The Brief

With fewer than six weeks to go before the June election, candidates running for City of L.A. and Los Angeles Unified School District offices have raised a combined $19 million, according to records from the L.A. City Ethics Commission.

Campaigns for mayor, District 11 City Council member and city attorney have emerged as the most funded races.

Here’s how they stack up:

L.A. mayor

Mayoral candidates Karen Bass and Adam Miller are leading all L.A. city candidates in fundraising, with $3.7 million and $2.7 million raised so far, respectively.

The candidates have tapped into very different sources to fund their campaigns.

Miller, a tech entrepreneur and leader of multiple nonprofits, has loaned $2.5 million to his own campaign and raised just $223,000 from donors since entering the race in February.

Bass, on the other hand, had already gathered more than $2.3 million in contributions by January. She’d received some of those donations as far back as July 2024.

The city’s matching funds program has also given Bass a nearly $874,000 boost over Miller, who did not qualify to receive a 6-to-1 match from the city on donations that meet certain criteria.

Nithya Raman, City Council member for L.A.’s District 4, has had the quickest growth in donor support out of all candidates for mayor after entering the race in February.

She’s received a combined $1.1 million from direct contributions and matching funds from the city.

Former reality TV star Spencer Pratt has received about $538,000 in contributions, and Presbyterian minister and community organizer Rae Huang has taken in about $273,000.

District 11

Traci Park, who is the current City Council member for the 11th district, has brought in about $1.4 million so far through contributions and matching funds.

Faizah Malik is an attorney at the nonprofit law firm Public Counsel and is challenging Park for her council seat. She has raised about $632,000.

This race also has the largest amount of outside spending across the city and LAUSD.

About $972,000 has been spent in support of Park, including about $634,000 from the Los Angeles Police Protective League and $297,000 from a committee sponsored by United Firefighters of L.A. City.

Unite Here, a labor union representing hospitality workers, has spent more than $220,000 in support of Malik.

City attorney

Hydee Feldstein Soto, the incumbent city attorney, has raised nearly $1.2 million in contributions and matching funds.

Marissa Roy, deputy attorney general, has raised nearly $1 million in her race to unseat Feldstein Soto.

Deputy District Attorney John McKinney and human rights attorney Aida Ashouri have raised about $73,000 and $14,000, respectively, in the race.

As SpaceX prepares for its public offering, it's undergoing a critical test of the largest rocket ever built.

Later on Thursday, the company is set to conduct a launch of a heavily redesigned version of its Starship rocket. The new rocket will fly using dozens of new Raptor 3 engines powered by a novel fuel system in the booster. It will also carry upgraded avionics, satellites, and test ports for a future refueling system that could allow Starship to one day reach other destinations like the Moon and even Mars.

The launch comes a little under a month before investors expect SpaceX's much-anticipated initial public offering. Many analysts expect SpaceX to raise up to $75 billion, and to be valued at up to $1.5 trillion. The amount raised could make this the largest IPO ever, and make SpaceX one of the most valuable companies in the world.

But a lot of that may rest on how Starship performs.

The launch is "super important for the IPO," said Franco Granda, a senior researcher who covers SpaceX for the data firm, PitchBook. He believes that if Starship's launch goes badly, it could cause investors' excitement for the IPO "to diminish quite dramatically."

"Even though tests are inherently tests, and failure typically doesn't dictate what happens later on, I think SpaceX will want to get this one right," he said.

Financial disclosures released on Wednesday show just how critical the test is. SpaceX is spending billions of dollars per year developing Starship. The development is eating up the profits from its launch business, which operated at a $662 million loss in the first quarter of this year.

Cheap, frequent launches key to the business model

Starship is unlike any rocket ever built. Standing at around 400 feet in height, it's made of durable, but heavy, stainless steel. To overcome its bulk, the spacecraft sits atop an enormous booster called "Super Heavy" that shoots it skyward with 33 Raptor engines. After Starship separates from the booster, it can ignite its six engines to get to space, while the booster is capable of flying back to earth and landing at its launchpad.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said that the ultimate goal is to make Starship return to the pad, allowing the entire system to be reused almost instantaneously. If it works, it would radically lower the cost of launches.

That's key to SpaceX's short-term and long-term vision. The rocket is expected to carry larger, more capable satellites for the company's Starlink internet service. It's also being developed into a lunar lander for NASA and as a possible rocket to Mars. Most recently, Musk proposed that Starship could be used to launch data centers into space, where they could use solar power to run AI chips.

"Starship is a critical piece of the puzzle," Musk said during an event in March to unveil a new chip fabrication facility. To achieve SpaceX's goals, "you need massive payload to space, and Starship will enable that."

The new financial disclosure document reveals just how much of SpaceX's future relies on Starship's development. 

"Any failure or delay in the development of Starship at scale or in achieving the required launch cadence, reusability and capabilities thereafter would delay or limit our ability to execute our growth strategy," the document says. 

It also puts real numbers on how much money SpaceX is spending to develop the giant rocket. In 2025, the company spent a little over $3 billion dollars. In the first quarter of 2026, it spent another $930 million on Starship development.

SpaceX's new Raptor 3 engines deliver more thrust and contain numerous technological improvements, but they have yet to be tested in flight.

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SpaceX

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Success is far from assured. The first version of Starship launched in April of 2023, but failed to separate from its booster and tumbled out of control before exploding. It took three tries before the rocket eventually reached space. The second version of the spacecraft was plagued by multiple failed attempts throughout 2025, though its final two launches went as expected.

This third version is an ambitious redesign, said Scott Manley, an engineer and YouTuber who closely tracks Starship's development. Manley said that the latest version of Starship is more refined. Heat tiles appear more carefully placed, and clunky, temporary fixes, like a "hot staging ring" that was bolted onto the booster after the first accident, have been integrated into the design.

"It looks more like a rocket and less like a bunch of grain silos welded together," he said.

Manly said he's particularly interested in how the rocket's new Raptor 3 engines perform. The engines have been heavily redesigned to increase thrust and eliminate the need for bulky shielding on the bottom of the rocket. The engines have been extensively tested, but they haven't been to space before. "We don't know how they're going to perform under flight circumstances."

Even if the newest version of Starship flies as expected, the space launch company faces a long path towards making the behemoth rocket work as a business proposition. Starship's heat shield has not yet proven durable enough to survive multiple trips through the atmosphere and the spacecraft itself has yet to attempt a landing at the pad in Brownsville, Texas.

Getting all the parts of Starship to work as planned is far more complex than what SpaceX has done with its existing rocket, the Falcon 9, said Tim Farrar, the president of TMF associates, which analyzes mobile satellite services. Starship is "a multidimensional problem that they haven't actually solved yet," he said.

"You can't justify a valuation well in excess of a trillion dollars based on what SpaceX is doing today," Farrar said. "You've got to believe that Musk will come up with something much bigger than that."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Amid tech layoffs, anxiety around artificial intelligence and a forthcoming run for president, Gov. Gavin Newsom today signed an executive order that calls for state agencies to explore ways to mitigate job losses stemming from AI.

The order, among other things, tells state agencies to explore severance policies, subsidized employment and other ways to help displaced workers. It also calls for a report on the impact of AI on the California labor market.

In addition, it calls for the study of increased job training , stock compensation, cooperative business ownership for workers and how unions are negotiating over AI.

Newsom signed executive orders last month and in 2023 simultaneously putting in place AI protections and encouraging state agencies to use the technology.

The latest order comes a day after Facebook owner Meta laid off 8,000 workers, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg citing AI in a memo to staff after the cuts. Tech companies Cisco and Block also recently cited AI after laying off thousands of workers. The order also comes two days after the California Senate passed the No Robo Bosses Act, which prevents businesses from using decisions made by AI and other automated systems as the sole reason a person gets fired or disciplined. Newsom vetoed a similar bill last fall.

In February, AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, members of the California Labor Federation and labor leaders in Democratic primary states pledged to pull support for a Newsom 2028 presidential campaign if he didn’t take steps to protect workers from artificial intelligence. Newsom’s veto of the predecessor of the No Robo Bosses Act was named as a reason for that pledge.

In a statement shared with CalMatters, California Labor Federation president Lorena Gonzalez said the executive order is welcome but not enough.

"We are glad that Governor Newsom is acknowledging the potential harm of AI on workers, but it's not enough to just study the issue, we have to take action now. Catastrophic job loss from AI is not inevitable, it's a political choice,” she said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Los Angeles Metro is suing Burbank over its refusal to grant construction permits for the local portion of a rapid bus route from North Hollywood to Pasadena.

The Burbank City Council only learned about the lawsuit halfway through a six-hour meeting about the bus on May 20. After the revelation, council members wondered aloud if Metro was watching the live stream and questioned what the purpose of the meeting was if they were now, apparently, in active litigation.

The special meeting was called to update the public over staff’s concerns about how a new state housing law could affect zoning around the long-planned bus stops along Olive Avenue.

“It turned out the update was more than we thought,” Burbank City Attorney Joseph McDougall said during the meeting. McDougall said the city hadn’t yet been served as of Wednesday evening.

According to a copy of the complaint filed on May 19 in L.A. County Superior Court, Metro argues that Burbank doesn’t have the authority to refuse the construction permits under the California Environmental Quality Act and an agreement forged between the countywide transportation agency and the city.

Metro is asking the court to direct Burbank to “cease conditioning issuance, approval, or processing” of project permits on any of the city’s issues with the design of the bus route.

Fast facts about the project

In 2022, Metro’s Board gave final approval for a 19 mile-long bus rapid transit route that features 22 stops through North Hollywood, Burbank, Glendale, Eagle Rock and Pasadena.

Bus rapid transit projects are those that typically feature dedicated bus lanes, signal priority and enhanced stations. Think of a bus rapid transit as a light rail on wheels instead of tracks.

The bus rapid transit project is funded in part with nearly $270 million of local sales taxes collected through Measure M, which county voters approved in 2016.

Metro is looking to break ground in July 2026 so the bus is operational in time for the 2028 Olympic Games.

The center of the ongoing battle between Burbank and Metro is the section of yellow in the Burbank portion of the bus rapid transit route showing that the countywide transportation agency wants to construct side-running dedicated bus lanes.

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Competing perspectives on the bus lanes

The city of Burbank has been resolute through the bus route’s design process that it doesn’t want dedicated lanes along Olive Avenue. The city’s position is that dedicated bus lanes would leave only one driving lane in each direction on the arterial street, causing congestion and spillover traffic on smaller, neighboring streets.

It has instead advocated for the bus to run with other traffic to preserve all the driving lanes.

Metro’s position, according to the lawsuit, is that removing dedicated bus lanes would “materially increase travel time and reduce reliability and ridership … undermining the premium transit service that justified the public investment under Measure M.”

What does housing have to do with this?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 79 in 2025, which establishes regulations that allow for higher and more-dense housing around specific kinds of transit stops than what local zoning rules would otherwise permit.

The qualifying transit stops in the region have yet to be determined. Still, David Kriske, Burbank’s assistant community development director for transportation, said the bus rapid transit could trigger the law since the five of the six stops in the city would be serviced by buses traveling along full-time, dedicated lanes.

In January, Burbank requested Metro do an additional environmental impact review of the project, specifically on any new land use impacts in light of the bill’s passage.

In a March letter to the city, Ray Sosa, Metro’s chief planning officer, said “the adoption of statewide legislation that could potentially result in development or redevelopment of parcels near project stops does not require Metro to re-open an environmental review concluded nearly four years ago.”

At Wednesday’s meeting, city officials displayed a poster board showing the potential areas that could be upzoned around the planned bus stops. One incensed public commenter pointed at the map and said it looked like “detonation zones and blast radiuses from Metro into Burbank.”

Metro's Board voted earlier this year to oppose implementation of the law.

This image displayed on a poster board facing the public at the May 20 shows where the city of Burbank thinks SB79 would apply because of Metro's bus rapid transit project.

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City of Burbank

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More on the lawsuit

Metro’s legal action isn’t entirely surprising. According to a letter to the city attorney attached to the lawsuit, Metro’s outside counsel had presented a draft of the complaint to the city on May 8.

Metro said in a statement that it “had little choice but to file a suit” since Burbank has “decided to withhold all permits unless Metro removes dedicated bus lanes or conducts additional environmental review because of the passage of SB 79.”

The countywide transportation agency’s lawsuit says it has spent nearly $44 million so far on design and pre-construction of the bus route and that “each day of delay increases Metro’s damages and threatens its ability to deliver the project” by the 2028 Games.

Jonathan Jones, communications manager for Burbank, said the city won't comment on pending litigation.