Travis Kalanick's five-minute jet-ski commute to his Austin office

Travis Kalanick posted a video on X showing what he called his "5 minute jet ski commute" across Lake Austin to his new office. He owns a home on the lake and told the TBPN podcast in March that he has had the place for five years, drawn in part by the water and a love of watersports.

His move reflects a broader shift of tech leaders to Texas, driven by lower taxes, cheaper real estate, and a friendlier regulatory climate than California, where rising costs and talk of a one-time billionaire wealth tax have unsettled some executives. Kalanick now leads Atoms, the newly renamed version of City Storage Systems and the parent company of CloudKitchens.

The startup is developing AI-powered robots to automate repetitive physical work in industries such as food service, mining, manufacturing, and logistics, and he has described the goal as building "gainfully employed robots" that can take on specialized tasks at an industrial scale.

United States, Austin, Texas

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