Daily Tech & GNSS News Digest - March 30, 2026

Trump’s new science and technology advisory council landed with a conspicuous set of absences — no Musk, no Altman, no Anthropic — while SpaceX moved to give retail investors an unprecedented slice of its record-breaking IPO. Meanwhile, the complete exodus of xAI’s founding team underscored the turbulence inside Musk’s AI operation, and in orbit, ESA’s Celeste pathfinder satellites reached their target after multiple weather delays.

Tech News

Trump’s Tech Council Excludes Musk, Altman, and Anthropic — Sacks Steps Down as AI Czar

President Trump announced 14 appointments to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), stacking the panel with Silicon Valley heavyweights including Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Sergey Brin (Google), Lisa Su (AMD), Marc Andreessen (a16z), Michael Dell, and Safra Catz (Oracle). Conspicuously absent: Elon Musk and Sam Altman, who are locked in dueling federal lawsuits over OpenAI’s nonprofit-to-profit conversion and alleged market monopolization. Anthropic — currently suing the administration over a Pentagon blacklisting — was also excluded.

The council will be co-chaired by David Sacks, who simultaneously confirmed his departure as the White House’s AI and crypto czar after reaching the 130-day limit for special government employees. Sacks’ move from operational policy to an advisory role is significant: PCAST can study issues and issue recommendations but does not make policy, and the White House has no plans to appoint a replacement AI czar. The reshuffling leaves a vacuum in day-to-day AI policy coordination at the exact moment when frontier AI regulation, the Anthropic litigation, and multiple mega-IPOs are converging on Washington. Bloomberg noted that the council’s composition — heavy on companies with active federal contracts and light on safety-focused voices — signals the administration’s preference for an industry-led, growth-first AI agenda.

SpaceX IPO: E*Trade in Talks to Lead Retail Allocation of Up to 30%

SpaceX is preparing to reserve up to 30% of its historic IPO for retail investors — roughly three times the typical allocation for a public offering — and Morgan Stanley’s E*Trade unit is in talks to lead the retail share sale, Bloomberg and Reuters reported Monday. The arrangement would favor E*Trade over rival brokerage platforms Robinhood and SoFi, both of which have been pitching for roles on the offering. SpaceX is considering cutting both firms out altogether, routing all retail shares through Morgan Stanley’s platform.

The retail strategy reflects Elon Musk’s calculation that his 250 million+ social media following represents a durable demand pool that traditional institutional roadshows cannot match. At a targeted raise of $75 billion and a valuation of $1.5–1.75 trillion, a 30% retail allocation would mean ordinary investors could access roughly $22 billion in shares — an unprecedented figure for any IPO. SpaceX has scheduled April investor briefings with company executives as the SEC continues its regulatory review of the S-1 filing, with a June listing still on the table. The offering, if completed at the upper end, would make Musk a trillionaire on paper and SpaceX the most valuable company to debut on public markets by a factor of more than two.

All 11 xAI Co-Founders Have Now Left Elon Musk’s AI Company

The last two original co-founders of xAI — Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen — departed the company late last week, completing a full exodus of all 11 co-founders who launched the AI venture with Musk in 2023, TechCrunch reported Friday. The departures accelerated sharply in 2026: Greg Yang left in January, Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba exited within 24 hours of each other in February, followed by Toby Pohlen, Zihang Dai, and Guodong Zhang in February and March. Earlier departures included Kyle Kosic (2024), Christian Szegedy and Igor Babuschkin (2025).

Musk publicly acknowledged the churn, stating that xAI “was not built right the first time around” and is “being rebuilt from the foundations up.” The rebuilding follows SpaceX’s all-stock acquisition of xAI in a deal valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, which folded xAI, X (formerly Twitter), and SpaceX under a single corporate umbrella ahead of the IPO. The complete loss of a founding team is rare even by Silicon Valley standards and raises questions about technical continuity at an AI lab competing directly with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic — though Musk appears to be betting that SpaceX’s engineering culture and infrastructure scale will matter more than the original research leadership.

Additional Headlines

Hong Kong Tech ETF Draws Record Inflows Despite Sell-Off: The CSOP Hang Seng Tech Index ETF attracted HK$13.6 billion ($1.7 billion) in net inflows through March 27 — the largest monthly total since the fund’s 2020 debut — even as the fund fell roughly 9% in March, reflecting persistent investor conviction in Chinese tech despite Iran war jitters and broader market volatility.
Shield AI Raises $2 Billion for Autonomous Defense Systems: The San Diego-based defense AI company closed a $2 billion funding round to scale its autonomous aircraft and drone swarm technology, underscoring the accelerating convergence of AI and defense spending as the Iran conflict sustains elevated military budgets.
Bank of America Deploys AI Advisory Platform to 1,000 Advisors: Bank of America rolled out an AI-powered advisory platform built on Salesforce’s Agentforce technology to approximately 1,000 financial advisors, while its virtual assistant Erica now handles work equivalent to roughly 11,000 employees — one of the largest enterprise AI deployments in financial services to date.

GNSS News

Update: ESA Celeste LEO-PNT Pathfinder Satellites Successfully Reach Orbit

After two weather-related scrubs on March 24 and 25, ESA’s Celeste Pathfinder A satellites successfully launched aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket on March 28 at 10:14 pm NZT from Launch Complex 1 on the Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand. The mission, named “Daughter of the Stars,” was Rocket Lab’s 85th launch overall and its first dedicated mission for the European Space Agency. Both CubeSats — a 12U unit built by GMV (Spain) and a 16U unit built by Thales Alenia Space (France) — were deployed to a 510 km quasi-polar orbit and have established contact with ground stations.

The successful deployment marks Europe’s first dedicated Low Earth Orbit positioning, navigation, and timing hardware in space. From 510 km altitude, the satellites will broadcast L- and S-band signals that arrive at receivers with significantly stronger power and faster geometry changes than signals from Galileo’s Medium Earth Orbit constellation — enabling faster convergence times for high-accuracy positioning. The Pathfinder A mission will validate core Celeste system technologies and begin the process of activating the required ITU frequency allocations ahead of the planned 11-satellite full demonstration constellation. ESA has emphasized that Celeste is designed to complement, not replace, Galileo — adding a LEO augmentation layer that could deliver enhanced performance in urban canyons, polar regions, and GNSS-contested environments. The broader Celeste architecture envisions signals across S-band, C-band, and UHF frequencies with no precedent in existing civilian satellite navigation, potentially laying the foundation for a European LEO-PNT service operational in the 2030s.

FAA Updates GNSS Interference Resource Guide With Expanded Pilot Procedures

The Federal Aviation Administration published Version 1.1 of its GPS/GNSS Interference Resource Guide in late March, a substantial revision of the document first released earlier in 2026. The update — developed with input from the Performance Based Operations Rulemaking Committee’s (PARC) GPS/GNSS Disruption Action Team, which includes NBAA among its members — significantly expands the guidance available to pilots for recognizing, responding to, and reporting GNSS jamming and spoofing incidents.

The revised guide adds detailed cockpit-level indicators for interference detection, including time shifts, position disagreements, and anomalies in systems beyond basic navigation — specifically calling out impacts on RNAV/RNP capability, ADS-B surveillance, and synthetic vision displays. For spoofing events, the FAA now explicitly warns that effects can persist after leaving the affected area, advising pilots to cross-check with non-GNSS navigation sources, favor ground-based approaches when available, and power-cycle affected avionics if necessary. The guide also standardizes the reporting chain: pilots should alert ATC in real time when they suspect interference and file a written anomaly report after landing. The update arrives as GNSS interference incidents in U.S. airspace — including the March 19 spoofing event at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport — have moved from rare occurrences to operationally relevant events that the FAA must equip pilots to handle systematically.

Key Takeaways

Washington’s AI power structure is consolidating around incumbents, not innovators: Trump’s PCAST roster rewards companies with existing federal relationships while sidelining the three most consequential AI figures — Musk, Altman, and Anthropic’s Amodei — suggesting the administration’s AI policy will favor scale and compliance over frontier research and safety.
SpaceX’s retail-first IPO strategy could reshape how mega-offerings are distributed: Reserving 30% of a $75 billion raise for everyday investors — triple the industry norm — is a bet that social-media-driven demand can substitute for institutional price discovery, with implications for every large IPO that follows.
Europe’s LEO-PNT ambitions have crossed from paper to orbit: The successful Celeste launch delivers the first European hardware capable of demonstrating how LEO satellites can augment Galileo with stronger signals and faster convergence — a tangible step toward the resilient, multi-layer navigation architecture that escalating GNSS interference demands.