Musk Eyes A Tesla-SpaceX Merger & Ebola Spreads In Africa

Hi readers, happy Thursday! Today we’re covering the possibility of a Tesla-SpaceX merger, Putin’s push for peace talks, breaching the Paris 1.5 C target, the spread of ebola in Africa, Meta’s $25 billion fine, another Trump energy affordability push, and an AI cybersecurity issue that took down a chunk of the internet.

“You won’t win until you learn how to lose. I don’t like to do it, to lose, but I can stand it. Along with everything else, you have to acquire the ability to accept defeat. No one makes it without stumbling.” ― Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Musk’s Got Mergers On His Mind

It’s happening: on a Tuesday earnings call for SpaceX (which now encompasses his space company, his AI firm, and Twitter), Elon Musk announced that SpaceX and Tesla have already formed special committees to explore merging the two companies. “Because I’m a conflicted party, I can’t actually be in the discussions,” said the CEO of both companies, before adding, “I think it would be a good idea.”

The prospective merger would create a behemoth with a market cap of roughly $3.5 trillion, as SpaceX is valued at $2 trillion and Tesla’s market cap is almost $1.5 trillion. The two companies have increasingly turned their attention to AI over the past few years, with Tesla focused on robots and automated driving and SpaceX merging with xAI earlier this year. “It’s not hard to see why a vertically integrated company seems attractive,” said one analyst. “Tesla robots linked by Starlink to xAI data centers for control and AI model training purposes would give SpaceX an end-to-end advantage that nobody else could replicate quickly.”

Even if Musk really wants the merger to go through, the deal will have to be approved by a majority of Tesla shareholders (including himself). Once approved, though, the merger could net him more control over the automaker as he controls roughly 20% of Tesla stock but 80% of SpaceX.

Talking About Peace Talks

Putin is giving peace a chance. Or at least, he’s pretending to. Yesterday, the Russian president agreed to participate in U.S.-mediated peace negotiations with Ukraine after a meeting in St. Petersburg with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff. Moscow is requesting that the peace talks be held in Abu Dhabi after November 10, with a focus on technical terms concerning how to guarantee the security of both Ukraine and Russia post-war. Just a few hours after news of the prospective meeting made headlines, Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv was hit by a Russian missile attack, which damaged several houses and injured at least six people.

Outside of Putin deciding to maybe play nice, the meeting in St. Petersburg also yielded a few other results. As a gesture of goodwill, the Kremlin released Stephen Hubbard, a U.S. schoolteacher who’s been jailed in Russia for four years for allegedly fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine. Putin also floated the idea of holding a meeting with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sideline of the upcoming APEC summit in China, which would be focused on ending the Russia-Ukraine conflict. “A trilateral ‌meeting between ⁠the leaders of Ukraine, the US, and Russia could help end the war sooner. A trilateral meeting between the leaders of Russia, China, and the US would do only the opposite: encourage Putin to continue this war,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said about the prospective summit.

It’s Only Over When You Quit

• The Paris Climate Agreement’s 1.5 degree Celsius target is basically dead. In a climate report released on Wednesday, the U.N. stated that humanity has no chance of keeping temperatures from rising 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, a target put in place to prevent “irreversible changes including in ice sheets, permafrost carbon, ocean circulation, and coral systems, along with devastating human impacts.”

• The report states that breaching the 1.5 C target is now “imminent and unavoidable” thanks to our inability to curb greenhouse gas emissions. On the bright-ish side, the report states that we can keep climate change around the 1.7 to 1.8 C level – but only if we cut greenhouse gas emissions much more than any limits that are currently being considered. That sounds somewhat doable until you realize that the global economy is focused on AI-related growth that’s reliant on massive power-sucking datacenters to keep expanding. Plus, the U.S. has once again withdrawn from the accords, meaning the second-biggest carbon emitter in the world isn’t bound by the agreement’s already-loose standards.

Ebola Extends Its Reach

• Ebola is spreading throughout Africa, and has now reached its fourth country. Health officials in Nigeria announced that the disease was detected in their country on Tuesday via a woman who arrived from Uganda. This particular strain of ebola, which has a fatality rate of 48.1%, has infected people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and Kenya, killing 4,646 people. All but three of those deaths were people living in the D.R.C.

• The ongoing outbreak is the fastest-spreading on record, and is set to outpace the 2014-2016 outbreak which killed over 11,000 people. “My concern, now that this has spread from East Africa to West Africa, is that we now ​have a pan-African event, as opposed to a few at-risk countries,” said one Nigerian physician. Nigeria has a robust set of systems in place to respond to the disease and Uganda was declared ebola-free in August, though the disease is still spreading throughout the D.R.C.

Additional World News

• The Secret Terms of Trump’s Venezuelan Oil Deal (ProPublica)

• Kim Jong Un: Why do rumours about his death keep coming back? (BBC) 

• US invokes rarely used torture law in revamped case against Maduro (Reuters)

• French 10-year bond yield hits 5% for first time since 2002 amid unrest (CNBC)

• Europe’s far right seizes on protest violence to push authoritarian anti-immigration agenda (Guardian)

• U.S. troops and diplomats evacuating Middle East posts, sources say (NBC): “Moving American forces further out of harm’s way is part of U.S. military officials’ planning as President Donald Trump considers restarting major combat operations in Iran, potentially before or after next month’s midterm elections, one of the U.S. officials and one of the people familiar with the matter said.”

Meta Gets Mega-Fined

• Yesterday, a New Mexico judge slapped Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) with the biggest fine the tech giant has ever faced. The judge ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $25 billion in a lawsuit brought against the company by the state’s lawyers. Meta was found liable for the damages after a jury decided that the social media firm had violated state laws more than 40 million times by mishandling Facebook users’ personal information.

• “The lies extend beyond Facebook's data practices as well,” the judge said, stating that they reflect “the heart of Facebook's core business practices.” The case involved Facebook handing millions of people’s user data to a political consulting firm, which used the data to help Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Meta executives then went on to repeatedly lie that user data was never shared with third parties without permission. 

• According to the book, the sheer number of state law violations by the firm should have seen Meta fined $219 billion, but state attorneys only pushed for $40 billion in fines. Meta has argued that any fine larger than $3.4 billion would be unconstitutional, and that the judge’s ruling makes it “all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico.” The tech giant, which has a market cap of roughly $1.8 trillion, plans to appeal the decision.

The Heating Oil Must Flow

• Trump’s energy affordability push is still pushing. On Wednesday, the Department of Energy announced that it plans to loan out up to a third of the U.S.’s emergency heating oil reserve, which currently sits at 1 million barrels. The move will mainly affect people in the Northeast, where a large portion of homes use heating oil to stay warm during the winter, by making up to 315,000 barrels of oil available to energy companies in the region. The oil will be loaned out via a bidding process, and the agency expects companies to return the same amount of oil they borrowed before next winter.

• “This is a temporary measure to solve a temporary supply disruption,” said energy secretary Chris Wright. The Trump administration is likely releasing the oil to boost support for Republican candidates in the Northeast ahead of midterm season. In Maine, Republican Senator Susan Collins is facing a serious challenge from Democrat Troy Jackson, while New Hampshire also has an open Senate seat that’s currently a close contest between Democrat Chris Pappas and Republican John Sununu. 

Additional USA News

• AIPAC halts endorsements and direct contributions to candidates (NPR) 

• Bush family members back Democrat James Talarico in Texas Senate race (BBC)

• Peter Thiel breaks with Trump over Iran war: ‘We should not have done it’ (Politico)

• Ilhan Omar says US agents seized 17 items in raid designed to ‘freak’ her out (Guardian) 

• Taxpayers are funding private school tuition. It's helping classical Christian schools expand (AP)

• Vivek Ramaswamy’s Appalling Campaign Ad (Atlantic, $): “The Republican candidate for governor of Ohio has drawn condemnation from the right and the left for casually dismissing his opponent’s account of being raped as a child.”

AI Takes Down The Internet (Kind Of)

• Yesterday, websites across the internet were taken offline (voluntarily) after “critical vulnerabilities” were discovered in PHP, a widely-used programming language. Originally short for “Personal Home Page,” PHP is used across most of the public-facing internet, including sites built on WordPress. The websites that were closed yesterday include various government pages, Wikipedia, and even forums like 4chan.

• According to OpenAI, the vulnerabilities were originally discovered by an AI security group called Calif, which used the firm’s GPT-5.6 Sol model to discover the security flaws. A Google-owned cybersecurity firm named Wiz independently discovered and reported the vulnerabilities as well, confirming the seriousness of the issue. The PHP Foundation, which effectively manages the coding language, said that one of the flaws “was theorized” in 2024, but “no concrete vectors were found and other concrete issues with clear impact overshadowed these concerns.”

• If exploited, the vulnerabilities could give hackers the ability to run their own code on websites, changing content on the sites and giving them access to stored data. According to internet service giant Cloudflare, early attacks using the vulnerability have already begun, and the PHP Foundation has encouraged website owners to update their servers or take them down if that’s not possible. Sites running PHP 8.1 or older won’t be able to access the security patch, and should update to newer versions of the language.

Additional Reads

• How to overcome task paralysis (Psyche)

• Can a simple photo of your face reveal how ill you are? (BBC) 

• iPhone Duo review: Apple’s folding phone is a messy, expensive good time (Verge)

• Airbnb hosts can no longer make guests strip beds and wash dishes under new rules (BBC) 

• Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made (New Yorker, $)

• No iPad Till After Dinner, Mom (NYMag): “Americans over 60 now spend more than half their leisure hours in front of screens. But unlike millennials and most Gen-Xers, who have spent years navigating engagement bait, stealth marketing, and AI slop — and have developed a working instinct for what to trust — older adults tend to have little idea of what they’re looking at.”

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Crazy to watch climate change become priority #27 or whatever for politicians as we continue to blow past all the lines in the sand.

Editor + Writer: Marcus Gee-Lim

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