Maneetpaul Singh

March 28, 2021

Monday Conversation Starters

Dear Friend & Subscriber,

This is my weekly installment of Monday Conversation Starters. The place where I share my favorite tech and business news from the week, so you can have some fun conversations on Monday.

My Top Headline:

SpaceX is Buying Old Oil Rigs to Transform Them Into Off-Shore Launchpads

SpaceX is actively testing Starship, the rocket that will hopefully transport humans to Mars in the coming years.

Starship also has potential to revolutionize the travel industry here on earth. SpaceX has a vision of creating an industry just like traditional airplanes. The rockets will be used to transport passengers from one side of the globe to the other in under an hour.

With this ambitious vision, SpaceX will need to build a network of landing/launchpads. Unlike airplanes, launching rockets is much louder and more disruptive. So the only viable way to do this is to build pads offshore in the ocean.

The company has taken its first steps in this plan by purchasing two retired oil rigs off the coast of Texas.

Though they tried being secretive about the purchase, the community figured it out because drone footage showed the oil rigs with new names painted on their deck. SpaceX named the oil rigs after the moons of Mars.

Moving forward, SpaceX will need to completely retrofit these oil rigs to be used as launchpads. If you find this topic interesting, check out the video that shows all the footage and more details. I'm sure we'll see some interesting progress in the coming months.

In other news...

  • YouTube demonetizes David Dobrik over sexual assault allegations in his "vlog squad"
  • Amazon is fighting hard against next week's union vote in Alabama
  • CEOs of many tech companies testified before Congress on the topic of misinformation
  • The New York Times sold a NFT of a column for $560K
  • Slack rolled out a new feature that they needed to quickly fix due to harassment concerns
  • Tesla is now accepting bitcoin as payment
  • Citigroup is enforcing something called Zoom-Free Fridays
  • Intel is spending $20 billion to build chip plants in Arizona
  • Prince Harry has joined a Silicon Valley startup as a senior executive
  • Microsoft is in talks to acquire Discord 
  • Somebody invented a new type of pasta

Have a great week ahead!

Best,
Maneetpaul Singh

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