☕️ Blue Origin sends first wheelchair user to space

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🚀 Blue Origin sends first wheelchair user to space

🤖 ChatGPT will now let you pick how nice it is

💸 Court restores Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay package

⌛️ Google says it needs more time to upgrade Assistant to Gemini

💰 SoftBank races to fulfil $22.5 billion funding commitment to OpenAI by year-end

💥 Google sues SerpApi for scraping search results

🎁 + 14 other news & articles you might like

🧰 + 6 trending tools

📚 + 2 trending papers & reports

FROM OUR PARTNER

• Blue Origin launched a New Shepard rocket today carrying European Space Agency engineer Michaela Benthaus, making her the first wheelchair user to ever fly above the internationally accepted boundary of space.
• The company spent years working to improve accessibility at its facilities, which included adding an elevator to the seven-story launch tower with guidance from an internal resource group named New Hawking.
• The NS-37 mission took the six-person crew past the 100-kilometer altitude mark for a few minutes of zero-gravity before the capsule descended to a parachute-assisted touchdown in the West Texas desert.

• OpenAI is rolling out a new update that finally lets you manually dial up or down the warmth and enthusiasm levels shown by ChatGPT to better match your own preferences.
• You can now go into the personalization settings to control how often the AI uses emoji, headers, and lists, or even pick a personality that is quirky, professional, or cynical.
• The company also added tools for writing emails that allow you to highlight chunks of text and ask for specific changes directly instead of typing out a separate prompt.

• The Delaware Supreme Court overturned a Chancery Court ruling to reinstate Elon Musk’s 2018 pay package, stating the cancellation left the CEO uncompensated for his time and efforts over six years.
• Adjusted for the current stock price, this compensation is now worth about $140 billion, meaning Tesla will likely revoke a separate $29 billion offer meant as a hedge against the appeal.
• This unanimous decision concludes a years-long battle that pushed Musk to move company incorporation to Texas after a shareholder with only nine shares argued the award involved conflicts of interest.

• Google has pushed back its plans for replacing the old Google Assistant with the Gemini AI app on Android devices, confirming the full switch will now take place in 2026.
• The company says this adjustment ensures a seamless transition, meaning the old Google Assistant will continue working on older Android phones and tablets instead of stopping by the end of 2025.
• This process is happening across other platforms too, as Gemini is expected to become the default on Android Auto by March 2026 while Google updates smart home gadgets going back 10 years.

• SoftBank is scrambling to secure $22.5 billion to meet its funding commitment to OpenAI by year-end, forcing the group to liquidate holdings and stop other investments to support artificial intelligence.
• CEO Masayoshi Son has already sold a $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia and offloaded T-Mobile U.S. shares, while now requiring his direct approval for any Vision Fund deal exceeding $50 million.
• The conglomerate may also tap margin loans backed by Arm Holdings, having recently boosted its unused borrowing headroom to $11.5 billion after the stock surged to nearly three times its IPO price.

• Google is suing SerpApi for allegedly bypassing security protections to scrape search results and sell access to licensed content that the search giant pays third parties to use in features.
• The complaint accuses SerpApi of ignoring website directives by disguising crawlers, rotating fake bot identities, and using large bot networks to pull data even when specific site owners explicitly opt out.
• The company argues it is acting as a rights holder because the service takes images and real time data that is licensed, then resells that restricted information to others for a fee.

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• Want to link from Google’s app store to your app? That’ll be $2–4 per install LINK

• Google's boomerang year: 20% of AI software engineers hired in 2025 were ex-employees LINK

• Google Cloud announces deal with Palo Alto Networks approaching $10 billion LINK

• Sam Altman says he’s ‘0%’ excited to be CEO of a public company as OpenAI drops hints about an IPO: ‘In some ways I think it’d be really annoying’ LINK

• Firefox will add an AI "kill switch" after community pushback LINK

• FTX, Alameda Execs Will Be Barred From Wall Street Roles for Up to 10 Years LINK

• Roomba's bankruptcy may wreck a lot more than one robot vacuum maker LINK

• Investment in data centers worldwide hit record $61bn in 2025, report finds LINK

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