Tesla unveils Roadster 2 with SpaceX thrusters, Meta TOS mines linked content for AI, Seagate, ARM, Broadcom - Big Tech Report

Tesla showed off its long-delayed Roadster 2 at a SpaceX facility in Texas on Thursday, with Elon Musk demonstrating a version fitted with rocket thrusters borrowed from the aerospace company. A remotely controlled car was shown driving up a ramp, flipping using thruster power, briefly flying, and clearing a line of existing Tesla models before accelerating to 60mph in under a second. Musk said the car has altitude controls and main rear thrusters, allowing it to "basically fly like a rocket," and acknowledged it may not be street-legal everywhere.

Tesla's reservation site now lists three Roadster 2 configurations: a "performance" version requiring a £50,000 deposit, a "thrust" version at $250,000, and a one-seat "rocket" variant with a full flight system available by invitation only. The company said the flying capability is not permitted on public roads. Musk first announced the Roadster 2 in 2017, pitching it as an electric sports car to rival gasoline performance models; production is slated for 2028 at a base price above $200,000. Tesla shares were down 1.62% at $356.56, and SpaceX, which does not trade publicly on major exchanges, was listed at $145.97, down 1.78%.

Meta will update its commercial terms of service on 30 October to require business accounts to let Meta's automated bots crawl and use content from any website linked to those accounts, without an opt-out, according to Ars Technica. The language authorizes Meta to "access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl" the domains and web pages associated with a business's products or services, and to use that content to "develop, improve, research, train, and maintain" its products. The terms do not mention AI explicitly, but legal experts say the reference to "train" and to scraping tools makes the intent clear.

The change affects all business accounts but lands hardest on news publishers, nearly all of which maintain at least one Meta business account, Nieman Lab reported. Publishers currently suing OpenAI over unlicensed AI training on copyrighted articles could find Meta has sidestepped that fight entirely by extracting blanket crawling rights through its commercial terms, regardless of how the fair-use question is eventually resolved in court. Shares of Meta Platforms were down 2.51% at $718.21 in the regular session.

Memory chip stocks had their worst week in months, with SK Hynix down 24.3% in Seoul, Samsung Electronics off 17.7%, and Micron closing Thursday at $931.24, roughly 26% below its record high. The Roundhill Memory ETF fell 14% for the week. Broadcom shares were down 3.10% at $333.64 and ARM fell 4.11% to $234.73 in regular trading.

Counterpoint Research director MS Hwang told Benzinga the trigger was not China's progress on denser server memory from ChangXin Memory Technologies, which he said is unlikely to affect supply before 2028. Instead, he pointed to remarks from Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan at a Singapore panel on Monday, where Tan said capital, not wafers or memory, would be the company's biggest constraint on AI development — a comment Hwang said may have been read as a signal that AI spending itself is slowing. He added that supplier cash flows remain strong and balance sheets clean, meaning the sell-off does not resemble a traditional memory-cycle downturn.

Sony has revealed a "Midnight Black" PlayStation 5, a digital-only console scheduled to launch on 19 November for ¥55,000 ($350) — but exclusively in Japan. The console, model CFI-2200B02S, is region-locked to Japanese PSN accounts with system language and country settings forced to match, making it unavailable to buyers outside the domestic market. It is nearly identical to an all-white model Sony released in November 2025, with a matching disc drive sold separately.

The launch lands the same day as the next "Grand Theft Auto" installment, and highlights a widening gap between console pricing in Japan and the US, where Sony has raised PS5 and PS5 Pro prices, citing "continued pressures" from global memory and storage shortages. PS5 Pro units have reportedly sold for as much as $1,500 at some US retailers, and physical unit sales have reportedly declined as a result. Sony shares were up 0.95% at $24.93 in regular trading.

Amazon has warned it may close more than a dozen last-mile warehouses in New York City and move thousands of jobs out of the five boroughs if the Delivery Protection Act becomes law, according to industry experts who spoke with the New York Post. The bill, championed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and backed by 34 City Council co-sponsors, would force Amazon to directly hire roughly 5,000 delivery workers in the city who currently work for third-party contractors — a model Amazon does not use anywhere else in the country.

Experts point to Amazon's response to a unionization effort in Quebec as a likely template: the company closed seven warehouses near Montreal last year after workers at one facility organized, costing about 1,900 Amazon employees and 2,800 contracted delivery workers their jobs by March. Amazon is still fighting a labor-tribunal complaint and a customer class action over that closure, though it says service has since recovered under a new logistics partner. In New York, a potential closure would affect 2,000 warehouse staff and 5,000 delivery workers, but not the 5,500 unionized employees at the Staten Island JFK8 fulfillment center, who remain without a collective bargaining agreement. Amazon shares were down 0.9% at $252.47 in regular trading.

YouTube is in active discussions with publishers about building out an audiobook library, with a launch targeted for 2027, according to a Wall Street Journal report cited by Tubefilter. The offering could be bundled into YouTube Premium, the $15.99-a-month ad-free tier already linked to YouTube Music, or sold a la carte; YouTube has not confirmed the report.

The move would pit YouTube against Spotify and Audible in audiobooks after it has already pushed into music streaming and podcasting. YouTube hosts a large volume of narrated content already, from authorized channels run by writers like Dean Koontz to unauthorized uploads of public-domain works, and has longstanding ties to the publishing and BookTok communities it could lean on to sell titles. Spotify, which recently expanded its own audiobook catalogue to more than 180 markets, was down 1.33% at $526.26 in regular trading.