Peter Diamandis, host of Moonshots, opened the episode by calling a Tesla demo "probably the most insane product demo ever." The night before the October 16, 2026 recording, he said, Tesla unveiled a flying version of its Roadster sports car in Waco, Texas, next to SpaceX's McGregor test site. His first verdict was "Only Elon." The panel then turned to harder questions: why build it, who would insure it, and which agency is supposed to license a car with rocket nozzles.
Diamandis, founder of XPRIZE, was joined by Salim Ismail, founder of Open ExO; Emad Mostaque, founder of Intelligent Internet; and Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPRIZE and the first woman to travel to space on a privately funded flight. Diamandis said he had been due to attend the launch and record with Elon Musk, but "commitments are commitments."
What the demo showed
What hooked Diamandis was the Roadster driving up a multistory curved ramp upside down. Watching the video the first time, without the explanation, he wondered whether it used magnets or some kind of rail. It was a fan suction system that, he said, could hold the car against two Gs, twice the pull of gravity.
The presentation clip the hosts played said the suction fans sit on the bottom of the car and are what let it go upside down, and that "we borrowed some technology from SpaceX to do the rest." That technology, as described in the clip, is two carbon-overwrapped pressure vessels holding about 600 liters in total, roughly 250 kilograms of air, feeding 10 nozzles. Thrusters of this kind push the car by releasing compressed gas instead of burning fuel. The clip stressed that the car can refill its own ultra-high-pressure air tank, so it needs no special propellant and can "pop itself up" whenever the driver likes. The footage showed what the clip's commentary called "just a little flight," then a longer hop.
How long the car can stay off the ground was not stated. Ismail asked; Diamandis didn't think Tesla had given a hover time. The conversation settled on a guess of a few seconds, given how quickly the stored air would run out. When the discussion noted that nobody should expect to see hopping cars on real streets, Diamandis added: "until we solve for gravity shielding or something like that."
The numbers as read on the show
Diamandis read out the claimed specifications: 0 to 60 miles per hour in under one second, a top speed of 230 mph and 300 miles of range. Tesla plans three versions, he said. The performance version reaches 60 mph in 1.6 seconds and the thrust version in 0.9 seconds. The rocket version is a one-seater described as "air-ready." Production starts in 2028 "per Elon," he said, no price was given, and Tesla shares rose 5% on the news.
Another figure came up in the discussion: the rocket version doing 0 to 60 in 0.6 seconds and reaching 380 kilometers per hour, described as "half the speed of sound." Those numbers don't fit together. 380 km/h is about 236 mph, close to the 230 mph top speed Diamandis had already quoted and less than a third of the speed of sound at sea level.
"Because we can"
Ismail asked the obvious question: why? Diamandis answered, "because we can." The conversation offered other reasons. The point, it was argued, is that the car can fly, and the technology is "clearly for Mars." The demo also shows Tesla and SpaceX combining their capabilities, which the discussion framed as a step toward the Moon and Mars. There was a recruiting argument too: a stunt like this raises the bar and makes top engineers want to work at Tesla and SpaceX. Porsche had held a car release the same day, the discussion noted. "Oh, poor Porsche," Diamandis said.
The conversation also recalled that Musk had tweeted as far back as 2018 about putting thrusters on a Tesla to make it fly. In that telling, he missed some timelines but got it done.
Who insures a rocket car?
Ansari asked what the insurance would cost. Ismail didn't think the question had an answer. "I don't think it's insurable," he said. "If I'm the insurance company, I'm like, yeah, those thrusters stay off. Otherwise, your insurance is off."
The discussion also floated the idea that Tesla might run its own insurer, the way Toyota has Toyota Insurance, and observed that very few people will own one of these cars anyway.
Who regulates it?
Diamandis said the demo showed Tesla and SpaceX working together and predicted the two companies would announce a merger before the end of the year. He then asked Ismail: "Who regulates this? DOT, FAA, nobody?" (the Department of Transportation, which oversees road vehicles, or the Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees aircraft). And how would it be licensed?
Ismail said this is the challenge with every new technology. "The scaffolding of regulatory and the institutions to protect insurance, safety, et cetera, always lag behind," he said. Working out how to regulate the car could take a year or two, by which time Musk is "two generations ahead." Ismail called it "the biggest stress test that we're seeing across all of these technologies, not just this car."
The discussion also heard the opposite reading: that the car is street legal as it stands, because "there's nothing to stop you from strapping a rocket to your car," so it fits within existing rules and insurance is the real obstacle.
When a genuinely new kind of aircraft arrives, the federal process covers far more than the vehicle. For powered-lift aircraft, which take off like helicopters and fly like planes, the FAA issued a final rule setting out how pilots and instructors are certified and trained and what operating requirements apply. Whether a car making brief air-assisted hops would fall under anything like that was left open on the show.
Letting the AI take over
The presentation clip said the demo car was technically autonomous "to make sure we don't kill anyone," but that long term the Roadster would be the only manually driven car Tesla makes. Ansari said she was surprised it is only a human-driven car. Diamandis doubted that manual driving would cover the flying part: "no way that control system is going to fly without AI in the loop."
That led Diamandis to an idea he likes. People who want to drive fast could do their best behind the wheel, he said, and "if you start losing traction, the AI takes over." He pointed to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, where, he said, there is a high death rate in sports cars because the cars outperform their drivers' ability to think and react. He gave no figures. An AI layer, he argued, could "make sure everybody's safe."
Ismail placed the idea in a familiar line of car technology: anti-lock brakes and traction control, already built into cars, and more recently lane-drift and collision warnings. The next step, he said, is a general capability of "trying not to kill the human, despite what the human does," and he called it "badly needed."
Ansari took the point further. Researchers use "alignment" for the problem of getting AI systems to act in people's interests. "This is the answer to alignment," she said. "You know, AI doing the right thing despite what we do."
Earlier in the conversation, Ismail had put the larger test to the 2028 target: "The real miracle will be can they ship it on time rather than does it fly?"