Tesla shares closed higher, then jumped after the bell today after Elon Musk’s car company reported better-than-expected earnings. Profits fell last quarter, however, thanks to all the money Tesla spends on artificial intelligence and robots.

Meanwhile, shares in Musk’s other company, SpaceX, took off on solid earnings as it expands from rockets to AI. Is it any wonder that Musk, the richest man in the world, has asked his boards to explore a merger? 

We’ll get into that below, plus a big story about another Musk company, but first let’s go to Prineville, Oregon, a small city that might (might!) give us a look at the economy of the future. — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

Data centers are nothing new; big tech companies have been building them for decades.

What is new is the increasing attention being paid to them by local activists and elected officials, and their increasing unpopularity with the public (as shown, for instance, in multiple public opinion polls).

As the data center sector has expanded across Oregon, the small city of Prineville, in high sagebrush desert about 60 miles east of the Cascade Mountains, has been an early and repeat adopter.

Back in 2010, Facebook broke ground for its first data center in Prineville to take advantage of the cool, dry climate, along with abundant industrial land and power supplies for development. Meta's Prineville hyperscale data center campus has grown into one of the company’s biggest in the U.S.: 11 buildings covering 3.2 million square feet, according to information provided by Meta.

Apple also operates a major data center in town. Together, the facilities represent total investments of $8 billion, according to a spokesperson for Economic Development for Central Oregon.

With a hinterland of mountainous pine forests, Prineville and surrounding Crook County once supported half a dozen sawmills running three shifts a day.

But by 2010, Prineville’s timber industry was dying, said Nicole Ramos, regional economist for the Oregon Employment Department. After the Great Recession, “employment in that industry just started to decrease and kept decreasing. It never recovered.”

The county’s unemployment rate approached 20%, and median household income was near the bottom statewide, said Caroline Ervin, Prineville’s director of economic development.

“Prineville, economically and from a community perspective, was dying on the vine,” she said. “We had a declining population. Fast-forward to now, we have a growing population and a thriving community.”

Ramos said unemployment is now at 6% in the county. As of 2024, it had the highest median annual income for private-sector employees in the state — $93,332 per year.

What would you do if you were guaranteed about $1,300 a month for an entire year? Those were the terms of a Google-funded universal basic income pilot program in the Bay Area.

Times reporter Eli Tan followed several recipients (gift link) to see how their lives changed, and came on our show to talk about whether this kind of UBI could be a viable solution for AI job disruption.

We told you about the White House’s divergent — you might say K-shaped — framing of the economy right now. Well, the Washington Sun found the price of Trump’s famous “Make America Great Again” hats has outpaced inflation since his first term ended. Gold and silver cufflinks, meanwhile, follow the metals market.