Elon's moon factory 🚀, Chrome WebMCP 🤖, Stripe minions 👨‍💻

Elon Musk has told employees at xAI that the company needs a factory on the moon to build AI satellites. These satellites will be launched into space ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2026-02-11 6 fintech predictions: why fraudsters are excited about AI (Sponsor) The heaviest users of AI in fintech aren't fintechs. Bad actors are the real early adopters - mass-generating fake IDs, deepfakes, and large-scale social engineering. According to Plaid's 2026 Fintech Predictions, this imbalance will persist in the short term. What else is coming? Read the whitepaper where Plaid CEO Zach Perret, joined by Credit Product Lead Michelle Young and CTO Will Robinson, share their takes on where fintech is headed next.  You'll discover why: Neobanks will launch via stablecoins instead of traditional banks Lenders will focus more on fraud than delinquency Conversational AI will become the default fintech UI And more See what's next 📱 Big Tech & Startups Elon Musk Wants to Build an AI Satellite Factory on the Moon (5 minute read) Elon Musk has told employees at xAI that the company needs a factory on the moon to build AI satellites. These satellites will be launched into space using a massive catapult called a 'mass driver'. Musk plans to build a self-sustaining city on the moon as a steppingstone to Mars and beyond. SpaceX is preparing for an initial public offering that could come as early as June. Musk's xAI loses second co-founder in two days (2 minute read) Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu, two of xAI's co-founders, have left the company. The departure comes as xAI faces regulatory probes in multiple jurisdictions across Europe, Asia, and the US regarding the company's Grok AI chatbot allowing the mass-creation and syndication of non-consensual, explicit images. These images were based on photos of real people, including children. xAI merged with SpaceX earlier this month. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology The Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine unlocks a new frontier beyond AlphaFold (5 minute read) The Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine (IsoDDE) is a unified computational drug-design system that progresses beyond AlphaFold 3 in its predictive accuracy. It introduces new capabilities that bridge the gap between structure prediction and real-world drug discovery. IsoDDe can predict small molecule binding affinities with accuracies that exceed gold-standard physics-based methods at a fraction of the time and cost. It offers a scalable foundation for AI drug design and represents a leap forward in accuracy and capability. SpaceX's next-gen Super Heavy booster aces four days of "cryoproof" testing (4 minute read) SpaceX's upgraded Super Heavy booster has completed cryogenic proof testing for the first time. The successful test moves engineers closer to launching the first test flight of an upgraded version of SpaceX's mega-rocket, Starship V3. SpaceX launched Starship V2 five times last year, but the first three test flights failed. SpaceX could be in position to launch the first Starship V3 test flight before the end of March. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science TLDR is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI ($200k-$300k, Fully Remote) As the first engineer on TLDR's new Applied AI team, you'll build AI agents and composable Claude Skills to let non-technical teammates create their own AI workflows. Learn more. Minions: Stripe's one-shot, end-to-end coding agents (9 minute read) Minions are coding agents that are built to one-shot tasks. Stripe merges over a thousand completely minion-generated pull requests each week. A typical minion run starts in a Slack message and ends in a pull request that passes CI and is ready for human review, with no interaction in between. This post shows how Stripe's engineers use minions and what they can do. Chrome 146 includes an early preview of WebMCP (2 minute read) WebMCP lets agents query and execute services without browsing the web like a user. The web standard exposes structured tools for AI agents on existing websites to replace screen-scraping with robust, high-performance page interaction and knowledge retrieval. WebMCP lets agentic browsers know exactly how to interact with page features to support a user's experience. 🎁 Miscellaneous Heuristics for lab robotics, and where its future may go (38 minute read) It's very possible that lab robotics, cloud labs, and the like will not actually fundamentally alter the broader problems that drug discovery faces. Automation is meant to be a throughput multiplier. The technology will enable different experiments at a scale that would be impossible without automation. It will become rational to start doing the things that everyone already knows they should be doing but can't currently justify. AI Is Giving You a Personalized Internet, but You Have No Say in It (10 minute read) AI is personalizing the internet for everyone with tailored ads, bespoke advice, and unique product prices. There's typically no 'off' switch for these tools, giving users less say in things. Opting out is often complicated. The tech industry's strategy of forcing AI on users is at odds with feedback from many users. ⚡ Quick Links I guess we're doing Moon factories now (4 minute read) SpaceX has announced a renewed focus on lunar development, an endeavor that will require enormous resources to sustain, which means accelerating capitalism in space. The Scientist and the Simulator (16 minute read) Curing cancer, designing new materials, and solving energy will require AI that can interface with and predict the physical world. Tools vs. Treaties (14 minute read) The most effective governance works by changing the infrastructure rather than people's behavior. Facebook Adding AI Profile Picture Animations and Story Editing Tools (1 minute read) Meta has added new editing tools that can animate profile pictures, create images for Facebook Stories and Memories, and animate the backgrounds to text posts. Cheap design (7 minute read) Design is now cheaper, but it isn't free - what matters now is understanding. We Just Got a Peek at How Crazy a World With AI Agents May Be (12 minute read) While OpenClaw as it exists today doesn't live up to the hype, it does provide a peek at what may be coming. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/7c97ce4b/ Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers and engineers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here, create your own role or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! TLDR is one of Inc.'s Best Bootstrapped businesses of 2025. If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. Or if TLDR isn't for you, please unsubscribe.