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Enlarge / A Tesla facility in Lathrop, CA. (credit: Andrei Stanescu / Getty)

Tesla's stock closed at a record high of $2,000 on Thursday, pushing the company's market capitalization to $370 billion. Tesla has been on a weeklong rally since announcing a five-for-one stock split. The split will be distributed to anyone who holds the stock tomorrow—Friday, August 21.

A little more than two months have passed since Tesla's stock first reached $1,000 per share. Last month, Tesla announced a solid second-quarter profit of $104 million. It was the fourth straight quarter of profits.

That could qualify Tesla for inclusion in the S&P 500 stock index. If Tesla wins a slot in the S&P 500, funds that track the index would need to buy Tesla shares. That could push the stock price up even further.

A team of elite military test pilots finds itself tapped to be astronauts for Project Mercury, the first human spaceflight program in the United States, in The Right Stuff, a new eight-episode dramatic series debuting in October on Disney+. Like Philip Kaufman's Oscar-winning 1983 film of the same name, the series is based on the bestselling 1979 book by Tom Wolfe.

Wolfe became interested in the US space program while on assignment by Rolling Stone to cover the launch of Apollo 17, NASA's last Moon mission. He spent the next seven years writing The Right Stuff, intent on capturing the drive and ethos of those early astronauts. (In a foreword to the 1983 edition, he pondered "What makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle... and wait for someone to light the fuse.")  Wolfe spent a great deal of time consulting with General Chuck Yeager, who was shut out of the astronaut program and ended up as a contrasting character to the college-degreed Project Mercury team featured in the book. The Right Stuff won widespread critical praise, as well as the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

When United Artists decided to finance a film adaptation, the studio hired William Goldman (The Princess Bride) to adapt the screenplay, but his vision was very different from that of director Philip Kaufman, and Goldman quit the project. Kaufman wrote his own draft script in eight weeks, making Yeager more of a central figure; Goldman's script ignored Yeager entirely. Goldman later wrote that "Phil [Kaufman]'s heart was with Yeager. And not only that, he felt the astronauts, rather than being heroic, were really minor leaguers, mechanical men of no particular quality, not great pilots at all, simply the product of hype."

Enlarge (credit: Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A California judge has granted Uber and Lyft an emergency reprieve from an order requiring them to treat their drivers as employees. The companies were facing a Thursday deadline to comply with the order. Earlier today, Lyft announced that it would be forced to shut down in the state at midnight tonight.

Lyft said it was being forced to shut down its California operations by a 2019 California law, AB 5, that forces ride-hailing companies to treat their drivers as employees rather than independent contractors. Uber had warned that it was likely to do the same if the courts didn't delay enforcement of the law.

"This is not something we wanted to do, as we know millions of Californians depend on Lyft for daily, essential trips," Lyft wrote. However, the company said, the new law would "necessitate an overhaul of the entire business model — it’s not a switch that can be flipped overnight."