AUSTIN, Texas — Elon Musk posted a 13-year-old video clip Wednesday night that has already racked up millions of views, showing the Tesla and SpaceX CEO laughing at his younger self for deliberately choosing the “two worst industries” — electric vehicles and solar power — instead of building a search engine like Google.

In the resurfaced footage from roughly 2013, a younger Musk appears on camera in a relaxed setting, grinning broadly as he recounts early career decisions. “I could have created Google, but I decided to do EVs and solar instead,” he says, before bursting into laughter at the apparent absurdity of the choice at the time. He adds that EVs and solar were widely viewed as the “two worst industries” because of high capital costs, low margins and intense competition.

Musk’s post on X quickly became a viral sensation, with more than 11 million views and tens of thousands of likes within hours. The clip resonated deeply with followers who see it as proof of his long-term vision and willingness to bet against conventional wisdom.

Context of the 2013 Moment

The video dates to a period when Musk was already deeply invested in Tesla and SolarCity (later acquired by Tesla). At the time, electric vehicles were niche products hampered by battery limitations and high prices. Solar energy faced skepticism over intermittency and cost. Meanwhile, Google was dominating search and advertising, appearing to be an obvious, high-margin business opportunity.

Musk had sold his stake in PayPal years earlier and used the proceeds to fund SpaceX and Tesla. The clip captures his characteristic blend of self-deprecation and confidence, acknowledging the risk while clearly believing in the long-term payoff. “The universe brought it back to him,” one popular reply noted, referencing how Musk later acquired the X.com domain (originally his PayPal-era company) to rebrand Twitter as X.

Why the Clip Resonates in 2026

Musk’s decision has aged remarkably well. Tesla is now valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, with electric vehicles mainstream and autonomous driving on the horizon. Solar power has become one of the fastest-growing energy sources globally, bolstered by Tesla’s energy storage business. SpaceX has transformed space travel, and Musk’s other ventures — Neuralink, xAI and The Boring Company — continue pushing boundaries.

The post arrives amid ongoing debates about Musk’s influence across industries. Supporters view the clip as motivational proof that bold, contrarian bets can succeed spectacularly. Critics argue it overlooks challenges such as Tesla’s production struggles, regulatory scrutiny and labor issues. Still, the overwhelming reaction has been admiration for Musk’s foresight.

Replies poured in with quotes from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (“when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it”) and comparisons to fictional visionaries like Tony Stark. Many users highlighted Musk’s refusal to chase “easy” markets, instead focusing on humanity-scale problems like sustainable energy and multi-planetary life.

Musk’s Philosophy on Risk and Vision

The video underscores Musk’s often-stated belief in first-principles thinking and willingness to tackle “impossible” problems. In interviews over the years, he has described EVs and solar as critical to addressing climate change, even when the economics looked bleak. His 2013 laugh now reads as knowing foresight rather than naivety.

Analysts note that Musk’s approach — heavy upfront investment in technology and manufacturing scale — has become a blueprint for other entrepreneurs. Tesla’s Gigafactories, vertical integration and software-over-hardware strategy have influenced industries far beyond autos. SolarCity’s early solar roofs and Powerwall batteries laid groundwork for Tesla Energy, now a major profit driver.

Broader Impact and Fan Reactions

The post also reignited discussions about Musk’s decision to buy Twitter (now X) and rebrand it, tying back to his original X.com venture. Users pointed out the poetic symmetry of the universe “bringing it back” to him. Others used the moment to praise Musk’s long-term commitment to humanity’s future, citing SpaceX’s Starship progress and xAI’s Grok models.

Not all reactions were positive. Some critics highlighted ongoing controversies, from Tesla’s self-driving technology scrutiny to Musk’s political commentary. Yet even detractors acknowledged the clip’s entertainment value and historical significance.

Musk has not added further comment beyond the video itself. The post continues to generate engagement, with fans creating memes, edits and motivational threads based on the laughter. Clips of the moment have spread across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Reels, amplifying its reach beyond X.

Legacy of Contrarian Bets

This 2013 clip fits into a larger pattern. Musk has repeatedly chosen difficult paths: reusable rockets when NASA relied on expendable ones, electric cars when gasoline dominated, and now brain-computer interfaces and AI safety. Each time, skeptics called the ideas impractical or doomed. Each time, Musk persisted until the technology caught up.

Business historians compare Musk to figures like Henry Ford or Thomas Edison — visionaries who bet on transformative technologies despite early ridicule. The clip humanizes Musk, showing that even he found the odds amusing at the time, yet pressed forward anyway.

As Tesla pushes toward robotaxis and full self-driving, SpaceX targets Mars missions, and xAI advances large language models, the 2013 laughter feels prophetic. What once looked like the “two worst industries” now drives trillion-dollar valuations and global conversations about energy, transportation and humanity’s future.

For Musk’s millions of followers, the post serves as both entertainment and inspiration. In an era of short-term thinking and quarterly earnings pressure, it reminds viewers of the power of patience and conviction. The universe, as the replies repeatedly note, did conspire to help Musk achieve his goals — but only because he chose the hardest road first.

Whether one views Musk as a visionary or a controversial figure, the 2013 clip captures a pivotal moment of self-aware humor that continues to captivate audiences more than a decade later. As Musk’s companies reshape multiple industries, this throwback video stands as a lighthearted reminder of how far contrarian thinking can carry someone who is willing to laugh at the odds — and then beat them.

Amazon has quietly opened a new front in the battle for ultra-fast delivery, becoming the first retailer in Britain to drop parcels by drone after a limited launch in Darlington, County Durham.

The service, operated under the company’s long-gestating Prime Air programme, will see packages weighing less than 5lb (2.2kg) flown out from an Amazon fulfilment centre to homes within a 7.5-mile (12km) radius. Initial payloads are unglamorous but practical: beauty products, batteries, charging cables and the kind of small household items shoppers tend to discover they need only when it is already too late to drive to the shops.

For Amazon, which first promised drone deliveries more than a decade ago and has since watched the technology stutter through regulatory and engineering setbacks, the Darlington launch is both a proof point and a test bed. For Britain’s retail sector, including the small and medium-sized businesses that increasingly rely on Amazon’s logistics network, it is a sharper reminder still that the goalposts on customer expectation are moving once again.

The trial’s earliest beneficiary was Rob Shield, a Darlington farmer who let Amazon use an Airbnb on his land for its first test runs. The novelty, he admits, soon took over.

“Initially it was a novelty, so we were ordering everything under the sun,” he says. “Pens, paper, chocolates, anything to make it keep coming.”

Parcels arrive in shoebox-sized packages, released from a height of around 12ft onto the front garden. The spectacle, Mr Shield concedes, drew its own audience: “We’d have people come just to see it.”

What began as a curiosity has become, in his telling, a quiet utility. “You start realising, ‘I actually need something today’, like tape measures and stuff you’re always losing. We just order it and it comes.”

In the UK, Amazon’s drones currently promise delivery within two hours. The American benchmark is rather more pointed: David Carbon, vice president of Amazon Prime Air, says the average delivery time in the US is now 36 minutes.

“The certainty is people have never told us they want their stuff slower,” he says. “If you’ve got kids and you want fever medication, you want it. You don’t want to drive to the store.”

Amazon will cap operations at ten flights an hour and up to one hundred deliveries a day on weekdays, a deliberately modest cadence designed to satisfy regulators rather than sceptical shareholders.

The aircraft in question is the MK30, Amazon’s latest model, fitted with sensors intended to avoid trampolines, washing lines, pedestrians and other aircraft. GPS guides the drone to each drop-off, where it releases its load. “This is effectively an autonomous drone that can do what a pilot does in a flight deck. It can do what ground crews do, and it can deliver a package,” Mr Carbon says.

That autonomy is not absolute. The Darlington flights are conducted “beyond visual line of sight”, BVLOS in industry parlance, but every aircraft is monitored remotely by an operator who liaises with air traffic control at nearby Teesside Airport when required.

The choice of Darlington is, on closer inspection, a piece of careful corporate scouting rather than an accident of geography. The town offers a useful mix of residential streets, major roads and an airport in close proximity, allowing Amazon to stress-test its kit across multiple environments without travelling far. Crucially, it sits beside an Amazon hub with the deep stock needed to support the service.

It is also the only location outside the United States where the company is operating drone deliveries.

The Civil Aviation Authority has granted approval for a trial running to the end of the year, with temporary protected airspace, a regulatory prerequisite for autonomous flight under current rules, secured until mid-June and expected to be extended. Darlington Borough Council, which approved temporary planning permission for what it described as the “unprecedented nature of the scheme”, said it was “great to see Darlington at the forefront of such a pioneering scheme which highlights our borough as an area of innovation, development and investment”.

The limits of flying logistics

For all the choreography, the technology has obvious constraints. Eligible customers will need a garden or yard. Flats and terraces without outside space are excluded.

Dr Anna Jackman, an associate professor of geography at the University of Reading, says the Darlington trial illustrates both the promise and the limitations of the technology. “A lot of our demand for delivery services is in urban centres. They are very densely populated, very congested. And the reality is [drone deliveries] don’t work well in high-rise buildings.”

Rooftop drop-offs and centrally located drone hubs are being explored, she adds, “but right now we’re not there yet”.

There is also the question of safety, where Amazon’s record is not unblemished. In February, an MK30 drone clipped the gutter of an apartment building in a Dallas suburb after losing GPS signal, falling to the ground and breaking apart. No one was hurt, and Amazon has since suspended deliveries to similar buildings. Mr Carbon describes it as one of the “things we learn as we go along”, noting that 170,000 drone flights have been completed safely.

Drones are not entirely new to British skies. The NHS is trialling them to ferry blood supplies across London, and Royal Mail is using them to reach remote communities in Orkney. Amazon’s intervention is different in character: this is a commercial play by the country’s largest online retailer, and the read-across for smaller businesses is significant.

Independent retailers and the SMEs that use Amazon’s marketplace will, sooner or later, face customers who have come to view sub-two-hour delivery as the baseline. The pressure to match, or at least mitigate, that experience will fall hardest on those without the logistics muscle of a global platform. At the same time, the gradual normalisation of BVLOS flight could open new commercial doors for British drone operators, software firms and aerospace suppliers servicing the sector.

For now, the residents of Darlington are the test market, and reaction has been mixed. The launch itself ran years behind Amazon’s original 2023 pledge to begin in 2024, a reminder that aviation regulation does not bend easily to Silicon Valley timelines.

Mr Carbon is unrepentant. “We wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t commercially viable,” he says. “It’s a business, right? Absolutely, it can be commercially viable, and that’s the goal that we’re going after.”

Whether it ends up reshaping British retail logistics or remaining an expensively engineered curiosity will depend on what happens next: the regulator’s willingness to widen the airspace, Amazon’s appetite to keep spending, and customers’ willingness to look up.

Amy Ingham

Amy is a newly qualified journalist specialising in business journalism at Business Matters with responsibility for news content for what is now the UK’s largest print and online source of current business news.

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The Quayside base began as the global law firm’s innovation and technology hub

The Newcastle office of global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright has hailed growth with the creation of 40 new jobs over the past 12 months.

Bosses at the Newcastle Quayside base say they have made a significant investment in local talent, including six new associate and senior lawyers, 20 new roles across the firm’s finance and IT departments and 15 new paralegals. It comes as the city office celebrates its 10th anniversary.

In the decade since its 2016 launch with just a small group of paralegals working on due diligence, the office has grown to employ more than 370 staff across 10 departments. Those teams offer a range of business and legal services to clients around the world.

The office is described as critical to Norton Rose Fulbright’s global operations as its specialist innovation and technology hub. Leaders there says the North East’s emergence as a UK AI Growth Zone will help shape the office’s future.

Rod Harrington, chief operating officer for Norton Rose Fulbright in Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific, said: “10 years on, Newcastle has become one of the most important operational centres in our global firm. What began as our first innovation hub now delivers legal, technology and business services at a scale and quality that has genuinely changed how we serve clients across the EMEAPAC region and beyond.

“The office has shown what is possible when you bring lawyers, paralegals, technologists and business professionals together in a single team with a shared purpose. As we move into the next phase, with AI reshaping professional services, Newcastle is exceptionally well placed to play a critical role in that work on behalf of the whole firm.”

Peter Scott, global managing partner and managing partner for Europe, Middle East & Asia Pacific, added: “Newcastle has played a crucial role in advancing the firm’s transformation programme, and we thank everyone for their extensive contributions to our success. Reaching our 10-year milestone in Newcastle is a testament not only to the strength of our teams, but also to the relationships we have built across the city and the wider North East.

“As we celebrate this anniversary, we also look ahead with a shared ambition for Newcastle to help shape the future of our legal service delivery in the UK and globally.”

Dan Newcombe, head of Legal Services in Newcastle, who joined the office in 2016, said: “Alongside the Newcastle office leadership committee, I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the success and growth of our fantastic office over the past decade.

“We are incredibly proud of what has been built here and look forward to continuing to strengthen our impact, while cementing our position as an employer of choice in the North of England.”

The slowing labor market is posing a challenge to recent college graduates looking to begin their careers, with many new graduates finding work in Southern cities.

A study by ADP using anonymized data to compare the 53 largest metro areas in the U.S. based on hiring, wages and affordability for workers in their 20s with college degrees. 

It found that Birmingham, Alabama, and Tampa, Florida, were at the top of the list of destinations for fresh graduates embarking on careers. Birmingham was in the 85th or higher percentile in wages, affordability and hiring, while Tampa was buoyed by topping the rankings in hiring despite middling scores for wages and affordability.

Those cities were followed by San Jose, California, and Columbus, Ohio, in the rankings. 

PRIVATE SECTOR ADDED 109,000 JOBS IN APRIL, ABOVE EXPECTATIONS, ADP SAYS

Tampa, Florida, was once of the cities at the top of the list of destinations for fresh graduates embarking on careers. (Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Four other cities in the top 10 were also located in the South, including Raleigh, North Carolina; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Nashville, Tennessee; and Charlotte, North Carolina. Two large metro areas rounded out the top 10, with San Francisco and New York City ranking seventh and tenth, respectively.

A report by The Wall Street Journal about the ADP study’s findings noted that the analysis suggests an emerging recovery in hiring for college graduates is playing out unevenly around the country.

The Journal noted that both Columbus and San Jose unexpectedly rose in the rankings this year despite some components of their overall ranking being less consistent, as San Jose ranked in the 12th percentile of metro areas in terms of affordability and Columbus was in the 50th percentile for earnings.

HOW AI EXPOSURE IS RESHAPING JOBS IN CREATIVE FIELDS

Raleigh, N.C., ranked in the top 10 of the list of metro areas hiring the most recent college graduates. (iStock)

Several prominent metro areas lost ground in their overall rankings, such as Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Baltimore, Maryland; and Austin, Texas, were in the top five of the rankings last year but fell below their peers this year. 

Austin was in the 94th percentile a year ago but fell to 77th, while Baltimore also dropped from the 96th percentile to the 75th.

RECENT COLLEGE GRADS ARE LOSING THEIR EDGE IN THE JOB MARKET, STUDY SHOWS

San Francisco and San Jose represented the West in the rankings. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The biggest risers in the report from last year included several members of the top 10 list. Tampa jumped from the 54th percentile to the 98th, while San Jose rose from the 76th percentile to the 96th, and Tulsa climbed from the 50th to the 90th percentile.

Fresno, California, was outside the top 10 but made a significant leap in the report from the 22nd percentile to 79th.

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Wetherspoon chair brands any limit on early morning airport alcohol sales a ‘Big Brother’ approach after Ryanair chief questions airport drinking

JD Wetherspoon’s Tim Martin has hit out at outspoken Ryanair chief Michael O’Leary over demands for airports to tighten restrictions on early morning alcohol consumption.

Mr Martin, chairman of the UK’s most recognisable pub chain, says regulating drinking at airports amounts to a “Big Brother” approach that could ultimately result in passengers being breathalysed.

Ryanair boss Mr O’Leary had called on airports to prohibit passengers from drinking pints ahead of early-morning flights, as reported by City AM.

The budget airline mogul claimed his carrier is forced to divert flights on an almost daily basis due to the unruly conduct of intoxicated passengers.

O’Leary told the Times earlier this week: “It’s becoming a real challenge for all airlines. I fail to understand why anybody in airports bars is serving people at five or six o’clock in the morning. “

“Who needs to be drinking beer at that time?”

The Ryanair chief executive accused airports of “profiteering” from disorderly behaviour which causes havoc for airlines and other passengers.

“The ones who are profiteering off it are the airports who have these bars open at five or six o’clock in the morning and during delays are quite happy to send these people as much alcohol as they want,” he said.

However Mr Martin, whose company runs sizeable pubs at major UK airports including Heathrow and Gatwick, has fired back. Any cap on alcohol consumption would prove extremely challenging to enforce, he said, adding: “It is in everyone’s interests to have good behaviour at airports and on flights.

“[But] a two-drink limit would be extraordinarily difficult to implement, short of breathalysing passengers, and would, in our opinion, be an overreaction – especially since many of the problems stem from incoming flights.”

Wetherspoon maintains that food, soft drinks, tea and coffee represent two thirds of turnover at its airport establishments, as the pub group attempts to challenge suggestions that it benefits from inebriated conduct.

A “significant proportion” of alcoholic beverages purchased in airports are accompanied by a meal, and introducing restrictions would simply drive passengers towards buying drinks from off-licences or supermarkets prior to reaching the terminal, Wetherspoon argued.

Shadow transport secretary Richard Holden described the proposals to restrict drinking as “slightly draconian”.

“There is something peculiarly British about the tradition of having a pint at 6am when waiting for your Ryanair flight,” he said.

This is not the first clash between Tim Martin and Michael O’Leary over airport pints, as the pair previously argued over the issue in 2024.

The New York Times

NYT

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increase; green up pointing triangle was sued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over allegations it passed over a white man for promotion in pursuit of what the agency called unlawful corporate diversity policies. 

In a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court Tuesday, the U.S. watchdog said the Times chose not to promote the staffer to an editor role in early 2025 because of his race and gender. Instead, it hired a nonwhite woman who, the agency alleged, had less experience than the man.