In this week's issue:

  • Tesla Cybercabs — plural, fleet-level — flooding downtown Austin streets on Sunday, no side mirrors, Starlink terminals on the roof
  • A Travis County jury just dropped a $116M verdict on a waste company CEO who allegedly turned a family business into a personal piggy bank
  • An Austin-built nuclear reactor is racing to reach criticality by July 4 — first new reactor at Idaho National Lab in 50 years
  • Cornyn vs. Paxton polls close at 7pm CT tonight — Paxton is the heavy favorite, and $109M was spent to get here

Let's ride.

Top Stories

The Cybercabs Are Here. Not One. A Fleet.

We reported the first single Tesla Cybercab spotted in South Austin on May 16. Then May 24 brought safety data. Then on Sunday, May 25, it escalated: multiple Cybercabs appeared simultaneously across downtown Austin, generating one of the most viral local tech moments this city has seen in years. These aren't test mules or prototypes with steering wheels. They are production-spec vehicles — confirmed by multiple independent witnesses — featuring no side mirrors (a legal and design departure enabled by camera-based surrogate systems) and Starlink terminals mounted directly on the roof. Sightings ran from mid-day through at least 11:25 PM. The exact number of vehicles on the street at any one moment isn't confirmed, and there's no official Tesla statement specifically about the May 25 surge. We also cannot confirm whether paying passengers are being carried yet — Texas law permits it under Tesla's statewide TNC authorization, but no passenger service announcement has been made. What we can confirm: this is no longer a curiosity. It's a fleet-level presence.

The infrastructure is being built to match. Tesla is simultaneously converting a 35,000 sq ft warehouse in Irving, TX (DFW area) into a dedicated Cybercab maintenance and dispatch hub — 16 V4 Supercharger stalls, 212 vehicle storage spots, purpose-built for high-volume driverless operations, completely separate from consumer Service Centers. That's Texas-wide robotaxi infrastructure going in at the same time Austin streets are filling up with the product. The political scaffolding is just as visible: Governor Abbott said at the Texas Bankers Association convention last week that he "texts with Elon Musk all the time" — placing Musk in the same tier as Jamie Dimon and Charlie Scharf of Wells Fargo as CEOs he's in regular personal contact with. That kind of relationship doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't produce results by accident either. Austin is becoming the autonomous vehicle capital of the country precisely because the state's chief executive is in the group chat.

Internet wits are keeping pace. David Burge (@iowahawkblog) — one of the best follows on X — joked that "In 6 months Austin will be a radioactive wasteland after the Waymo-Zoox-Cybercab War," which lands because it's basically true: Waymo, Zoox, and now Tesla Cybercab are all operating or testing in Austin simultaneously. Meanwhile, writer Drew Bredvick observed something that rings sharper by the day — Austin's tech culture has shifted from the comfortable Dell-era "work-life balance" ethos to something more ambitious and restless: people overheard having AI conversations in coffee shops, hardware startups sprinting, big-swing energy everywhere you look. The Cybercabs rolling past your table on 6th Street are the physical proof of concept.

Sources: TeslaNewswire / X, @RealInvestorTan / X, @Mr__Beatty / X, Not a Tesla App (Irving hub), @iowahawkblog / X, Drew Bredvick / X, Dallas Morning News (Abbott/Musk)

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The $116M Family Feud at Texas Disposal Systems

In 1977, brothers Jimmy and Bobby Gregory started Texas Disposal Systems with one truck, one customer, and $10,000. Nearly fifty years later, TDS is one of the nation's largest independently owned waste companies — nearly 1,200 employees, 93 Texas counties, 6 million pounds of waste daily, roughly 500 trucks — headquartered in Creedmoor, Travis County, and holding Austin's municipal waste contract. It is, by any measure, a monument to Texas entrepreneurship built from nothing. What a Travis County jury decided last week is that Bobby Gregory — the CEO, the 80% owner, the man who ran the company for decades — spent years systematically looting it at his brother's expense.

The lawsuit, filed in 2022, alleged a deliberate campaign to squeeze Jimmy out of everything he'd built. According to the complaint: Bobby allegedly cut Jimmy off from company financial information after Jimmy began estate planning in 2019, raised his own salary from $300,000 in 2019 to approximately $2 million by 2022, stopped distributing profits to Jimmy, fired Jimmy and both of his children — Jennifer and Justin — in January 2022, and created a series of side companies (Okapi Leasing, Okapi Environmental Services, TxAlloy/Acme Iron and Metal) specifically to redirect TDS contracts and cash flow away from the main company. The jury agreed: $91.1 million in actual damages to TDS Companies for breach of fiduciary duty, $23+ million in exemplary damages (the jury found Bobby acted with "specific intent to cause substantial injury"), and $1.4 million directly to Jimmy for breach of contract — a total exceeding $116 million. Jimmy's attorney Casey Dobson of Scott Douglass & McConnico said it "could be the largest verdict in Travis County history outside personal-injury cases." Bobby denies all of it, claims the litigation is being funded by TDS competitors, and says he will appeal.

What happens next is genuinely unresolved. A judge still has to determine the final amount awarded and how the $91.1M portion is distributed — to Jimmy personally or back to TDS Companies. More consequentially, the judge holds authority to appoint a receiver to oversee TDS operations, which would mean outside control over a company handling Austin's garbage, operating across 93 counties, and processing six million pounds of waste every day. This is not a remote or abstract business story. TDS is woven into the physical infrastructure of Central Texas. The Gregory family feud was always about more than money — it was about who controls something that big, and whether a lifetime of building something together survives contact with that much power concentrated in one man's hands. The jury gave its answer.

Sources: Austin American-Statesman (Paul Flahive), Scott Douglass & McConnico LLP, Waste Dive (Megan Quinn)

Weird Austin

One Thing

Driverless Cybercabs on 6th Street. A 50-year family empire blowing up in a Travis County courtroom. Austin in one issue — the future arriving faster than anyone expected, and the past catching up with people who thought they could outrun it.

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