• Tesla posted footage of its robotaxi driving without a safety driver ahead of its Q3 earnings call.
• Two of the clips included footage of a Waymo robotaxi and Avride encroaching on Tesla's path.
• The clips showed the Tesla Robotaxi slowing down.

Tesla took some subtle jabs at its robotaxi competitors ahead of its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

On a website Tesla created for its robotaxi safety report, the company uploaded clips of its self-driving cars maneuvering in real-world conditions without a driver behind the wheel. Obstacles and hazards included stormy weather, a pedestrian crossing at a green light, stray pets, and rival robotaxis getting in the way.

Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's VP of AI, also posted the video on X, calling it "Robotaxi B-roll."

At around the 1:44 mark of Elluswamy's post, the video shows a robotaxi coming to a complete stop in its own lane as a Waymo makes a wider-than-usual right turn. The Waymo can be seen encroaching into Tesla's lane before it returns to its own path.

A Waymo spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

In another short clip, the Tesla robotaxi is seen driving at night, braking for an Avride car that pulled up from the right, a little too far into the Tesla's path.

Avride is a robotaxi company that offers robotaxi rides through Uber in Dallas and is testing rides with a safety driver behind the wheel in Austin.

A spokesperson for Avride did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tesla posted the footage as it seeks to make its case publicly on robotaxi safety. The company began offering a limited number of autonomous rides without an in-car safety monitor in Austin in January.

In the newly posted safety report, Tesla said its robotaxi service has driven 3.3 million miles autonomously — relatively small compared to Waymo's more than 271 million miles driven as of June.

Tesla said during its Q3 earnings call that it will launch unsupervised Cybercabs in Dallas in November.

• Meta established a new class of stock to ensure Mark Zuckerberg stayed as CEO.
• The stock class will "continue the founder-led model that has driven the company," Meta said in its third-quarter earnings.
• Zuckerberg has taken a leading position in Meta's AI era.

Meta's board wants Mark Zuckerberg to stick around.

The company announced a new category of non-voting Class C stock in its third-quarter earnings report. It listed several reasons for creating the new class — one of which is to keep the CEO in control.

A Special Committee established by Meta's board determined that Zuckerberg was the best fit to lead the company into its future, and highlighted the CEO's creative vision and management abilities.

"The creation of the Class C common stock will continue the founder-led model that has driven the company's success since its inception," Meta said.

The stock class will also provide Meta the ability to finance its growth, the earnings report said. Meta is spending big on AI and the data centers needed to power it. The company reported $34.91 billion in third-quarter capital expenditures.

Meta's press release said the distribution would effectively amount to a two-for-one stock split for existing shareholders. Susan Li, Meta's chief financial officer, said that the stock will be distributed to existing shareholders.

Other tech companies have issued stock to access new capital without diluting their CEO's voting power. Google performed a stock split in 2012 for a similar reason. Semafor was first to report the new stock class.

Zuckerberg has long been the face of Meta. He's strengthened his leadership through the AI boom, going "startup mode" and getting hands-on with the tech. The company's AI team set up their desks around where Zuckerberg sits.

The success of Muse, Meta's AI agent, has raised the profile of another Meta executive: Alexandr Wang. The chief AI officer has joined Zuckerberg for podcasts and spoken onstage at keynotes.

A Financial Times profile last week touted Wang as a "potential successor to Zuckerberg." It's clear the board wants Zuckerberg there for the long haul.

• Meta's AI agent, Muse, is unprofitable due to "very high compute costs," CEO Mark Zuckerberg says.
• Meanwhile, Meta expects Reality Labs, its AI glasses division, to lose $15 billion next year.
• The social media giant has a plan to fix that.

Meta says some of its biggest cash incinerators could finally start turning profits.

The social media giant, which generated over 97% of its quarterly revenue from ads, has faced persistent questions from investors about the lack of profitability in its AI and hardware initiatives.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed those concerns head-on during its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

Zuckerberg said that Muse, the AI assistant it launched last month, is unprofitable since it's "very compute intensive to run." Meta expects to start turning that around next year by massively improving Muse's efficiency.

"If compute efficiency continues improving quickly for another few years, which we think is highly likely, then Muse will be highly profitable over multiple years," he said.

Meta plans to make money from Muse by taking a small transaction fee off of purchases it drives, Zuckerberg said at Meta's Connect conference last month.

Zuckerberg added that Muse, which launched only in the US and Canada, wasn't launched globally due in part to the amount of compute it requires. (Meta's North American users are generally its most lucrative.)

Zuckerberg also struck a positive note about its cash-hemorrhaging Reality Labs division, which makes products like Meta Ray-Bans and virtual reality glasses.

Meta expects Reality Labs to narrow its losses to about $15 billion in 2027, down from the $18 to $19 billion it expects to lose this year. The division should start trending toward profitability next year, as Meta's AI systems make it more useful, Zuckerberg said.

"I continue to believe that the path to delivering holographic experience, of bringing together the physical and digital worlds and everyday glasses, will come through VR first," Zuckerberg said.

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• The "Fourth Wing" TV show has its Violet and Xaden.
• Amazon MGM Studios and Michael B. Jordan's Outlier Society are adapting Rebecca Yarros' series.
• Amazon announced in October that the show had found its two lead actors.

At this point, it's hard not to be familiar with Rebecca Yarros' "Empyrean" series about dragon rider Violet Sorrengail.

When "Onyx Storm," the third book in the romantasy series, was released in January 2025, it became the fastest-selling adult novel in 20 years.

Yarros is working on the fourth installment in the series, and she recently released a collection of short stories set in the "Empyrean" universe called "Threshing Day." However, it will still be a while before book four is ready for readers.

In the meantime, though, we're getting closer to a series adaptation of "Fourth Wing," which officially found its lead actors.

'Fourth Wing' is becoming a TV show

In October 2023, Deadline announced that Amazon MGM Studios and Michael B. Jordan's Outlier Society were developing "Fourth Wing" into a TV series. Yarros is an executive producer for the show.

Outlier Society produced Jordan's "Creed III" and is developing a slate of other series and films in addition to "Fourth Wing."

Deadline also reported in October 2023 that Amazon MGM Studios had acquired the rights to the entire "Empyrean" series. In her January 2025 Variety interview, Yarros said she had shared the "five-book arc" for the "Empyrean" series with Amazon.

"They have the five-book arc, which went a little awry in Book 3 just because the positioning, but they already know that," she told Variety. "But they have the five-book arc and the general big points of what happens in between each book, but they don't have the specifics between Book 4 and Book 5, because I'm getting ready to go to my crazy plotting board and plot out every single event that happens in each book, so that I make sure that I'm within my two books there."

A new showrunner

In July 2024, Outlier Society announced it had hired Moira Walley-Beckett, who worked on shows like "Breaking Bad" and "Anne with an E," as the showrunner for the series. In a January 2025 interview with Variety, Yarros said Walley-Beckett was "great" and "phenomenal," but in July 2025, Walley-Beckett exited the project.

Variety reported in September 2025 that Meredith Averill was taking over as showrunner. Averill was previously the showrunner of the Netflix series "Locke & Key" and a producer on shows like "The Good Wife" and "The Haunting of Hill House."

Amazon declined to comment on this piece when contacted by Business Insider, but Yarros shared a screenshot of a Deadline article about the showrunner announcement on her Instagram when it dropped.

"Welcome to the team, Meredith Averill! Guys, I love everything this wonderful woman has worked on and I'm so excited to have her joining us," Yarros said in her caption.

'Fourth Wing' is in the works

In January 2026, Jordan assured fans the "Fourth Wing" show was on its way in an interview with Deadline.

"We are making sure that this is going to be an exciting show that delivers on all of the things the fans want and some of the things that they won't be expecting either," Jordan said.

He also told the outlet that he's aware of how much fans of "Fourth Wing" care about the series.

"But trust me, I know how beloved this franchise IP is," he said. "It's early stages, but I feel how much people care about this one. It's not lost on us."

And on May 11, 2026, Jordan announced the show had been ordered to series for Prime Video at the Amazon Upfront, an annual event where Amazon offers a sneak peek at its coming content.

Yarros and Averill joined Jordan onstage at the event, as did Lisa Joy, an executive producer on the show who will direct the first episode. Joy has previously worked on shows like HBO's "Westworld" and Prime Video's "Fallout."

Yarros posted about the event on her Instagram story, sharing a photo of herself, Jordan, Averill, and Joy, writing, "What an absolutely wild night! So grateful for this team!"

Meet Violet and Xaden

The Amazon Upfront seemed to build momentum for the show, as it was announced in October that the Prime Video series had cast its Violet Sorrengail and her enemy turned lover Xaden Riorson. Deadline first reported the casting on October 15, 2026, though the streamer didn't confirm that news until October 21.

Esther McGregor will play Violet. McGregor, the 24-year-old daughter of Ewan McGregor, appeared in "Babygirl" and "We Were Liars," another Amazon adaptation.

Meanwhile, 30-year-old Emilio Sakraya has been cast as Xaden. The German actor is known for projects like "Rheingold" and the popular Netflix series "Warrior Nun." Both actors are relative newcomers, though, with their "Fourth Wing" casting marking a big step in their careers.

McGregor reshared Amazon's post about her casting to her Instagram story, writing, "So beyond excited. Honored. Thrilled."

Sakraya also shared the post to his Instagram story, but he captioned it with a quote from "Iron Flame," the second book in Yarros' series, in a fun nod to the text: "My house. My chair. My Woman."

In a statement shared by Amazon, Yarros said, "I'm so grateful to our producing and casting team for conducting a thorough, worldwide search to find Violet and Xaden. It will be incredibly exciting to see these talented actors, Esther and Emilio, bring our beloved characters to life on screen."

Yarros said at a London event in August 2024 that she intentionally never shared any hopes for which actors may be cast in the show.

"I will never say who my perfect fan cast is because the cast is so diverse, and I want to open that up to more diversity," she said. "And I feel like the second I say who I think this character is, that's who everyone will accept. That's only who they will accept."

"I kinda hope they find, like, an up-and-coming generation," she added. "But I would never put my fan cast in your heads."

At the same event, she clarified that she wouldn't be involved in the casting process, but that she had shared one hard-line casting request with Amazon and Outlier Society.

"They know how staunch I am against whitewashing Xaden," she said. "I think that's the biggest thing."

Xaden is described as having "warm tawny skin" in "Fourth Wing" and "tawny-brown" skin in both "Iron Flame" and "Onyx Storm." Sakraya was born in Germany to a Serbian father and a Moroccan mother, according to an interview with German Films Quarterly.

Amazon did not provide any additional details on casting or when filming for the series may begin.

Yarros talked about the series' pilot while on a book tour for 'Onyx Storm'

Although details about the series are limited, Yarros made a few comments about the show while promoting "Onyx Storm."

Speaking at an engagement on January 24, 2025, in New York, Yarros told fans she had read the pilot for the "Fourth Wing" show — and loved it.

"I read the latest version of the pilot last week," she said. "It's really nerve-racking when you read something like that because you're really — you're trusting someone else with your baby, right? And you're trusting someone else to say, like, 'Hey, this is important in your work, and this isn't,' and you kinda get your guard up."

"But guys, I, like, kicked my feet the whole time," she said. "You're gonna love it."

Yarros also praised Walley-Beckett at the event, calling her a "brilliant writer" and saying she maintained the book's integrity in the pilot. It's unclear how the pilot may have changed since Walley-Beckett's exit from the project.

• Walmart is rolling out two new tools to help third-party AI agents shop on behalf of customers.
• The company says the tools give people more control of their bots, and help bots be more accurate.
• Walmart's move contrasts with Amazon's approach, after it blocked Meta's agent Muse from its site.

Walmart wants your bot to shop.

The retail giant said Wednesday that it has two new tools to help third-party AI agents shop on customers' behalf: agent profiles and an agent gateway.

The agent profiles link all transactions to the bot that performed them, and allow Walmart customers to manage authorizations and spending limits as they would for an additional user on their credit card account, the company said.

With agent gateways, bots no longer have to navigate a website that is designed for humans. Instead, Walmart is granting access through a model text protocol that it says will help agents work more quickly and accurately.

Walmart's move contrasts with Amazon's approach, which recently blocked Meta's agent Muse from its site, saying agents violate Amazon's conditions of use. Amazon has also pushed back on other third-party agents, including a lawsuit against Perplexity and restrictions on agents from Google and OpenAI.

"As customers begin using agents to help them shop, we're building connections, permissions and options that complement those tools and support how customers want to use them," the company said in a statement.

The company also said the gateway protects the information that Walmart has about its customers, and only provides what is necessary for completing a given transaction. In particular, the gateway can share a relevant pattern or preference — such as a customer's favorite laundry detergent brand — without sharing their entire purchase history with the agent.

The company also laid out a set of terms and conditions regarding how AI agents are expected to operate when shopping.

Under the terms, the company said it will honor its usual returns policy and that agents will always see the same pricing that a human would see on Walmart.com.

• Tesla has begun production of its humanoid robot, Optimus, in Fremont, California.
• Musk said he expects to begin delivering Optimus to customers at the end of 2027.
• Musk said it will take at least a year to produce 20,000 Optimus units a week.

Tesla has begun producing its long-awaited humanoid robot, Optimus, at its Fremont factory, the company said in its quarterly earnings report.

"The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured," Tesla said, saying the current manufacturing process is "suitable for a commercial product."

"There's still some things we need to tweak about the design, because you need to deliver a robot that is safe and reliable and has long duration," CEO Elon Musk said on Tesla's Q3 earnings call. "It can't, like, wear out after a month."

Musk said the company will take at least a year to scale up Optimus production to 20,000 units a week in Fremont. He said he expects to begin delivering Optimus to customers at the end of next year.

Musk tempered expectations about how quickly Tesla can scale up Optimus production because it is "such a radically new product." He said the early stages of production will be "somewhat bumpy" because "there's like 10,000 things that have to go right" to build the robot. One of the big challenges Musk outlined is building robot hands.

Musk said Tesla is building an "Optimus Academy," where robots will practice tasks and generate data to improve the AI models that power them. The company also plans to install its next-generation AI5 chip in Optimus in April, which will give the robots more computing power and be a "big step change in intelligence," Musk said.

The latest version of Optimus has not been unveiled. Musk said he expects to release a video of Optimus within one or two months. He previously said Tesla was keeping the robot under wraps to prevent competitors from copying its design.

Tesla stopped producing the Model S and Model X at its Fremont, California, plant earlier this year to make room for an Optimus line designed to eventually produce a million robots a year. A second line under construction in Austin is planned to have an annual capacity of 10 million robots.

Tesla is competing in a crowded humanoid market. Agility Robotics, which plans to go public, has deployed its Digit robot across nine customer facilities, while Figure AI has announced deployments in logistics and distribution centers this year. Sunday Robotics, 1X, and Weave Robotics are preparing to ship robots into homes this fall.

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• The Trump administration agreed to drop its appeal of a Public Service Loan Forgiveness ruling.
• The ruling blocked Trump's plan to limit PSLF eligibility from taking effect.
• An advocacy group said it's a victory for borrowers pursuing PSLF.

Student-loan borrowers pursuing a major forgiveness program got a rare legal win.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration agreed to drop two of its appeals of a June ruling that had blocked its plan to narrow eligibility for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which forgives student debt for government and nonprofit workers after 10 years.

The Education Department intended to implement a plan on July 1 to exclude employers from PSLF who did not align with the administration's definition of "public service," listing actions like assisting with gender-affirming care or 'acts of terrorism.

A judge ruled at the end of June that the plan was unlawful and would not take effect. This followed a series of lawsuits filed by advocacy groups and nonprofits, including Student Defense, which said the education secretary did not have the authority to roll out those changes.

The administration appealed the ruling at the end of August. With the appeal set to be dismissed, borrowers will not face any immediate changes to PSLF. Another appeal in a separate PSLF lawsuit is still pending.

"The Trump administration's attempt to weaponize public service loan forgiveness against organizations it disagrees with was anti-democratic and unlawful from the start," Dan Zibel, chief counsel at Student Defense, said in a statement. "This is a significant victory for millions of Americans who have dedicated their careers to public service."

The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent previously said that the rule had been intended to "ensure federal benefits go to our Nation's teachers, first responders, and civil servants who tirelessly serve their communities."

Borrowers pursuing PSLF are still facing challenges. The Education Department recently removed some borrowers' payments toward forgiveness, citing Biden-era coding errors. Others have reported delays getting their payments counted toward relief, leaving them in limbo.

A department spokesperson previously said that the agency "remains committed to ensuring that every qualifying payment is properly credited to a borrower's account."

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• Tesla is facing some profitability headwinds.
• Its operating income fell 56% year over year as AI and research and development costs climbed.
• The company is still in the green, and it surprised earlier this month by delivering 486,532 vehicles in the third quarter.

Tesla is still selling plenty of cars. Making the same amount of money on them is getting harder.

On Wednesday, the Elon Musk-led automaker reported that its operating income fell 56% year over year to $718 million in the third quarter — below Wall Street's estimates of $746.3 million — while overall revenue of $28.05 billion came in a smidge below analysts' estimates.

Tesla pointed to higher operating expenses tied to its AI efforts, or "SI"/"Super Intelligence" as Trump prefers, and other R&D projects. Lower regulatory credit revenue and weaker energy storage gross profit also weighed on profitability, while lower vehicle prices hurt revenue.

"While we continue to execute on innovations to reduce the cost of manufacturing and operations, over time, we expect our hardware-related profits to be accompanied by an acceleration of SI, software and fleet-based profits," the company reported.

It's not all bad news for Tesla's profits. The company is still solidly in the green, and it beat on the bottom line. Tesla reported 48 cents in adjusted earnings per share, above the 44-cent analyst consensus estimate. Free cash flow of $1.5 billion was also a surprise after Wall Street had expected negative free cash flow of $4.92 billion.

The automaker also sees areas of profit growth in its future: autonomy subscriptions are trending up, and Tesla said it's offering the right, region-specific product mixes.

During the earnings call, Tesla's chief financial officer, Vaibhav Taneja, said the company is experiencing its "highest backlog" of vehicles in four years. The company, he said, is trying to increase vehicle production.

He also added that Tesla has secured $30 billion of borrowing to support expected capital expenditures, but the company doesn't expect to "make any draws under any of the new facilities in this calendar year."

"The main takeaway is that Tesla's surprisingly positive cash flow quarter did not come from stronger profits," Thomas Monteiro, senior analyst at Investing.com, said after the report.

"Added to the equation is the fact that Tesla's AI spending remains broadly inefficient, with research costs up nearly 70% and operating margins down to just 2.6%, while at SpaceX AI is already one of the biggest sources of revenue," the analyst added.

The new quarter has already made waves

The Tesla story continues to play out in real time, and it's had a busy month since the fourth quarter kicked off in October.

On Tuesday, during SpaceX's earnings call, Musk said that Tesla and SpaceX had each formed committees to explore a potential merger. Both companies are helmed by Musk — and he owns billions of dollars in stock of each.

Anticipation of the potential mega-merger has been building around the companies for much of 2026, and has only increased since SpaceX went public. Musk said he was not included in those committees and that calling the merger a foregone conclusion "would be overstating it."

It also came less than a week after Tesla held its high-flying demo for the Roadster. The sports car performed a gymnastics routine, including briefly jumping into the air and twirling over a lineup of other Tesla vehicles.

It came nine years after Tesla first promised to relaunch the Roadster. Musk first showed off a prototype of the vehicle in 2017 and predicted a 2020 product launch.

• Anthropic has its answer to AI agents like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.
• Claude Duet, built on Anthropic's flagship model, has entered the personal agent frenzy.
• Karan Ahuja, a recent departee from Meta, led Claude Duet's development.

Anthropic is joining the personal AI agent craze.

The company announced the new app Claude Duet on Wednesday, billed as a "proactive agent" that can run in the background, surface tasks to a user, and handle a variety of work. The tool is in research preview for now with a waitlist, meaning it won't immediately compete for the larger market with other new agents like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.

Still, the announcement ramps up the pressure on those companies — Anthropic says it built Duet around its flagship Opus 5.5 model, which was released in late September and has already become one of the industry's most popular. Recent model breakthroughs have made AI better at handling work on its own, spurring a rush to build these "always-on" personal agents.

"It can have the discernment and judgment around when to be proactive, when to act on your behalf," said Mike Krieger, a co-lead of Anthropic's Labs team, said in a Duet launch video.

The tool, Anthropic says, will send users a brief each morning about what's happening on their connected apps, and message them when something needs attention. Like other companies' offerings, it runs outside a user's computer, sends notifications, and asks for approval on certain tasks.

Anthropic announced Duet on the day of Meta's earnings report and used the opportunity to mention a new poach from Mark Zuckerberg's company. Karan Ahuja led product management for Meta Superintelligence Labs until July, according to his LinkedIn, before starting at Anthropic in August and leading Duet's development.

He wrote on X that he's been using Duet to build Duet, and said the team "built it for professionals and small business owners juggling a lot at work and at home."

Ahuja also wrote that Anthropic is letting people into Duet from the waitlist "as quickly as possible."

The news didn't go unnoticed at Meta. Alexandr Wang, who heads Meta Superintelligence Labs, posted a meme about Duet's similarity to Muse.

Anthropic is fast approaching a giant initial public offering, which could value the company at as much as $2 trillion. Like other AI players, the company navigates a high-wire competition to win over users, secure computing power, build state-of-the-art models, and deliver AI-native products.

The data firm Apptopia estimates that Muse had more than 14 million installations as of Wednesday. It found that Claude users who installed the Muse app were using Claude more than before, though still for fewer minutes per day than they spent on the Meta product.

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• Meta spent $34.91 billion in capital expenditures in its third quarter.
• The company is spending big on data centers and other infrastructure for its AI development.
• Meta predicted $135-145 billion in capex for 2026, aligning with analyst expectations.

Meta is making it rain for AI.

The company spent $34.91 billion in capital expenditures during the third quarter of 2026. That's up from the second quarter's sum, $31.08 billion.

For the year 2026, Meta said it expects to spend between $135-145 billion in capital expenditures, narrowed from its prediction of $130-145 billion last quarter.

Meta's forecast includes the yearly capex prediction that analysts expected: $139.79 billion.

As Meta bets big on AI, it is investing heavily in its development. It has built massive, costly data centers and spent big on computing power.

The spending uptick was expected. On the "Cheeky Pint" podcast earlier this month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recounted early conversations about the investment — and said he'd bet up to $200 billion on AI, before he knew the models would work.

Investors haven't loved Meta's massive capex forecasts in past quarters. The stock tumbled almost 10% last quarter after earnings per share missed Wall Street estimates, and sank 6% the quarter before on raised capex guidance.

This quarter, Meta has a new hero product: Muse.

The AI assistant has reached over 2 million daily users and 3 million downloads. It quickly scaled the App Store. Muse users told Business Insider they chatted with it to help plan trips and ace exams.

The energy around the company is ebullient, as Alexandr Wang, Meta's chief AI officer, continues to post memes of Muse's squishy-looking mascot.

At Meta's Connect keynote event in September, Zuckerberg said Muse "has a novel business model."

"We believe that Muse will make you money, and we're standing behind this by making Muse free for a huge number of tokens with the expectation that over time, we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions," he said.

Muse could help justify the capex guidance for some investors. The stock was trading up 4.12% after-hours at the time of publication.

• GM says it's keeping humans in its OnStar call centers to help with emergencies.
• It comes as OnStar is getting a fresh makeover, complete with AI.
• "The stakes are too high," an exec told BI about the human-in-the-loop.

GM is giving OnStar an AI overhaul. The automaker says it is not coming for the person who answers when your airbags deploy.

On Wednesday, during the company's tech conference, GM Forward, Ed Nightingale, GM's vice president of digital products, told Business Insider that the automaker would continue to use human OnStar staffers on emergency calls to contact first responders.

"That's something that isn't changing," Nightingale said. "We feel that, when it comes to a crash or a problem being solved, they want to make sure that there's a human in the loop. The stakes are too high."

After publication, a GM spokesperson told Business Insider that OnStar Advisors "aren't going away" and will remain a core part of the OnStar experience.

Humans-in-the-loop are a notable constraint on GM's AI ambitions compared to other software companies. Other AI-enabled companies, such as SpaceX, have recently highlighted how few customer calls are routed to humans.

GM said that keeping people involved in complex or sensitive situations is an intentional part of its AI strategy. Technology handles more routine interactions, while humans take the call during an emergency.

It also comes as the company gives OnStar — its 30-year-old in-car emergency service — a much bigger job.

GM showed off OnStar AI on Wednesday. It's a new voice assistant designed to understand a vehicle and the driver using it. The automaker said it can answer questions about vehicle alerts, control some functions, plan routes around bad weather, and offer more context-aware suggestions, including from information through a driver's digital calendar.

The assistant will arrive first on the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq via an over-the-air update in the coming months, GM said. Other vehicles will follow.

GM also plans to unify its brand-specific mobile apps under the OnStar AI name next summer.

Onstage, Sterling Anderson, GM's chief product officer, said the company was turning the 30-year-old service into "an intelligent platform."

The shift is part of a large bet from GM.

GM is focusing heavily on its tech capabilities. On recent earnings calls, CEO Mary Barra has highlighted GM's subscription products. Anderson previously told Business Insider about how AI has allowed the company to cut product development time in half, starting with the GMC Hummer EV, which only took 20 months of development. Industry-average product development is typically around 5 years.

On Wednesday, the company also highlighted the development of its hands-off, eyes-off self-driving features, set to make their debut in the Cadillac Escalade IQ in 2028.

GM still has to persuade drivers that the new tools are valuable enough to use — and, in some cases, pay for.

Nightingale said subscriptions only retain customers when drivers can see the benefit.

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From Scientology to disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, documentarian Alex Gibney has never met a subject too big or too controversial to tackle.

Then came Elon Musk.

When Gibney was approached with the idea to do a documentary on the Tesla and SpaceX CEO in 2022, his plan was straightforward: Tell the story of how Musk used his businesses to become one of the most powerful figures in the world.

But when he was ready to deliver a two-hour feature film on Musk two years later, HBO issued him a directive a filmmaker rarely hears: Make it longer.

It was 2024, and the breadth of Musk's influence had expanded into the political sphere. With Gibney's subject helping President Donald Trump campaign for a second term, then later spearheading the second Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency, Gibney's story had expanded. His documentary would need to, too.

The result is "Musk," an incisive, nearly four-hour documentary that chronicles the personal, professional, and political life of the richest man in the world. From his controversial acquisition of Twitter, which he renamed X; to his relationships with the mothers of his children; to the accidents tied to Tesla's self-driving feature, Gibney's film is a comprehensive look at the scope of Musk's power and influence in the 21st century.

Gibney even found a clever workaround for featuring Musk in the doc after he declined to be interviewed. Playing on Musk's belief that we are all living in a simulation, the director used AI to craft an avatar of Musk, who speaks in quotes amalgamated from his past interviews.

Of course, a man as powerful and outspoken as Musk has already voiced his displeasure with someone else controlling his narrative. After the movie's world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, Musk threatened to sue Gibney's production company for defamation. Musk has also bashed the movie on X, stating: "Gibney just assembled a hit list of people who either have an axe to grind or don't even know me (but still have an axe to grind). He has ZERO integrity. Horrible human."

Hearing from angry subjects is nothing new for Gibney, who was the subject of the Church of Scientiology's full-page newspaper ads decrying his work over 10 years ago tied to the premiere of his documentary "Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief."

"With Elon Musk — and he's not unique in this, but he specializes in it — he begins tweeting horrible things about people and the next thing you know, this army of followers and bots starts to gin up the rage matrix," Gibney told Business Insider.

Not that he's rattled yet. With decades of documentaries speaking truth to power under his belt, Gibney has developed thick skin and some top-secret harassment survival strategies.

"Let's just say I've taken some precautions," he said.

For the latest interview in Business Insider's Director's Chair series, Gibney talks about creating an AI Musk, being followed by Scientologists, and his nerve-racking experience in a self-driving Tesla.

On creating an AI Musk avatar and making the movie longer

Business Insider: You thought you had finished this movie in 2024. Was it daunting to go back down the Elon Musk rabbit hole when HBO asked you to?

Alex Gibney: Yeah, it was daunting. We had to renegotiate the budget and all sorts of other stuff. But I got why HBO wanted that. And when Musk hitched his wagon to Trump, it was clear: This is big.

I started out making a film about 21st century power, which in this case involved economic power but also tech power. Now, add to that political power, and suddenly it's a really big story.

Was AI Musk in the original movie? 

The idea of it was. We had put in a placeholder for it, but we were also anticipating that maybe we might get an interview with him at some point.

It was kind of an epiphany to do it this way. It came out of past experience: What's the workaround for somebody who won't or can't talk to you? In "Client 9" and "Zero Days," we came up with workarounds that fit those stories. The key here was to find a workaround that would fit this story. That's how we ultimately came up with the idea of the avatar.

Did it unlock anything in you regarding using AI tools in your work in the future?

I think it will depend on the project. AI has become a kind of suitcase term for everything from Siri to AGI. In this instance, this was a human effort using AI tools, which revolved mostly around sync; in other words, making the lips and the body sort of move with the voice. But there was also designing the room, what he was going to wear, the gamer chair.

The further we pushed it and the more interested we got in AI with the company we used, Makemake A.I., this idea of memes and looking at his own image, that's where we came up with certain scenes where you see the back of his head and he's watching himself. Those were things that we improvised on.

On the qualities Musk and Elizabeth Holmes share and Tesla's image

I couldn't help but think about your Elizabeth Holmes doc, "The Inventor," when watching "Musk." The "fake it 'til you make it" ethos that's baked into Silicon Valley, has that been fascinating to observe? Both Holmes and Musk are founders who are amazing salespeople hoping that what they bet on takes off. 

I think there is a similarity with Elizabeth Holmes. What was rattling around in my head through this was confidence. Musk, like Holmes, was able, through force of confidence, to convince people of things that they knew not to be true. That became a superpower.

The big difference between Tesla and SpaceX and Elizabeth Holmes is that those are real products. The Tesla S is a great car. These reusable rockets are extraordinary, and we show the magnificence of that in the film.

Not to take anything away from him or those companies, but there's also the bullshit factor. The idea of going to Mars and the promises. And you can see how they repeat themselves and get bigger and bigger. Oh, yeah, full self-driving! I'm sorry, Tesla's self-driving option is still a level two system, and over 60 people have died.

(Editor's note: Tesla has maintained that its Autopilot feature requires constant driver attention, and that its vehicles issue prompts warning the driver to stay alert and hold the steering wheel.)

The things you highlight about Musk's involvement in DOGE and suggesting he influenced the election are shocking, but the things you highlight about Tesla got me the most. The battery swapping, the self-driving car feature. Were you shocked by how much smoke and mirrors there are at Tesla?

Yes. It was something that I didn't know when I started. And as you mentioned, fake it 'til you make it. They just faked it. Mostly, it was in order to raise the stock. The economic fundamentals of the company never warranted a high stock price, but if you can convince people that the CEO is a genius and also that it's not really a car company — it's a tech company, so some super inventions are coming down the road — you can persuade people to gin up the stock. 

(Editor's note: Musk and Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.)

On almost hitting a child while using the self-driving feature on a Cybertruck

You rode a self-driving car yourself; you did it with a Cybertruck for the movie. 

I did. There was a cut where we included a four-minute sequence of me in the Cybertruck. I went to the San Francisco Tesla showroom and wanted to drive a Cybertruck, and they showed me how to turn on the self-driving feature. I pressed "Go," and off I went to the other side of the city. It was like a 20-minute ride there and back.

What's interesting is for most of the trip it was kind of astoundingly good. But then there were moments when it was astoundingly bad, sometimes in ways that were played to safety. Like, I was trying to merge onto a very busy thoroughfare, and cars kept coming, and if it were me as the driver, I would nudge out there, but full self-driving couldn't figure that out, so I sat there for 10 minutes. Other instances, it couldn't decide what to do at critical moments and almost hit a pedestrian. 

It came uncomfortably close to a child. The child kind of came from the side out of a parked car. It's not something you would anticipate, but it was really scary.

Why didn't you put that in the movie?

Ultimately, the legal case that we spotlight in the movie was a far more powerful deep dive. There were mortal consequences. A woman died. And the deep dive into the evidence itself was so much more powerful. If I had only done a film about Tesla, I probably would have included it. 

On the movie's fate on HBO and the consequences of checking power

The greatest irony in all of this is this movie could have been out a year or so ago, but HBO asked you to make it longer. Now Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery have merged, so HBO is now under David Ellison, who once considered bringing on Musk as an equity investor in Paramount. Are you concerned HBO will not air "Musk"?

I was concerned until recently. I'm always on the alert. But I've been told that they will air it and that even David Ellison very well knows about it and promises he will air it. 

You have worked with HBO forever. 

Yeah, I love them. 

So if they are telling you it is going to happen, you believe them. 

But what you learn is, shit happens. [Laughs.] Executives change. Circumstances change, and the next thing you know, it's not what you thought. But, for now, we are making very specific plans about when it's going to come out, which is likely in January. 

Because of where the industry is going — fewer networks and distribution options, and the options available are mostly run by conglomerates often looking for political cooperation — for the kind of stories you tell, are you looking for alternative distribution avenues in the future with your company, Jigsaw?

We have a skunkworks inside Jigsaw to try to solve some of these distribution problems.

In this new environment, films that people desperately want to see are being held back from audiences. The platforms tell you people don't want to see them, but that's just not true. HBO is the exception, but what a lot of the platforms are doing is investing in predictable, least objectionable programming. A lot of the platforms want it to be like the cereal aisles at the grocery market: they are all the same cereal, but different variations between Rice Krispies and Froot Loops. They can predictably get people invested in that mixture of salt and sugar that keeps them coming back for more without providing anything that is nutritious. 

So the avenue is theatrical, like it was a decade-plus ago. "Musk" is out in theaters through Bleecker Street, and that's powerful because it's a lot harder to put the genie back in the bottle when it's already out there. 

Checking power sometimes comes with blowback. You have experienced everything from Julian Assange leaking the script to "We Steal Secrets" before that movie came out to Scientologists following you around after you made "Going Clear." Do these things wear on you, or do they fuel you?

I mean, given the fact that I haven't stopped, it seems to be fueling me. That said, it doesn't mean I don't need to take precautions. But I'm still motivated by the idea of people with enormous power abusing it at our expense; that seems to be a spur for me. 

When it comes to Elon Musk, he's the richest and arguably the most powerful person in the world, so it can have these devastating consequences. Ashley St. Clair has security because the X platform has a way of directing vitriol at people. And Elon can say it's just free speech, but he knows very well that by doing what he does and by the platform tweaking its algorithm for replies and rage addiction, he knows that his statements are going to be amplified in a really horrible way that may result in harm to an individual.

(Editor's note: Musk, who has called himself a "free speech absolutist," described X's policy in 2022 as "freedom of speech, not freedom of reach," saying the company would limit the reach of negative posts but not delete them. Musk did not respond to a request for comment about his X posts and the company's algorithm.)

Is your experience with Musk's followers different from what you experienced with Scientology?

Scientology is a little different, but people did come up to me in dark parking lots in a way that was discomforting. But what some ex-Scientologists told me was, "What they are doing is they aren't going to put a rattlesnake in their mailbox; they are trying to get inside your head. So once you understand that, just don't let them inside your head." That turned out to be very wise advice.

Scientology was tough, and when my film on Assange came out, the vitriol on Twitter was extreme, and I wasn't prepared for that. What I've come to learn is you have to know your enemy. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

"Musk" is in theaters now.

• Recycling standards vary across the US, with municipalities often setting their own unique rules.
• Recycling the wrong material or including wet or dirty items can contaminate the waste stream.
• Some items may need to be dropped off at specific locations rather than collected.

Many of us have been guilty of "wish-cycling" — that is, tossing every piece of paper, plastic, metal, or glass in the blue bin, assuming it's probably recyclable.

Unfortunately, recycling is more complicated than that.

"There are literally thousands of recycling standards across the country," Rajesh Buch, a professor at Arizona State University, where he teaches a course on sustainable business, told Business Insider.

That's in part because recycling systems that sort through piles of discarded items can cost tens of millions of dollars. "In most communities," he said, "they don't have the resources to have these fully loaded, full-capacity systems."

The disposal of household batteries, for example, is a common source of confusion. While the EPA recommends that single-use household batteries be sent to specialized battery recyclers, it also says that "in most communities, alkaline and zinc carbon batteries can be safely put in your household trash."

For residents of New York City, however, the Department of Sanitation's guidelines declare this is illegal and dangerous, citing risk of fire and explosion. New York City residents are required to dispose of their batteries at waste drop-off sites or at stores that accept them.

Conflicting standards can be confusing, but dumping every container or scrap can contaminate the waste stream, Buch said.

Earth911 has a recycling locator that can help you find where to dispose of certain recyclables, or you can pay a company like TerraCycle to do the work for you.

That said, there are some items that almost always need to go in the garbage or a special recycling facility. Here is a list of 25 of them.

1. Aerosol cans

Aerosol cans are metal with plastic caps, which should be recycled separately. Some recyclers accept the cans, but others don't.

You'll want to make sure they're empty if you can recycle them, especially if the cans contained chemicals.

"Some of these are dangerous to put in the blue bin," Buch said.

2. Batteries

Some cities, like Seattle and New York, have barred people from throwing batteries in the trash because they can cause chemical leaks and fires. Batteries usually can't be recycled curbside, either.

Instead, a battery recycling facility needs to take them, Buch said.

If you want to recycle them, you can find retail locations willing to take batteries on the site Call2Recycle.

3. Chip bags and other snack wrappers

Chip bags, granola bar wrappers, and other snack packages are often multi-layered materials, Buch said.

"You've got foil on the outside," he said. "You've got a plastic coating on the inside, and that's not recyclable."

The machines aren't able to separate the layers, he said.

Some brands' packaging is recyclable through How2Recycle, though you'll have to drop it off at a participating grocery store or retailer.

4. Coffee mugs and other ceramics

There isn't good technology to recycle ceramics, Buch said. They can even damage equipment.

The same is true for heat-resistant glass used to make items like baking dishes. Unwanted ceramics can usually be discarded in the household trash.

5. Coffee pods

Over the years, coffee companies have made their pods more environmentally friendly by switching to a different type of recyclable plastic. But you still can't just toss them in your recycling right out of the machine.

"The foil is recyclable," Buch said. "The plastic is recyclable." But you have to remove the foil top from the plastic cup. As with all other recycling, it should be clean and dry.

Even when properly separated, though, the pods can be what Buch calls a "nuisance item." They're so small that they often fall through slots or holes in sorting machines instead of getting recycled.

"Anything that's 2 inches or smaller is going to fall out of the sorting system," Buch said.

There are still ways to recycle some pods, though. Nescafé accepts pods you return to them, for example.

6. Diapers

Disposable diapers are difficult to recycle "even if you didn't have all the poop inside," Buch said. They contain a variety of materials, like plastic and cellulose.

Some recycling companies like TerraCycle might take them, but municipal facilities most likely won't.

Some companies abroad, like Germany's BASF, are making advancements in chemically recycling diapers using the process of gasification, Plastics News reported.

7. E-waste

Cellphones, printers, and computers contain plastic, metal, and a mix of other materials that make them poorly suited for standard recycling systems.

Many cities have separate facilities where you can drop off e-waste, or you might be able to schedule a special pickup. For example, if you have a coffee maker that's gone kaput, a retailer like Staples might recycle it and other small appliances for free.

8. Inflatable pools and toys

In 2018, the US generated 35.7 million tons of plastic waste and only recycled about 9% of it, according to the EPA's most recent estimates. Because there are so many different kinds of plastics, it can be difficult to know what you can and cannot throw in your blue bin.

Many plastic containers have a little symbol: recycling arrows with a number in the center. This is what's known as a resin identification code.

Most recycling facilities accept empty, clean, dry number 1 or 2 plastic. Some locations accept numbers 1 through 7, while others won't take numbers 3, 6, or 7. It's best to check before you chuck your plastic in the bin.

PVC, which is number 3, is used to make inflatable pool toys, faux leather, and other goods, and is very difficult to recycle.

9. Light bulbs

There are many types of light bulbs, from CFLs to LEDs. It's important to figure out what type you have before tossing it because many municipalities have different rules about where they go.

"Some of the old light bulbs even have mercury or other kinds of chemicals in them, like fluorescent light bulbs," Buch said. So you may have to take them to your local hazardous waste collection site.

Some hardware stores will take certain types of bulbs, and Batteries Plus accepts a wide variety, including LEDs, incandescent bulbs, and fluorescent tubes.

10. Medical waste

Needles, syringes, and other sharp medical products can injure workers at waste and recycling facilities. Some locations have drop boxes or other collection sites that take them.

Safe Needle Disposal offers lists of disposal locations by state as well as mail-in services, which often require a fee.

11. Napkins and paper towels

You may know that you only used a paper towel to dry your hands, but the recycling facility doesn't. They have to assume it could have been covered in food, grease, or even something hazardous.

"Those things become contaminated waste in the blue bin," Buch said.

Plus, the fibers in these paper products are too short to get recycled.

The cardboard rolls inside, however, can be recycled if they're clean and dry.

12. Plastic utensils

Plastic utensils have a few traits that make them a no-go for the recycling bin. For starters, the size and shape of plastic utensils mean it's hard for them to be processed by machinery. These objects often cause jams or other issues in machines.

Additionally, they're often made from a mix of plastics that can be hard to separate.

The waste collection company Republic Services conducted a survey of over 2,000 Americans, which found that 38% of those surveyed recycled plastic cutlery, as reported by Recycling Today.

13. Prescription pill bottles

As with coffee pods, some prescription pill bottles and their lids are small enough to fall through sorting machines and won't be recycled.

"There might be some communities where they don't take the pill bottle and other communities where they do," Buch said.

14. Greasy pizza boxes

Cardboard is one of the most recycled materials in the US, but over half of what's tossed still ends up in landfills, according to a 2019 estimate.

While most pizza boxes are made of cardboard, they're also often greasy. "Sometimes the cardboard has cheese stuck to it, so now you've got cardboard with food, so it's contaminated," Buch said.

Some facilities will still take the boxes if they're not too dirty.

15. Wet or unrinsed bottles and containers

While many people may throw their finished bottles in the recycling bin without much of a second thought, excess foods or liquids can complicate the recycling process. Briefly rinsing all residue from containers and letting them dry is the best practice.

If bottles still contain liquid, they could damage machinery or be rejected by the automated sorting process, according to Recycle Now.

16. Plastic bags and bubble wrap

Plastic bags and film and bubble wrap can cause serious problems for recycling equipment, acting a bit like hair caught around a vacuum roller brush.

"Plastic film stretches and becomes literally filament-like," Buch said. "It gets wrapped around inside these sorting systems."

The Republic Services survey found that 41% percent of those surveyed recycled plastic shopping bags.

Many grocery stores have collection boxes for plastic bags.

17. Loose plastic bottle tops

Whether you should leave plastic tops on water bottles before recycling them varies between municipalities.

"The lid is made of a different material than the plastic bottle itself," Buch said, so they're recycled differently.

Many facilities can separate the cap and bottle. However, you'll still want to check with your local recycler because some require cap-free bottles.

18. Styrofoam

Many cities and states have banned Styrofoam food containers, but the substance still arrives in a lot of products and shipping packaging.

Styrofoam, also known as polystyrene, isn't recyclable in most curbside bins. Many cities have drop-off sites, though they may only take certain types, like Styrofoam blocks.

19. Receipts

Though receipts can sometimes seem paper-like enough for the recycling bin, the thermal paper that most are printed on contains chemicals like Bisphenol-A and Bisphenol-S, which could contaminate other paper in the recycling stream or find their way into wastewater, per the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

So the next time you're cleaning out your coat pockets, those receipts that have been in there for a year can go straight to the trash.

20. Photos and glossy photo paper

Much like receipts, recycling photos and glossy paper may seem acceptable, but the coating on most photo paper contains metals or plastic.

If you're unsure about whether certain other glossy materials, like wrapping paper, can be recycled, you can perform the "rip test" as outlined by the Ecology Center. If the material doesn't rip the way printer paper does, it's most certainly not recyclable.

21. Cables, wires, garden hoses, and extension cords

Like plastic bags, electrical cords and wires, string lights, and garden hoses are items that sanitation departments often describe as "tanglers."

Portland's garbage and recycling guidance notes that these materials can wrap around the recycling equipment and must be removed by hand, a process it describes as both inefficient and dangerous.

22. Clothing and shoes

Clothing, shoes, and other textiles don't belong in household recycling bins.

If they are in good condition, they can be donated to charity or even sold online for some extra cash. The US Environmental Protection Agency recommends checking with local charities to see whether they accept damaged clothing and shoes.

You can also check to see whether your local authority offers a textile recycling service. For example, Fairfax County, Virginia, has a pilot textile recycling program with bins for recycling old clothing, shoes, and other textiles.

23. Mirrors and window panes

While you should generally be recycling your glass containers and bottles, mirrors and window panes are a different story.

This is because mirrors and window panes have a different melting point than glass jars and containers, which can contaminate the recycling stream.

If in good condition, mirrors can be donated to thrift stores, and windows to organizations like Habitat for Humanity ReStore.

24. Shredded paper — depending on your recycling program

Whether you can recycle shredded paper depends on your local recycling program, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Its small size makes it challenging to sort at recycling facilities, and many facilities do not accept it for that reason. Some authorities, such as Gainesville, Florida, request that residents place it in a paper bag for recycling.

To avoid shredded paper going to waste, you can also use it for compost.

25. Compostable plastic cups and containers

Compostable plastics can contaminate plastic recycling streams when mixed with non-compostable plastics.

The Environmental Protection Agency recommends checking whether your area has a recycling program that accepts compostable plastic or a local drop-off area for these items.

• A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion over how it handled its users' data.
• It could be the largest penalty against Meta in history.
• Meta recently agreed to an $18 billion settlement over the impact of its tech on kids.

A judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading users about how it handled their data and for failing to prevent misinformation on Facebook.

The ruling could be the largest penalty in Meta's history. Last month, Meta settled a child-safety lawsuit brought by a group of US states for $18 billion.

The New Mexico case focused on Meta's handling of user records that Cambridge Analytica used for campaign purposes during the 2016 election. New Mexico alleged that Facebook misrepresented the extent of users' control over their data on the app.

"Facebook's wrongdoing—over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public—goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote in the ruling. "It relates to the way in which Facebook induces people onto the platform and ultimately keeps them there."

In a statement, Meta's chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the penalty "makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico."

"At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online," Mahoney said. "We are confident we will prevail on appeal."

A jury ruled against Meta last month, finding the company committed nearly 50 million violations of a New Mexico law prohibiting deceptive trade practices. Each violation carries a penalty of up to $5,000.

Some Meta executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were deposed in the case. New Mexico first sued the company in 2021, and the case went to trial last month.

In internal Meta communications presented at the trial, Zuckerberg appeared to obfuscate methods for users to hide their data.

"Give them a chance to change their privacy settings but obviously don't encourage it," Zuckerberg wrote in one internal message.

Meta's next move remains unclear. The company didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

This is a breaking news story. It will be updated.

• Nvidia vice president Laura Fay has retired after a decade at the company.
• Fay grew Nvidia's enterprise marketing team from roughly 60 to 600 employees.
• Nvidia brought in Google Cloud's Alison Wagonfeld as its first chief marketing officer this year.

Laura Fay, a longtime Nvidia marketing executive who reported to CEO Jensen Huang, retired in July after roughly a decade at the AI chip giant.

Fay formerly served as Nvidia's vice president of global enterprise marketing, overseeing campaigns, events, analyst relations, and partner marketing. She said her team grew from roughly 60 to 600 people by the time she left.

Fay was among 36 employees on an internal list obtained by Business Insider last year of company leaders reporting directly to Huang. Prior to joining Nvidia, she spent 22 years at Cisco, concluding her tenure there as VP of global marketing.

Fay said Huang recruited her to build Nvidia's enterprise marketing organization as the company looked to expand beyond gaming.

"I want to change the world, and I want you to change it with me," she recalled him telling her on their first call.

Fay said she began considering retirement around her 10th anniversary in January, though a call from Huang congratulating her and expressing hope that she'd stick around for another decade persuaded her to stay a little longer.

Nvidia declined to comment.

Fay's retirement came as Nvidia also brought in new marketing leadership. In February, the company hired Google Cloud executive Alison Wagonfeld as its first chief marketing officer.

The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that Wagonfeld would oversee all marketing and communications teams and assume responsibilities previously divided among several leaders.

Those changes follow another longtime marketing departure. Greg Estes, Nvidia's former vice president of corporate marketing and developer programs, retired in 2025 after roughly 15 years at the company.

Several other longtime Nvidians have retired this year, including sales chief Jay Puri, chief accounting officer Donald Robertson, and VP of hardware engineering Robert Huang. Some retirees told Business Insider that Nvidia's exponential stock run helped precipitate their decisions.

Nvidia's communications organization has also undergone a shake-up as scrutiny around the company has intensified, with roughly 15 employees departing since 2025 amid a reorganization under new leadership.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at gweiss@businessinsider.com or Signal at @geoffweiss.25. Use a personal email address, a non-work WiFi network, and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• SpaceX is offering employees a 20% pay bump to volunteer to help build its data centers in Memphis.
• The company is looking for "leaders" who can "remove blockers," according to emails seen by BI.
• Elon Musk said on Tuesday he often spends "four days a week" in Memphis working on SpaceX's data center buildout.

SpaceX is offering employees a pay bump to temporarily move to Memphis and help build its data centers.

Elon Musk's rocket company is giving employees a 20% pay increase if they volunteer to spend six weeks assisting its critical supercomputer buildout, according to an email seen by Business Insider.

"We now need leaders — current and emerging — to guide teams and remove blockers as we bring more supercomputers online," read the email, which was sent in early October to all SpaceX employees.

It specified that volunteers did not need to be managers already, adding that construction experience is a plus and that "drive matters most."

Employees who put themselves forward should expect to spend six weeks on-site in Memphis, Tennessee, or Southaven, Mississippi, where SpaceX is currently expanding its huge Colossus 1 and 2 data centers to meet surging demand for its compute business.

Volunteers "must be in good performance standing," with more than one year of tenure preferred, the email said. Employees who volunteer will receive a 20% premium on their base salary or on their hourly rate of pay for the period of their assignment, and be eligible for "bonuses tied to program success."

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

The email described the reallocation of employees from other parts of SpaceX to assist the company's data center buildout as a "surge," a tactic employed by the company to divert employees and resources to mission-critical projects.

In 2022, CNBC reported that SpaceX offered employees pay bumps of between 10%-25% to temporarily relocate to Texas as it attempted to launch its Starship megarocket.

The company has been offering "surging" employees a 20% premium on their salary to move to Memphis since at least August, according to another email seen by Business Insider that called for "SpaceX experts and aces" to work for the next three months on the data center buildout. The email said the program is intended to end on December 31, 2026, but could be extended.

SpaceX will cover travel expenses and logistics, both emails said.

SpaceX's compute cash cow

The supercomputers in Tennessee and Mississippi, which were originally built by xAI before the startup was folded into SpaceX in February, have become a critical part of the company's business.

In SpaceX's earnings on Tuesday night, the rocket giant said AI revenue that includes leasing out its compute to other companies — including Anthropic and Google — had soared to more than $7 billion, nearly half SpaceX's entire quarterly revenue.

On the analyst call, CEO Elon Musk said that SpaceX was being "hounded relentlessly" by companies looking to rent out its compute, adding that they could have rented it out several times over.

SpaceX has been shifting executives in addition to rank-and-file employees to oversee its aggressive expansion. Business Insider previously reported that the company had placed a former Starship executive in charge of building out its compute capacity in Memphis.

Musk told investors on Tuesday he was also spending most of his time in the city as he looked to push SpaceX toward a target of bringing an extra 10 gigawatts of compute online by the end of 2027.

"I've been spending, personally, a lot of my time in Memphis, often four days a week," the SpaceX CEO said. He previously said he was living in an Airstream trailer on the site.

Do you work at SpaceX and have any information to share? Get in touch with this reporter at tcarter.41 on Signal or tcarter@businessinsider.com. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Elon Musk said AI rivals are clamoring to rent SpaceX's compute.
• SpaceX plans to split compute between its internal uses and outside customers.
• The company could rent out its compute "several times over if we said yes to everyone," Musk said.

SpaceX's AI rivals are clamoring to rent computing power from the artificial intelligence and rocket company, CEO Elon Musk said.

"We are also, frankly, hounded relentlessly by every hyperscaler and by dozens of smaller companies to rent more of our compute," Musk said during SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call Tuesday.

Musk said SpaceX could rent out the company's compute "several times over if we said yes to everyone."

SpaceX, however, is reserving a chunk of that capacity for its own AI ambitions, including scaling its AI chatbot Grok and Cursor, the coding startup it recently acquired.

Musk said SpaceX is seeking to devote roughly half of its compute to internal uses and rent out the other half to third parties. That balance could change month to month, he said.

"It's going to be dynamic," said Musk. "And obviously, our approach is to rent at the — effectively the spot market rate as opposed to sign these long-term deals."

The company expects the value of compute to increase as AI models improve and ultimately generate "more useful intelligence per watt," said Musk.

"And the value of that compute is proportionate to the useful intelligence per watt," Musk said, adding that rental rates for older Nvidia H100 chips have climbed from when they were new.

"I think that's likely to continue," said Musk. "I think we're going to face a shortage of super intelligence compute. And that shortage is going to remain for a long time."

Musk likened the situation to Monty Python's famed cheese shop sketch, in which a customer repeatedly asks for different cheeses only to find that none are available.

"We've actually tried to offload some of our inference compute to other cloud providers so that we can use more compute for training," the CEO said. "And we get the cheese shop sketch."

• Former "GMA3" co-anchors Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes are married.
• The two first sparked controversy when they were spotted cuddling while still legally married.
• Nearly four years later, the two are now legally wed, and their exes are engaged.

As one of the internet's favorite sayings goes: Never let your spouse stop you from finding your soulmate.

"GMA3: What You Need to Know" co-anchors T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach sparked controversy in November 2022 after their relationship became public when photos of them cuddling were published by The Daily Mail.

The relationship between the two journalists — who were legally married to other people at the time — subsequently made national headlines. 

Holmes married attorney Marilee Fiebig, 49, in 2010, the same year Robach married actor Andrew Shue, 59. After the news broke, both Holmes, 49, and Robach, 53, said they were either separated or in the midst of divorce proceedings when they were photographed together.

"To be clear, we were outed as being in a relationship, but everyone else thought we were being outed as adulterers — being outed as cheating on our spouses — and it wasn't the case," Holmes said on a December 2023 episode of their podcast, "Amy & T.J."

In October 2025, nearly three years after the first headlines about their relationship, Holmes and Robach announced on their podcast that they had gotten engaged.

One year after their engagement, Robach and Holmes married on September 19, 2026, in Holmes' home state of Arkansas, according to public marriage records. People reported the news on October 13.

In a happy twist, Shue and Fiebig are also in a relationship and have been together since December 2023. They announced their engagement just over a week after Robach and Holmes' marriage became public.

Here's a timeline of the scandal that rocked "GMA3" and led to both Holmes and Robach exiting the morning show.

Holmes and Robach did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Keyaira Boone, Esme Mazzeo, and Libby Torres contributed to a prior version of this article.

November 30, 2022: The Daily Mail published photos of Robach and Holmes.

Robach and Holmes began cohosting "GMA3: What You Need to Know" in 2020, although they had worked together at ABC since Holmes' hiring in 2014.

In November 2022, The Daily Mail posted images of them together in a series of intimate situations, including having drinks in a New York bar and traveling to a cottage in the Shawangunk Mountains of upstate New York. The two were pictured laughing together, holding hands, and casually touching one another.

Shortly after, Entertainment Weekly reported that Holmes shuttered his X and Instagram accounts, and Robach deactivated her Instagram profile.

December 2022: Shue deleted pictures of Robach on his Instagram profile.

Shue's account was wiped of pictures of his wife the day after The Daily Mail published their photos of Robach and Holmes, E! News reported.

December 2022: An interview with Robach and Reese Witherspoon from earlier in the year resurfaced, hinting at similarities between "GMA3" and "The Morning Show."

An October 2022 interview between Robach and Witherspoon resurfaced on Twitter, reminding viewers that the host had once possibly hinted at drama occurring behind-the-scenes of "GMA3."

Witherspoon, who was promoting her Apple TV+ drama "The Morning Show," asked Robach and her co-hosts whether the fictional workplace drama "hit home a little bit."

"We can give you a few more plot lines," Robach replied, as her colleagues laughed. Witherspoon jumped on the opportunity to take the show's stories to the next level. 

"Email me," she told Robach.

December 2022: "GMA3" staffers said Robach and Holmes did not start dating until they were separated from their spouses.

People reported that Holmes and Robach were both effectively single when they began dating, citing sources. 

"This was two consenting adults who were each separated. They both broke up with their spouses in August within weeks of each other," a source said.

"The relationship didn't start until after that," they added.

Meanwhile, the two anchors continued filming. On December 2, they even joked about what "a great week" they were having in a sarcastic tone, according to Page Six.

December 5, 2022: Robach and Holmes were pulled off the air.

Robach and Holmes were placed on hiatus from "GMA3" amid the scandal. The New York Times reported ABC News' then-president, Kim Godwin, called the news frenzy surrounding their relationship an "internal and external distraction" on a morning editorial call.

It came amid claims from staffers that Holmes had engaged in relationships with other colleagues at ABC during his time there, while married. He has not publicly commented on the accusations.

December 28, 2022: Holmes filed for divorce.

Holmes filed for divorce from Fiebig in New York. They were married for nearly 13 years and share one daughter, Sabine.

On the same day the news broke, Holmes and Robach were photographed making out in Miami.

January 2023: Holmes' estranged wife, Marilee Fiebig, spoke out via her divorce lawyer for the first time since the scandal broke.

"Marilee's sole focus has remained on the overall best interest of her 9-year-old daughter," Stephanie Lehman, Fiebig's lawyer, told The Daily Mail.

She confirmed that the divorce between Fiebig and Holmes was progressing. "To that end, T.J.'s lawyer and I have been working together to move their divorce forward privately, expeditiously, and as amicably as possible," Lehman continued.

Lehman criticized Holmes' public actions.

"Notwithstanding, we continue to be disappointed by T.J.'s lack of discretion, respect, and sensitivity toward Marilee and the party's daughter," she added.

The divorce was ultimately settled in October 2023, People reported.

January 27, 2023: Holmes and Robach exited "GMA3" permanently.

In late January 2023, TMZ was the first to report that the co-anchors were preparing to officially exit "GMA3."

The same day as the reports, Holmes' and Robach's exits were confirmed. In a statement given to Business Insider, ABC said that Holmes and Robach were officially leaving the network.

"After several productive conversations with Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes, about different options, we all agreed it's best for everyone that they move on from ABC News," a spokesperson for the network said. "We recognize their talent and commitment over the years and are thankful for their contributions."

December 1, 2023: Robach and Holmes made their red-carpet debut as a couple.

The two attended KIIS FM's iHeartRadio Jingle Ball 2023 together. They showed plenty of PDA in their first public appearance as a couple.

December 5, 2023: Robach and Holmes released the first episode of their podcast, a year to the day after their relationship was publicly revealed.

During the first episode of "Amy & T.J.," the former anchors emphasized that they were both separated from their respective partners when their relationship began.

"To be clear, we were outed as being in a relationship," Holmes said on the podcast. "But everyone else thought we were being outed as adulterers, being outed as cheating on our spouses, and it wasn't the case."

Robach, for her part, said her close friends knew she was in the middle of divorcing Shue when the photos of her and Holmes leaked in November 2022.

"I took my ring off early August. It was very clear to anyone who knew me that I was in the middle of a divorce," she said.

Holmes also acknowledged that the couple probably could have gone about things differently.

"We shouldn't have allowed — and I could say that in hindsight — for folks to find out about our relationship before they found out about our divorces," he said. 

But Robach said they were trying to protect their families from potential backlash.

"We thought we were protecting our children and our families, and we thought we had time," she said. "And we thought we had a right to privacy. And maybe that was foolish and silly."

December 5, 2023: The same day the podcast launched, reports surfaced that Robach's and Holmes' exes were dating.

Page Six first reported that Robach's ex, Andrew Shue, and Holmes' ex, Marilee Fiebig, had been dating for about six months.

People reported that they "bonded over their shared experience of splitting from their partners," citing a source.

March 17, 2024: Holmes and Robach ran the New York City Half Marathon together.

As running has been part of their relationship for years, the two continued their tradition by participating in the NYC Half Marathon in March 2024.

Robach called the day "13.1 miles of pure joy" on Instagram.

September 30, 2024: Holmes and Robach announced they had moved in together.

The decision to move in together was spurred by Robach's then-21-year-old daughter, Ava, who asked to temporarily move into her mom's apartment due to a roach infestation.

"I've just said, 'Hey y'all, knock yourselves out. I'll be at T.J.'s,' " Robach said on their podcast.

This led to the two officially cohabitating.

"I've enjoyed the time that we've had together. It's been a little different, but I've liked it," Holmes said.

In February 2025, Us Weekly reported that their exes, Shue and Fiebig, had moved in together as well.

October 14, 2025: They announced they are engaged.

In a four-minute minisode of their podcast, Robach and Holmes shared the news that they are officially engaged — and had been for around a month.

"I was in three massive football stadiums three weekends in a row, wearing my engagement ring very proudly, very excitedly, and kept waiting for somebody to point it out or ask me, 'Hey, what's that?' And it never happened," Robach said.

Holmes added that if any news about the proposal came out from anyone besides them or "the 10 people" they told, it was nonsense.

September 19, 2026: They get married in Arkansas.

According to a wedding license obtained by People, Holmes and Robach applied for the license the day prior. They tied the knot in Arkansas, where Holmes was born and where his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, is located.

October 13, 2026: News of their wedding becomes public.

The license was filed with the County Clerk's office in Washington County on October 13, which is how the news of their marriage became public. They have not commented on their marriage yet, but they've talked about it before.

During a May 2026 episode of their podcast, they shared that they had picked a date and "a way" they wanted to get married that "would be very special to us," but didn't give details. "We can't say what that is. That's a big thing for us."

October 21, 2026: Shue and Fiebig announce their engagement.

On October 21, Shue confirmed to People that he and Fiebeg were engaged after three years of dating.

"I don't know how it happened, but there's a happy ending," he said. "I don't think there was anything other than this just happened to be our way of getting to know each other and being able to share ourselves with each other in a time where we both needed a friend," he added, referring to how they first met.

"We're very grateful and hopeful," he concluded.

• The internet is ablaze after cybersecurity researchers using AI found a bug in the PHP programming language.
• Greg Brockman said bad actors could use the exploit to steal private user data.
• The FBI and NSA have advised people to either take down websites or update their software.

OpenAI said that 70% of the world's websites could be in peril after cybersecurity researchers using its AI models found exploits in a popular programming language.

The National Security Administration's cyber division advised all web providers that use PHP, a widely used open-source language, to take their systems offline or update their software after OpenAI said one of its models found two "critical" flaws in the language's infrastructure.

Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, said in an X post that hackers could exploit the vulnerability to steal private user data or modify websites.

"We consider this one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory," OpenAI said in a blog post.

While OpenAI said the vulnerabilities appear to have been identified before any attackers discovered them, the public disclosure set off a race for companies and governments to update their websites and apply fixes before hackers could exploit the bugs.

"We are seeing early attacks emerging and are updating mitigations as new vectors show up," Dane Knecht, Cloudflare's chief technology officer, said in a post on X.

Numerous websites, including those belonging to governments and the media, went offline on Wednesday to address the issue.

PHP is a popular programming language that often handles the behind-the-scenes work powering websites that require user logins and online orders.

The critical flaw was first identified by Calif, a cybersecurity research company using GPT-5.6 Sol. Wiz, another cybersecurity company, independently uncovered the issues, OpenAI said. The companies are part of an OpenAI-led initiative called "Patch the Planet," which aims to make the world's digital infrastructure more secure.

OpenAI has also warned that as cybersecurity researchers continue to probe software vulnerabilities using its ever-advancing frontier models, more security failures will emerge.

An engineer at Microsoft pointed out that the PHP vulnerability was discovered with an older model.

"I don't think the world is prepared for the sheer number of vulnerabilities newer models will uncover," the engineer, Nicolas Bustamante, said on X.

The public disclosure on Wednesday by OpenAI and others of the existence of the exploits triggered urgent messages from leaders worldwide, including the Japanese Prime Minister.

"We have an urgent request for everyone to take action tonight," said Sanae Takaichi.

• After Robert and John F. Kennedy were assassinated, a rumor formed that the family could be cursed.
• Their history has been marred with tragedy, from four plane crashes to a deadly skiing accident.
• In 1969, Ted Kennedy publicly referenced the curse when apologizing for fleeing a fatal car crash.

Members of the Kennedy family have reached the highest positions in public office, becoming senators, congressmen, and even the president. Now, the next generation of Kennedys is carrying that legacy forward.

Still, the family has also endured profound losses across generations. Most recently, Kyle Kennedy, the granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy, died at 42 in September.

The family has also dealt with numerous tragedies, from illness and assassinations to fatal accidents and addiction. The family’s history of loss has fueled the long-running notion of a “Kennedy curse.”

Here are the many tragedies that have affected the Kennedy family.

Kennedy patriarch Joe Kennedy Sr. had high expectations of his children. Some conspiracists have suggested he was to blame for what would befall his family.

Joe Kennedy Sr. rose from reasonably humble beginnings to become an ambassador to Britain, and he made millions working as a bank president, selling liquor, and owning a Hollywood studio, The Atlantic reported.

Conspiracists have maintained that the Kennedy patriarch committed crimes like bootlegging to make the fortune that eventually supported future Kennedy endeavors.

The New Yorker reported these crimes were often mentioned "in the same breath" as the tragedies that struck the Kennedys, "assuming that there is a dark pattern in the way things happen."

The first Kennedy to feel the brunt of his ambition was his daughter, Rosemary, born in 1918.

She had seizures and tantrums and was intellectually disabled, though her parents worked hard to keep that a secret from society. 

To avoid the suspicion that anything was different about Rosemary, she was presented alongside her sister Kathleen at Buckingham Palace with other eligible debutantes, Marie Claire reported.

"To present Rosemary, an intellectually disabled adult, to the monarchy at Buckingham Palace during the debutante season was more than a bold act," Kate Clifford Larson, the author of "Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter," said, Marie Claire reported.

"A debutante with intellectual disabilities would have stirred long-held prejudices about passing along 'defective' traits to the next generation," she said. "Joe and Rose were determined to keep the family secret, making sure that Rosemary was treated just like all the other eligible young women presented at court that year."

In 1941, Joe Kennedy Sr. organized for his daughter, then 23, to have a lobotomy, with disastrous consequences.

At the time, the media said the operation was "easier than curing a toothache," NPR reported, and was frequently used to "treat" people with mental illnesses. However, the lobotomy only made Rosemary's condition worse.

For months afterward, she was unable to walk or talk, and she was put into an institution and cut off from her family for the next two decades. Rosemary lived at a mental health facility until her death in 2005.

The next tragedy struck the eldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.

Joe Jr. had been groomed for political office his whole life. When he was born, his grandfather, who was then the mayor of Boston, had told the press he would become president one day, according to the National Park Service.

Joe Jr. was successful both as an athlete and a student, Vanity Fair reported.

When he graduated from high school, he was awarded a trophy for the best student in both "scholarship and sportsmanship," according to Vanity Fair.

Joe Jr. left before his senior year at Harvard Law to volunteer as a Navy flyer in World War II. He died during a failed secret bombing campaign.

According to the National Park Service, Joe Jr. volunteered for the mission, which involved flying explosives over enemy territory, detonating them, and parachuting to safety. However, the explosives were accidentally set off early, killing both pilots on board the aircraft. 

"His worldly success was so assured and inevitable that his death seems to have cut into the natural order of things," his brother John wrote in a family memorial.

In 1948, another plane crash rocked the family when Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy died in a plane crash in France.

She had been a headstrong child, and her decisions in her love life caused a rift in the family — her mother, Rose, disapproved of Kathleen's soon-to-be marriage to a Protestant man, The Atlantic reported.

Months after their wedding in 1944, her husband was killed in battle, and she began an affair with Earl Peter Wentworth Fitzwilliam, a married man. 

Before the couple traveled to Paris to seek her father's blessing, People reported that their 10-seat plane encountered turbulence and crashed into the mountains between Paris and Cannes.

Both Kick and Peter, who was piloting the plane, were killed on impact. She was 28 years old. Only her father, Joe Sr., attended her funeral, according to The Atlantic.

After Joe Jr.'s death, Joe Sr. turned his focus to John F. Kennedy, who told a friend, "Now the burden falls on me."

Joe Sr. helped him begin his political life, using his contacts to call in favors and spending tens of thousands of dollars on his campaign, The Atlantic reported.

He reportedly said, "We're going to sell Jack like soap flakes," per PBS.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy became president of the US, and his family became forever regarded as American royalty. 

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in downtown Dallas.

He was fatally shot on November 22, 1963. President Kennedy was 46 years old.

The so-called "curse" of the Kennedys began to solidify the following week when Jackie Kennedy, who was known for shaping her family's image and her husband's presidency, invited a Life magazine reporter to Cape Cod for an exclusive interview.

During the interview, she said, "There will be great presidents again, but there will never be another Camelot," CBS reported.

"You must think of this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough," she continued, The Atlantic reported. "For Jack, history was full of heroes."

It was over the next few years, as Robert "Bobby" Kennedy grieved for his brother, that he started to see parallels between his family and the ancient Greeks.

A devout Catholic, Bobby began to question the source of his family's tragedies and whether God could give him the answer as to why they had all suffered so much grief, The Washington Post reported.

Bobby had studied the ancient Greek tragedies throughout his education, and he began to draw parallels between the classic parables and his family's woes.

"He began to wonder if the Kennedy family had somehow overreached, dared too greatly," author Evan Thomas wrote in "Robert Kennedy: His Life," per The Washington Post.

"Athenian drama returns obsessively — as we do, every November 22nd — to the shocking and yet seemingly inevitable spectacle of the fallen king, of power and beauty and privilege violently laid low," Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in The New Yorker.

In 1964, seven months after his brother was assassinated, tragedy almost struck the Kennedys again when Sen. Ted Kennedy went down in a plane crash.

Two people were killed in the incident, but Kennedy lived, CNN reported. He was left badly injured, though. He broke two ribs and three vertebrae, and his lung collapsed, Boston Magazine reported.

After the incident, Bobby alluded to the Kennedys being unlucky.

"There are more of us than there is trouble," he told the media after the crash. "The Kennedys intend to stay in public life. Good luck is something you make, and bad luck is something you endure."

Just four years later, in 1968, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated while campaigning to be president.

He was shot moments after he had won the California Democratic presidential primary. After he was struck, he asked a busboy if everybody else was unharmed, The Atlantic reported.

The busboy reportedly placed a rosary in his hand and told him that everyone was fine, according to The Atlantic. Robert "Bobby" Kennedy died soon after at the age of 42.

It was yet another blow to the Kennedy family, especially since Bobby had been acting as a surrogate father to his late brother John's two children. He also had 11 children with his wife of 18 years, Ethel Kennedy.

In 1969, Ted Kennedy had another near-death experience when he survived driving off a bridge on the island of Chappaquiddick in Massachusetts.

Ted Kennedy, then a senator, drove the car off the bridge after leaving a cookout party at a rented cottage, The Atlantic reported. His passenger, a woman named Mary Jo Kopechne, died at the scene.

Ted reportedly tried to save Kopechne, but he then fled and didn't report the crash for 10 hours. Still trapped inside the car, Kopechne drowned in the water. Ted later pleaded guilty to leaving the scene and was sentenced to a two-month suspended jail sentence, the BBC reported.

Ted remained a senator after the controversy but lost his chance to run for president.

After the crash, Ted Kennedy publicly referenced the idea of a family curse for the first time.

During his televised apology a week after the crash, Ted Kennedy said he had wondered "whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys," The Washington Post reported.

It marked the first time a member of the Kennedy family openly spoke about the reported "Kennedy curse," the Herald Tribune reported. But the speech had been crafted by several speechwriters, The New York Times reported, and was arguably more of a PR stunt than a true apology or admission of guilt.

In the speech, he recalled the "scrambled thoughts" that went through his mind after the crash, which he gave to the press. 

"They were reflected in the various inexplicable, inconsistent, and inconclusive things I said and did, including such questions as whether the girl might still be alive somewhere out of that immediate area, whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys, whether there was some justifiable reason for me to doubt what had happened and to delay my report, whether somehow the awful weight of this incredible incident might in some way pass from my shoulders," he said.

"I was overcome, I'm frank to say, by a jumble of emotions: grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion, and shock."

In 1984, Bobby Kennedy's son, David Kennedy, died of an overdose in a hotel in Florida.

David had struggled with addiction for years after his father's assassination in 1968.

The New York Times reported that David was possibly traumatized after watching his father's assassination on TV when he was 13 years old. He was only 28 years old when he was found dead in his Los Angeles hotel room.

Cocaine, painkillers, and a prescription drug used to treat several different psychotic disorders were found in his system, the Times reported, though there was no determination of whether it was an accidental overdose. 

"He was sensitive and gentle, which was attractive," his ex-girlfriend Rachel Ward later wrote of David in The Sydney Morning Herald in 2014. "David was very young when his father, Robert F. Kennedy, died, and it had an enormous impact on him. He had a drug addiction and was a troubled soul. He didn't have the arrogance of the other Kennedys because he was lost and struggling. But in the end, he couldn't get himself together and went under."

In 1997, Michael Kennedy, another of Robert Kennedy's sons, died in a skiing accident in Colorado.

Michael, 39, had been tossing around a football with his relatives while skiing.

The family had played "ski-football" for generations, The New York Times reported, and Kennedy was skiing while playing football on skis with relatives and friends when he struck a tree; he was not wearing a helmet.

In another public tragedy, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, and her sister died in a 1999 plane crash near Martha's Vineyard.

On July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her older sister Lauren Bessette were killed in a plane crash off the coast of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.

The group was dropping off Bessette on the island before Kennedy and Bessette-Kennedy planned to travel on to Hyannis to attend his cousin's wedding.

However, after encountering hazy conditions off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Kennedy, the plane's pilot, crashed the plane into the ocean, killing everyone on board. 

As Coast Guard officials searched for the missing bodies, the public outpouring of grief grew over the tragedy of the three young passengers' deaths.

Twenty years later, in 2019, tragedy struck the next generation of Kennedys when Saoirse Kennedy Hill, Robert's granddaughter, died from an accidental overdose.

Saoirse died of an overdose at the family's compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, The New York Times reported. She was 22 years old when she died, and had previously written about her struggle with depression, which she called "deep bouts of sadness that felt like a heavy boulder on my chest."

"Our hearts are shattered by the loss of our beloved Saoirse. Her life was filled with hope, promise, and love," the family said in an official statement. 

In 2020, another of Robert's granddaughters, Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, and her 8-year-old son, Gideon, died in a canoe accident.

The mother and son went missing in a canoe while searching for a ball that had drifted out into the Chesapeake Bay. Both of their bodies were later found by divers, The New York Times reported.

Tatiana Schlossberg, the eldest child of Caroline Kennedy, died in December 2025.

In a November 2025 essay for The New Yorker, Schlossberg revealed that she had been diagnosed with terminal acute myeloid leukemia. Doctors discovered the cancer shortly after she gave birth to her daughter in May 2024.

In the essay, Schlossberg reflected on the pain her diagnosis caused her family, writing that she had spent her life trying to protect her mother before facing a tragedy she could not prevent.

Schlossberg and her husband, George Moran, had two children: their daughter, Josephine Moran, born in May 2024, and their son, Edwin Garrett Moran, born in April 2022. He is the first great-grandchild of John F. Kennedy.

The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation announced that Schlossberg died on December 30. She was 35.

Kyle Kennedy, the granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., died at the age of 42.

Kyle Francis Kennedy, the granddaughter of Robert and Ethel, and daughter of Michael Kennedy (who died in a 1997 skiing accident), died on September 21 at her home in Westwood, Massachusetts.

She spent much of her career in education, advocating for more equitable elementary education.

Though her cause of death has not been publicly disclosed as of October 21, she struggled with health issues over the past few years, including a severe spinal cord injury that left her with long-term paralysis and other serious health challenges, according to Kennedy's obituary.

After her injury, Kennedy continued her advocacy work by testifying before the Massachusetts State House about discrimination in healthcare against disabled individuals.

She is survived by her former husband, Liam Kerr, and their two sons, Conor, 12, and Declan, 10. Their daughter, Josephine, was a twin to Conor and died just days after she was born in 2014.

Even if some otherworldly force like a curse isn't at play, it's undeniable that the Kennedy family has suffered a long string of tragedies and heartbreak.

In 2018, Edward Klein, who wrote a book about the Kennedy curse, defended his claim about the misfortune the Kennedy family experienced.

"I've looked high and low and cannot find another family since the ancient Greek House of Atreus that has suffered more calamities and misfortunes than the Kennedys," Klein, the author of "The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy Has Haunted America's First Family for 150 Years," told The Washington Post.

"The humanity of their story is what keeps us engaged," Kennedy family biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli told NBC News in 2019. "We peer behind the scenes of their wealthy lifestyle, and we see, for all the advantages they have, tragedy can still happen."