In this week's issue:
- Austin's $5.3B humanoid robot company just hired the people who deployed self-driving cars at scale — and a new robot is coming
- Spirit Airlines is dead, 17,000 jobs gone, and the Biden DOJ killed it — here's what Austin travelers need to do right now
- Five people from Amarillo's pickleball club killed in a fiery plane crash near Wimberley, headed to a tournament in New Braunfels
- It's Gary Clark Jr. Day in Austin, the whole month of May at Antone's is sold out, and there's a free merch pop-up happening right now
Let's get into it.
Top Stories
- Five killed in fiery plane crash near Wimberley — victims were Amarillo pickleball players headed to a New Braunfels tournament. A Cessna 421C took off from Amarillo at 9:12 PM Thursday, climbed to 17,400 feet, then entered a 5,000+ ft/min death spiral before radar contact was lost near Wimberley; NTSB is investigating and weather was ruled out.
- Central Texas flash flooding soaked the region with 2+ inches of rain — the weekend is clearing. LCRA recorded over 2 inches at multiple gauges April 30–May 1, the Bastrop Dam floodgates were opened, and low water crossings closed across Austin and Cedar Park before a secondary front shut off the rain.
- Austin Development Services cut short-term rental renewal fees by improving processes — while also reducing staff headcount. In a city not known for government efficiency wins, the STR licensing overhaul is a genuine rarity: lower costs for operators, fewer bureaucrats, better outcomes.
- More than 1 million square feet of Austin office sublease space has been absorbed since September — but enormous supply remains. The Austin Business Journal reports the sublease market is moving, but vacancy is still deep, signaling a commercial real estate correction that's working itself out slowly.
Austin's Humanoid Robot Company Just Hired the Team That Deployed Self-Driving Cars
On April 28, Apptronik — the Austin-based humanoid robotics company born out of UT's Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2016 — announced it hired five senior executives from the companies that did something nobody had done before: they took self-driving cars and legged robots from controlled research environments into the real, unstructured, chaotic world. The marquee hire is Daniel Chu as Chief Product Officer, who served as CPO at Waymo, arguably the only autonomous vehicle company that has genuinely cracked fleet-scale deployment. Alongside him: Kevin Garell (SVP Services & Support, ex-Boston Dynamics), Chirag Shah (VP Software, ex-Amazon AI), Dave Perry (VP Marketing, ex-Paramount+ and Amazon), and Justin Birtz (VP People, ex-iRobot). This is not a lab announcement. This is a company that has raised $935M in its Series A at a $5.3B post-money valuation — co-led by B Capital and Google, with Mercedes-Benz, AT&T Ventures, John Deere, the Qatar Investment Authority, and PEAK6 all at the table — and is now assembling the operational team to match.
The signal in the Chu hire specifically is hard to overstate. Waymo's entire thesis was that autonomous vehicle deployment is fundamentally a fleet operations problem, not just an engineering problem: uptime, support infrastructure, data feedback loops, safety protocols at scale, customer integration. Chu spent 20+ years living inside that problem. Apptronik's Apollo robot — a roughly 6-foot humanoid with both legs and wheels — is already in commercial pilots with Mercedes-Benz, GXO Logistics, and Jabil, and the company runs AI on Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics models. B Capital's Howard Morgan has publicly projected $1 billion in Apollo orders starting 2027, at roughly $80,000 per unit per year. Apptronik is also teasing a second, as-yet-unnamed humanoid platform. Plans include a robot training and data collection facility in Austin and a new California office. The company currently employs about 300 people.
Context matters here: Apptronik is the most well-funded humanoid robotics startup in the world — its $935M Series A surpasses Figure AI's $850M+ raise. It is a UT Austin spinout, headquartered in Austin, with plans to expand its Austin footprint. The question of whether humanoid robots will actually work in factories — not in demos, but in production, at scale, day after day — is the $100B question defining the next decade of industrial automation. Apptronik's answer is to hire the people who already solved a version of that problem. When Waymo's CPO walks in the door, the message to the market is unambiguous: Apptronik is done being a robotics research project. It is now a commercial deployment operation.
Sources: TechCrunch | Reuters | CNBC | GlobeNewswire
Upcoming Events
- Gary Clark Jr. Day Merch Pop-Up at Antone's — TODAY, Sunday May 3, 12–5 PM upstairs at Antone's (305 E 5th St), all ages, free, first come first served — rare and out-of-print Gary Clark Jr. merch while supplies last.
- Austin FC vs. St. Louis City SC — TODAY, Sunday May 3, 5:30 PM at Q2 Stadium, MLS regular season home game.
- Brigitte Calls Me Baby at Antone's — Tuesday May 5, 8 PM, 18+, at Antone's (305 E 5th St).
- Friends Fair 2026 Launch Party at Contemporary Austin — Wednesday May 6, 6–9 PM at The Contemporary Austin Jones Center Moody Rooftop, $10 (free for members) — preview event for the homegrown art fair featuring 17+ galleries from 10 cities.
- Friends Fair 2026 at The Loren Hotel — May 8–9 at The Loren Hotel on Lady Bird Lake, FREE with RSVP at friendsfair.art, featuring galleries from Austin, Dallas, NYC, LA, Chicago, Miami, and beyond.
- Gary Clark Jr. Monday Residency at Antone's — Every Monday in May (May 4, 11, 18, 25), 8 PM — all four shows are SOLD OUT, but worth knowing: Mike Keller, Malford Milligan, Peterson Brothers Band, and Moeller Brothers each take a Monday support slot.
- Affordable Art Fair Austin — May 14–17 at Palmer Events Center (900 Barton Springs Rd), tickets $15–$50, 55+ galleries, artworks priced $100–$12,000.
Spirit Airlines Is Dead. The Government Killed It. Here's What Austin Travelers Need to Do.
Spirit Airlines ceased all operations effective Saturday, May 2, 2026 — ending 34 years in business and canceling more than 675 routes overnight. 17,000 employees are out of work. Travelers across the country, including at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, were stranded with no rebooking offered by Spirit and no pathway to a voucher outside of bankruptcy court. AUS confirmed the disruption in an official statement. The immediate trigger was a perfect storm: jet fuel costs surging past $4 per gallon (tied to the Iran conflict) and a last-ditch $500M rescue negotiation with the Trump administration that collapsed. Spirit had already been through one Chapter 11 in November 2024 after losing $2.5 billion since 2020; its second bankruptcy in August 2025 left it with $8.1B in debts against $8.6B in assets — a company running on borrowed time and empty margin.
But the real kill shot came years earlier. In 2023, the Biden DOJ blocked Spirit's planned merger with JetBlue, arguing it would reduce competition. The theory, on paper, was consumer protection. The result, in practice, was the destruction of the exact competitor the DOJ claimed to be protecting. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called the merger block "a massive mistake" — and he's not wrong. The irony is that the DOJ's decision didn't save competition; it guaranteed that budget travelers would eventually have one fewer option entirely. This is the predictable outcome when regulators substitute their judgment for the market's: the patient dies from the cure.
If you had Spirit tickets, here's where to go right now. United is capping rescue fares at $199–$299 one-way through May 16, and has explicitly listed Austin as a covered city — book online. Southwest is offering $200–$400 fares in person at the airport counter. Delta has rescue fares for 5 days. JetBlue is covering 72 hours. Frontier is running 50% off base fares through May 10, plus a $199 unlimited summer pass. All require proof of a canceled Spirit reservation. Credit and debit card refunds from Spirit will be processed automatically; if you had Spirit vouchers or points, those go through bankruptcy court — meaning you should assume they're gone.
Sources: FOX 7 Austin | KVUE | KXAN via AOL | Houston Chronicle
Weird Austin
- A house built before the Civil War is "coming home" to Austin. The Austin Business Journal is being mysterious about it, which is the correct energy for a pre-1861 structure apparently making some kind of homecoming journey.
- Yemeni coffeehouses — open past midnight, cannabis-friendly — are expanding across America and Austin is getting one. Yemen introduced coffee to the world roughly 600 years ago, and now its late-night cafe culture is quietly becoming the most interesting thing happening in American nightlife.
- Austin dad joke of the week, courtesy of Arlo Gilbert: "Graham Platner's oyster business has one customer, his mom's restaurant. It's a shell company." The joke is good. The fact that Austin's entrepreneur class posts oyster business puns on a Sunday morning is better.
- The town famous for its watermelon festival is now 3D-printing solid rocket motors for the U.S. Navy. X-Bow Systems has transformed Luling, Texas — 60 miles south of Austin, historically known for the Watermelon Thump festival — into a live weapons manufacturing campus scaling to 3 million pounds of solid propellant per year.
One Thing
Austin is building humanoid robots and burying failed airlines in the same weekend. That's the range. That's why this city is different.
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