharge without damage.
Recovering valuable metals such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt from worn-out cells so they can be used to build new ones. Tesla and its former battery chief's company Redwood Materials aim to close this loop and reduce mining.
A standardized test used to compare AI models on tasks like math, coding, or general knowledge. xAI reports Grok's scores on public benchmarks to show how it stacks up against rival models.
How well an implanted material coexists with living tissue without triggering harmful inflammation or rejection. Neuralink uses flexible polymers and a sealed casing so the body tolerates the device for years.
A Tesla cabin air setting that runs the car's large HEPA filter at full power to scrub particulates and pathogens from incoming air. It is offered on the Model S and Model X.
A rocket firing that flips a Falcon 9 first stage around and pushes it back toward the launch site after it separates from the upper stage. It is the first of several controlled burns that turn a spent booster into a returning, landable vehicle.
The single slowest step that limits how fast an entire process can run, so that fixing anything else changes nothing until it is addressed. Elon Musk's factories focus effort on finding and widening the current bottleneck.
A system that reads electrical signals from neurons and translates them into commands a computer or device can use. Neuralink's N1 is a fully implanted BCI that sits in the skull and reads the brain without wires breaking the skin.
The decisions a company's leaders make about where to spend its money, whether on new factories, research, paying down debt, or returning cash to shareholders. How well a company allocates capital largely determines its long-run value.
A motor rotor wrapped in a carbon-fiber sleeve so it can spin at very high speed without the magnets flying apart. Tesla uses this in its Plaid motors to reach higher revolutions and more power.
The uncrewed version of SpaceX's Dragon capsule that hauls supplies, experiments, and equipment to the International Space Station and returns cargo to Earth. It was the first commercial spacecraft to visit the station.
The positive electrode of a battery, the side electrons flow toward as the cell discharges. Its chemistry, such as a high-nickel mix, largely sets a cell's energy and cost.
A battery construction that skips the intermediate module level and places cells directly into the pack, saving weight and space. It is closely related to Tesla's structural pack approach.
How hard the burning gases press inside a rocket engine's combustion chamber, measured in bar. Higher pressure generally means more thrust from a given size, and Raptor's roughly 300 to 350 bar is among the highest ever flown.
A single line of data from one electrode site streaming a neuron's activity. The number of channels, over a thousand in Neuralink's implant, sets how much of the brain it can listen to at once.
A stretch of flight where a rocket's engines are shut off and the vehicle simply glides along its path, often to line up the right moment for the next burn. Falcon 9 upper stages sometimes coast for a long period before reigniting to place a satellite in its final orbit.
How far a vehicle keeps rolling when power is cut, a measure of aerodynamic drag and friction losses that directly affects range. Tesla tunes body shape and drivetrain to reduce these losses.
A small jet that steers a rocket by releasing puffs of pressurized gas, usually nitrogen, rather than burning fuel. Falcon 9 uses them to rotate and orient the booster in the near-vacuum where its aerodynamic fins have nothing to push against.
The name of xAI's giant supercomputer cluster in Memphis, Tennessee, built to train the Grok models. It was assembled in a matter of months and grew to hundreds of thousands of connected GPUs.
A NASA effort that paid private companies to build spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the space station, ending U.S. reliance on Russian rockets. SpaceX's Crew Dragon was the first vehicle certified under it to carry astronauts.
A single shared wall separating the fuel and oxidizer tanks inside a rocket stage, rather than two tanks with a gap between them. Merging them into one structure saves length and weight, a trick SpaceX uses in the Falcon 9 second stage.
A crowd-sourced fact-checking feature on X where volunteer contributors add context to misleading posts, shown publicly only when people who usually disagree rate a note as helpful. It replaced top-down moderation for many disputed claims.
A heavy-duty electrically controlled switch that connects or isolates the high-voltage battery from the rest of an electric car. It snaps open in a crash or fault to make the vehicle electrically safe.
How much text an AI model can hold in mind at once, measured in tokens. A larger context window lets a model read a whole contract or long document in a single pass.
Boring a tunnel and installing its supporting wall segments at the same time, rather than alternating between digging and stopping to build the lining. The Boring Company treats this as a key way to speed up tunneling and cut cost per mile.
The surgical step of removing a small piece of skull to reach the brain beneath. Neuralink's procedure cuts a coin-sized opening so the implant can sit flush where the bone was.
X's program that pays users a share of revenue based on the engagement their posts earn, meant to keep popular accounts posting on the platform. Payouts are tied to activity from other paying subscribers.
Rocket fuel or oxidizer chilled to extremely low temperatures so it becomes a dense liquid that fits more energy into a tank. Liquid oxygen and liquid methane are both cryogenic, which is why Starship vents wisps of vapor as it sits on the pad.
The large rotating disc at the front of a tunnel boring machine, studded with cutting tools that grind through earth and rock as it turns. Its diameter sets how wide the finished tunnel will be.
Tesla's purpose-built two-seat robotaxi, unveiled in 2024, designed with no steering wheel or pedals and built for autonomous ride-hailing. It is meant to be produced cheaply using the company's unboxed assembly method.
The number of times a battery can be fully charged and drained before its capacity drops to a set fraction of new, often 80 percent. Chemistries like lithium iron phosphate are chosen for storage partly because they last far more cycles.
A Grok feature that searches the live web and X posts in real time before answering, rather than relying only on what it learned during training. It lets the model pull in current events and fresh information.
The number of independent ways a joint or mechanism can move. A robot hand with more degrees of freedom can grip and manipulate objects more like a human hand.
The step in Elon Musk's process that pushes engineers to remove parts and steps aggressively, on the logic that the best part is no part at all. He advises deleting so much that you must add roughly a tenth of it back, or you did not cut deeply enough.
The total change in velocity a rocket can deliver, the fundamental budget that decides whether a mission can reach orbit, the Moon, or Mars. Every maneuver spends part of this budget, which is why refueling Starship in orbit stretches how far it can go.
A fee on a commercial electricity bill based on the single highest burst of power a customer draws, not the total energy used. Businesses install batteries to shave that momentary peak and cut the charge.
Deliberately lowering a satellite so it reenters the atmosphere and burns up at the end of its life. Starlink satellites are designed to deorbit within a few years to avoid becoming long-lived space junk.
An engine firing that slows a spacecraft just enough to drop out of orbit and fall back into the atmosphere on purpose. Crew Dragon performs one before returning astronauts, and SpaceX plans a controlled deorbit burn to safely retire the International Space Station.
How much of a battery's stored energy is used before recharging, given as a percentage of its full capacity. Draining a battery less deeply on each cycle generally makes it last for more cycles overall.
Designing a product from the start so it is easy and cheap to build at scale, rather than perfecting the design and only later worrying about production. Elon Musk treats the factory as the harder engineering problem than the product.
A Starlink capability that lets ordinary, unmodified mobile phones connect straight to satellites for texting and basic data in areas with no cell towers. The satellites act like a cell tower in space for partner carriers.
A moment when a human driver or safety monitor takes control back from a self-driving system. Disengagement rates are a common yardstick for how reliable an autonomous system is.
A small maneuvering engine used on the Dragon spacecraft to adjust its orbit and approach the space station. A cluster of Dracos lets the capsule steer precisely during docking.
SpaceX's reusable spacecraft that rides atop a Falcon 9 to carry cargo or crew to orbit. It comes in a cargo version for resupplying the space station and Crew Dragon for astronauts.
A way of making battery electrodes without the wet solvents and long drying ovens of the usual process, applying the active material as a dry powder film. Tesla pursued it for the 4680 cell to shrink factory size and cost.
A drivetrain with one electric motor on each axle, giving all-wheel drive and letting the car send power to whichever end has grip. Tesla can tune the front and rear motors separately for efficiency or performance.
A way of recording brain activity from a grid of electrodes laid on the surface of the brain rather than poked into it. It captures stronger, steadier signals than a scalp reading but less detail than Neuralink's penetrating threads.
A tiny conductor placed near neurons to pick up their electrical signals or to deliver stimulation. Neuralink threads carry many such electrodes so a single implant can listen to hundreds of points in the brain at once.
Reading the brain's electrical activity through sensors placed on the scalp, without any surgery. It is the least invasive brain-signal method but gives a blurry picture compared with an implant sitting on or in the brain.
The liquid or gel inside a battery that lets lithium ions travel between the two electrodes while blocking electrons from taking the same path. Its makeup affects how fast, cold, and safely a cell can operate.
A self-driving design where a single trained network takes in camera images and outputs driving controls directly, instead of chaining separate hand-coded modules. Tesla rebuilt its Full Self-Driving software this way starting with version 12.
Buying or storing electricity when it is cheap and selling it back when prices rise. Battery systems like Megapack earn revenue by charging during low-price hours and discharging during expensive peak demand.
How much energy a battery stores for its weight or volume, usually given in watt-hours per kilogram or per liter. Higher energy density means a car can go farther, or a phone last longer, without getting heavier.
A short engine firing a returning booster performs high in the atmosphere to slow the descent and shield its engines from the worst of the reentry heating. Without it the fast-falling stage would be torn apart before it could land.
A required federal study of how a project would affect the environment before the government approves it, mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act. SpaceX's Starbase launches and expansions must clear this review, which can delay flight schedules.
A design where the outer body panels carry the structural load rather than a separate internal frame. The Cybertruck uses a stainless steel exoskeleton, which is part of why its body is so angular.
Flying a normally reusable rocket without saving any part of it, sacrificing the booster and its recovery hardware so all the fuel goes toward lifting a heavier payload. SpaceX charges more for expending a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy core on demanding missions.
A government contract that reimburses a supplier for its actual costs and adds a fee on top, so the supplier is paid more when a project costs more. SpaceX has argued that fixed-price contracts, which pay a set amount regardless of cost, better reward efficiency.
A later training step that takes a general pretrained model and adjusts it on narrower, higher-quality data to sharpen a specific skill or behavior. It is far cheaper than pretraining because it touches far less data.
A way of reasoning that breaks a problem down to its most basic, certain truths and builds an answer up from there, rather than copying how things have always been done. Elon Musk has cited it as the core method behind SpaceX and Tesla.
A government agreement that pays a supplier a set amount to deliver a result, leaving the supplier to absorb any cost overruns. SpaceX has used fixed-price NASA contracts, which reward companies that keep their own costs down.
Improving self-driving software by gathering real-world driving data from the whole fleet of cars on the road and using it to train better models. Tesla's millions of vehicles act as a data-collection network for this purpose.
Safety equipment that can destroy a rocket in mid-flight if it veers off course and threatens people on the ground. SpaceX uses an autonomous version that decides on its own, without waiting for a ground controller, letting launches happen with less overhead.
The basic arithmetic steps a chip performs, used to measure the raw computing effort poured into training an AI model. The total FLOPs spent on a training run is a common yardstick for how large and expensive that run was.
The algorithmically ranked stream of posts X shows a user by default, chosen by software rather than strict chronological order. X open-sourced parts of the code that decides what appears there.
Keeping the electrical grid's alternating-current cycles steady at their target rate, such as 50 or 60 hertz. Fast-responding batteries are paid to inject or absorb power in fractions of a second to hold frequency stable.
The front trunk of an electric car, a storage compartment under the hood made possible because there is no engine there. Tesla vehicles use the frunk for extra cargo space.
Tesla's camera-based driver-assistance software that can steer, brake, accelerate, and handle intersections and turns. Despite the name, it legally still requires an attentive human ready to take over, so Tesla labels the consumer version Supervised.
An efficient but very hard to build rocket engine cycle that routes all of the fuel and all of the oxidizer through two preburners before the main chamber, wasting almost no propellant. Raptor is the first engine of this type ever to fly.
A digitally defined boundary that limits where a service is allowed to operate. Tesla's early Robotaxi rides ran only inside a roughly 20-square-mile geofence in Austin.
An orbit about 36,000 kilometers up where a satellite circles Earth at the same rate the planet turns, so it appears to hover over one spot. Reaching it carries far less payload than a low orbit, which is why heavy-lift rockets matter for these missions.
A stretched, egg-shaped orbit that a rocket drops a satellite into as a stepping stone, from which the satellite then climbs to its final perch high above the equator. Delivering to this orbit is a common yardstick for a rocket's heavy-lift muscle.
The very large high-pressure die-casting machine, supplied to Tesla by firms like IDRA, that produces gigacast underbody sections. Some clamp with roughly 6,000 to 9,000 tons of force, enough to cast a full rear body module in about ninety seconds.
A manufacturing method where a huge die-casting machine molds a large section of a car's underbody as one single aluminum piece, replacing dozens of separate stamped and welded parts. Tesla pioneered it to cut cost, weight, and assembly time on the Model Y and later vehicles.
A single very large plant that makes batteries and vehicles at enormous scale, named for the giga prefix meaning one billion. The idea is that one factory can rival an entire industry's prior output and drive down cost per unit.
A unit of energy equal to one billion watt-hours, used to size battery factories and large storage projects. A single gigawatt-hour is roughly enough to power tens of thousands of homes for a day.
To swivel a rocket engine slightly so its thrust can steer the vehicle. On Super Heavy, the inner ring of engines gimbals to point the rocket while the outer engines stay fixed.
The buildup of scar-like tissue the brain forms around a foreign object, which can gradually wall off an implant and weaken its signal. Neuralink's thin, flexible threads aim to provoke less of this response than rigid electrodes.
A specialized chip, originally built for graphics, that excels at the heavy parallel math used to train and run large AI models. xAI's Colossus supercomputers are built from hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs.
An extra block of shares that underwriters can sell beyond the planned amount of a stock offering if demand is strong. Exercising the full greenshoe lets a company raise more money than first announced.
Waffle-patterned steering surfaces that fold out from the top of a Falcon 9 booster as it falls back through the atmosphere, letting it steer toward a precise landing spot. SpaceX switched to titanium grid fins so they could survive the reentry heat and be reused without refurbishment.
Paid tasks that batteries and other resources perform to help keep the electrical grid stable, such as smoothing frequency or covering sudden shortfalls. Selling these services is a major way large storage projects earn money.
The first large language model released by xAI, launched in 2023 and later opened for others to use. It established the Grok line of chatbots that answer questions inside the X platform.
An online encyclopedia produced by xAI whose articles are written and maintained by Grok rather than human volunteer editors. It is pitched as an AI-generated alternative to traditional crowd-edited reference sites.
A cluster of large dish antennas on the ground that links Starlink satellites to the internet backbone through fiber. Traffic from a user's dish hops to a satellite and then down to the nearest gateway to reach the wider internet.
A small electric engine on each Starlink satellite that uses charged gas to nudge its position and raise or lower its orbit. SpaceX has flown versions using krypton and later argon as the propellant.
When an AI model produces a confident answer that is simply wrong. Reducing the hallucination rate is a key measure of how trustworthy a model has become.
The generation of Tesla's self-driving computer, first shipped in 2019, built around two of Tesla's own AI chips for redundancy. It replaced Nvidia-based hardware and runs the car's neural networks on board.
The upgraded Tesla self-driving computer introduced around 2023, paired with higher-resolution cameras and more processing power than Hardware 3. It gives newer vehicles more headroom to run larger self-driving models.
An engineering approach that builds and tests many physical prototypes rather than trying to perfect a design on paper first, accepting that some will fail. SpaceX applies it to Starship, flying and losing vehicles to learn quickly.
A climate system that moves heat rather than generating it with a resistive heater, drawing warmth from the outside air and the car's own components. Tesla introduced it to improve cold-weather range.
The protective layer that keeps a spacecraft or rocket from burning up as it reenters the atmosphere at high speed. A lander like Starship HLS that never reenters Earth's atmosphere can drop the heat shield entirely to save weight.
The large Tesla battery installation in South Australia, built with Powerpacks after Elon Musk's public bet to deliver it within 100 days. It proved grid batteries could respond to outages far faster than conventional plants.
Igniting a rocket's upper-stage engines while it is still attached to the lower stage, so the exhaust helps push the two apart. Starship adopted hot staging, adding a vented ring at the top of Super Heavy to let the fiery gases escape during separation.
A working culture where the best argument wins regardless of who makes it, so a junior engineer can overrule seniority with better reasoning and evidence. It is meant to keep decisions grounded in physics and data rather than rank.
A metric Elon Musk uses for the ratio of a finished part's cost to the cost of its raw materials. A high ratio signals that the design or manufacturing, not the materials, is where the money is being wasted.
Political spending on advertising that openly supports or opposes a candidate but is made without coordinating with that candidate's campaign. It is the main way a super PAC influences an election.
An electric motor that creates its rotating magnetic field by inducing current in the rotor, using no permanent magnets or rare-earth metals. Tesla used induction motors in the original Roadster and Model S, valuing their high-power output.
Running an already-trained neural network to make decisions in real time, as opposed to the separate, data-center process of training the network in the first place. Tesla's in-car AI chips perform inference to drive the vehicle.
A very high-speed networking technology that links thousands of GPUs so they can share data fast enough to train one model together. Without this kind of fabric, a large cluster's chips would sit idle waiting on each other.
The fee a merchant pays on every card transaction, split among the banks and networks that process the payment. Capturing interchange is part of how a payments product like X Money makes money.
United States rules that restrict sharing rocket, satellite, and other defense-related technology with foreign nationals, under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. They shape who SpaceX can hire and what technical details it can disclose.
The device that converts a battery's direct current into the alternating current the grid and home appliances use, and often back again. It is a core component inside products like Powerwall, Powerpack, and Megapack.
A U.S. regulatory approval that lets a company test an unapproved medical device in people under a controlled clinical trial. Neuralink needed one from the Food and Drug Administration before it could implant its device in its first human volunteers.
A rating meaning a device is sealed against dust and can survive being submerged in water briefly, so it can sit outdoors in rough weather. Powerwall carries an IP67 rating for outdoor installation.
A battery or solar system's ability to keep powering a home on its own when the wider grid goes down, disconnecting cleanly so it does not feed the dead lines. It is what lets a Powerwall run a house through a blackout.
A higher-frequency radio band around 27 to 40 gigahertz that Starlink uses for the high-capacity links between satellites and ground stations. Its wider bandwidth carries more data but is more easily degraded by heavy rain.
A unit of power equal to one thousand watts, used to rate how much work an electric motor can do; roughly 0.75 kilowatts equals one horsepower. Electric-car motor and charger outputs are commonly quoted in kilowatts.
A unit of stored or used energy, roughly the amount a microwave draws running for about an hour. It is the standard way to measure the capacity of electric-car and home batteries.
A slice of radio spectrum in the roughly 12 to 18 gigahertz range that Starlink uses for the main link between user dishes and satellites. It balances good data capacity against reasonable resistance to rain interference.
The final engine firing that slows a descending booster from high speed to a near standstill just as it touches down. Because the rocket is nearly empty and light by then, even a single throttled engine produces enough thrust to hover, a tricky balance SpaceX calls a suicide burn.
The deployable supports that swing out from the base of a Falcon 9 booster just before touchdown so it can stand upright after landing. They fold flat against the rocket during flight and lock into place only in the final seconds of descent.
An AI system trained on vast amounts of text to predict and generate human-like language. Grok is built on a large language model, as are the systems that write Grokipedia articles.
An optical connection that lets Starlink satellites relay data to one another through space using lasers instead of radio. This lets the network carry traffic over oceans and remote areas where no ground station is nearby.
The formal permission a rocket operator must obtain from aviation regulators before each launch or set of launches. The Federal Aviation Administration issues these licenses and can ground flights while it investigates an anomaly.
Piping coolant directly to the chips instead of relying on fans and air, needed because dense racks of AI GPUs give off far more heat than ordinary servers. Colossus uses liquid cooling to pack its GPUs tightly.
A lower-cost, durable battery chemistry that trades some energy density for safety and longevity. It is widely used in stationary storage like Megapack and in lower-priced vehicle trims.
A rechargeable battery that moves lithium ions between its electrodes to store and release energy, packing high energy into low weight. It is the chemistry behind Tesla's cars and home storage products.
An underground transit system where individual Tesla vehicles carry passengers through small tunnels directly from station to station without intermediate stops. The Boring Company designed it to move people point to point rather than in large trains that halt at every station.
The band of space a few hundred kilometers above Earth where most satellites and crewed stations operate. It is the easiest orbit to reach, so rockets can carry their heaviest payloads there.
The point early in a launch where the combination of speed and thick lower atmosphere presses hardest on the rocket's structure. Vehicles often throttle their engines down through this stretch to keep the aerodynamic stress within safe limits.
The nickname for the launch tower's two mechanical arms that catch a returning Super Heavy booster in mid-air. Catching the booster at the pad lets it be inspected and reflown quickly without legs or a separate landing site.
Tesla's large, pre-assembled grid battery, delivered as a container-sized unit that stores several megawatt-hours of electricity. Utilities line up dozens or hundreds of them to store solar and wind power and steady the grid.
The upper-stage version of the Merlin engine, fitted with a large bell-shaped nozzle tuned for the emptiness of space where a wider nozzle squeezes out more efficiency. A single MVac pushes the Falcon 9 second stage the rest of the way to orbit.
The fuel combination of liquid methane and liquid oxygen used by SpaceX's Raptor engine. Methane is chosen partly because it could one day be manufactured on Mars from local resources.
An AI model design that routes each piece of input through only a small fraction of the network, activating a few specialized parts rather than the whole, to save computing power. Grok uses this structure, activating two of eight experts per token.
The strip of brain that plans and commands voluntary movement. Neuralink places its first implants here so that a paralyzed person's intended hand movements can be read out and turned into cursor control.
The soil, rock, and debris a tunnel boring machine excavates as it digs. Handling and removing muck is one of the slowest parts of tunneling, so The Boring Company works to process it faster and even reuse it in bricks.
An AI model that can take in and reason about more than one kind of input, such as text and images together, rather than text alone. Grok gained the ability to see and describe pictures as it became multimodal.
Tesla's electric-vehicle charging connector, which has spread to become the de facto standard across North America after rival automakers adopted it. Other regions use different plugs such as CCS2 in Europe and GB/T in China.
The process of translating patterns of neuron firing into a meaningful output, such as the direction a person wants to move a cursor. Software on the implant and paired device learns each user's brain signals to make the decoding accurate.
A concept for extremely small wireless sensors, envisioned as barely larger than specks of dust, scattered to record activity deep in the body or brain. It represents one long-term direction for shrinking brain implants beyond today's threaded designs.
A computing system loosely modeled on the brain that learns patterns from data, used for tasks like recognizing objects or driving. Tesla's self-driving relies on neural networks running on its in-car chips.
A nerve cell that carries information through the brain and body by firing brief electrical pulses. Neuralink's implant works by listening in on the electrical activity of individual neurons near its electrodes.
Delivering small electrical pulses to nerve or brain tissue to influence its activity, rather than only listening to it. Neuralink's electrodes are designed to both record and stimulate, which underpins its plans to restore vision or movement.
A high-nickel cathode chemistry that packs a lot of energy into each cell, long used in Tesla's longer-range vehicles. Its high energy density comes at the cost of relying on scarce cobalt and nickel.
A widely used cathode chemistry that balances energy, power, and cost by blending nickel, manganese, and cobalt. Automakers tune the ratio of the three metals to favor either range or cost.
A high-end Nvidia data-center GPU widely used to train large AI models, prized for its speed on the matrix math that neural networks demand. xAI's first Colossus build was assembled largely from H100 chips.
A neural network in Tesla's self-driving stack that builds a live three-dimensional map of which spaces around the car are filled by objects, even ones it cannot classify. It helps the car avoid obstacles it has never seen a label for.
The structural frame at the base of a Falcon 9 booster that arranges its nine Merlin engines in a circle of eight around one center engine. The layout packs the engines tightly while making them easier to install and protect from one another.
An integrated eight-way valve at the heart of Tesla's heat-pump climate system that routes coolant between the cabin, battery, and motors as needed. It lets the car scavenge waste heat to warm the cabin efficiently in cold weather.
The tilt of a satellite's orbit relative to the equator, which sets how far north and south it passes over the Earth. Higher inclination shells let Starlink cover polar regions that lower-tilt orbits miss.
A defined altitude and set of inclinations at which a batch of satellites is placed to form part of a constellation. Starlink spreads its satellites across several orbital shells to tune coverage over different latitudes.
The speed a spacecraft must reach, roughly 28,000 kilometers per hour in low orbit, so that its forward motion balances Earth's gravity and it keeps falling around the planet instead of back down. Reaching this speed, not just altitude, is the hard part of getting to orbit.
The amount of electricity a data center can draw from the grid, a hard limit on how many power-hungry GPUs it can run. Securing enough of it, plus on-site generation, is a central constraint on building AI supercomputers.
The numerical values inside a neural network that get adjusted during training and hold everything the model has learned. Model size is often quoted by parameter count, with larger counts generally allowing more capability.
The useful cargo a rocket carries to orbit, such as satellites, crew, or supplies, separate from the rocket and fuel. How much payload a rocket can lift falls sharply for higher or more distant orbits.
The clamshell nose cone that shields a satellite from wind and heat during the climb through the atmosphere, then splits open and drops away once the rocket reaches space. SpaceX recovers fairing halves from the ocean and reflies them to cut costs.
Using a battery to supply power during the hours when demand and prices are highest, so a home or business draws less from the grid at those times. It lowers bills where utilities charge extra for peak usage.
Sending money directly from one person to another, the way apps like Venmo work, without writing a check or visiting a bank. X Money is built to let users send peer-to-peer payments inside the X app.
A plug that passes through the skin to wire a brain implant to outside equipment, used in earlier research systems. Neuralink deliberately avoids one, sealing everything under the skin to cut infection risk and let the device charge and transmit wirelessly.
An electric motor whose rotor carries fixed magnets, typically made with rare-earth elements, giving high efficiency especially at everyday cruising speeds. Tesla adopted this type for the Model 3 to extend range.
An antenna that steers its signal electronically, with no moving parts, by coordinating many small elements. SpaceX uses phased array antennas so satellites can lock onto ordinary phones moving relative to satellites overhead.
The physical process by which certain materials, chiefly silicon, turn sunlight directly into electric current when light knocks electrons loose. It is the basic principle behind every solar panel and Solar Roof tile.
Tesla's three-motor performance drivetrain, with two motors at the rear and one at the front, used in the top Model S and Model X. The name and layout let the car deliver its quickest acceleration figures.
A facility where Starlink's network connects into the public internet and exchanges traffic with other providers. Gateways route data to a nearby point of presence so users appear on the internet from that location.
A tunneling technique where the boring machine dives down from the surface, digs the tunnel, then angles back up to the surface at the far end, like a porpoise breaking the water. It removes the need for large, expensive launch and extraction pits.
A ratio that measures how much of a data center's electricity actually reaches the computing chips versus how much is lost to cooling and overhead. A value near one means almost all the power does useful work.
Tesla's earlier commercial and utility-scale battery, sold as a modular cabinet before the larger Megapack largely replaced it. It was the storage unit behind Tesla's early grid projects such as the one in South Australia.
Tesla's home battery, a wall-mounted unit that stores electricity from solar panels or the grid to power a house during outages or expensive peak hours. Multiple units can be stacked for a larger home or small business.
A small combustion stage in a rocket engine that burns part of the propellant first to drive the pumps before the main chamber fires. Full-flow staged combustion uses two preburners, one fuel-rich and one oxidizer-rich.
The first and largest stage of building a language model, where it learns patterns of language by predicting the next token across huge amounts of text. This step consumes the most compute and produces the base model before any fine-tuning.
Elon Musk's term for the brutally difficult phase of ramping a new product from prototype to high-volume manufacturing, when small problems multiply across thousands of units. Tesla's Model 3 ramp is the best-known example he has described.
A defense strategy of fielding a large number of small, cheap satellites rather than a few expensive ones, so the network keeps working even if some are lost. Starshield and related contracts are built around this proliferated approach.
Moving rocket fuel and oxidizer from one vehicle to another while in orbit, also called orbital refueling. It is the make-or-break technology that lets Starship top off in orbit before heading to the Moon or Mars.
The Boring Company's purpose-built tunnel boring machine, designed to dig continuously and launch directly from the surface rather than needing a large pre-dug pit. Later versions aim to tunnel far faster than conventional machines by porpoising down, mining, and porpoising back up.
Shrinking the numbers a model uses from high precision to a coarser format so it runs faster and fits in less memory. It trades a small amount of accuracy for large gains in speed and cost when serving a model.
The first step of Elon Musk's design process, which insists that every requirement be traced to a named person and challenged, because rules handed down as fixed are often wrong. Treating requirements as suggestions to be tested comes before deleting or simplifying anything.
The robotic system Neuralink built to insert its delicate threads into the brain with precision a human hand cannot match. It stitches each thread past blood vessels one at a time, much like a sewing machine.
The worry that an electric vehicle will run out of charge before reaching a charger. Tesla addresses it with long-range batteries, in-car route planning, and its Supercharger network.
A version of SpaceX's Raptor engine built with an oversized nozzle optimized for firing in the vacuum of space rather than at sea level. Starship's upper stage carries a mix of sea-level Raptors and RVacs so it can perform well both low in the atmosphere and in orbit.
How quickly a company improves its technology over time, which Elon Musk argues matters more than being ahead at any single moment. A slower competitor with a faster rate of innovation will eventually overtake a leader.
A feature where the back wheels turn slightly, tightening the turning circle at low speed and improving stability at high speed. The Cybertruck includes it to make a large truck maneuver more easily.
A system that recovers some of a vehicle's energy during braking by running the motor in reverse as a generator, sending power back to the battery. It extends range and is especially useful on long downhill stretches for heavy vehicles.
Circulating cold propellant through channels around a rocket engine's chamber to carry heat away, a more durable approach than letting a lining burn off. SpaceX adopted it on the Merlin 1C engine.
When an agency meant to oversee an industry ends up serving the interests of the companies it regulates rather than the public. It is a frequent criticism raised in debates over how established players slow new entrants.
A method of shaping a model's answers by having people rate its responses and then training it to prefer the higher-rated ones. It is how a raw model is turned into a helpful assistant that follows instructions.
The average number of births per woman needed to keep a population steady over the long run, generally about 2.1 in developed countries. Falling below it is the technical anchor of the population-collapse argument.
Recovering and reflying a rocket's stages rather than discarding them after one flight, the way an airliner is not scrapped after a single trip. Because the fuel is cheap and the hardware is not, reusability is what drives launch costs down.
A launch that packs many small satellites from different customers onto one rocket, splitting the cost the way carpoolers share a ride. SpaceX's Transporter flights use this model to loft dozens of small payloads at once for a low price per satellite.
A large autonomous vehicle Tesla unveiled alongside the Cybercab, meant to carry up to twenty people or cargo without a driver. It is aimed at high-density transit and delivery routes.
The share of energy a battery returns after the losses of charging and discharging. Megapack runs at about 93.7 percent, meaning most of the stored energy is recovered.
Highly refined, rocket-grade kerosene used as fuel, burned with liquid oxygen, in engines like the Merlin. It powered SpaceX's early Falcon 1 and the Falcon 9.
How many times per second a device measures a signal, since neural spikes last only about a millisecond a fast rate is needed to catch them. Neuralink samples each channel thousands of times a second to reconstruct the spikes faithfully.
A coordinated group of many satellites working together to provide continuous coverage over a region or the whole planet. Starlink uses thousands of satellites so at least one is always overhead, avoiding the gaps a single satellite would leave.
Corporate bonds, meaning borrowed money a company repays with interest, that rank ahead of other debt for repayment. SpaceX paired its stock offering with a large senior-notes issue as belt-and-suspenders financing.
A thin porous membrane inside a battery that keeps the two electrodes from touching and short-circuiting while still letting ions pass through. A failure of the separator is a common trigger for thermal runaway.
A method where new self-driving software runs silently in the background, predicting what it would do without controlling the car, so its choices can be compared against the human driver. Tesla uses it to test features safely before deployment.
How clearly a true neural signal stands out against the background electrical hiss around it. Placing electrodes close to neurons is what gives an implant like Neuralink's a high enough ratio to read individual spikes.
A battery negative electrode that uses silicon, which can hold far more lithium than the usual graphite, to store more energy in the same space. The challenge is that silicon swells as it charges, so cells use only a silicon-rich mix rather than pure silicon.
An inverter built with silicon carbide power transistors instead of ordinary silicon, which waste less energy as heat and switch faster. Tesla was an early adopter, using them in the Model 3 to boost drivetrain efficiency.
An electric-car architecture that packages the battery, motors, and running gear into a flat slab underneath the passenger cabin, like a skateboard deck. It frees up interior space and lets many different body styles share one base.
Tesla's roofing product that replaces ordinary shingles with tiles, some of which contain hidden solar cells, so a roof generates power while looking like a normal roof. It is installed as a full roof rather than added on top of one.
The brain region that receives and interprets the sense of touch from across the body. Writing signals into it is how a brain implant could one day give a robotic limb a feeling of contact.
A measure of a rocket engine's fuel efficiency, expressed in seconds, with higher numbers meaning more thrust squeezed from each unit of propellant. An engine gains specific impulse in vacuum by swapping in a larger nozzle.
Government permission to transmit on specific radio frequencies in a given area, since airwaves are a shared public resource. Starlink must secure spectrum licenses from regulators in every country where it operates.
The moment a rocket sheds its spent lower stage so the lighter upper stage can continue toward orbit on its own. Falcon 9 uses a pneumatic pusher system rather than explosive bolts so the two stages part cleanly and the booster can be recovered.
A class of efficient rocket engine cycles that burn propellant in a preburner to drive the pumps, then route those gases into the main chamber rather than dumping them overboard. Full-flow staged combustion is the most complete and hardest version.
SpaceX's choice to build Starship out of stainless steel rather than the aluminum or carbon fiber used on most rockets. Steel is cheaper, holds its strength at both the cold of cryogenic fuel and the heat of reentry, and can be welded in the open air.
SpaceX's satellite internet service that beams broadband from a large constellation of low-orbit satellites to small dish antennas on the ground. It targets rural and remote users who lack reliable cable or fiber connections.
SpaceX's government and defense version of Starlink, built to carry sensitive payloads and provide secure communications for national-security customers. It uses the same satellite platform but with hardened encryption and custom sensors.
How full a battery is at a given moment, expressed as a percentage of its capacity. Trading software tracks each battery's state of charge to decide when to buy or sell power.
An estimate of how much of a battery's original capacity and performance remain after use and aging, expressed as a percentage. It tells an owner or utility how close a pack is to needing replacement.
A ground test in which a rocket is clamped down and its engines briefly ignited without letting it fly, to confirm everything works before launch. SpaceX runs static fires at the pad as a routine dress rehearsal for both Falcon 9 and Starship.
A small entry and exit point, sometimes no larger than a parking space, where passengers get into or out of a Loop vehicle. Keeping stations tiny and numerous is meant to let riders board close to their destination instead of at a few big hubs.
A steering system where the wheel connects to the road wheels through electronics and motors rather than a mechanical column. The Cybertruck uses steer-by-wire, which also enables its variable steering ratio.
A battery design where the pack is a load-bearing part of the car's body rather than a module bolted underneath. Tesla glues its 4680 cells directly between two structural panels so the pack adds stiffness while removing weight and parts.
A polar orbit tilted so a satellite passes over each part of Earth at the same local time of day, giving consistent lighting for imaging. SpaceX's rideshare missions frequently deliver small satellites into this orbit for Earth-observation companies.
A political committee that can raise and spend unlimited sums to support or oppose candidates, as long as it does not coordinate directly with a campaign. America PAC is the super PAC Elon Musk founded in 2024.
Tesla's own network of proprietary fast chargers that deliver high-power direct current to recharge an electric car in minutes rather than hours. It has gradually opened to non-Tesla vehicles through adapters and the spread of the NACS plug.
A powerful engine built into Crew Dragon's walls that can blast the capsule away from a failing rocket in an emergency. Eight SuperDracos provide the launch escape system that protects the astronauts inside.
Training material generated by AI models rather than gathered from the real world, used to expand or refine the data a model learns from. It helps when high-quality human-made data runs short.
A hidden set of standing instructions given to an AI model before a user's conversation begins, defining its persona, rules, and tone. xAI has at times published Grok's system prompt to show how it is steered.
A grid of multiplier circuits on a chip arranged to crunch the matrix math that neural networks rely on, very fast and efficiently. Tesla's in-car AI chips pair processor cores with systolic arrays to run self-driving.
A battery-cell design that removes the small metal tabs normally used to collect current, instead connecting along the entire edge of the electrode. Tesla's 4680 cell uses this to cut internal resistance and heat, allowing faster charging.
The collection of driving data from a vehicle, such as speed, braking, and time of day, used to price insurance by actual behavior. Tesla gathers it directly from the car, dropping the plug-in dongle rival insurers mail to customers.
Tesla's approach of driving using only cameras and neural networks, after it removed radar and ultrasonic sensors from its cars. The company argues that solving vision the way humans do avoids conflicting signals from mixed sensors.
Elon Musk's five-step process for designing and building things, run in a strict order: question requirements, delete parts, simplify, speed up, then automate. The steps are meant to be followed in sequence, with automation always last.
Elon Musk's stated goal of turning X from a messaging service into a single app that also handles payments, video, shopping, and more, modeled on China's WeChat. It is the strategic reason Twitter was renamed X.
A dangerous chain reaction where one overheating battery cell releases heat that ignites its neighbors, potentially setting off a whole pack. Battery designs use spacing, cooling, and barriers to stop it from spreading.
An ultra-thin, flexible polymer filament, thinner than a human hair, that carries Neuralink's electrodes into the brain tissue. Their flexibility is meant to reduce damage compared with the rigid needles used by earlier brain implants.
Dialing a rocket engine's thrust up or down in flight, much like easing a car's accelerator. Deep throttling is essential for a Falcon 9 landing, where the nearly empty booster must slow to a gentle touchdown without being shoved back upward.
The reinforced structural hub at the bottom of a rocket stage that gathers the push from all the engines and channels it into the airframe and tanks above. On Starship's Super Heavy it must absorb the combined force of its many Raptor engines.
The comparison of how hard an engine pushes against how much the vehicle weighs, where a value above one means the rocket can actually lift off. Rocket engineers chase a high thrust-to-weight ratio so more of the launch's energy goes to the payload rather than to hauling the engine.
An electricity rate plan where power costs more during busy hours and less overnight, encouraging customers to shift usage. Home batteries like Powerwall exploit it by charging when power is cheap and discharging when it is dear.
A chunk of a word, the basic unit an AI language model reads and generates text in. A model's context window and its running cost are both measured in tokens.
Sending different amounts of power to individual wheels to improve grip, cornering, and acceleration. The next-generation Roadster uses three motors with torque vectoring to deliver its launch performance.
A large group of GPUs wired together and run as a single machine to train one AI model at once. The size of the cluster, counted in chips, largely sets how big and capable a model a company can build.
The unpressurized lower section of the Dragon spacecraft that carries external cargo and holds the solar panels. The trunk is jettisoned before reentry and burns up in the atmosphere.
A large machine with a rotating cutterhead that grinds forward through earth while installing the tunnel lining behind it. The Boring Company uses TBMs to dig its transit tunnels, starting with a test tunnel in Hawthorne.
The strategy of digging a much narrower tunnel than traditional transit tunnels by sizing it for single vehicles instead of full trains. Because tunneling cost rises sharply with width, a smaller bore is central to The Boring Company's cost argument.
A curved, precast concrete piece that a boring machine bolts into place behind the machine to form the permanent tunnel wall. Rings of these segments hold back the surrounding earth and keep the tunnel from collapsing.
A high-speed pump, spun by its own small turbine, that forces fuel and oxidizer into a rocket engine's combustion chamber far faster than tanks could feed them by pressure alone. It is the beating heart that lets an engine like Merlin or Raptor produce enormous thrust from a compact size.
The empty gas space above the liquid in a partly filled propellant tank, and the small settling thrust used to push that liquid toward the engine feed lines before a burn in weightlessness. Managing ullage keeps bubbles out of the pumps when an engine restarts in orbit.
The 30X-series stainless steel alloy Tesla developed for the Cybertruck's exoskeleton body panels, chosen for strength and dent resistance. Its hardness is part of why the panels are flat rather than curved.
Tesla's planned assembly method that builds a vehicle as separate large sub-assemblies worked on in parallel, then joins them near the end, instead of moving one body shell down a single line. Tesla says it can shrink factory footprint and cut assembly cost for its next-generation vehicles.
The flat, self-orienting antenna a customer installs to connect to Starlink, nicknamed Dishy. It automatically points at passing satellites and links to a Wi-Fi router indoors.
A rigid bed-of-nails grid of stiff electrode needles that was the standard research brain implant for decades. Neuralink's flexible threads and higher channel count are pitched as a step beyond this older approach.
A very high radio frequency band around 40 to 75 gigahertz that SpaceX has been authorized to use for future Starlink capacity. It offers enormous bandwidth but travels shorter distances and is more affected by weather.
The commercial tunnel network The Boring Company operates beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center and surrounding areas, carrying passengers in Tesla vehicles. It is the company's first paid, revenue-generating system and has been approved to expand to dozens of stations across the city.
Building key parts and processes in-house rather than buying them from outside suppliers, to control cost, quality, and supply. It is a recurring strategy across Elon Musk's companies, from SpaceX engines to Tesla batteries.
Software that pools many separate batteries, such as home Powerwalls, and operates them together as one resource a utility can call on. The combined fleet can steady the grid during demand spikes as if it were a single power plant.
The region at the back of the brain that processes sight. Neuralink's Blindsight aims to restore a form of vision by writing signals directly into the visual cortex, bypassing a damaged eye.
A full countdown practice in which a rocket is loaded with cryogenic propellant and taken almost to the moment of ignition, then stopped. It lets engineers wring out fueling and countdown problems without the risk of actually lighting the engines.
X's paid subscription tier that grants a verification checkmark, longer posts, reduced ads, and access to Grok. It replaced the old free verification system with one anyone can pay for.
The 2025 deal that folded the X platform into xAI under a single company, valuing the combined entity in the tens of billions of dollars. It tied the social network's data and reach directly to the AI lab building Grok.
A tradable credit a government awards automakers for selling clean vehicles, which companies short on credits must buy from those with a surplus. Tesla has earned substantial revenue selling these regulatory credits to other carmakers.
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