The Tesla car company "will be winding down production of the Cybertruck" in 2027, according to a tweet from Elon Musk. Like everything else Musk says, ever, this must be treated as having essentially no truth value whatsoever and at best a coincidental relationship to anything that later happens with or to Cybertruck production. It's noteworthy as an index of what Musk wants people to believe—it's noteworthy, then, that Musk wants people to believe that the era of Cybertruck production is coming to an end.

And by "noteworthy," I mean: fucking hilarious!

Few vehicles live on in history as metonyms for failure and embarrassment. Edsel, DeLorean, whatever poor beleaguered machine ferries the Sacramento Kings to a given road game instead of doing them the favor of exploding along the way. Add to these the Cybertruck, one of the most hyped vehicles of all time; Tesla's production capacity for the Cybertruck reportedly was something like 250,000 units per year, and, should the end of its production in fact come in 2027, it will wrap up its four-year run certainly having sold, in total, worldwide, under half of that number. Given the ballooning demand for electric vehicles, the relative lack of competition among all-electric trucks, Tesla's huge head-start in EV production, the unparalleled hype around the Cybertruck's release, and its flowering into a rolling emblem of Musk's personal toxicity, the Cybertruck deserves to endure in history as among the most embarrassing mass-produced products ever available for purchase by human beings. I'd rather carry a battery-powered Big Mouth Billy Bass around under my arm for a year than be seen, by any single person, climbing into or out of a Cybertruck once.

Fox has officially closed its $22 billion acquisition of Roku, the companies announced on Friday. With Roku under its umbrella, Fox now controls a major streaming platform that reaches more than 100 million households in the US.

First announced in June, the deal will allow Fox to bring Fox Sports, news content, and local stations to Roku. "I would expect that we can grow our viewership in the US with a combination of Roku technology, Roku's platform, the tremendous content that's on The Roku Channel, and the content that Fox brings to it as well," Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said at the time. Along with Roku, Fox also operates its own Fox One s …

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Tesla is getting the Cybertruck ready for retirement in an effort to ramp up its robotaxi output. In an X post on Friday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the company will be "winding down" Cybertruck production at its Texas Gigafactory sometime around the middle of next year, "to make room for increased Cybercab production."

The production plant in Austin, Texas, is the only Tesla facility that's known to assemble the Cybertruck, and that's equipped to make the specialized components required to build the vehicles. Musk hasn't mentioned if Cybertruck production will be moved elsewhere, but doing so would be arduous, especially for a car that' …

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The New York Times Company is in talks"exclusive negotations" to acquire Letterboxd, the social network for film lovers, for around $330 million, The New York Times reports. The Times Company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and A24 were all recently rumored to be among those interested in buying Letterboxd.

The negotiations with the Times Company have included the potential for Letterboxd's co-founders to stay in charge but report to a Times Company executive. Letterboxd would likely remain standalone for the "foreseeable future," according to the NYT. The company would also integrate the Times Company's ad tech.

NYT spokesperson Charlie Sta …

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Salon launched 31 years ago as one of the first online-only news magazine outlets, and it announced today in an unsigned post that it's ceasing publication.

The company said that the "business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years," and it decided that its publishing model is "no longer sustainable." It didn't go into detail about why, but many websites are grappling with "Google Zero" and the impact of AI tools. When reached for comment, Salon general manager Amanda Wolfe pointed The Verge to today's announcement post.

"Thirty-one years is a remarkable run, but what matters most is what happene …

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I was raised under a big sky, on a long flat prairie. As a child, my parents taught me to stick out my tongue when anyone said the name "Bill Clinton." Everyone I met, everyone I knew and loved for my whole entire childhood, was a Republican, except for the few libertarians. Sure, people may have grumbled about our invariably Republican elected officials—be it Bush or Perry or Abbott—but they still voted for them. Republicans ruled Texas in the same inexorable way the sun rises each morning. The alternative was basically unthinkable. Until last night, when all of a sudden it wasn’t.

I knew the place where I grew up was changing. But as the returns came in Tuesday night, I felt like I’d been hit by lightning. Steve Kornacki pointed at my home county, Denton, and declared that James Talarico was up by almost 13 points in the early returns. That margin wouldn’t stay, but the lead did. With 95 percent of the vote counted, Talarico won Denton County with a little over 53 percent of the vote. And it wasn’t just him. Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor, took Denton County by a narrow margin. Both took the state. 

They were not alone. In every statewide race in Texas, the Democratic candidate won. As Forrest Wilder wrote in Texas Monthly on Wednesday, “It seems like Texans went into the voting booth with a vengeance, voting against anyone with an R next to their names.” In addition to the national Senate seat and the governor’s mansion, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who has been an incredibly adept and evil politician my entire adult life, got destroyed by Vikki Goodwin. Democrats won the attorney general’s office, the comptroller, the railroad commissioner, and the fucking agriculture commissioner. They flipped suburban counties, including Paxton’s own home county of Collin.