Tesla shares jumped on Monday following a report that President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team are planning to make a federal framework to regulate self-driving vehicles a top priority for the U.S. Transport Department.

As of 6:11 a.m. ET, Tesla stock was up 7.98% in U.S. premarket trading after the release of the Bloomberg News report, which cited unnamed sources familiar with the matter.

CNBC could not independently verify the report and has requested comment from the Trump team and from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a Transportation Department unit tasked to oversee self-driving technologies.

Musk was a central figure in the business world pushing for Trump’s return to the White House in the lead-up to this month’s elections. The tech billionaire now stands to benefit from the close relationship he has formed with the Republican politician, who previously served a first presidential term between 2017 and 2021.

Last week, Trump picked Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency — or “DOGE for short — which he said would end government “bureaucracy,” relax “excess” regulations and cut “wasteful” expenditures.

A federal framework for regulating self-driving vehicles would be a major boon to Musk’s Tesla, which has been promising fully self-driving vehicles for several years but has so far failed to deliver a car capable of being driven autonomously without a human behind the wheel.

The long-term vision for Tesla is to produce a fleet of so-called “robotaxis,” autonomous vehicles that can drive people around without the need for human supervision.

Last month, Musk showed off Tesla’s long-awaited robotaxi — a concept car called the “Cybercab,” a $30,000 two-seater vehicle with no steering wheels or pedals.

Tesla has already been beaten to the punch in the robotaxi race by Google’s Waymo venture, which is among the few companies that have successfully launched self-driving cars on public roads.

Speaking during an event unveiling Tesla’s Cybercab and “Robovan” vehicles, Musk said he expects Tesla to have “unsupervised” Full Self-Driving technology up and running in Texas and California next year in the company’s Model 3 and Model Y electric vehicles.

Full Self-Driving, or FSD, is Tesla’s premium driver assistance system, currently available in a “supervised” version for Tesla electric vehicles. FSD currently requires a human driver at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time.

Trump’s transition team is reportedly looking for policy leaders for the Transportation Department to develop a federal regulatory framework for self-driving vehicles, according to Bloomberg.

They include Emil Michael, a former Uber executive, Republican Representatives Sam Graves of Missouri and Garret Graves of Louisiana, Bloomberg reported.

LISBON, Portugal — Tech CEOs in Europe are urging region al countries to take bolder action to tackle Big Tech’s dominance and counter reliance on the U.S. for critical technologies like artificial intelligence after Donald Trump’s electoral win.

The Republican politician’s victory was a key topic among prominent tech bosses at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Many attendants said they’re unsure of what to expect from the U.S. president-elect, citing this unpredictability as a core challenge at present.

Andy Yen, CEO of Swiss VPN developer Proton, says Europe should echo American protectionism and adopt a more “Europe-first” approach to technology — in part to reverse the trend of the last two decades, during which much of the Western world’s most important technologies, from web browsing to smartphones, have become dominated by a handful of large U.S. tech firms.

VPNs, or virtual private networks, are services that encrypt data and mask a user’s IP address to hide browsing activity and bypass censorship.

“It’s time for Europe to step up,” Yen told CNBC on the sidelines of Web Summit. “It’s time to be bold. It’s time to be more aggressive. And the time is now, because we now have a leader in the U.S. that is ‘America-first,’ so I think our European leaders should be ‘Europe-first.'”

One key push for the past decade from the European Union has been to take legal action and introduce tough new regulations to tackle the dominance of large technology players, such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta.

As Trump prepares to come into power for a second mandate, concerns have now mounted that Europe might reel in its tough approach to tech giants out of fear of retaliation from the new administration.

The Exploration Company (TEC) announced Monday it has raised $160 million to fuel development of its capsule that is designed to take astronauts and cargo to space stations.

Venture capital firms Balderton Capital and Plural were the lead investors in the round which also included French government-backed investment vehicle French Tech Souveraineté and German government-backed fund DeepTech & Climate Fonds.

TEC’s core product is Nyx, a capsule that can be launched from rockets into space carrying passengers and cargo. Nyx is reusable so once it has dropped its payload, it can re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and be used for the next mission.

“It’s a big market, and it’s growing about a bit more than 10% per year because more nations want to fly their astronauts and more nations want to go to the moon,” Hélène Huby, founder and CEO of TEC, told CNBC in an interview.

“So there is an increased demand for sending people to stations, sending cargo to stations,” she said.

This part of the market has very few players. Some of the biggest are SpaceX which has a capsule called Dragon. There are also rivals from China and Russia.

“We said, ‘okay, let’s build this capacity in Europe so that Europe can have its own capsule and also the world needs an alternative solution. [We] cannot only bet on SpaceX,” Huby said.

TEC is currently developing the second version of Nyx which it expects to launch next year, followed by a final version in 2028. This model will be partly financed by the European Space Agency.

Huby said the company has signed $800 million in contracts to use its capsule. These include mission contracts with companies including Starlab, which is designing a new space station, and Axiom Space.

There is increasing activity in space among nations including China, the U.S. and India. One of the most ambitious projects is the NASA-led Gateway, which will be the first space station to orbit the moon.

“If you have more people, you also have a need for more cargo. So this is what is happening around the Earth and around the moon,” Huby said.

Huby sees TEC being a key player when it comes to developing the technology that is needed to return cargo to Earth once it has been in space.

“This is also where we where we believe our vehicle is going to play an important role,” Huby said.