Investor's Corner
How will Tesla perform in Mr. Trump’s America?
To say the results of the 2016 election were surprising is a gross understatement. That’s like saying the the national debt is rather a lot of money. What will a Trump presidency mean to Elon Musk and Tesla Motors? The answer is, it’s too early to tell. But we can make some (hopefully) educated guesses.
First and foremost, Trump is a champion of American companies providing jobs for Americans. Tesla has taken an abandoned factory in Fremont, California and turned it into one of the premier automobile manufacturing facilities in the world. And that’s just for openers.
Tesla has just announced it has acquired Grohmann Engineering, a highly respected German engineering firm located in in the city of Prüm near the border with Belgium and Luxembourg. With help from Grohmann, Musk wants to show the world how to increase production by a factor of ten by ‘building the machine that builds the machine’. That translates into higher productivity, something any businessman can understand.
Musk is committed to building a sustainable future while President-elect Trump is committed to a “Drill, baby, drill” mentality. Green Tech Media weighs in with the opinion that Trump will simply ignore the Paris climate accord and dismantle Obama’s Clean Power Plan. He undoubtedly will rein in the power of the EPA. What effect will that have on CAFE rules? We simply don’t know but no one should be surprised if vehicle efficiency targets for car companies become considerably watered down over the next few years.
Musk has always challenged the other car companies to build “compelling electric cars” but few have accepted the challenge. Most give the appearance of being dragged kicking and screaming into the zero emissions future while they continue to build every large truck and SUV they can weld, bolt, and screw together. One thing seems clear. Incentives for electric vehicles and for building a national EV charging infrastructure will likely be reduced in a Trump administration or eliminated all together.
That would not seem to be a major issue for Tesla Motors, whose current customers are mostly able to afford the products Tesla makes with or without incentives. But it could be an issue for at least some of the 373,000 Model 3 reservation holders. It is more likely that SolarCity’s rooftop solar business will be negatively impacted by a Trump administration. The President-elect has said publicly he doesn’t believe government should pick winners and losers in the commercial world. Utility companies may find it easier to resist encroachment on their business model from rooftop solar with Trump at the helm.
Elon told CNBC News on November 4 that he had hoped Donald Trump would not get the nomination and that Hillary Clinton’s climate policies were more in tune with his own preferences. He went on to say he now felt a bit stronger that Trump was “not the right guy, he just doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States.”
Will Musk and Trump be able to do business? Trump has to be a big supporter of American business but for Musk, the idea of his zero emissions cars with electricity derived from burning more coal and more natural gas extracted from our national parks and public lands has to be a bitter pill to swallow.
For the moment, America has said it doesn’t give a damn about sustainability, even though 60% of people tell the pollsters that building a green economy is high on their wish list. For now, “cognitive dissonance” is the order of the day. The people have spoken and their message is they want good jobs and lots of them sooner rather than later. A lot of people have taken Donald Trump at his word that he can provide them.
It is doubtful that Trumps’ victory will impact the fate of Tesla Motors or SolarCity negatively. Tesla has too much momentum built up and solar power is poised to supplant fossil fuels and nuclear simply because it costs less. Solar won’t need incentives if it is cheaper than the alternatives. Now electric cars will need to get less expensive to appeal to mainstream buyers.
Investor's Corner
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope heads to orbit this August aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with massive scientific ambitions.
SpaceX is set to play a central role in one of NASA’s most anticipated science missions in years. The company’s Falcon Heavy rocket, currently the most powerful operational launch vehicle in the world, will carry the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit on August 30 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is now in final preparations inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where on June 26 technicians used a crane to lift the observatory into a specialized stand for fueling and pre-launch testing.
Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, whose career helped shape how the agency approaches space science.
NASA chose SpaceX Falcon Heavy because of Roman’s needs to reach a specific orbit far from Earth, well beyond where a standard Falcon 9 can deliver it. The Falcon Heavy, which first flew in 2018, has since become NASA’s go-to option for missions that need serious muscle without the cost and complexity of older launch systems.
Celebrating SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy Tesla Roadster launch, seven years later (Op-Ed)
Roman will carry a field of view at least 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope, meaning it can photograph enormous swaths of the universe in a single shot rather than the narrow slices Hubble captures. That difference in scale is significant. While Hubble reshaped our understanding of the cosmos over 30 years, Roman is built to work faster and wider, surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies at once.
One of Roman’s most compelling capabilities is its potential to discover and photograph planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, and with enough precision to directly image planets that would otherwise be lost. That means scientists could study the atmosphere and surface characteristics of distant worlds rather than simply confirming they exist. Combined with Roman’s sweeping field of view, the telescope could detect thousands of exoplanets, and some of those planets may be in habitable zones where liquid water could exist. No telescope currently in operation has this level of power and capability. That capability alone could change what we know about other worlds, and perhaps finally answer the question: are we the only intelligent lifeforms in existence?
What Roman actually finds once it reaches orbit is an open question, and that is exactly what makes this launch worth watching.
Elon Musk
California snubs Tesla in its newly passed EV incentive that favors Rivian and Lucid
California passed a $135 million EV incentive that rewards Rivian and Lucid while sidelining Tesla
California just drew a line in the EV incentive sand to put Tesla on the wrong side of it. The state recently passed a $135 million program offering first-time electric vehicle buyers a direct incentive with no application required, but the rules were written in a way that leaves Tesla at a structural disadvantage compared to Rivian and Lucid.
The program caps eligible vehicles at $50,000 for new EVs and $25,000 for used ones. That pricing threshold rules out a significant portion of Tesla’s lineup, though some lower-priced Model 3 and Model Y configurations would still qualify. California-based automakers are exempt from the price cap entirely, regardless of what their vehicles cost. Rivian, headquartered in Irvine, and Lucid, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, both benefit from that exemption. Rivian’s R2 starts at roughly $45,000 but has versions above the cap. Lucid’s Air and Gravity start at $70,990 and $79,990 respectively, well above any threshold a non-California company would face.
California hits Tesla Cybercab and Robotaxi driverless cars with new law
Tesla built its reputation and a significant portion of its early market share in California, where EV adoption has consistently led the nation. The company operates its original factory in Fremont, California, and the state was home to Tesla’s headquarters for most of its existence. That changed in 2021 when Tesla moved its corporate headquarters to Austin, Texas. Since then, the relationship between the company and California Governor Gavin Newsom has been openly adversarial, with Musk and Newsom trading public criticism on multiple occasions.
California’s EV incentive landscape has shifted repeatedly in recent years, and Tesla has previously lost eligibility for state-level programs as its vehicles exceeded income-adjusted price thresholds. The federal $7,500 EV tax credit, which Tesla models have qualified for and lost depending on policy cycles, is no longer available after it expired without renewal, making state-level programs more meaningful to buyers than they have been in years.
The practical impact for buyers is more nuanced than the headline suggests. California residents purchasing a Tesla under $50,000 for the first time can still access the incentive. But the exemption written for California-based manufacturers is a structural advantage that rewards where a company plants its headquarters flag rather than where it builds its products, and Tesla moved that flag to Texas.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s newest logo confirms everything about what it’s become
SpaceX officially absorbed xAI under the SpaceXAI brand, completing the largest private merger in history.
SpaceX made its corporate transformation official in May 2026 when Elon Musk posted on X that xAI would cease to exist as a standalone company. “xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX,” he wrote.
A new SpaceXAI logo was announced today, visually embedding the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity, which can be seen as a deliberate design choice that signals the merger is not a partnership but a full absorption and XAi a core function of the same company. The same way Starlink is not a separate brand but a SpaceX product. The announcement closed the loop on a process that began February 2, 2026, when SpaceX acquired xAI in the largest private merger in history, valued at $1.25 trillion. SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion.
We are now @SpaceXAI. pic.twitter.com/ema66xDWC9
— SpaceXAI (@SpaceXAI) July 6, 2026
The reason SpaceX bought xAI was stated plainly by Musk at the time of the deal: to build orbital data centers. SpaceX had simultaneously filed with the FCC to launch up to one million satellites designed to function as AI compute nodes in low Earth orbit, escaping what Musk described as the energy constraints limiting AI development on Earth.
xAI provided the AI software stack, with Grok, the X platform, and the Colossus supercomputer infrastructure in Memphis with over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, while SpaceX provided the rockets, Starlink, and the capital base to fund it. The two companies needed each other. xAI was burning $2.5 billion in losses on $250 million in revenue. SpaceX was generating an estimated $8 billion in profit on $15 billion in revenue and needed an AI narrative to command the valuation it was targeting for its IPO.
What SpaceX has done, regardless of how the orbital AI vision ultimately plays out, is walk into a public market as something no company has been before: a rocket manufacturer, satellite internet provider, AI software company, social media platform, and supercomputer operator under one ticker. Whether that combination is worth $2 trillion depends entirely on which of those businesses you believe in most.
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