Tech News — 2026-04-02#

Story of the Day#

SpaceX has confidentially filed for an IPO targeting a valuation of more than $1.75 trillion, an astronomical figure bolstered by its recent merger with Elon Musk’s xAI. This listing promises to be the largest ever, opening public investment to a company that dominates global rocket launches and actively aspires to deploy AI data centers in space.

Top Stories#

Artemis II Launches to the Moon · Ars Technica NASA successfully launched the Artemis II mission, sending four astronauts on a 10-day trip around the Moon. It marks the first crewed flight of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, bringing humanity closer to the lunar surface than anyone has been in over half a century. Between the historic milestones, the crew is already fielding distinctly terrestrial IT problems: dealing with two broken instances of Microsoft Outlook.

OpenAI Acquires Tech Talk Show TBPN · Bloomberg OpenAI has purchased TBPN, a popular Silicon Valley business talk show, in a rare media acquisition aimed at shaping the public narrative around artificial intelligence. The viral daily podcast, which frequently interviews tech elites including Sam Altman, will maintain editorial independence but operate within OpenAI’s strategy organization.

Google Open-Sources Gemma 4 Models · Ars Technica Google launched Gemma 4, a new family of open-weight AI models optimized for local hardware and mobile devices, importantly dropping its custom license in favor of a much more flexible Apache 2.0 license. The models offer massive performance gains, with the 31-billion parameter variant beating models 20 times its size on AI leaderboards.

Tesla Q1 Sales Disappoint Amid EV Slump · Bloomberg Tesla posted modest Q1 sales growth of just 6.3 percent year-over-year, delivering 358,023 vehicles and widely missing Wall Street’s expectations. While production numbers rebounded by 12.6 percent, the mismatch highlights a growing overproduction problem as the broader EV market navigates a deepening slump.

Amazon Imposes Fuel Surcharges Amid Iran Conflict · TechCrunch Amazon is hitting its third-party sellers with a 3.5 percent “fuel and logistics” surcharge as the ongoing war in Iran roils global energy markets. The fee applies to Fulfillment by Amazon services in the US and Canada, passing the elevated costs of the Middle East conflict directly onto independent merchants.

Anthropic’s DMCA Takedown Backfires on GitHub · Ars Technica An Anthropic-backed DMCA effort to remove leaked Claude Code from GitHub accidentally took down over 8,100 legitimate forks of its official public repository. While the overzealous dragnet has since been reversed, it underscores the AI startup’s frantic uphill battle to contain its exposed source code.

Also Worth Knowing#

• Flipboard launches Surf (The Verge): Flipboard released Surf, a new social app and feed reader designed to consolidate content from RSS feeds and decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky into a single destination.
• Google boosts AI Pro storage (Engadget): Google’s $20-per-month AI Pro plan is upgrading user cloud storage from 2TB to 5TB at no additional cost.
• CFTC sues states over prediction markets (Engadget): The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission is suing Illinois, Arizona, and Connecticut to stop them from independently outlawing or regulating prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket.
• OpenAI secretly funded child safety group (Gizmodo): Advocacy groups pushing a California bill for AI age verification were blindsided to learn their coalition was secretly funded almost entirely by OpenAI.