Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok experienced its latest meltdown this week, telling users that the mercurial CEO is more athletic than basketball superstar LeBron James and rivals Leonardo da Vinci in intelligence.

But when it comes to launching rockets, the entrepreneur is struggling to live up to Grok’s outrageous flattery. Right on the heels of the glazing, Musk’s space company SpaceX suffered a major setback on Friday morning when a next-generation Starship booster prototype exploded during testing.

As Ars Technica‘s Eric Berger reports, the incident occurred at the company’s Massey test site several miles away from its “Starbase” testing facilities in South Texas. A livestream shows the booster exploding at around 4:04 am local time.

In a statement posted to X several hours later, Space

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