Late Monday, Rivian said it had secured a contingent commitment for a $6.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy that can help the electrical vehicle maker resume construction of a massive factory in Georgia.

Funds will come from the Department of Advanced Vehicle Technology Development’s Office of Loan Programs loan program. Rivian said it expects to begin operations on the Georgia plant in 2028, 4 years later than originally planned. By the top of 2030, the factory will employ 7,500 people, and this number is expounded to the motivation package approved several years ago by the Department of Economic Development of Georgia.

In December 2021, Rivian announced plans to build a second factory east of Atlanta, which the corporate said would double the annual production capability of its plant in Normal, Illinois, and would cost an estimated $5 billion to build. Rivian said on the time that the goal annual production capability of the Georgia plant could be 400,000 vehicles per 12 months, with production of next-generation electric vehicles starting in 2024. The company received a $1.5 billion incentive package to build the plant in Georgia, according to documents to the state Department of Economic Development.

Facing a money crunch, Rivian halted construction of the factory and altered plans to build the next-generation R2 mid-size SUV there. Instead, Rivian announced in March 2024 during R2 that the brand new electric vehicle could be produced at a factory in Normal, Illinois. This change was projected to save the corporate $2.25 billion.

A couple of months later, Rivian received $827 million in incentives from the state of Illinois to support the development of the R2 on the Normal plant.

In recent years, the federal loan program has supported many corporations for electric vehicle projects, including $465 million for Tesla in 2009, which was $9.2 billion contingent liability in June to support a Ford-SK three way partnership to finance two U.S. battery plants and a $2 billion loan to help battery materials and recycling startup Redwood Materials finance the expansion and expansion of its Nevada headquarters.

Because Elon Musk plays such a crucial role on Donald Trump’s transition team, his cronies, a lot of whom are Silicon Valley enterprise capitalists, are reportedly being encouraged to assist.

For example, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and particularly its co-founder Marc Andreessen, is mentioned repeatedly. He, together with Antonio Gracias and Joe Lonsdale, have reportedly been asked to help on Musk’s advisory panel, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is examining ways to beat the technical challenges of collecting data on federal programs. The Washington Post on Sunday.

They are among the many few other Silicon Valley tycoons who are being tapped.

Gracias is the co-founder of Valor Equity Partners, which has done well through the years in backing Musk firms, including SpaceX and Tesla (he was a board member of the latter from 2007 to 2021). Lonsdale is the co-founder of VC firm 8VC and an energetic supporter of defense technologies (reminiscent of Anduril) and other government technologies reminiscent of financial software provider OpenGov. Lonsdale worked under billionaire VC Peter Thiel and helped co-found Palantir. Andreessen Horowitz has been a serious investor in SpaceX since around 2022 and is buying more shares as possible, as TechCrunch previously reported, and Andreessen has been a vocal supporter of Musk.

The DOGE commission hopes to recommend program cuts and fewer federal employees, Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy explained in Wall Street Journal editorial. last week. They wrote that additionally they expected a legal response. The group plans to launch a podcast within the near future, reports the Washing Post.

Meanwhile, Andreessen Horowitz can be said to be running for a position on the Trump administration’s promised cryptocurrency advisory board. It will probably be staffed by several crypto industry executives who need to help the United States set crypto policy, the industry they told Reuters last week. Reuters reports that Brian Quintenz, head of cryptocurrency policy at a16z, has already advised Trump’s team.

Another VC being discussed for a spot on this committee is Paradigm, an investment firm co-founded by Fred Ehrsam, the previous co-founder of Coinbase. Paradigm focuses on cryptocurrency/blockchain investments. Coinbase, which is just not a VC firm but funds its own corporate firm, Coinbase Ventures, can be fascinated by the commission, sources told Reuters.

Meanwhile, Thiel’s former student Michael Kratsios, who served as chief technology officer in the primary Trump administration, was reportedly hired to handle tech policy on Trump’s transition team. The case was reported by “Polityka” last week. Kratsios was known for authoring Trump’s 2020 pro-AI investment executive order. Before joining the federal government, he worked for Thiel Capital. However, Kratsios is just not currently a VC. According to him, he has been working at AI Scale AI since 2021 LinkedIn.

Lonsdale and a16z couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. They also didn’t reply to a request for comment from The Washington Post.

Instagram introduces the power for users to share their locations with friends via DM (direct messages) – company announced on Monday. The feature indicates that the Meta-owned social network desires to challenge services like Apple’s “Find My” and Snapchat’s Snap Map, that are popular ways to ascertain the location of friends and family members in real time.

The launch of this feature is not a complete surprise, as earlier this 12 months it was noted that Instagram was testing a way for users to see their friends’ live locations. It’s price noting that one other Meta messaging app, WhatsApp, has been allowing users to share live locations with others for quite a while.

Unlike Apple and Snapchat, which let you share your location with others indefinitely, Instagram only allows users to achieve this for an hour. Instagram says this feature might be used to coordinate arrival times or find friends in crowded places.

You can share your location with one person or in a group chat. When you share your location, only people in a specific chat will give you the chance to see where you might be, and your location can’t be shared with other chats. You’ll also see an indicator at the highest of your chat reminding you that you just’re currently sharing your current location.

All lively locations expire after one hour. Given that WhatsApp permits you to share your location with others for as much as eight hours, it’s possible that Instagram’s deadline on location sharing could change in the long run.

According to the corporate, the new feature is available in chosen countries. TechCrunch asked for more details.

On Monday, Instagram also announced that users can now customize their chat names by adding nicknames for themselves or others. The company says this feature might be used to share insider jokes or just shorten long usernames.

You can create a nickname by tapping the chat name at the highest of the conversation after which choosing “Nicknames.” Here you’ll be able to select the username of the person you must assign a nickname to. Nicknames are only visible in your DMs.

Additionally, Instagram is rolling out 17 new sticker packs with over 300 stickers that might be shared in chat.