“I want to make a big announcement,” said Faryar Shirzad, the chief policy officer of Coinbase, to a nearly empty room. His words echoed across the massive hall at the Bitcoin Conference, deep in the caverns of The Venetian Expo in Las Vegas, and it wasn’t apparent how many people were watching on the livestream. Then again, somebody out there may have been interested in the panelists he was interviewing, one of whom was unusual by Bitcoin Conference standards: Chris LaCivita, the political consultant who’d co-chaired Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. “I am super proud to say it on this stage,” Shirzad continued, addressing the dozens of people scattered across 5,000 chairs. “We have just become a major sponsor of the America250 effort.” My jaw dropped. Coinbase, the world’s largest crypto exchange, the owner of 12 percent of the world’s Bitcoin supply, and listed on the S&P 500, was paying for Trump to hold a military parade.No wonder they made the announcement in an empty room. Today was “Code and Country”: an entire day of MAGA-themed panels on the Nakamoto Main Stage, full of Republican legislators, White House officials, and political operatives, all of whom praised Trump as the savior of the crypto world. But Code and Country was part of Industry Day, which was VIP only and closed to General Admission holders — the people with the $199 tickets, who flocked to the conference seeking wisdom from brilliant technologists and fabulously wealthy crypto moguls, who believed that decentralized currency on a blockchain could not be controlled by government authoritarians. They’d have drowned Shirzad in boos if they saw him give money to Donald Trump’s campaign manager, and they would have stormed the Nakamoto stage if they knew the purpose of America250. America250 is a nonprofit established by Congress during Barack Obama’s presidency with a mundane mission: to plan the nationwide festivities for July 4th, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “Who remembers the Bicentennial in 1976?” the co-chair, former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios, asked the crowd. “I remember it like it was yesterday, and this one is going to be bigger and better.” But then Trump got re-elected, appointed LaCivita as co-chair, and suddenly, the party was starting earlier. The week before the conference, America250 announced that it would host a “Grand Military Parade” on June 14th to celebrate the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, releasing tickets for prime seats along the parade route and near the Washington Monument on their website, hosting other festivities on the National Mall, and credentialing the press covering the event. (Their celebrations and events are a different operation from the U.S. Army, which had never planned for a parade to celebrate its 250th birthday, much less a military parade, but is now spending up to $45 million in taxpayer dollars to make the parade happen.) According to the most recent statements from Army officials, the parade will include hundreds of cannons, dozens of Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters, fighter jets, bombers, and 150 military vehicles, including Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Stryker Fighting Vehicles, Humvees, and if the logistics work out, 25 (or more) M1 Abrams tanks. Trump had spent years trying to get the government to throw a military parade — primarily because he’d attended a Bastille Day parade in France and became jealous — and now that he was back in office, he’d finally eliminated everyone in the government who previously told him that the budget didn’t exist for such a parade, that the tank treads would ruin the streets and collapse the bridges, that the optics of tanks, guns and soldiers marching down Constitution Avenue were too authoritarian and fascist. June 14th also happens to be Donald Trump’s birthday.And Coinbase, whose CEO once told his employees to stop bringing politics into the workplace, was now footing the bill — if not for this military parade watch party, then for the one inevitably happening next year, when America actually turns 250, or any other festivities between now and then that may or may not fall on Trump’s birthday. (This wasn’t the first party they helped fund, though. Earlier this year, Coinbase wrote a $1 million check to Trump’s inauguration committee. One month later, the SEC announced that it was dropping an investigation into Coinbase.) I had to keep reminding myself that I was at the Bitcoin Conference. I’d been desperately looking for the goofy, degenerate party vibes that my coworkers who’d covered previous crypto conferences told me about: inflated swans with QR codes. Multimillionaires strolling around the Nakamoto Stage in shiba inu pajamas. Folks who communicated in memes and acronyms. Celebrity athletes who were actual celebrities. “Bitcoin yoga,” whatever that was. Afterparties with drugs, lots of drugs, and probably the mind-bending designer kind. And hey, Las Vegas was the global capital of goofy, degenerate partying. But no, I was stuck in a prolonged flashback to every single Republican event I’ve covered over the past ten years – Trump rallies, conservative conferences, GOP conventions, and MAGA fundraisers, with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” playing on an endless loop. There was an emcee endlessly praising Trump, encouraging the audience to clap for Trump, and reminding everyone about how great it was that Trump spoke at the Conference last year, which all sounds even stranger when said in an Australian accent. In addition to LaCivita, there were four GOP Congressmen, four GOP Senators, one Trump-appointed SEC Commissioner, one Treasury Official, two senior White House officials (including David Sacks, the White House crypto and A.I. czar), and two of Trump’s sons. All of them, too, spent time praising Trump as the first “crypto president.” (Vice President J.D. Vance would be speaking the next day to the general admission crowd, but he was probably going to praise Trump, too.) The titles of the panels seemed to be run through some sort of MAGA generative AI system: The Next Golden Age of America. The American Super Grid. Making America the Global Bitcoin Superpower. The New Declaration of Independence: Bitcoin and the Path Out of the U.S. National Debt Crisis. (Speaker: Vivek Ramaswamy.) Uncancleable: Bitcoin, Rumble & Free Speech Technology. (Speaker: Donald Trump Jr.) The only difference was that this MAGA conference was funded by crypto. And if crypto was paying for a MAGA conference, and they had to play “God Bless the USA,” they were bringing in a string quartet.Annoyed that I had not yet seen a single Shiba Inu — no, Jim Justice’s celebrity bulldog was not the same thing — I left Nakamoto and went back to the press area. It hadn’t turned into Fox News yet, but I could see MAGA’s presence seeping into the world of podcasters and vloggers. A Newsmax reporter (great blowout, jewel-toned sheath dress, heels to the heavens, very camera-ready) was interviewing White House official Bo Hines (clean-cut, former Yale football player and GOP congressional candidate, nice suit), right before he was hustled onstage for a panel with a member of the U.S. Treasury. Soon, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) was doing an interview gauntlet while his senior aides stood by, one wearing a pink plaid blazer that could have easily been Brooks Brothers. Over on the Genesis Stage, the CEO of PragerU, a right wing media company that attacks higher education, was interviewing the CEO of the 1792 Exchange, a right-wing nonprofit that attacks companies for engaging in “woke business practices” such as diversity initiatives. (Leveraging Bitcoin’s Values to Shift the Culture in America.) I walked into the main expo center, past a crypto podcaster in a sequined bomber jacket talking to a Wall Street Journal reporter. For some reason, his presence was a relief. Even though he was clearly a Trump supporter — his jacket said TRUMP: THE GOLDEN AGE on the back — there was something more janky and homegrown, less corporate, about him. But the moment I looked up and saw a massive sign that said STEAKTOSHI, the unease returned. A ghoulish-looking group of executives from Steak ‘n Shake, the fast food company with over 450 locations across the globe, had gathered under the sign in a replica of the restaurant. They were selling jars of beef tallow, with a choice of grass-fed or Wagyu, and giving out a MAKE FRYING OIL TALLOW AGAIN hat with every purchase an overt embrace of the right-wing conspiracy that cooking with regular seed oils would lower one’s testosterone. (Relevant to the conference: they were also advertising that their restaurants now accepted Bitcoin.)Andrew Gordon, the head of Main Street Crypto PAC, had been to five previous Bitcoin Conferences and worked on crypto tax policy since 2014. He’d seen Trump speak at the last conference in Nashville during the election, and the audience – not typically unquestioning MAGA superfans – had melted into adoring goo in Trump’s presence. But now that Trump was using his presidential powers to establish a Bitcoin reserve, roll back federal investigations into crypto companies, and order massive changes to financial regulatory policies — in short, changing the entire market on crypto’s behalf with the stroke of a pen — Gordon clocked a notable vibe shift this year. “There are people wearing suits at a Bitcoin conference,” he told me wryly back in the press lounge. (He, too, was wearing a suit). The change wasn’t due to a new breed of Suit People flooding in. It was the Bitcoin veterans the ones who’d been coming to the conference for years, dressed in loud Versace jackets or old holey t-shirts – who were now in business attire. “They’re now recognizing the level of formality and how serious it is.”According to the Bitcoin Conference organizers, out of the 35,000-plus attendees in Vegas this year, 17.1 percent of them were categorized as “institutional and corporate decision-makers” — a vague way to describe politicians, corporate executives, and the rest of the C-suite world. Whenever they weren’t speaking onstage, they were conducting interviews with outlets hand-selected from dozens of media requests that had been filtered through the conference organizers, or in Q&A sessions with people who’d bought the $21,000 Whale Pass and could access the VIP Lounge. (Yes, the industry-only day of the conference had an even more exclusive tier.) They were sidebarring with crypto CEOs outside the conference for round tables, privately meeting Senators for lunch and White House officials for dinner. Gordon himself had just held a private breakfast for industry insiders, with GOP Senators Marsha Blackburn and Cynthia Lummis as special guests. And for the very, very wealthy, MAGA Inc., Trump’s primary super PAC, was holding a fundraising dinner in Vegas that night, with Vance, Don Jr., and Eric Trump in attendance. That ticket, according to The Washington Post, cost $1 million per person.It was the kind of amoral, backroom behavior that would have sent the General Admission attendees into a rage — and they did the next day, when the convention opened to them. During one extremely packed talk at the Genesis Stage called Are Bitcoiners Becoming Sycophants of the State?, a moderator asked the four panelists what they’d like to say to Vance and Sacks and all the politicians who’d been there yesterday. And Erik Cason erupted.“‘What you’re doing is actually immoral and bad. You hurt people. You actively want to use the state to implement violence against others.’ 
That’s like, fucked up and wrong,” said Cason, the author of “Cryptosovereignty,” to a crowd of hundreds. “If you personally wanna like, go to Yemen and try to stab those people, that’s on you. But asking other people to go do that – it is a fucked up and terrible thing.” He grew more heated. “And also fuck you. You’re not, like, a king. You’re supposed to be liable to the law, too. 
And I don’t appreciate you trying to think that that you just get to advance the state however the fuck you want, because you have power.”“These are the violent thugs who killed hundreds of millions of people over the last century,” agreed Bruce Fenton of Chainstone Labs. “They have nothing on us. All we wanna do is run some code and trade it around our nerd money. Leave us alone.”The audience burst into cheers and applause. Bitcoin was the promise of freedom from the government, who’d murdered and stolen and tried to control their lives, and now that their wealth was on the blockchain, no one could take their sovereignty. “Personally, I don’t really care what they [the politicians] think,” said American HODL, whose title on the conference site was “guy with 6.15 bitcoin,” the derision clear in his voice. “They are employees who work for us, so their thoughts and opinions on the matter are irrelevant. Do what the fuck we tell you to do.
 I don’t work for you. I’m not underneath you. You’re underneath me.” But the politicians weren’t going to listen to them, much less talk to them. The politicians spent the conference surrounded by aides and security who stopped people from approaching – I’m sorry, the Senator has to leave for an engagement now – or safely inside the VIP rooms with the $21,000-dollar Whale Pass holders and the million-dollar donors. By the time American HODL said that the politicians worked for him, they were on flights out of Vegas, having gotten what they wanted from Code and Country, an event that was closed to General Admission pass holders.Coinbase’s executives were at Code and Country, however. Coinbase held over 984,000 Bitcoin, more coins than American HODL could mine in a lifetime. And Coinbase was now a sponsor of Donald Trump’s birthday military parade. The Nakamoto Stage during Code + Country at the Bitcoin Conference.After David Sacks and the Winklevoss twins finished explaining how Trump had saved the crypto industry from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (or as one Winklevoss called her, “Pocahontas”), I was jonesing for a drink. A few other reporters on the ground had told me about “Code, Country and Cocktails,” the America250 afterparty held at the Ayu Dayclub at Resort World, and I signed up immediately. Reporters at past Bitcoin Conferences had promised legendary side-event depravity, and I hoped I would find it there. As I entered the lush, tropical nightclub, I saw two white-gloved hands sticking out the side of the wall, each holding a glass of champagne at crotch level. I reached out for a flute, thinking it was maybe just a fucked-up piece of art, and gasped as the hand let go of the stem, disappeared into the hole, and emerged seconds later with another full champagne glass. Past the champagne glory hole wall — there was really no other way to describe it — was a massive outdoor swimming pool, surrounded by chefs serving up endless portions of steak frites, unguarded magnums of Moët casually stacked in ice buckets, the professional Beautiful Women of Las Vegas draped around Peter Schiff, the famous economist/podcaster/Bitcoin skeptic. When not booked for private events, the crescent-shaped pool at Ayu would be filled with drunk people in swim suits, dancing to DJ Kaskade. No one was in the pool tonight. Depravity was not happening here. In fact, there was more networking going on than partying, and it was somehow more engaging than Bone Thugs-N-Harmony suddenly appearing onstage to perform. And it was distinctly not just about making money in crypto. A good percentage of this crowd wore some derivative of a MAGA hat, and anyone who could show off their photos of them with Trump did so. This, I realized, was how crypto bros did politics — a new game for them, where success and influence was not necessarily quantifiable. “Crypto got Trump elected,” Greg Grseziak, an agent who manages crypto influencers, told me, showing me his Trump photo opp. “In four years, this is going to be the biggest event in the presidential race.”Grzesiak walked off to do more networking, I finished my glory hole champagne, and in the meantime, Bone Thugs had started performing “East 1999”. A fellow reporter leaned over. “Who do you think those guys are?” he asked, pointing to a group of extremely tall white men in suits and lanyards, standing behind a velvet rope to the left of the stage.I walked over to investigate. They looked like the group of Steak ‘n Shake executives I met at the Expo Hall — the ones with the beef tallow jars and derivative MAGA hats — and they were lurking next to the stage, watching the rappers like vultures but barely moving to the music. This scene was too preposterous to actually be real: Steak ‘n Shake executives, at the Bitcoin Conference, attending a party for America250, in the VIP section, during a Bone Thugs-n-Harmony set? “Shout out to Steak ‘n Shake for being the first fast food restaurant to accept Bitcoin!” announced one of the Bones. The company logo appeared on a screen above his head.No flashy Vegas magic (or dancers in cow costumes, now shimmying onstage with Steak ‘n Shake signs) could mask what I just saw. This party was co-sponsored by a MAGA-branded fast-food chain owned by Sardar Biglari, a businessman who had purchased Maxim, became its editor-in-chief, and used the smutty magazine to endorse Trump in 2024. So was Frax, the stablecoin exchange, and Exodus, one of the biggest crypto wallet companies in the market. Bitcoin Magazine’s logo flashed across the stage at one point, as editor-in-chief David Bailey, in his own derivative MAGA hat, tried to hype up the crowd for J.D. Vance’s speech the next day. (“You only get to live history once,” he said, to faint cheers.)For some unknown reason, these companies were all putting their money into America250, and as I had to keep reminding myself, America250 — the government nonprofit in charge of planning the country’s celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration’s signing — was currently working to get tanks in the streets of Washington DC for Donald Trump’s birthday. I went for one last champagne flute from the glory hole, just for the novelty, and as the hand disappeared back into the wall, I caught something I’d missed earlier: above the hole was a logo for TRON, the blockchain exchange run by billionaire Justin Sun. He had faced several fraud investigations from the SEC that magically disappeared after he invested $75 million in a Trump family crypto company, and seemed more than happy to keep throwing crypto money at Trump. Recently, he won the $TRUMP meme coin dinner, spending over $16 million on the token in exchange for a private and controversial dinner with the president.TRON was also cosponsoring the America250 party.Earlier, I’d run into the Australian emcee in the elevator of The Palazzo. She’d spent the day teetering across the Nakamoto Stage in dainty kitten heels, a pinstriped blazer and miniskirt suit set, and given the gratuitous Trump praising and the fact she was blonde, I had stereotyped her as MAGA to the core. But the program was over and she was holding her heels by their ankle straps, barefoot and sighing in relief. This was not her usual style, she told an attendee. She’d take a pair of sneakers over heels if she could. But the conference organizers had told her to dress up because there were senators in attendance. “Tomorrow, the real Bitcoiners are coming,” she said, and she’d get to wear flat shoes. And the next morning, on the day of Vance’s speech, I found myself stuck outside the conference with the “real Bitcoiners.” In spite of all the emails that the conference had sent me reminding me of how strict security measures would be, possibly to overcorrect from last year’s utter shitshow around Trump’s appearance, I’d woken up too late, eaten my bagel too leisurely, got sidetracked by a police officer-turned-Bitcoin investor excited I was wearing orange (whoops), and barely missed the cutoff for the Secret Service to let me in. But the conference had set up televisions with a live feed of Vance’s speech, and the rest of the general admission attendees were remarkably chill about it, opting to mingle in the hallways until the Secret Service left. I found myself in a smaller crowd near the expo hall door, next to a young man carrying a live miniature Shiba Inu (“It’s a tiny doge!” he said proudly), and the podcaster I’d seen earlier in the sequined bomber jacket. He introduced himself as Action CEO, and with nothing else to do but wait — “You can watch the [Vance] replay,” he reassured me, “these events are mainly about networking” — we got to talking. “I’m actually excited that Trump isn’t even here, I’ll be honest with you,” he said, speaking with a rapid cadence. Trump was ultimately just one guy, and the fact that he sent his underlings and political allies — the ones who could actually implement his grand promises for the crypto industry — proved he hadn’t just been paying lip service. That said, it had come with some uncomfortable changes, including the re-emergence of Justin Sun. “It’s a little bit concerning when you say, All right, we don’t care what you did in the past. Come on out, clean slate,” he continued. “That’s the concern right now for most people. Seeing people that did wrong by the space coming back and acting like nothing happened? That’s a little concerning.” And not just that: Sun was back in the United States, having dinner with Trump, and giving him millions of dollars. “If you’re sitting in a room and having a conversation, people are literally gonna go, yeah, it’s kind of sketch that this guy is back here after everything that’s happened. You’re not gonna see it published, because it’s not a popular opinion, but we’re all definitely talking about it.” If Action’s friends weren’t comfortable talking about it openly, that fraudsters with enough money were suddenly back in the mix, it was certainly not the kind of conversation the CEOs were going to have in front of the General Admission crowd. (Though it did mean that the emcee, looking much happier than she did the day before, got to wear low-heeled boots and shorts.) But behind closed doors — or at least at the Code and Country panels, where the base pass attendees couldn’t boo them — they gave a sense of what their backroom conversations with the Trump administration did look like.“I was actually at a dinner last night and one of the things that someone from the admin said was, What if we give you guys everything you want and then you guys forget? Because there’s midterms in 2026, and hopefully 2028, and beyond,” said Sam Kazemian, the founder and CEO of Frax, which had sponsored the America250 party. “But one of the things I said was: We as an industry are very, very loyal. The crypto community has a very, very, very strong memory. And once this industry is legalized, is transparent, is safe, all of the big players understand that this wasn’t possible without this administration, this Congress, this Senate. We’re lifelong, career-long allies.”“Loyalty” is a dangerous concept with this president, who’s cheated on his three wives, stopped paying the legal fees for employees who’d taken the fall for him, ended the careers of sympathetic MAGA Republicans for insufficiently coddling him, withdrew security for government employees experiencing death threats for the sin of contradicting him in public by citing facts. It was only weeks ago that he and Vance were publicly screaming at Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who was at the White House to request more aid in the war against Russia, for not saying “thank you” in front of the cameras. It would be less than a week before he began threatening to cancel all of Elon Musk’s government contracts when the billionaire criticized the size of Trump’s budget, even though Musk had given him millions and helped him purge the government. And if you were to find a photo of any political leader, billionaire or CEO standing vacant-eyed next to Trump and shaking his hand, the circumstances are practically a given: they had recently made him unhappy, either for criticizing him, making an imagined slight, or simply asserting themselves. The only way they could avoid public humiliation, or their businesses being crushed via executive order, was to go to Mar-a-Lago, tell the world that the president was wonderful, and underwrite a giant party for his birthday military parade. Maybe Kazemian knew he was being tested, or maybe the 32-year old Ron Paul superfan had no idea what the administration was asking of him. Either way, he responded correctly. At least one person at the conference was thinking about ways that the government could betray the Bitcoin community. As the panel on Bitcoiners becoming sycophants of the state wrapped up, and the other panelists finished telling the government pigs to go fuck themselves and keep their hands off their nerd money, the moderator turned to Casey Rodarmor, a software engineer-turned-crypto influencer, for the last question: “Tell everyone here why Bitcoin wins, regardless of what happens.”“Oh, man, I don’t know if Bitcoin wins, regardless of what happens,” he responded, frowning. He had already gamed out one feasible situation where Bitcoin lost: “If we all of a sudden saw a very rapid inflation in a lot of fiat currencies, and there was a plausible scapegoat in Bitcoin all over the world, and they were able to make a sort of marketing claim that Bitcoin is causing this — Bitcoin is making your savings go to zero, it’s causing this carnage to the economy — 
If that happens worldwide, I think that’s really scary.” The moderator froze, the crowd murmured nervously, and I thought about the number of times Trump had blamed a group of people for problems they’d never caused. An awful lot of them were now being deported. “I take that seriously,” Rodarmor continued. “I don’t know that Bitcoin will succeed. I think that Bitcoin is incredibly strong, it’s incredibly difficult to fuck up. But in that case… man, I don’t know.” I had asked Action CEO earlier if Kazemian, the Frax CEO, was right — if the crypto world was unquestioningly loyal to Trump, if their support of him was unconditional. “Oh, it’s definitely conditional,” he said without hesitation, as his Trump jacket glittered under the fluorescent lights. “It’s a matter of, are you going to be doing the right things by us, by the people who are here?” We walked down the expo hall, past booths promising life-changing technological marvels, alongside thousands of people flooding into Nakamoto Hall, ready to learn how to become unfathomably rich, who paid $199 to be there.The audience of “Are Bitcoiners Becoming Sychophants of the State?”, Day Two of the Bitcoin ConferenceSee More:

Key Takeaways The European Commission will introduce the new International Digital Strategy that will focus on tech collaboration with the US and other countries. This is in contradiction to the growing pressure in Europe that calls for tech sovereignty and reducing tech dependence on the US. Low venture capital funding and a diverse regulatory landscape have been major challenges for tech innovation in Europe. Europe is seeing an increasing push to establish technological sovereignty and reduce the region’s reliance on US technology. However, there’s always been an undertone of acceptance that the EU is years behind the US when it comes to technological innovation and advancements. Now, the European Commission is planning to acknowledge this publicly. The EC will introduce a new International Digital Strategy, which will focus on collaboration with the United States and other tech-forward countries, such as Japan, South Korea, and India. The lawmakers believe that “decoupling” from the West is unrealistic and will instead push Europe further back in the technological race. Europe’s Call for Tech Sovereignty Several prominent political leaders and lawmakers have advocated for European sovereignty over technology and artificial intelligence.  For instance, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, said in a speech in 2024 that Europe’s strategic autonomy is a conscious choice to end the region’s dependence on others. In an earlier speech, he also said that if Europe fails to build champions in areas such as digital and artificial intelligence, its choices will be dictated by others.  Similarly, Thierry Breton, the former EU Commissioner for Internal Markets, said that digital spending in the EU will breach the 20% target, underlining the importance of investing in European tech sovereignty. He focused on Europe’s declining market share in the semiconductor industry and called for the development of groundbreaking European tech. The Eurostack movement in the EU has also been gaining a lot of traction and support from various think tanks, academic researchers, and industry voices. Eurostack staff calls for the development of an indigenous infrastructure stack in the European region, including cloud, AI, semiconductors, digital services, and data centers. The main aim is to reduce Europe’s dependence on Chinese and US technology. This growing concern among EU well-wishers is quite understandable. Excessive reliance on the United States puts the US (meaning Donald Trump) in a controlling position, where he can arm-twist the European Union in matters of trade and even politics.  We have already seen an example of this during the tariff war, where Trump imposed a 25% tariff on automobiles (and their parts) and steel and aluminum products imported from the EU. Also, the fact that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon account for around 69% of the cloud market in the EU is quite concerning, too. Europe Wakes Up to Reality Despite positive speeches and statements by people in power in the EU, the fact remains that Europe is still lagging behind the United States. Bulgarian lawmaker Eva Maydell said that Europe should “sober up” and accept that the train has left the station. Dan Nechita, the current EU director for the Transatlantic Policy Network, said that it’s not the right time to be politically absolute and say that “we are going to do everything in Europe.” EU tech chief Virkkunen has been working hard to bring home the support of influential tech lobbies and emphasized the need to continue working with the United States. To put it in a nutshell, the European Commission is ready to accept the fact that the damage is done, and now Europe needs to play second fiddle and forge strategic partnerships with key technological leaders (primarily in the US) to stay alive in the race. Lack of Investments and the EU’s Regulation-First Approach One of the major reasons behind the European Union’s sluggish tech development is the lack of venture capital investments in the region. As per an IMF post, EU VC funds raised around $130B between 2013 and 2022. During the same time, the US raised $924B.  Similarly, annual VC investments in the EU are only 0.2% of the GDP when compared to 0.7% in the US. Currently, the United States accounts for a massive 52% of the global VC funds, whereas the EU holds just 5%.  Lack of investments has forced European startups to look elsewhere, especially the United States, for funding and support. One of the major reasons for such low venture capital interest in Europe is its diversity. Each of the 27 countries in the EU has its own regulatory and legal challenges, which make it difficult for multinational corporations to operate in the region.  Plus, the EU has adopted a regulation-first approach, which is very different from the United States. Of course, this approach has its own merits, but it has surely slowed down the speed of technological investments in the region.  For instance, the GDPR puts a truckload of regulatory and moral responsibility on companies to protect user data. Similarly, the AI Act focuses on the more ethical development of artificial intelligence that’s aligned with human values and refrains companies from exploiting public data. Sure, all of these are positive tech regulations important to protect the long-term sovereignty of the public at large. Even global tech advocates have praised the EU’s efforts for the development of safe and ethical technologies. However, we cannot ignore the fact that this has come at the cost of sluggish tech investments and overall growth. With its back against the wall, Europe needs to reassess its strengths and focus on areas such as open-source technologies, such as France’s La Suite numérique, and government-backed technological initiatives to have a say in the upcoming artificial intelligence and semiconductor race. Krishi is a seasoned tech journalist with over four years of experience writing about PC hardware, consumer technology, and artificial intelligence.  Clarity and accessibility are at the core of Krishi’s writing style. He believes technology writing should empower readers—not confuse them—and he’s committed to ensuring his content is always easy to understand without sacrificing accuracy or depth. Over the years, Krishi has contributed to some of the most reputable names in the industry, including Techopedia, TechRadar, and Tom’s Guide. A man of many talents, Krishi has also proven his mettle as a crypto writer, tackling complex topics with both ease and zeal. His work spans various formats—from in-depth explainers and news coverage to feature pieces and buying guides.  Behind the scenes, Krishi operates from a dual-monitor setup (including a 29-inch LG UltraWide) that’s always buzzing with news feeds, technical documentation, and research notes, as well as the occasional gaming sessions that keep him fresh.  Krishi thrives on staying current, always ready to dive into the latest announcements, industry shifts, and their far-reaching impacts.  When he's not deep into research on the latest PC hardware news, Krishi would love to chat with you about day trading and the financial markets—oh! And cricket, as well. View all articles by Krishi Chowdhary Our editorial process The Tech Report editorial policy is centered on providing helpful, accurate content that offers real value to our readers. We only work with experienced writers who have specific knowledge in the topics they cover, including latest developments in technology, online privacy, cryptocurrencies, software, and more. Our editorial policy ensures that each topic is researched and curated by our in-house editors. We maintain rigorous journalistic standards, and every article is 100% written by real authors.

If you wanted to get a COVID vaccine during pregnancy, to protect yourself and your future baby from the virus, that may soon be difficult to impossible. According to a short video posted on X, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, who is also a noted anti-vaccine activist, said that the COVID-19 vaccine “has been removed” from the list of vaccines recommended in pregnancy, as well as the list of vaccines recommended for healthy children. This announcement sidesteps the usual regulatory process, and it’s not clear exactly what will happen next—but here’s what we know. The announcement may not be entirely validRFK, Jr made the announcement in a video where he stood alongside the NIH director Jay Bhattacharya and FDA commissioner Marty Makary. Notably, nobody from the CDC was present. The FDA approves vaccines, but it’s the CDC that is in charge of recommendations. (It is not clear who the CDC’s acting director actually is, or whether there is one.) Normally, the CDC has an advisory panel called ACIP (the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices) that reviews scientific evidence to make recommendations for vaccines. They’ll vote on whether a given vaccine should be recommended for everybody in a group of people. Their decisions are then passed to CDC leadership, who make the final call as to whether the vaccine gets officially recommended for that group. Vaccines are not usually added or removed to the recommended list by the CDC without consulting with ACIP, and they definitely aren’t usually added or removed by tweeting a video. Dorit Reiss, a law professor who specializes in vaccine policy, posted on LinkedIn that the announcement may not be legally valid if it’s not immediately followed by supporting documentation. She says: “Under administrative law, to avoid being found arbitrary and capricious, an agency's decision has to meet certain criteria, including explaining the agency's fact finding, a connection between the facts and the decisions, etc. A one minute video on Twitter doesn't quite get you there.” So far, the CDC’s web page on vaccines recommended in pregnancy still says that “A pregnant woman should get vaccinated against whooping cough, flu, COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).” The adult and child vaccine schedules still include COVID vaccines.Strangely, this move on behalf of the CDC contradicts the one we reported about recently from the FDA. The FDA plans to require extra steps (possibly unethical and/or impractical ones) to approve new COVID vaccines for healthy children and adults. But these steps don’t apply to people who are at high risk for complications of COVID. The FDA’s policy announcement included a list of those high risk health conditions—which includes pregnancy.Why it matters which vaccines are “recommended”Recommending a vaccine doesn’t just mean expressing an opinion; the Affordable Care Act requires that vaccines recommended by ACIP must be covered by most private insurance and Medicaid expansion plans without any cost sharing. That means no deductible and no copay—so these vaccines must be free to you out of pocket if you fall into a group of people for whom they are recommended. The recommended vaccines include all the standard childhood vaccines, plus your seasonal flu shot, and other vaccines that are recommended for adults, for people who are pregnant, and so on. The full schedules are here. If you’ve gotten a COVID shot, a flu shot, a tetanus shot, a shingles shot—the shot’s inclusion on this list is why you were able to (probably) get it for free.So taking a vaccine off the recommended list means that it could be prohibitively expensive. GoodRX, which keeps tabs on pharmacy prices, reports that COVID shots may cost $200 or more out of pocket, plus any applicable administration fee that the provider might charge.Taking a vaccine off the recommended list may also mean it won’t be covered by the Vaccines for Children program, which provides free vaccines to children who don’t have coverage for them through health insurance.Whether or not the vaccine actually gets taken off the list, the recent HHS announcement has another impact: The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said in a statement that “Following this announcement, we are worried about our patients in the future, who may be less likely to choose vaccination during pregnancy despite the clear and definitive evidence demonstrating its benefit.” The ACOG statement also pointed out a few ways in which removing the vaccines from the recommended list is not “common sense and good science,” as the HHS announcement claimed. ACOG writes: “As ob-gyns who treat patients every day, we have seen firsthand how dangerous COVID infection can be during pregnancy and for newborns who depend on maternal antibodies from the vaccine for protection. We also understand that despite the change in recommendations from HHS, the science has not changed. It is very clear that COVID infection during pregnancy can be catastrophic and lead to major disability, and it can cause devastating consequences for families.”

ExpressVPN is good at its job. It's easy to be skeptical of any service with a knack for self-promotion, but don't let ExpressVPN's hype distract you from the fact that it keeps its front-page promise of "just working." Outside of solid security, the two best things ExpressVPN offers are fast speeds and a simple interface. Our tests showed only a 7% average drop in download speed and a 2% loss of upload speed, worldwide. And while the lack of extra features may frustrate experienced users, it makes for a true set-and-forget VPN on any platform. This isn't to say ExpressVPN is without flaws — it's nearly bereft of customization options and it's notably more expensive than its competition — but it beats most VPNs in a head-to-head matchup. For this review, we followed our rigorous 10-step VPN testing process, exploring ExpressVPN's security, privacy, speed, interfaces and more. Whether you read straight through or skip to the sections that are most important for you, you should come away with all the information you need to decide whether to subscribe. Editors' note: We're in the process of rebooting all of our VPN reviews from scratch. Once we do a fresh pass on the top services, we'll be updating each review with a rating and additional comparative information. Table of contents Findings at a glance Installing, configuring and using ExpressVPN ExpressVPN speed test: Very fast averages ExpressVPN security test: Checking for leaks How much does ExpressVPN cost? ExpressVPN side apps and bundles Close-reading ExpressVPN's privacy policy Can ExpressVPN change your virtual location? Investigating ExpressVPN's server network Extra features of ExpressVPN ExpressVPN customer support options ExpressVPN background check: From founding to Kape Technologies Final verdict Findings at a glance Category Notes Installation and UI All interfaces are clean and minimalist, with no glitches and not enough depth to get lost in Windows and Mac clients are similar in both setup and general user experience Android and iOS are likewise almost identical, but Android has a nice-looking dark mode Speed Retains a worldwide average of 93% of starting download speeds Upload speeds average 98% of starting speeds Latency rises with distance, but global average stayed under 300 ms in tests Security OpenVPN, IKEv2 and Lightway VPN protocols all use secure ciphers Packet-sniffing test showed working encryption We detected no IP leaks Blocks IPv6 and WebRTC by default to prevent leaks Pricing Base price: $12.95 per month or $99.95 per year Lowest prepaid rate: $4.99 per month Can save money by paying for 28 months in advance, but only once per account 30-day money-back guarantee Bundles ExpressVPN Keys password manager and ID alerts included on all plans Dedicated IP addresses come at an extra price ID theft insurance, data removal and credit scanning available to new one-year and two-year subscribers for free 1GB eSIM deal included through holiday.com Privacy policy No storage of connection logs or device logs permitted The only risky exceptions are personal account data (which doesn't leave the ExpressVPN website) and marketing data (which the policy says should be anonymized) An independent audit found that ExpressVPN's RAM-only server infrastructure makes it impossible to keep logs Virtual location change Successfully unblocked five international Netflix libraries, succeeding on 14 out of 15 attempts Server network 164 server locations in 105 countries 38% of servers are virtual, though most virtual locations are accessed through physical servers within 1,000 miles A large number of locations in South America, Africa and central Asia Features Simple but effective kill switch Can block ads, trackers, adult sites and/or malware sites but blocklists can't be customized Split tunneling is convenient but unavailable on iOS and modern Macs Aircove is the best VPN router, albeit expensive Customer support Setup and troubleshooting guides are organized and useful, with lots of screenshots and videos Live chat starts with a bot but you can get to a person within a couple minutes Email tickets are only accessible from the mobile apps or after live chat has failed Background check Founded in 2009; based in the British Virgin Islands Has never been caught selling or mishandling user data Turkish police seized servers in 2017 but couldn't find any logs of user activity Owned by Kape Technologies, which also owns CyberGhost and Private Internet Access A previous CIO formerly worked on surveillance in the United Arab Emirates; no evidence of shady behavior during his time at ExpressVPN Windows Version 12 leaked some DNS requests when Split Tunneling was active Installing, configuring and using ExpressVPN This section focuses on how it feels to use ExpressVPN on each of the major platforms where it's available. The first step for any setup process is to make an account on expressvpn.com and buy a subscription. Windows Once subscribed, download the Windows VPN from either expressvpn.com or the Microsoft Store, then open the .exe file. Click "Yes" to let it make changes, wait for the install, then let your computer reboot. Including the reboot, the whole process takes 5-10 minutes, most of it idle. To finish, you'll need your activation code, which you can find by going to expressvpn.com and clicking "Setup" in the top-right corner. You can install ExpressVPN's Windows app from the Microsoft store, but we found the website more convenient. Sam Chapman for Engadget Extreme simplicity is the watchword for all ExpressVPN's designs. The Windows client's launch panel consists of three buttons and less than ten words. You can change your location or let the app pick a location for you — the "Smart Location" is the server with the best combination of being nearby and unburdened. Everything else is crammed into the hamburger menu at the top left. Here, in seven tabs, you'll find the Network Lock kill switch, the four types of content blockers, the split tunneling menu and the option to change your VPN protocol. You can also add shortcuts to various websites, useful if you regularly use your VPN for the same online destinations. To sum up, there's almost nothing here to get in the way: no delays, no snags, no nested menus to get lost in. It may be the world's most ignorable VPN client. That's not a bad thing at all. Mac ExpressVPN's app for macOS is almost identical in design to its Windows app. The process for downloading and setting it up is nearly the same too. As on Windows, it can be downloaded from the App Store or sideloaded directly from the expressvpn.com download center. Only a few features are missing and a couple others have been added. Split tunneling is gone (unless you're still on a macOS lower than 11), and you won't see the Lightway Turbo setting. ExpressVPN recommends some servers, but it's easy to search the whole list. Sam Chapman for Engadget Mac users do gain access to the IKEv2 protocol, along with the option to turn off automatic IPv6 blocking — Windows users have to leave it blocked at all times. Almost every website is still accessible via IPv4, but it's useful if you do need to access a specific IPv6 address while the VPN is active. Android Android users can download ExpressVPN through the Google Play Store. Open the app, sign in and you're ready to go. The Android app has a very nice dark-colored design, only slightly marred by an unnecessary information box about how long you've used the VPN this week. ExpressVPN's Android app puts a little more information on the screen than it needs to, but still runs well. Sam Chapman for Engadget There's a large button for connecting. Clicking on the server name takes you to a list of locations. On this list, you can either search or scroll and can choose individual locations within a country that has more than one. We connected to as many far-flung server locations as we could, but not a single one took longer than a few seconds. The options menu is organized sensibly, with no option located more than two clicks deep. You will see a couple of options here that aren't available on desktop, the best of which is the ability to automatically connect to your last-used ExpressVPN server whenever your phone connects to a non-trusted wifi network. There are also a few general security tools: an IP address checker, DNS and WebRTC leak testers and a password generator. These are also available on the website, but here, they're built into the app. With the exception of the latter, we'd recommend using third-party testing tools instead — even a VPN with integrity has an incentive to make its own app look like it's working. iPhone and iPad You can only install ExpressVPN's iOS app through the app store. During setup, you may need to enter your password to allow your phone to use VPN configurations. Otherwise, there are no major differences from the Android process. ExpressVPN looks good on iPhone and iPad. Sam Chapman for Engadget The interface is not quite as pleasing as the dark-mode Android app, but it makes up for that by cutting out some of the clutter. The tabs and features are similar, though split tunneling and shortcuts are absent. Also, both mobile apps make customer support a lot more accessible than their desktop counterparts — plus, mobile is the only way to send email support tickets. Browser extension ExpressVPN also includes browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome. These let you connect, disconnect and change server locations without leaving your browser window. It's nice, but not essential unless you have a very specific web browser flow you like. ExpressVPN speed test: Very fast averages Connecting to a VPN almost always decreases your speed, but the best VPNs mitigate the drop as much as possible. We used Ookla's speed testing app to see how much of your internet speed ExpressVPN preserves. For this test, we emphasized the locations ExpressVPN uses for most of its virtual servers, including the Netherlands, Brazil, Germany and Singapore. Some terms before we start: Latency, measured in milliseconds (ms), is the time it takes one data packet to travel between your device and a web server through the VPN. Latency increases with distance. It's most important for real-time tasks like video chatting and online gaming. Download speed, measured in megabits per second (Mbps), is the amount of information that can download onto your device at one time — such as when loading a web page or streaming a video. Upload speed, also measured in Mbps, is the amount of information your device can send to the web at once. It's most important for torrenting, since the amount of data you can seed determines how fast you can download in exchange. The table below shows our results. We conducted this on Windows, using the automatic protocol setting with the Lightway Turbo feature active — a recent ExpressVPN addition that keeps speed more consistent by processing connections in parallel. Server location Latency (ms) Increase factor Download speed (Mbps) Percentage dropoff Upload speed (Mbps) Percentage dropoff Portland, Oregon, USA (unprotected) 18 -- 58.77 -- 5.70 -- Seattle, Washington, USA (best server) 26 1.4x 54.86 6.7% 5.52 3.2% New York, NY, USA 156 8.7x 57.25 2.6% 5.57 2.3% Amsterdam, Netherlands 306 17x 53.83 8.4% 5.58 2.1% São Paulo, Brazil 371 20.6x 53.82 8.4% 5.65 0.9% Frankfurt, Germany 404 22.4x 55.71 5.2% 5.67 0.5% Singapore, Singapore 381 21.2x 52.76 10.2% 5.64 1.0% Average 274 15.2x 54.71 6.9% 5.61 1.6% These are extremely good results. ExpressVPN is a winner on both download and upload speed. No matter where we went in the world, we never lost more than about 7% of our download speeds, and upload lost an astoundingly low average of 2%. This suggests that ExpressVPN deftly distributes its user load between servers to eliminate bottlenecks. This Ookla speedtest shows you can still get fast internet while connected to ExpressVPN -- our unprotected speeds are around 58 Mbps. Sam Chapman for Engadget The latency numbers look worse, but the rise in the table is less sharp than we projected. Ping length depends far more on distance than download speed does, so we expect it to shoot up on servers more than 1,000 miles from our location. Keeping the average below 300 ms, as ExpressVPN does here, is a strong showing. ExpressVPN security test: Checking for leaks A VPN's core mission is to hide your IP address and make you untraceable online. Our task in this section is to figure out if ExpressVPN can carry out this mission every time you connect. While we can't be 100% certain, the tests we'll run through below have led us to believe that ExpressVPN is currently leak-proof. Available VPN protocols A VPN protocol is like a common language that a VPN server can use to mediate between your devices and the web servers you visit. If a VPN uses outdated or insecure protocols, or relies on unique protocols with no visible specs or source code, that's a bad sign. Not all protocols are available on all apps, but Mac has the full range. Sam Chapman for Engadget ExpressVPN gives you a selection of three protocols: IKEv2, OpenVPN and Lightway. The first two are solid choices that support the latest encryption algorithms. OpenVPN has been fully open-source for years and is the best choice if privacy is your goal. While IKEv2 started life as a closed project by Microsoft and Cisco, ExpressVPN uses an open-source reverse-engineering, which is both better for privacy and quite fast. Lightway is the odd one out, a protocol you'll only find on ExpressVPN, though its source code is available on Github. It's similar to WireGuard, in that both reach for faster speeds and lower processing demands by keeping their codebases slim. However, Lightway was recently rewritten in Rust to better protect the keys stored in its memory. Ultimately, you can't go wrong with any of ExpressVPN's protocol options. 99% of the time, your best choice will be to set the controls to Automatic and let the VPN decide which runs best. Testing for leaks ExpressVPN is one of the best services, but it's not leak-proof (as you can read in the Background Check below). Luckily, checking for DNS leaks is a simple matter of checking your IP address before and after connecting to a VPN server. If the new address matches the VPN server, you're good; if not, your VPN is leaking. First, we checked the Windows app with split tunneling active to ensure the flaw really had been patched. We tested several servers and didn't find any leaks, which suggests the patch worked, though leaks were rare even before ExpressVPN fixed the vulnerability. We checked our IP while connected to the virtual India location, which is run from a physical server in Singapore. Don't worry -- it still looks like India to streaming services. Sam Chapman for Engadget In fact, we didn't find any leaks on any ExpressVPN server we tested on any platform. Though questions remain about iOS, as you'll see later in this section, that's a problem on Apple's end that even the best VPNs can do very little about for now. The most common cause of VPN leaks is the use of public DNS servers to connect users to websites, which can mistakenly send browsing activity outside the VPN's encrypted tunnel. ExpressVPN avoids the risks of the public system by installing its own DNS resolvers on every server. This is the key factor behind its clean bill of health in our leak testing. Two other common flaws can lead to VPN leaks: WebRTC traffic and IPv6. The former is a communication protocol used in live streaming and the latter is a new IP standard designed to expand domain availability. Both are nice, but currently optional, so ExpressVPN automatically blocks both to ensure there's no opportunity for leaks to arise. One note about VPN security on iOS: it's a known and continuing problem that iOS VPNs do not prevent many online apps from communicating with Apple directly, outside the VPN tunnel. This risks leaking sensitive data, even with Lockdown Mode active in iOS 16. A blog post by Proton VPN shares a workaround: connect to a VPN server, then turn Airplane Mode on and off again to end all connections that were active before you connected to the VPN. Testing encryption We finished up our battery of security tests by checking out ExpressVPN's encryption directly. Using WireShark, a free packet sniffer, we inspected what it looks like when ExpressVPN transmits data from one of its servers to the internet. The screenshot below shows a data stream encrypted with Lightway UDP. After connecting to ExpressVPN, HTTP packets were rendered unreadable while in transit. Sam Chapman for Engadget That lack of any identifiable information, or even readable information, means encryption is working as intended. We repeated the test several times, always getting the same result. This left us satisfied that ExpressVPN's core features are working as intended. How much does ExpressVPN cost? ExpressVPN subscriptions cost $12.95 per month. Long-term subscriptions can bring the monthly cost down, but the great deals they offer tend to only last for the first billing period. A 12-month subscription costs $99.95 and includes three months for free with your first payment, costing a total of $6.67 per month. The bonus disappears for all subsequent years, raising the monthly cost to $8.33. You can also sign up for 28 months at a cost of $139.72, but this is also once-only — ExpressVPN can only be renewed at the $99.95 per year level. There are two ways to test ExpressVPN for free before making a financial commitment. Users on iOS and Android can download the ExpressVPN app without entering any payment details and use it free for seven days. On any platform, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee, which ExpressVPN has historically honored with no questions asked. You will have to pay before you can use it, though. In our opinion, ExpressVPN's service is solid enough that it's worth paying extra. Perhaps not this much extra, but that depends on what you get out of it. We recommend using the 30-day refund period and seeing how well ExpressVPN works for you. If it's a VPN you can enjoy using, that runs fast and unblocks everything you need, that's worth a server's weight in gold. ExpressVPN side apps and bundles ExpressVPN includes some special features that work mostly or wholly separate from its VPN apps. Some of these come free with a subscription, while others add an extra cost. Every subscription includes the ExpressVPN keys password manager. This is available under its own tab on the Android and iOS apps. On desktop, you'll need to download a separate extension from your browser's store, then sign in using your account activation code. It's available on all Chromium browsers, but not Firefox. Starting in 2025, new subscribers get an eSIM plan through holiday.com, a separate service linked to ExpressVPN. The baseline 1GB holiday eSIM plans last for 5 days and can apply to countries, regions, or the entire world (though it's not clear whether the package deal applies to the regional and global plans). Longer-term plans include larger eSIM plans. You can add a dedicated IP address to your ExpressVPN subscription for an additional cost per month. A dedicated IP lets you use the same IP address every time you connect to ExpressVPN. You can add the address to whitelists on restricted networks, and you're assured to never be blocked because of someone else's bad activity on a shared IP. Unlike many of its competitors, ExpressVPN doesn't currently offer antivirus or online storage services, but there is a comprehensive bundle of ID protection tools called Identity Defender. We haven't reviewed any of these products in detail, but here's a list for reference: ID Alerts will inform you if any of your sensitive information is leaked or misused online. It's free with all plans, but you'll have to enter your personal information on your ExpressVPN account page or a mobile app. ID Theft Insurance grants up to $1 million in identity theft reimbursement and comes free with new ExpressVPN one-year or two-year subscriptions. It's not yet available to those who subscribed before it launched in October 2024. Data Removal scans for your information in data brokerages and automatically requests that it be deleted. It's also free with one-year and two-year plans. Credit Scanner is only available for United States users. It monitors your activity on the three credit bureaus so you can quickly spot any suspicious transactions. The Identity Defender features are currently only available to new ExpressVPN customers in the US. Close-reading ExpressVPN's privacy policy Although we worry that the consolidation of VPN brands under the umbrella of Kape Technologies (ExpressVPN's parent company) will make the industry less competitive, we don't believe it's influencing ExpressVPN to take advantage of its users' privacy. To confirm, and get a full sense of what sort of privacy ExpressVPN promises its users, we set out to read ExpressVPN's privacy policy in detail. It's long, but thankfully aimed at casual users instead of lawyers. You can see it for yourself here. In the introduction, ExpressVPN states that it does not keep either activity logs (such as a user's browsing history while connected to the VPN) or connection logs (such as the duration of a user's session and their IP address, which can be used to extrapolate browsing activity). It then specifies the seven types of data it's legally allowed to collect: Data used to sign up for an account, such as names, emails and payment methods. VPN usage data which is aggregated and can't be traced to any individual. Credentials stored in the ExpressVPN Keys password manager. Diagnostic data such as crash reports, which are only shared upon user request. IP addresses authorized for MediaStreamer, which is only for streaming devices that don't otherwise support VPN apps. Marketing data collected directly from the app — a "limited amount" that's kept anonymous. Data voluntarily submitted for identity theft protection apps. Of those seven exceptions, the only ones that count as red flags are account data and marketing data. Both categories are highly personal and could be damaging if mishandled. Fortunately, complying with subpoenas is not one of the allowed uses listed for either data category, nor does the policy let ExpressVPN sell the data to other private parties. The only really annoying thing here is that if you ask ExpressVPN to delete your personal data, you won't be able to use your account from then on. You aren't even eligible for a refund in this case, unless you're within 30 days of your initial subscription. As for marketing data, ExpressVPN collects device fingerprints and location data when you sign up for an account on its website. The privacy policy also claims this is anonymized, as its "systems are engineered to decouple such data from personally identifiable information." Audits corroborate this, as we'll see in the next section. So, while it would be better if ExpressVPN didn't collect any personal data at all, its practices don't appear to pose a risk to anything you do while using the VPN — just the ExpressVPN website. Privacy audits VPN providers often get third-party accounting firms to audit their privacy policies. The idea is that a well-known firm won't mortgage its reputation to lie on behalf of a VPN, so their results can be trusted. For the last several years, ExpressVPN has had KPMG look over its privacy policy and relevant infrastructure (see "TrustedServer" below). KPMG's most recent report, completed in December 2023 and released in May 2024, found that ExpressVPN had enough internal controls in place that users could trust its privacy policy. The report is freely available to read. This is a very good sign, though we're looking out for a more up-to-date audit soon. TrustedServer "TrustedServer" is a marketing term ExpressVPN uses for its RAM-only server infrastructure. RAM-only servers have no hard drives for long-term storage and return to a standard disk image with every reboot. This makes it theoretically impossible to store user activity logs on them, even if ExpressVPN wanted to do that. The KPMG audit, linked above, reports that TrustedServer works as advertised. Between its many clean privacy audits and the Turkish server incident in 2017, we're prepared to say ExpressVPN is a private VPN, in spite of its aggravating exception for marketing. Can ExpressVPN change your virtual location? Next, we tested whether ExpressVPN can actually convince websites that you're somewhere other than your real location. Our security tests have already proven it can hide your IP address, but it takes more than leak-proofing to fool streaming sites these days — Netflix and the others have gotten very good at combing through metadata to sniff out proxy users. The process for testing this is a lot like how we handled the DNS leak tests: try several different servers and see if we get caught. We checked five sample locations outside the U.S. to see if we a) got into Netflix and b) saw different titles in the library. The results are below. Server Location Unblocked Netflix? Library changed? Canada Y Y United Kingdom Y (second try; Docklands failed) Y Slovakia Y Y India Y Y (different from UK library) Australia Y Y In fifteen tests, ExpressVPN slipped up only once. Docklands, the UK server it chose as the fastest, wasn't able to access Netflix. We switched to a server labeled simply "London" and unblocked it without issue. ExpressVPN can change your virtual location so you can explore the wonderful world of K-drama. Sam Chapman for Engadget All the other locations got us access to an alternate Netflix library on the first try. We even checked whether the India server, which is physically located in the UK, showed us different videos than the UK servers. It did, which makes us even more confident that ExpressVPN's virtual locations are airtight. Investigating ExpressVPN's server network ExpressVPN users can connect to a total of 164 server locations in 105 countries and territories. These locations are reasonably well distributed across the globe, but as with all VPNs, there's a bias toward the northern hemisphere. There are 24 locations in the U.S. alone and a further 66 in Europe. That isn't to say users in the Global South get nothing. ExpressVPN has IP addresses from nine nations in South America (Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela) and six in Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco and South Africa). The network even includes Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Mongolia, impressive since central Asia may be the region most often shafted by VPNs. However, many of these servers have virtual locations different from their real ones. For those of you choosing a server based on performance instead of a particular IP address, ExpressVPN's website has a helpful list of which servers are virtual. The bad news is that it's a big chunk of the list. A total of 63 ExpressVPN locations are virtual, or 38% of its entire network. To reduce the sting, ExpressVPN takes care to locate virtual servers as close to their real locations as possible. Its virtual locations in Indonesia and India are physically based in Singapore. This isn't always practical, leading to some awkwardness like operating a Ghana IP address out of Germany. But it helps ExpressVPN perform better in the southern hemisphere. Extra features of ExpressVPN Compared to direct competitors like NordVPN and Surfshark, ExpressVPN doesn't have many special features. It's aimed squarely at the casual market and will probably disappoint power users. Having said that, what they do include works well. In this section, we'll run through ExpressVPN's four substantial features outside its VPN servers themselves. Network Lock kill switch "Network Lock" is the name ExpressVPN gives to its kill switch (though it's called "Network Protection" on mobile). A VPN kill switch is a safety feature that keeps you from broadcasting outside the VPN tunnel. If it ever detects that you aren't connected to a legitimate ExpressVPN server, it cuts off your internet access. You won't be able to get back online until you either reconnect to the VPN or disable Network Lock. ExpressVPN's kill switch is called Network Lock on desktop, and Network Protection on mobile (Android pictured) Sam Chapman for Engadget This is important for everyone, not just users who need to hide sensitive traffic. The recently discovered TunnelVision bug theoretically allows hackers to set up fake public wi-fi networks through which they redirect you to equally fake VPN servers, which then harvest your personal information. It's unlikely, but not impossible, and a kill switch is the best way to prevent it — the switch always triggers unless you're connected to a real server in the VPN's network. Like most of ExpressVPN's features, all you can do with Network Lock is turn it on and off. You can also toggle whether you'll still be able to access local devices while the kill switch is blocking your internet — this is allowed by default. Threat manager, ad blocker and parental controls ExpressVPN groups three tools under the heading of "advanced protection" — Threat Manager, an ad blocker and parental controls. Threat Manager consists of two checkboxes: one that blocks your browser from communicating with activity tracking software and one that blocks a list of websites known to be used for malware. Check any of these boxes to use the pre-set blocklists whenever you're connected to ExpressVPN. Sam Chapman for Engadget You can't customize the lists, so you're limited to what ExpressVPN considers worthy of blocking. They share their sources on the website. While the lists are extensive and open-source, they rely on after-the-fact reporting and can't detect and block unknown threats like a proper antivirus. The adblock and parental control options work the same way: check a box to block everything on the list, uncheck it to allow everything through. In tests, the ad blocker was nearly 100% effective against banner ads, but failed to block any video ads on YouTube or Netflix. The parental control option blocks a list of porn sites. It's an easy option for concerned parents, but only works while ExpressVPN is connected. As such, it's meant to be used in conjunction with device-level parental controls that prevent the child from turning off or uninstalling the VPN client. Split tunneling Sometimes, you'll find it helpful to have your device getting online through two different IP addresses at once — one for your home services and one for a location you're trying to spoof. That's where split tunneling is helpful: it runs some apps through the VPN while leaving others unprotected. This can also improve your speeds, since the VPN needs to encrypt less in total. You can configure split tunneling through either a blocklist or an allowlist. Sam Chapman for Engadget ExpressVPN includes split tunneling on Windows, Android and Mac (though only on versions 10 and below). You can only split by app, not by website, but it's still pretty useful. For example, you can have BitTorrent handling a heavy download in the background while you use your browser for innocuous activities that don't need protecting. ExpressVPN Aircove router By now, it should be clear that we find ExpressVPN to be a highly reliable but often unexceptional VPN service. However, there's one area in which it's a clear industry leader: VPN routers. ExpressVPN Aircove is, to our knowledge, the only router with a built-in commercial VPN that comes with its own dashboard interface. Usually, installing a VPN on your router requires tinkering with the router control panel, which turns off all but the most experienced users — not to mention making it a massive pain to switch to a new server location. Aircove's dashboard, by contrast, will be instantly familiar to anyone who already knows how to use an ExpressVPN client. It even allows different devices in your home to connect to different locations through the router VPN. Aircove's biggest drawback is its price. Currently retailing at $189 (not including an ExpressVPN subscription), it's around three times more expensive than an aftermarket router fitted with free VPN firmware. Some of you might still find the convenience worth the one-time payment. ExpressVPN customer support options ExpressVPN's written help pages are some of the best on the market. Its live chat is more of a mixed bag, and complex questions may cause delays. However, it is at least staffed with human agents who aim to reply accurately, rather than resolve your ticket as quickly as possible. You can directly access both live chat and email from ExpressVPN's mobile apps (on desktop, you'll have to go to the website). Sam Chapman for Engadget We approached ExpressVPN's support features with a simple question: "If I requested that ExpressVPN delete all my personal data, would I be able to get a refund for my unused subscription time?" (Remember from the Privacy Policy section that submitting a full deletion request also cancels your ExpressVPN account.) Our first stop was expressvpn.com/support, the written support center and FAQ page. It's divided into setup guides, troubleshooting, account management and information on each of ExpressVPN's products. The setup guides are excellent, including screenshots and clearly written steps; each one includes a video guide for those who learn better that way. Troubleshooting is just as good — no videos, but the same standards of clarity and usefulness prevail. The section starts with general problems, then delves into specific issues you might face on each operating system. Each article clearly derives from a real customer need. The live support experience To get answers on our refund question, we visited the account management FAQs. This section stated that the refund policy only applies within 30 days of purchase. Pretty clear-cut, but we still wanted an answer on our special case, so we contacted live chat by clicking the button at the bottom-right of every FAQ page. Live chat is in the bottom-right corner of every page of expressvpn.com. Sam Chapman for Engadget Live chat starts with an AI assistant, which is not too hard to get past — just ask it a question it can't answer, then click "Transfer to an Agent." We got online with (what claimed to be) a human in less than a minute. Answering the question took longer and involved an uncomfortable 10-minute silence, but we did get a clear verdict from a real person: refunds are within 30 days only, no matter what. If the live chat agent can't answer your question, you'll be redirected to open an email support ticket. Annoyingly, there's no way to go directly to email support through the website or desktop apps, though mobile users have the option to skip directly there. ExpressVPN background check: From founding to Kape Technologies ExpressVPN launched in 2009, which makes it one of the oldest consumer VPNs in continual operation. In more than 15 years of operation, it's never been caught violating its own privacy policy, though its record isn't free of more minor blemishes. Headquarters in the British Virgin Islands Founders Dan Pomerantz and Peter Burchhardt registered the company in the British Virgin Islands from the start to take advantage of that territory's favorable legal environment for online privacy. The BVIs have no law requiring businesses to retain data on their users, and the process for extraditing data is famously difficult, requiring a direct order from the highest court. In 2021, the BVI implemented the Data Protection Act (DPA) [PDF link], which prevents companies based in the territory from accessing data on their users anywhere in the world. It's a great privacy law in theory, modeled on best-in-class legislation in the EU. However, we couldn't find any evidence that its supervising authority — the Office of the Information Commissioner — has a leader or staff. In other words, while ExpressVPN is not legally required to log any data on its users, there's technically nobody stopping them from doing so. Whether you trust the jurisdiction depends on whether you trust the company itself. Let's see what the other evidence says. Security and privacy incidents Two significant incidents stand out from ExpressVPN's 16-year history. In 2017, when Andrei Karlov, Russia's ambassador to Turkey, was shot to death at an art show. Turkish police suspected someone had used ExpressVPN to mask their identity while they deleted information from social media accounts belonging to the alleged assassin. To investigate, they confiscated an ExpressVPN server to comb for evidence. They didn't find anything. A police seizure is the best possible test of a VPN's approach to privacy. The provider can't prepare beforehand, fake anything, or collude with investigators. The Turkey incident is still one of the best reasons to recommend ExpressVPN, though eight years is a long time for policy to change. The second incident began in March 2024, when a researcher at CNET informed ExpressVPN that its version 12 for Windows occasionally leaked DNS requests when users enabled the split tunneling feature. While these users remained connected to an ExpressVPN server, their browsing activity was often going directly to their ISP, unmasked. The bug only impacted a few users, and to their credit, ExpressVPN sprang into action as soon as they learned about it. The team had it patched by April, as confirmed by the researcher who initially discovered the vulnerability. But while their quick and effective response deserves praise, it's still a mark against them that a journalist noticed the bug before they did. Kape Technologies ownership and management questions In 2021, an Israeli-owned, UK-based firm called Kape Technologies purchased a controlling interest in ExpressVPN. In addition to ExpressVPN, privately held Kape owns CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, and Zenmate (before it merged into CyberGhost). As shown on its website, it also owns Webselenese, publisher of VPN review websites WizCase and vpnMentor, which poses an apparent conflict of interest. When reached for comment, a representative for ExpressVPN said that "ExpressVPN does not directly engage with, nor seek to influence, the content on any Webselenese site," and pointed us to disclosure statements on the websites in question — here's one example. Even so, it's a good reminder not to take VPN reviews at face value without knowing who's behind them (Engadget is owned by Yahoo, which does not own any VPNs). Diving deeper into the background of Kape's ownership will lead you to owner Teddy Sagi. Go back far enough, and you'll see he did prison time in Israel and was mentioned in the Pandora Papers, among other things. More recently, headlines about the billionaire have focused more his businesses in the online gambling and fintech arenas, as well as his real estate ventures. An ExpressVPN representative told us that "Kape's brands continue to operate independently," and our investigation bore that out — we couldn't find any proof that Kape or Sagi have directly attempted to influence ExpressVPN's software or daily operations. Closer to the immediate day-to-day operations of ExpressVPN was the company's employment of Daniel Gericke as CTO from 2019 through 2023. During that time, the US Justice Department announced it had fined Gericke and two others for their previous employment on a surveillance operation called Project Raven, which the United Arab Emirates (UAE) used to spy on its own citizens. The revelation prompted a public response from ExpressVPN defending its decision to hire Gericke, arguing that "[t]he best goalkeepers are the ones trained by the best strikers." ExpressVPN's representative confirmed that the company still stands by that linked statement. Gericke parted ways with ExpressVPN in October 2023, per his LinkedIn profile. While we don't know what we don't know, we can say that ExpressVPN has not notably changed its public-facing security and privacy policies during the time it's been connected to Kape, Sagi, or Gericke. In the end, how much ExpressVPN's history matters to you is a personal choice. If you object to any current or past actions by Kape Technologies or Teddy Sagi, there are other premium VPN options you might prefer. If you need more information to make up your mind, we recommend reading through CNET's 2022 deep dive on ExpressVPN's corporate history. Final verdict ExpressVPN is the VPN we most often recommend to beginners. It takes zero training to use, and consistently gets past filters on streaming sites. It also runs in the background with virtually no impact. If anything is worth the high price of admission, it's the excellent speeds distributed evenly across the worldwide server network. However, for certain specific cases, ExpressVPN may not be the best choice. There's no way to set up your own server locations, like NordVPN offers, and no double VPN connections, like you can build for yourself on Surfshark. Its corporate background is more suspect than the entities backing Proton VPN, and unlike Mullvad, ExpressVPN doesn't work in China — it's so well-known that the government targets its servers specifically. We suggest going with ExpressVPN for general online privacy, for spoofing locations in your home country while traveling, or if you regularly need to unblock sites in other countries. That encompasses 19 of every 20 users, which is fine by us, as ExpressVPN is a great service. It's just more of a reliable old screwdriver than a multi-tool. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/expressvpn-review-2025-fast-speeds-and-a-low-learning-curve-160052884.html?src=rss

Remember the banana peels, apple cores, and leftover pizza you recently threw in the garbage? Today, your food waste—and your neighbors’—is emitting climate-warming greenhouse gases as it decomposes in a nearby municipal landfill. Buried food scraps and yard waste at 51 dumps across Colorado generate an amount of methane equivalent to driving 1 million gasoline-powered cars for a year. About 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas over a period of 20 years, methane accounts for 11% of global emissions that scientists say are warming the atmosphere and contributing to more intense and severe weather, wildfires, and drought. Landfills are the third-largest source of methane pollution in Colorado, after agriculture and fossil fuel extraction. Draft methane rules released last month by the state’s Department of Public Health and Environment would, for the first time, require some dump operators to measure and quantify methane releases and to fix leaks. The proposal mandates that waste managers install a gas collection system if their dump generates a certain amount of the climate-warming gas.  It also addresses loopholes in federal law that allow waste to sit for five years before such systems are required—even though science has shown that half of all food waste decays within about three and a half years. The draft rule surpasses U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards in the amount of landfill area operators must monitor for emissions. It’s set to be heard by the state’s Air Quality Control Commission in August. Proposed regulations require the elimination of open gas flares—burning emissions directly into the atmosphere—and urge the use of biocovers and biofilters, which rely on bacteria to break down gases. The 70-page draft also calls for more routine and thorough monitoring of a dump surface with advanced technologies like satellites, which recently recorded large plumes of methane escaping from a Denver-area landfill. “We’ve had our eyes opened thanks to technology that has made the invisible, visible—now we know the extent of the problem, which is much greater than what estimates have portrayed,” said Katherine Blauvelt, circular economy director at Industrious Labs, a nonprofit working to decarbonize industry.  “When landfill operators fail to control leaks, we know harmful pollutants are coming along for the ride.” Cancer-causing volatile organic compounds, such as benzene and toluene, escape with methane leaching from landfills. These chemicals also contribute to the formation of lung-damaging ozone pollution, an increasing problem for the 3.6 million people who live in the greater Denver metropolitan area. Indeed, the region along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains ranked sixth in the nation for the most polluted air—with unhealthy ozone levels reported on one out of every 10 days, on average, according to the American Lung Association’s 2025 “State of the Air” report. The state is also woefully behind in its compliance with federal air quality standards. State officials and environmental advocates agree that reducing methane emissions from landfills, which are easier to mitigate than cow burps, for example, is one of the quickest and most efficient ways to slow warming in the short term. “Waste deposited in landfills continues producing methane for decades as it breaks down—and it’s one sector where Colorado has yet to directly take action to reduce these greenhouse gases,” said Tim Taylor, a supervisor in the state’s air pollution control division, in an online hearing last February on the proposed landfill methane rules. Colorado’s draft regulations are similar to those in California, Oregon, Maryland, and Washington, he added. More than 10 landfills in the state are already required under federal rules to have gas collection and control systems. Yet even with such technology in place, disposal facilities routinely exceed federal methane emissions caps. The state’s health department has also identified a dozen municipal solid waste landfills, based on a preliminary analysis, that would be required to put such systems in place under the proposed rules, Zachary Aedo, an agency spokesman, said in an email to Capital & Main. Many of these facilities are operated by counties, some of which expressed concerns about their ability to pay for such systems. “We are a small rural county, and a multimillion-dollar containment system is going to be more than we can build,” testified Delta County Commissioner Craig Fuller at the February hearing. “The financial equation of this whole thing is absolutely mind-boggling—we are struggling as it is to provide health and human services.” Other county officials embraced the proposed tightening of rules. “Landfills across Colorado, including in Eagle County, are leading sources of methane pollution,” said Eagle County Commissioner Matt Scherr in a March 6 statement. “As a local elected official I support a robust rule that embraces advanced technologies to cut pollution, protect public health and help the methane mitigation industry thrive.” For larger landfill companies, like Waste Management, which operates 283 active disposal sites nationwide, figuring out which technology works to best monitor emissions from a dump’s surface is proving a complex challenge. The company is testing technologies at facilities with different topographies and climate fluctuations to understand what causes emissions releases, said Amy Banister, Waste Management senior director of air programs. “Landfills are complicated, emissions vary over time, and we have emissions 24/7,” said Banister at an online meeting last September of a technical group created by Colorado health department officials. “Drones produced a lot of false positives—and we need more work understanding how fixed sensors can be applied in a landfill environment.” State health officials suggested municipalities could offset the costs of installing gas collection systems at disposal sites by converting methane into energy. Several landfill operations in Colorado currently have such waste-to-energy systems—which send power they generate to the state’s power grid. “We are mindful of the costs of complying with this rule and how tipping fees may be impacted,” said Taylor, an air quality supervisor, at the February hearing. “Analyses conducted in other states of their landfill methane rules found there wasn’t an increase in tipping fees as a result of regulations over time.” Tipping fees are paid by those who dispose of waste in a landfill. If operators passed on compliance costs to households, a state analysis found, the yearly average annual fee would increase $22.90 per household. Colorado’s push comes as the EPA issued an enforcement alert in September that found “recurring Clean Air Act compliance issues” at municipal solid waste landfills that led to the “significant release of methane,” based on 100 inspections conducted over three years.  Such violations included improper design and installation of gas collection and control systems, failure to maintain adequate “cover integrity,” and improper monitoring of facilities for emissions. To address gaps in federal regulations, which require operators to measure emissions four times a year by walking in a grid pattern across the face of the landfill with a handheld sensor, Colorado’s draft rules require third-party monitoring. Such measurements must be conducted offsite by an entity approved by the state’s air pollution control division that uses a satellite, aircraft or mobile monitoring platform. The infrequency of such grid walks—which skip spots that operators deem dangerous—contributes to the undercounting of methane emissions from landfills, according to a satellite-based analysis. An international team of scientists estimated potent greenhouse gas emissions from landfills are 50% higher than EPA estimates. Satellites like one operated by nonprofit Carbon Mapper found large methane plumes outside the quarterly monitoring periods over the Tower Landfill in Commerce City, northeast of Denver. The satellite allowed scientists to see parts of the landfill not accessible with traditional monitoring—measurements that found that such landfills are underreporting their methane emissions to state regulators, said Tia Scarpelli, a research scientist and waste sector lead at Carbon Mapper. “Landfill emissions tend to be quite persistent—if a landfill is emitting when it’s first observed, it’s likely to be emitting later on,” she added. Scarpelli cautioned that it’s important for regulators to investigate with operators what was happening on the landfill surface at the time the leak was measured. Tower Landfill’s operator, Allied Waste Systems of Colorado, provided reasons for such large methane releases in a January 2024 report to the state’s health department, including equipment malfunctions. The fix for about 22 emissions events over the federal methane limits detected in August 2023 by surface monitoring: “Soil added as cover maintenance.” Like many dumps across Colorado and the nation, the Tower Landfill is located near a community that’s already disproportionately impacted by emissions from industrial activities. “These landfills are not only driving climate change, they are also driving a public health crisis in our community,” said Guadalupe Solis, director of environmental justice programs at Cultivando, a nonprofit led by Latina and Indigenous women in northern Denver. “The Tower Landfill is near nursing homes, clinics, near schools with majority Hispanic students.” Physicians in the state warned that those who live the closest to dumps suffer the worst health effects from pollutants like benzene and hydrogen sulfide, which are linked to cancer, heart, and other health conditions. “People living near landfills, like myself, my family and my patients, experience higher exposure to air pollution,” testified Dr. Nikita Habermehl, a specialist in pediatric emergency medicine who lives near a landfill in Larimer County, at the February 26 public hearing, “leading to increased rates of respiratory issues and headaches and asthma worsened by poor air quality.” —By Jennifer Oldham, Capital & Main This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.

The NAACP is calling on local officials to halt operations at Colossus, the “supercomputer” facility operated by Elon Musk’s xAI in South Memphis. As reported in NBC News, leaders from the civil rights group sent a letter Thursday to the Shelby County Health Department and Memphis Light Gas and Water criticizing the organizations’ “lackadaisical approach to the operation of this dirty data center” and calling on them to “issue an emergency order for xAI to stop operations completely” — or if there’s no order, to at least cite and stop the company from allegedly violating clean air laws. The letter expressed particular concerns around the gas turbines that xAI runs to power Colossus. The company has applied for a permit to continue operating 15 gas turbines at the facility, although the NAACP said authorities have “allowed xAI to operate at least 35 gas turbines without any permitting” over the past year. City officials have previously said xAI did not need permits for the turbines’ first year of use. These turbines reportedly emit hazardous air pollutants, including formaldehyde, at levels exceeding EPA limits. The NAACP’s letter also pointed to the turbines’ nitrogen-oxide emissions. Noting that the Colossus facility is located near South Memphis’ Boxtown neighborhood, which the letter described as a “historically Black community,” the NAACP said the location perpetuates “the trend of industries adding pollution to communities who do not cause the problem.” “Instead of [the Shelby County Health Department] working to reduce health issues known in the area including that cancer risks are already four times the national average, it has allowed xAI to operate above the law,” the NAACP added. The NAACP’s letter is addressed to Shelby County Health Department Director Michelle Taylor, as well as Memphis Light Gas and Water’s commissioners; Taylor is leaving her role in Shelby County to become the commissioner of the Baltimore City Health Department. Techcrunch event Save now through June 4 for TechCrunch Sessions: AI Save $300 on your ticket to TC Sessions: AI—and get 50% off a second. Hear from leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Khosla Ventures, and more during a full day of expert insights, hands-on workshops, and high-impact networking. These low-rate deals disappear when the doors open on June 5. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW TechCrunch has reached out to the NAACP and xAI for comment. A spokesperson for Memphis Light Gas and Water told NBC News that it had not yet received the NAACP letter.

May 29, 20255 min readSpaceX’s Starbase Is Officially a City. Some Neighbors Aren’t ThrilledStarbase, SpaceX’s launch site turned company town in South Texas, faces local opposition from residents outside the city limitsBy Paola Rosa-Aquino edited by Lee BillingsSpaceX rockets stand near the end of a neighborhood street in the company’s Starbase launch complex in this photograph from October 2021. Starbase was officially incorporated as a city of Cameron County, Texas in May 2025. Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesBefore SpaceX’s Starship lost control and exploded over the Indian Ocean during its ninth test flight, the 400-foot-tall megarocket blasted off from Texas’s newest city.Starbase, situated on 1.5 square miles of the Lone Star State’s southernmost tip in the Rio Grande Valley, is mostly made up of SpaceX employees living on company-owned property and abuts a habitat for endangered wildlife, as well as a public beach.Starbase serves as the main testing and launch location for Starship, SpaceX’s planned fully reusable spacecraft, which is meant to revolutionize human and uncrewed space travel with its gargantuan payload capacity and rapid-fire flight cadence. If Starship’s development proceeds as planned, the megarocket could soon be ferrying crew and cargo alike to multiple otherworldly destinations—such as the lunar surface, for NASA’s Artemis program, and Mars, in fulfillment of SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s long-stated dream. But nearby residents worry about less glamorous local effects, fearing that a town built around the space company could continue SpaceX’s alleged pattern of polluting the area and blocking access to the nearby beach and other open public spaces.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.“SpaceX has already proven itself to be an extremely bad neighbor,” says Christopher Basaldú, an anthropologist and environmentalist and co-founder of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, who lives in nearby Brownsville, Tex. SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Long before it was Starbase, the area’s beaches, tidal flats and wetlands were of great significance to the Indigenous Carrizo/Comecrudo people (or Esto’k Gna in their own language). Many of them still live nearby as members of the modern-day Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas. Today the area is largely Latino and among the poorest in the country. Musk’s space company began buying up property there in 2012; ever since company housing and rocket-related infrastructure have steadily sprouted.“We’ve grown quite a bit just in the last couple of years. It’s a couple hundred employees [and] their families, living amongst actual rockets,” said Daniel Huot, a SpaceX communications manager, during a company livestream before Tuesday’s Starship test flight.Huot added that the move to incorporate what was formerly Boca Chica Village as Starbase will help the company “scale more quickly [to] try to build out the best community possible for all the people that are building the future of humanity’s place in space.”Even before SpaceX began launching rockets at the site, neighbors complained about potential environmental woes stemming from the company’s operations. In a 2018 press conference, Musk dismissed such concerns, saying “We’ve got a lot of land with no one around, and so if [a rocket] blows up, it’s cool.”The first launch of the 40-story-tall Starship vehicle in April 2023 didn’t entirely proceed as planned—it blew up the concrete launch pad and left a literal crater behind. Particulate debris, as well as concrete and steel shrapnel from the botched launch, scattered far and wide across the surrounding landscape, igniting fires and slamming into protected habitats and public beaches. Ash, dust and sand grains hurled aloft by this first Starship flight test rained down as far out as Port Isabel, Tex., about five miles from the launch site.Local environmentalists have also sounded the alarm on how the company’s activities at Starbase could increase chemical and sonic pollution that puts migratory birds and other vulnerable endangered species in the area at greater risk.Despite these brewing tensions, Starbase was incorporated in early May, making it the first new city in Cameron County, Texas, in 30 years.Only people who live in the immediate area—almost all of them SpaceX employees—were eligible to vote for the new city. Residents voted 212 for and six against. The city’s mayor and commissioners—all current or former SpaceX employees—ran unopposed. “Now [SpaceX has] stolen away not only a neighborhood but the land around it, which had been basically environmentally untouched areas,” says Basaldú, who is a member of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe.Starbase’s boundaries snake along State Highway 4, which provides the only access to both Starbase and the open-to-the-public Boca Chica Beach. A bill pending in the Texas Legislature would shift control over weekday closures of the beach and nearby roadways from the county commissioners to Starbase city leaders now that Starbase is a municipality under law.“As a community, we were there first,” says Suquiery Santillana, a resident of nearby Brownsville, Tex., who has visited Boca Chica Beach since childhood. “I’m almost 50, and now my grandkids are going.” Her family’s trips to the isolated shoreline now include wide-eyed roadside spectators from all across the country who want to catch a glimpse of the SpaceX launch site. While Santillana is happy that SpaceX has brought jobs to the area, she would like the company to communicate more about upcoming closures and launch plans with locals.Members of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe also trace their creation story to this once-pristine beach. The intermittent access restrictions imposed by SpaceX’s launches, some tribe members say, limit them from freely participating in traditions such as fishing and tribal ceremonies that have been taking place on their ancestral land for thousands of years.Activity at the site could soon ramp up even more. On May 22 the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced it had granted approval for SpaceX to increase the annual number of Starbase launches from five to 25. Eventually, Starship flights from the site could far exceed that because the vehicle is designed for very fast turnaround times and an unprecedentedly high launch cadence. Starship’s sheer size, coupled with more frequent launches, could balloon Starbase’s overall environmental footprint while also essentially shutting down Highway 4 for much of the year. The FAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.For now, Starbase is poised to continue its rapid development and expansion, with plans in the works for more housing, offices and rocket launch facilities. Jim Chapman of the local environmental justice nonprofit Save RGV (Rio Grande Valley) worries that Starbase’s incorporation could allow SpaceX to skirt important regulatory hurdles. “[SpaceX has] fewer layers of bureaucracy that [it has] to go through and get approval from,” he says. “But on the other hand, I haven’t really seen the county denying [it] anything.”As SpaceX vies to fly ever more powerful rockets in pursuit of Musk’s interplanetary aspirations, local residents also fear that the company’s launch activity and its proximity to new natural gas projects could pose grave threats to Rio Grande Valley communities. One such project currently under construction is less than six miles from the launch site—too close for comfort, some critics say, given the possibility of volatile explosions sparked by showers of fiery rocket debris.If Musk’s latest projections are to be trusted (he often overpromises and underdelivers on meeting ambitious rocketry deadlines), additional Starship test flights will blast off from Starbase every few weeks for the rest of the summer. Time will tell if the company will be mindful of those who live next door.