• Harvard's endowment returned a five-year high of 27.1% in the 12 months to June 30, besting the S&P 500.
• The Ivy League college counted a $2.2 billion SpaceX stake as its top Q2 portfolio holding by far.
• Harvard's endowment grew to almost $68 billion after accounting for taxes, gifts, and distributions.

Harvard University delivered its best investment return in five years as its bet on SpaceX boosted its stock portfolio.

The elite college's endowment returned 27.1% in the fiscal year ended June 30, its annual financial report revealed on Thursday. That comfortably outpaced the benchmark S&P 500's 22.3% total return over the same period.

After accounting for taxes, distributions, and gifts, Harvard's endowment grew by $11 billion to nearly $68 billion.

Harvard Management Company's stake in Elon Musk's maker of Starship rockets, Starlink satellites, and AI chatbot Grok was worth $2.2 billion at the end of June, per its second-quarter portfolio disclosure.

SpaceX was its number-one holding, more than six times more valuable than its second-biggest position, a sub-$350 million stake in Taiwan Semiconductor.

Its next-largest positions — each worth over $150 million — were Cerebras, Amazon, Alphabet, and Nvidia. Its 19 holdings at the end of June were together worth about $4.3 billion, more than double the portfolio's $1.8 billion value three months earlier.

Harvard said the strong performance of its endowment, which is nearly 400 years old and comprises about 15,000 individual funds, helped it weather the "abrupt termination of federal research grants" by the Trump administration.

It's worth noting that 13-F portfolio disclosures are a snapshot of a fund's US stock holdings on a certain date. They don't include foreign-listed stocks, non-stock assets like bonds or real estate, private investments, or stocks sold short.

Harvard said that as of June 30, 14% of its endowment was invested in public equities, 29% in hedge funds, 46% in private equity, 4% in real estate, and the balance elsewhere.

Harvard declined to comment when contacted by Business Insider.

SpaceX's valuation has whipsawed since the aerospace company went public on June 12. Its market capitalization topped $2.4 trillion on June 20, then tanked to $1.4 trillion by August 1, and has since rallied to around $2 trillion.

Musk's company posted a 92% year-on-year revenue jump for the quarter ended June, helping narrow its net loss from $1 billion to $541 million.

The world's richest man recently posted on X that he sees a path for SpaceX to be worth "orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy," implying its stock could rise at least 6,000-fold to $12 quadrillion over time.

He later clarified that wasn't a "statement of extreme confidence," but he believes the probability of achieving that valuation is "not zero." On October 14, he said he expects SpaceX to be worth more than $100 trillion in the next 10 years.

Harvard is one of several shareholders to reveal a sizable stake in SpaceX. Google parent Alphabet reported a roughly 4% stake valued at $94 billion as of the end of June. Longtime Musk associate Peter Thiel disclosed a 3.2% position worth $73 billion held by his Founders Fund and related entities. AI chipmaker Nvidia has a $21 billion stake.

• Elon Musk unveiled Tesla's flying, thrust-powered Roadster with a jaw-dropping demo.
• Tesla fans about to shell out as much as $250,000 to reserve it should probably read the fine print.
• Tesla said it can't guarantee the Roadster will be delivered, and it's unclear if the rocket-powered version is street-legal.

Where Tesla's going, you might not need roads — but you still need to read the terms and conditions.

Tesla's thruster-powered, midair flip-kicking, flying supercar was a wow moment even by the standards of the company's famously off-the-rails product unveilings.

But Tesla fans lining up to pay as much as $250,000 to reserve the new Roadster, which can do 0-60 mph in under a second thanks to a system of cold-gas thrusters, should probably take a close look at the fine print.

The company's T&Cs make it clear that the final price of the bleeding-edge EV — which comes in Performance, Thrust, and Rocket variants — has yet to be determined and state that there are no guarantees the Roadster will ever be delivered.

Meanwhile, it is unclear whether the two thruster-powered versions of the Roadster will actually be road-legal.

After combing through the Roadster's reservation agreement and Musk's comments at its unveiling, here's what you should know before splashing out on Tesla's most outlandish vehicle yet.

1. It's not clear where you can actually drive it

As the dust cleared on the jaw-dropping Roadster showcase, one key question remained unanswered: where exactly will you be able to drive it?

At the event, Musk said the cold air thruster-powered flying Roadster would be an actual "car that someone can own," not just a one-off concept demonstration.

But the Tesla CEO added that he was "not sure it's necessarily legal in all jurisdictions," and when an audience member asked if it would be street-legal, Musk was vague.

"Depends on your street. But it'll be a viable car," the billionaire said.

The flying Rocket variant shown in the demo is invite-only. It's listed on Tesla's website with the caveat that it is "not approved for public road use."

The gravity-defying stunts, flips, and barrel rolls shown off at Thursday's unveiling were performed without a driver in the car for safety reasons, and Musk described the vehicle as "not necessarily a safety-optimized car."

One thing that has been clarified is whether the Roadster's airborne capabilities make it an aircraft: "The Tesla vehicle does not meet the FAA's definition of an aircraft," a Federal Aviation Administration spokesperson told Business Insider.

By contrast, Tesla describes the Performance variant — which costs $50,000 to reserve — as "road ready" with its fan-suction system providing "next-level performance on and off the track." That suggests the goal is for the base version of the Roadster, at least, to be road-legal.

The limited-edition Thrust variant, meanwhile, is described as "race ready," implying that this version might be exclusively for driving on race tracks. That would not be unusual for a high-end hypercar, with Ferrari, Pagani, and Bugatti all selling track-only supercars that don't adhere to normal vehicle regulations.

2. It could cost more than you signed up for

Shelling out up to $250,000 for a Roadster reservation by no means guarantees that you will get one at that price.

According to the terms and conditions of Tesla's Roadster reservation agreement, the fees for the Performance and Thrust variants are only an estimate, as the company is still "working on what options, features and hardware the vehicle will have."

The final purchase price will be confirmed closer to the start of production, the document said, with the (fully refundable) reservation payment going toward the actual cost of the car.

3. Delivery is not guaranteed

The T&Cs also advise reservation holders that the Roadster is still "under development" and Tesla "cannot guarantee when your vehicle will actually be delivered or if it will be delivered."

This will likely bring back bad memories for Tesla fans who paid $50,000 to reserve the next-generation Roadster when it was first unveiled in 2017.

That version of the Roadster, a more conventional supercar that could still hit 0-60 mph in 1.9 seconds, languished in development for years and ultimately never entered production.

The delay caused some long-suffering reservation holders like Musk's arch-rival, Sam Altman, and tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, to cancel their orders in frustration after waiting nearly a decade for a car that never arrived.

Tesla fans will be hoping that history doesn't repeat itself.

Editor's note: October 16, 2026 — This story was updated to include a comment from the FAA.

• Musk described his plans for the Tesla Roadster during a 2019 exchange with YouTuber MKBHD.
• On Thursday, the Roadster did exactly as Musk promised nearly eight years ago, leaping into the air.
• While Musk missed his own deadline by years, the technology on display was just as he described it.

It's been a long time coming.

Almost eight years ago, in January 2019, Elon Musk shared plans on Twitter for Tesla's Roadster to lift off using cold-gas thrusters and ultra-high-pressure air. On Thursday, the much-anticipated Roadster did exactly that.

Musk's 2019 assertion came in response to a user sharing a GIF of the DeLorean from "Back to the Future" hovering in midair.

"The new Roadster will actually do something like this," he wrote. Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee responded: "The thing is I feel like you’re not joking."

"I'm not," Musk said.

He then described a SpaceX-made cold-gas thruster system that uses high-pressure air stored in a composite pressure vessel.

At a SpaceX test site in Texas on Thursday, almost 8 years later, a Roadster climbed a curved ramp, dropped, rolled through the air and landed on its wheels. It used the same basic technology: cold-gas thrusters fed by high-pressure air stored in composite pressure vessels.

The 2019 exchange was not Musk’s first mention of thrusters. In June 2018, he said the Roadster would include roughly 10 of them and suggested they might allow the car to fly.

When another user proposed compressed-air cold-gas thrusters, Musk said that configuration made sense and described a pump to replenish the air.

Musk's account of the technology has proved more consistent than his production timetable. Tesla unveiled plans for the second-generation Roadster in 2017 and originally targeted production for 2020. After repeated delays, Musk said in the reveal that production will begin in 2028.

The Roadster is not Tesla’s only vehicle to miss an ambitious release target. When Musk unveiled the Cybertruck in 2019, he said Tesla expected production to begin in late 2021. The first customer deliveries took place two years later, in November 2023.

While Musk has missed plenty of deadlines, many of his more improbable technology plans have made it beyond the drawing board. In December 2020, he said SpaceX would try to catch a returning Super Heavy booster with its launch tower.

Nearly four years later, the tower’s mechanical "chopsticks" caught one for the first time.

Musk has a habit of promising the improbable well before it is ready, but eventually, the improbable part arrives.

• Elon Musk's Tesla unveiled its new car, the Roadster, on Thursday.
• In its demonstration, the car took flight using thrusters and performed kickflips.
• Here's what smart people in tech and business have to say about it.

Tesla’s long-delayed Roadster finally made an entrance — by flying off a ramp.

At a livestreamed event Thursday night, the sports car climbed a curved ramp until it was upside down, launched into the air, flipped, and landed on its wheels, apparently aided by thrusters beneath the vehicle.

“Well, it worked,” Elon Musk said during the livestream.

Musk said Tesla and SpaceX engineers collaborated on the car, which uses high-pressure air and thrusters to lift itself off the ground. Tesla also showed a recorded demonstration in which the Roadster reached 60 mph in 0.81 seconds.

While the legality of such a device on public roads remains in question, the tech world is reacting to Musk's new creation with awe.

Here is what the leading voices in business and tech are saying about the new Roadster.

Jason Calacanis

Angel investor Jason Calacanis said in an X post that the videos of the flying car looked like "science fiction," and they're real, although they don't seem to be.

He seemed enthused by the demonstration, asking that while the car was only airborne for a couple of seconds, "what if it could keep you in the air for five minutes? Or ten? Or 30?"

Gene Munster

Gene Munster, the managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management and a longtime tech analyst, wrote his two takeaways from the Roadster event on X.

First, that "it was an engineering flex with no commercial value beyond embarrassing traditional car makers."

And the second was that it signaled Musk's ambition to merge his two publicly traded companies, SpaceX and Tesla.

John Carmack

John Carmack, the former CTO of Meta's virtual reality division, politely rejected the flying car.

"That demo involved a non trivial chance of embarrassing failure!" he wrote on X.

He added, "I'm only going for the baseline model. At this point in my life, rocket bunny hops are out of my comfort zone."

Marques Brownlee

Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, better known as MKBHD, appeared incredulous at Tesla's claims about the new Roadster.

"They really just got on stage and said this newly designed 4000+ pound car can do flips and go half the speed of sound (380+mph) and will ship in 2028," he wrote on X. "This is a prank, right?"

Alexandr Wang

Meta's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, had one burning question after watching Tesla's Roadster demonstration.

"wait who the hell was driving the tesla," Wang wrote on X, sharing footage of the car speeding down a dark track.

Dan Ives

Dan Ives, an analyst at Yorkville Ives and a longtime Tesla bull, said the Roadster reveal was "a statement about where the Tesla and SpaceX engineering stacks are headed together."

He wrote that the car's SpaceX-developed hardware was "a small example of the synergies between Tesla and SpaceX."

Still, he said, "The Roadster will not move the volume or revenue needle," but would "restore the brand halo at the top of the market."

David Marcus

David Marcus, the former PayPal president and Meta executive, credited Musk with bringing a sense of awe back to technology.

"The thing I’m most grateful to Elon for is bringing back an age of wonder and excitement to humanity," Marcus wrote on X, sharing Tesla's Roadster demonstration.

"That was jaw-dropping awesome! Screams and mouths wide open in the audience. Nuts."

Sam Altman

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, appeared to momentarily set aside his long-running beef with Musk to congratulate the Tesla boss.

"Wow the new roadster looks quite amazing, good job @elonmusk," Altman wrote in a Friday X post.

Altman had reserved an earlier version of the Roadster but said in October 2025 that he had canceled it after waiting 7.5 years, prompting a public exchange of barbs with Musk.

Musk was a cofounder and early financial backer of OpenAI, but he left the company's board in 2018 and has become critical of Altman's leadership.

• SpaceX says Grok is taking 20,000 Starlink customer calls a day — and closing 70% without humans.
• The company revealed the stat while touting its voice-capable agent.
• It's part of a race to build AI agents that love to chat — possible (likely, even) with each other.

Elon Musk's AI is a talker.

This week, Musk's combined AI-and-space-exploration company, SpaceX, announced a new Grok Voice model — and revealed that Starlink call centers are already using the AI-as-a-conversationalist technology to answer 20,000 customer calls a day.

The company said roughly 70% of those calls are resolved without humans.

Grok Voice agents are verifying customers, troubleshooting Starlink hardware, issuing credits, and shipping replacement equipment, the company said. Its AI agents can take on those tasks in multiple languages, too.

That makes Starlink a useful, real-world test case for AI voice technology — and particularly useful for its global expansion. The company says Starlink serves more than 6 million active customers around the world.

Instead of building a massive human customer-service operation to power call centers, SpaceX is betting it can serve its multilingual customers with AI.

SpaceX did not respond to Business Insider's questions about which languages Grok supports or what types of calls still require a person.

AI companies have been quickly rolling out more powerful voice models that do their best Chatty Cathy impression. In July, OpenAI released GPT-Live-1 with call-capable support, while Google has launched similar enterprise systems.

The same is true for AI companies that are focusing on consumers. Meta's Muse, for example, can also handle phone calls for those let into the beta feature.

So, soon, your bot may dial one for English — while a company's bot answers the call.

• Tesla has finally (re)revealed the second-generation Roadster.
• It's the automaker's new halo product.
• Musk has been hyping tonight's event, saying it's a contender for the "greatest product demo."

The Roadster has, at long last, taken off — quite literally.

Tesla unveiled its next-generation Roadster at a livestreamed event Thursday night, giving customers who have waited years their first fresh look at the EV maker's new halo car.

In a dramatic demonstration, the Roadster traveled up a huge curved ramp until it was upside down. The car then flew off the ramp, flipped, and landed safely on the ground, thanks to thrusters attached to the bottom of the vehicle.

"Well, it worked," Tesla CEO Elon Musk said after it successfully landed.

"Flying cars are real," Lars Moravy, Tesla's VP of vehicle engineering, added.

Musk called the latest Roadster a result of a collaboration with Tesla and SpaceX engineers.

The Tesla CEO said the car uses an "advanced ultra-high pressure air tank" to lift itself.

"The car has obviously altitude control thrusters and main thrusters in the rear, so it can basically fly like a rocket, and it could do rolls," he said.

In a separate recorded demonstration shown on screen, Tesla also showed the Roadster hitting 60 mph in under one second, marking .81 seconds.

Tesla shared more stats about the Roadster on X: a two-seater with about 300 miles of range and a top speed over 230 mph. Some of the configurations also appear to depend on whether the Roadster is equipped with "rocket" thrusters. For example, if the car is "air ready" and has the rocket, the Roadster seats only one.

There are also small details about the Roadster that notably diverge from Tesla's signature design choices.

The Roadster's door latches, for example, appear to be mechanical. Typical Tesla cars are known for their electronic door latches, which China is clamping down on due to safety risks.

The halo vehicle also appears to lack side-view mirrors, which raises the question of how the Roadster will be street-legal under federal standards.

Tesla's website lists three configurations of the car for purchase: performance, thrust, and rocket. The performance trim requires an immediate $5,000 deposit, with an additional $45,000 due in 10 days. The thrust version requires a $250,000 deposit. The rocket trim appears to be available only through "invite only."

Musk said the Roadster will be the only Tesla vehicle meant to be driven manually and that it's not "necessarily a safety-optimized car."

An observant audience member at the event also asked a glaring question: Is it street legal?

"Depends on your street," Musk said. "It'll be a viable car."

The long road behind

The revived nameplate has been a long time coming.

The original Roadster was Tesla's first production vehicle, launching in California in 2008. It used a chassis derived from British sports-car maker Lotus' Elise, but replaced its gasoline engine with an all-electric powertrain. That model ended production in 2012.

Musk surprised audiences in November 2017 at an event for Tesla's Semi truck by unveiling a second-generation Roadster. At the time, Tesla said the two-door sports car would have a 1.9-second zero-to-60-mph time, a top speed above 250 mph, more than 600 miles of range, and a gargantuan 200-kilowatt-hour battery pack.

That month, customers could put down a $50,000 deposit to reserve a Roadster, or pay $250,000 upfront for a Founders Series model.

Musk also floated a SpaceX package for the supercar with cold-gas thrusters that he said might "allow a Tesla to fly."

With the wait time creeping toward a decade, Musk apologized to "long-suffering" deposit holders in an earnings call, adding that Tesla was focusing heavily on its robotics and autonomy programs.

"Roadster is not just icing on the cake; it's the cherry on the icing on the cake," he said at the time. "We are working on it, but it has to come behind the things that have a more serious impact on the world."

Tesla began ramping up the Roadster's design cycle in the summer of 2025, Business Insider previously reported.

Musk had been hyping Thursday's livestreamed event on X. He claimed that event would be "a candidate for greatest product demo of all time" and that "the whole world will watch this."

• Ukraine's access to military-grade Starlink services is returning, sources told Business Insider.
• Defense ministry and parliamentary sources said on Thursday that Starshield operations had been at least partially restored.
• On Wednesday, Ukraine was caught off guard by sudden speed restrictions, affecting drone missions.

Ukraine's access to military-grade Starlink services appears to have been at least partially restored on Thursday, a day after Kyiv was stunned by sudden speed limits that it said hamstrung some drone operations.

Ukrainian defense ministry sources told Business Insider that Starshield services remained functional while in motion as of roughly 11:45 a.m. local time on Thursday, according to reports that they had received from military units.

The sources said the defense ministry is working to understand how and why there was a disruption to the operation of Starshield, SpaceX's dedicated satellite network for military services.

Yehor Cherniev, the deputy chairman of the Ukrainian parliament's national security, defense, and intelligence committee, told Business Insider that Starshield services had been restored to their pre-disruption capacity.

Ukrainian officials and service members were caught off guard on Wednesday by the unexpected Starshield disruption, which they said restricted speeds above 100 miles per hour. Some units experienced a loss of connection at speeds as low as 45 miles per hour.

The full extent of the service limitation remains unclear.

Yuriy, an officer with Ukraine's National Guard, told Business Insider that his units use Starshield to support drone operations and that speeds were back above 100 miles per hour as of Thursday morning. He asked to be identified only by his first name for security purposes.

However, Yuriy said that several operations were disrupted during the earlier restrictions.

Defense ministry sources said the disruption complicated mid-range strikes, air defense intercepts, and front-line logistics. Starlink does not work inside Russia, so the issue was limited to missions in Ukrainian territory or Russian-occupied territory.

The sudden Starlink disruption caused widespread confusion and raised questions about the source of the decision and whether it was connected to tensions between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over Kyiv's targeting of Russian energy facilities.

Ukrainian forces use Starlink, the commercial satellite internet service run by SpaceX, and Starshield, a secure network for military and government work built by the company but operated by the US government. Some Ukrainian officials initially blamed SpaceX for the disruption.

In an X post on Wednesday responding to Ukraine's former defense minister, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk put the issue on the Trump administration, saying that Starshield was "owned and controlled by the American government." He said "any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS."

A senior US official told Business Insider Thursday afternoon that "no such request was ever made by the President."

The Pentagon has not responded to requests for comment.

Sprawling influence

The outage and impact on front-line operations have called attention to Ukraine's deep dependence on Starlink, which has become critical for battlefield communications and drone warfare.

As Business Insider recently reported, Starlink's rapid expansion has given Musk and SpaceX an enormous source of influence and soft power, and the world's richest man has not been shy about using that power in Ukraine to influence the course of the war.

Musk said in 2023 that he refused a request from Ukraine's military to activate Starlink to assist a Ukrainian assault on the occupied Crimean peninsula. Earlier this year, SpaceX clamped down on Russian forces' use of Starlink terminals in Ukraine, handing Ukraine a key battlefield advantage.

While support for Ukraine has varied, Musk has consistently been a prominent critic of the Ukrainian president. In an X post late on Wednesday, hours after responding to Ukraine's defense minister, he wrote that it was "time for Zelenskyy to go."

The sudden Starlink disruptions came as Ukraine faces growing pressure from the US, with Trump pushing Kyiv to halt its strikes on Russian energy facilities. The US president said on Tuesday that Washington had not cut intelligence sharing with Ukraine, another concern for the country.

Cherniev, the Ukrainian lawmaker, confirmed on Thursday that the US continues to share intelligence with Kyiv.

Meanwhile, Russia has intensified its ballistic missile attacks against Ukraine, firing dozens overnight. Recent attacks have targeted Kyiv and Ukrainian energy facilities.