Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Even Elon Musk sometimes hires the wrong people.”I’ve fallen prey to the pixie dust thing as well, where it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ll hire someone from Google or Apple, and they’ll be immediately successful,'” Musk told Stripe cofounder John Collison and tech Dwarkesh Patel during a 3-hour-long appearance on a special joint episode of their podcasts.It’s why Tesla’s CEO doesn’t put his full faith in a candidate’s résumé.”Generally, what I tell people—I tell myself, I guess, aspirationally—is, don’t look at the résumé. Just believe your interaction. The résumé may seem very impressive, and it’s like, ‘Wow, the résumé looks good.’ But…

SpaceX and Tesla both began in California before relocating their headquarters to Texas — a move Elon Musk has said created a hiring challenge.Musk, the CEO of both companies, said married technicians, engineers, and scientists have struggled to bring their families to certain parts of the state. The problem is most acute at SpaceX’s south Texas launch site and headquarters, known as Starbase.”I call it the ‘significant other’ problem,” Musk said during a nearly three-hour interview with tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe’s cofounder John Collison that was posted on Thursday. “For Starbase, that was particularly difficult, since the odds…

A Houston doctor has been indicted on charges of falsifying medical records for five patients, making them ineligible to receive a liver transplant, federal prosecutors announced on Thursday. Dr. John Stevenson Bynon Jr. was indicted by a grand jury in Houston last month on five counts of false statements relating to health care matters. Bynon is accused of making false statements in his role as director of abdominal organ transplantation and surgical director for liver transplantation at Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston. Of the five patients detailed in an indictment made public on Thursday, three died and two others…

Super Bowl Sunday is the holy grail of advertising thanks to its massive viewership, with an average of 127.7 million Americans tuning in to the big game in 2025 alone. That same year, Hims & Hers became the first company to advertise GLP-1 weight loss medications during the Super Bowl — but it wasn’t without controversy.The 60-second ad, called “Sick of the System,” targeted the “broken” U.S. health care system and touted its more affordable compounded semaglutide as a solution to the obesity epidemic. The brand was accused of being “hypocritical” and “preying on people” while “chasing profit” and was…

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Public health officials and community leaders say that even before federal immigration authorities launched a crackdown in Minneapolis, a crisis was brewing.Measles vaccination rates among the state’s large Somali community had plummeted, with the myth that the shot causes autism spreading. Not even four measles outbreaks since 2011 made a dent in the trend. But recently, immunization advocates noted small victories, including mobile clinics and a vaccine confidence task force.Now, with the U.S. on the verge of losing its measles elimination status, those on the front lines of the battle against vaccine misinformation say much progress has…

SpaceX moved to cut off Russian access to Starlink this week, disabling connectivity over Ukraine while maintaining a whitelist of approved Ukrainian terminals.The new measure has spurred excitement among Ukrainian officials and pundits close to the war, who have said that Russian troops were increasingly using Starlink to guide long-range strikes and coordinate forces.”The enemy reports a mass Starlink blackout among Russian units at the front,” wrote Serhii Sternenko, the leader of a major Ukrainian crowdfunding organization for combat drones, on Thursday.”If this is true, then the Ukrainian army will regain its advantage in communications, and the enemy will have…

The rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic intensified this week.The two companies released dueling new AI models on Thursday and had back-to-back podcast appearances on “TBPN.”On Thursday, Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 4.6, an upgraded model that the company says would improve performance on office productivity and coding tasks, with an expanded “context window” that allows it to work through longer documents and more complex projects in a single session.Meanwhile, OpenAI punched back with its own new coding-focused model called GPT-5.3-Codex, which the company says runs faster, uses fewer computing resources, and can generate and manage complex software from English instructions. The…

Michael Ovitz, the cofounder of powerhouse Los Angeles talent agency Creative Artists Agency and a prolific tech investor, effusively praised Jeffrey Epstein and made arrangements to meet him at his New York home and off the coast of St. Barts, newly released files reveal.The disgraced financier invited Ovitz to his private Caribbean island in 2012 and said he knew Ovitz “well” in emails to a Microsoft executive and his publicist, Peggy Siegal. In 2013, Ovitz emailed Epstein, lauding his “outstanding multiple talents,” with Epstein emailing Ovitz, “great to see you smiling again,” later that year.A spokesperson for Ovitz denied that…

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — In some ways, 10-year-old Giancarlo is one of the lucky ones. He still goes to school.Each morning, he and his family bundle up and leave their Minneapolis apartment to wait for his bus. His little brother hefts on his backpack, even though he stopped going to day care weeks ago because his mom is too afraid to take him.As they wait behind a wrought-iron fence, Giancarlo’s mother pulls the boys into the shadow of a tree to pray. It’s the only time she stops scanning the street for immigration agents.“God, please protect my son when he’s not…

People without coding backgrounds are discovering that they can build their own custom apps using vibe coding — solutions like Lovable that turn plain-language descriptions into working code. While these prompt-to-code tools can help create nice prototypes, launching them into full-scale production (as this reporter recently discovered) can be tricky without figuring out how to connect the application with external tech services, such as those that can send text messages via SMS, email, and process Stripe payments. Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify’s director of engineering for payments, is building a solution that could eliminate these back-end infrastructure…