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Who Wears Short Shorts: David Einhorn’s Ghost Hunt for Tesla’s Weakness

Credit: Twitter | David Einhorn

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Death, Taxes, and David Einhorn complaining about Tesla being successful.

Those are the three certainties in life. And like clockwork, after Tesla announced yet another successful quarter in the books yesterday during its Q1 2020 Earnings Call, Einhorn was right there trying to accuse Elon Musk or Zachary Kirkhorn of fraudulent behavior. But, let’s face it, a guy who lost 21.5% for his clients in Q1 2020 has to cast stones at someone, and it might as well be someone who is doing well, right?

I know those first two tidbits of information sound harsh; they are honestly supposed to. But I will admit, I wasn’t always an Einhorn skeptic. In my spare time, I’m a poker player, and Einhorn is too, and he’s a successful one. And it is hard for a poker player not to like him, considering all of his winnings get donated to charity. With over $5.2 million in live cashes, a majority of that coming from a massive cash at the $1 million buy-in One Drop tournament at the World Series of Poker. That’s a lot of money to a good cause.

So I admit, David Einhorn is not all that bad of a guy. But he continues to play the villain in Tesla’s successful string of quarters, continually accusing the company and its executives of not playing by the rules. But hey, to each his own.

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Every single time Tesla has a successful quarter, Einhorn seems to be stalking the company’s Update Letter like a tiger waiting for its prey. However, tigers usually are successful when they see potential food, and Einhorn just continues to sit there and look more like the prey at this point.

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On the 30th of April, Einhorn tweeted another note toward Elon, asking him to justify Tesla’s accounts receivable. “Tesla’s claim for why there are so many for a product where the customers pay upfront, was that sales are crazily concentrated in the last days of the month–so much so that it matters if the month ends on a weekend. This quarter ended on a Tuesday,” he wrote.

Einhorn continues to come off like an obsessed ex-girlfriend, always worried about what Elon puts online, and makes extended digs toward the CEO of Tesla and his employees. But I guess what do you have to say for yourself when the stock you notoriously short continues to rise and your investors continue to lose money on your behalf.

Is it not all possible that Tesla experienced minimal financial loss even though Fremont was shut down for about a month at the tail end of the quarter? Is it at all possible that the most successful Q1 in company history had something to do with the fact that Tesla’s production rates are higher than they were a quarter ago? That another factory in the biggest auto market in the world is also churning out electric vehicles and selling them at higher numbers than any other vehicle in the market? That the same exact factory in that auto market is producing a car that had a 450% increase in registrations from February to March, despite the entire car industry falling?

This, to me, looks like Einhorn is using a typical case of what is called confirmation bias. He accused Tesla, in his brief note on Twitter, of fudging the numbers. But the problem is, the information is readily available out there on basically any site that covers electric vehicles.

Let me break it down for you this way, Einhorn. I’ll even use poker terms! Tesla is experiencing an upswing in China, and the rest of the market is experiencing a downswing. Every other company is managing to lose money because nobody is buying their cars, even though production is continuing. Tesla is making money because they continue to sell the Model 3 in astoundingly high numbers.

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Not only has Tesla made the Model 3 one of the most appealing cars in all of China, but they’re beginning to offer different variants. Before it was just the SR+, now there’s a Long Range and a Performance variant. Tesla even announced that the white interior is available for the Model 3 now, which could be a big deal for some.

Tesla’s Q2 might be a little bit rougher than Q1, especially if Fremont’s shut down continues until June, as reports have suggested. Perhaps Einhorn should have just taken Q1 on the chin, gotten rid of his “TSLAQ” title, and left the likes of other short sellers Jim Chanos in his rearview mirror. After all, David, it is not too late to get your hands on some beautiful TSLA stock. I hear its lovely to own some!

Part of me hopes that one day, Einhorn heads out to Silicon Valley, meets up with Elon for lunch and a tour, and switches sides, all in those short shorts that Musk sent him a few months back. After all, Tesla is fighting for the future of our planet, and short selling the stock is primarily environmental terrorism considering the company’s goal is to keep the Earth going.

Maybe one day, I’ll get to sit across from Einhorn at a poker table. If I do, I promise to ask him when he’s going to stop shorting TSLA and begin to believe the Master Plan. But if I don’t, I surely won’t lose sleep over it.

After all, I won’t be the one wearing vintage short shorts.

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Credit: Twitter

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Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s answer to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey got way more specific

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Elon Musk escalated his monthslong feud with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this week, pledging that his own AI video tool will produce a competing version before the year is out. Responding to a fan-made, AI-generated clip of the ancient epic, Musk wrote on X, “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”

In June, Musk quoted an xAI-shared trailer built entirely with Grok Imagine Video 1.5, a two-minute-plus reimagining of The Odyssey styled after a 1970s classical Hollywood epic, and predicted “full movies by the end of the year,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That trailer, built from 36 consistent shots by a single creator, was Musk’s proof of concept. This week’s pledge turns that prediction into a specific commitment, tied directly to Homer’s text rather than a generic demo.


When a fan separately proposed that Musk fund a live-action alternative, to “give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek,” Musk replied with two words: “I’m down.”

The Grok Imagine pledge lands as the tool’s underlying infrastructure has changed hands. Grok is no longer a standalone product, it folded into SpaceXAI after SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI closed in February, meaning the compute behind any Odyssey production traces back to the same Colossus supercomputers now bundled into SpaceX’s pitch to investors. Musk has separately said SpaceX’s own engineering data is being fed into the next major Grok training run, a two trillion parameter model he’s called the “2T run.”

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Whether Grok Imagine can sustain a feature length narrative, rather than a series of impressive individual shots, remains the open question.

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Cybertruck

Tesla Mobile App gets a new feature that wrap fans are going to love

Tesla’s Summer Update removes the USB drive step from customizing your car’s digital wrap design.

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Tesla’s latest 2026 Summer Update quietly closes out one of the more tedious steps in personalizing a Tesla’s digital appearance. Uploading a custom wrap design used to require a USB drive. Now it doesn’t.

The feature is listed in Tesla’s release notes as “Send Custom Wraps from Mobile App.” The company described it plainly: “Skip the USB drive and upload a custom wrap of your car from the mobile app. Instructions for creating a custom wrap here: github.com/teslamotors/custom-wraps.”

The digital wrap tool has been around since Tesla’s 2024 Holiday Update, when it launched for Cybertruck owners first, as Teslarati reported at the time. Getting a design onto the car meant formatting a USB drive, creating a folder named exactly “Wraps,” dropping in PNG files sized between 512×512 and 1024×1024 pixels and under 1 MB each, then plugging the drive in and applying the wrap through Toybox. Tesla expanded the tool to other models and renamed it from “Colorizer” to “Paint Shop” with the 2025 Holiday Update, while also adding license plate and window tint customization alongside the wraps.

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The latest Summer Update removes the USB step from that process. Owners will be able to pull a design from wherever they saved it, whether that’s a download from social media or something built from Tesla’s own GitHub templates, and push it to the car directly through the app.

Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more

It’s a small fix relative to the rest of this latest release, which also included expanded Grok voice commands, automatic navigation that learns regular routes, and self-driving stats inside the mobile app, all detailed in our rundown of the full Summer Update. The USB requirement was one of the more common complaints about Paint Shop since it launched. Tesla did not say when the wrap upload change would reach individual vehicles, only that the broader update is rolling out now in waves.

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Elon Musk

Tesla Diner is throwing a birthday party with a Franz-signed special treat

Tesla Diner turns one on July 21 with Optimus, roller skates, and a Franz-signed hat.

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tesla diner

Tesla is throwing its Hollywood Diner a first birthday party on July 21 and the celebration comes with a guest list of unique items, including a limited run of Tesla Diner birthday hats personally signed by Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen for the first 50 customers who place an in-car order at midnight.

One year after lines wrapped around the block on Santa Monica Boulevard for a diner that most of the restaurant industry did not take seriously, Tesla is making the case that the concept was worth the years it took to build. The concept had been in Musk’s head since at least 2018, when he floated the idea of “an old school drive-in, roller skates and rock restaurant” on X, describing it years later as “‘Grease’ meets ‘The Jetsons’ with Supercharging.”

Tesla Optimus Gen 3 is coming to the Tesla Diner with new ambitions

 

What made the diner genuinely different from any restaurant that came before it was not the menu or the nostalgia. It was the ordering model. Tesla owners could place food orders directly from their vehicle’s touchscreen before arriving, a small feature that hints at something much larger on the horizon. As the Cybercab and unsupervised FSD expand across major cities, the diner model becomes a template for an entirely new kind of commerce. A robotaxi pulling in to charge does not need a human to walk up to a counter. The vehicle places the order, the food is ready on arrival, and the passenger never interrupts the experience of being driven somewhere else. It is the first glimpse of what drive-through commerce looks like when the car is doing the driving.

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As Teslarati has reported, Musk signaled immediately after opening that the Hollywood location was only the beginning, posting that Tesla would expand the concept to major cities worldwide and along Supercharger corridors on long-distance routes if the first location proved successful. One year in, the birthday celebration on July 21 makes a strong case that it has. Tesla announced a full day of events including a Cybercab on display, a birthday menu, Optimus in attendance, face painting, a photo booth, roller skating servers, a light show, a Skypad DJ, and complimentary collectibles.

If Musk’s ambition holds, the Hollywood diner is year one of something much bigger. The birthday party is the proof of concept. The robotaxi fleet is the business model waiting behind it.

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