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Investor's Corner

Apple, Tesla Rumors and Dinner in San Francisco

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This last weekend was a buzz with Apple and Tesla rumors after Tesla’s conference call and Wall Street Journal’s article on Friday, Feb 13th, detailing Apple’s commitment to make an electric minivan, called the Titan. The latter news made my millennium. Too soon?

Some years from now, this special Friday could be viewed as the tipping point for electric vehicle adoption if Apple moves to production with the Titan. With Apple’s global brand, electric cars could receive so much free marketing and visibility on EV maintenance, no-emissions and maybe a total cost of ownership justifiable to regular car consumers.

So why is Apple jumping into electric car game? To challenge mothership Tesla or is there something else?

One theory comes from entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, where he feels that Apple could purchase Tesla Motors in the next couple of years and leverage the 17-in. “iPad” diagonal touchscreen for a “new” apps ecosystem. The theory includes the driverless-car push from Silicon Valley and posits the idea of “what-to-do” when you aren’t driving a car anymore?

As written last fall, “Video | Tesla Motors Teardown Unveils a Tech Company,” Tesla Motors designed the center console and specified components, unlike all other automakers which contract it out to a 3rd party. It looks like Apple may want to build on the Tesla foundation and,who knows, be the provider of center stacks to numerous automakers in the future (healthy debate on that topic).

From the Calacanis post, Apple will buy Tesla for $75b in 18 months (prediction):

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The Model S has a giant iPad in the center console, it would be trivial for Apple to power the center console with a retina display, and exceptionally easy for developers to create Tesla dashboard-aware Apps (think: Pandora, Waze, Apple Maps, iTunes, Beats, Spotify, etc).

You could charge $50 to $150 per App for the dashboard of a car — people are used to paying a bucketload to upgrade their car hardware.

As stated this weekend in numerous places, Apple has $173 billion in cash flow. Calacanis goes on to say that Apple would have to move quickly with buyout and buy it before the Model III went into production and Tesla started selling this model.

Buyout rumors have also coincided with Elon Musk tenure speculation with Tesla Motors in recent days. Musk has said he may exit the CEO position after the Model III is in full production and possibly CTO, JB Straubel would be next?

Of course, what could put the cherry on top of the EV cake this weekend? The president of the U.S. having dinner with Elon Musk and others (JB Straubel?) in San Francisco, see footage below.

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"Grant Gerke wears his Model S on his sleeve and has been writing about Tesla for the last five years on numerous media sites. He has a bias towards plug-in vehicles and also writes about manufacturing software for Automation World magazine in Chicago. Find him at Teslarati

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Elon Musk

SpaceX President to gift Trump Accounts her SpaceX stock

Gwynne Shotwell’s 2 million SpaceX shares are headed to children’s Trump Accounts starting this December.

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Concept rendering of SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell overlooks the company’s Hawthorne, California headquarters as an American flag flies over the campus at sunset.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said Friday that more than 2 million SpaceX shares belonging to her and her husband, Robert, will be distributed to children’s Trump Accounts in December, turning a pledge she made over the summer into an actual transfer. “Robert and I are thrilled that our gift of over 2 million shares of SpaceX stock will be distributed to children’s Trump accounts in December!” Shotwell wrote on X, adding that the shares are “transferring to escrow as we speak.”

The first round goes to children aged 11 to 17 who live in ZIP codes where the median family income is $57,000 or less, along with kids in ZIP codes with too few residents for the Census to report that figure. Shotwell said those families should receive a notice by Monday, Reuters reported.

A second gift is expected to be finalized in the next few weeks. That round will cover eligible children in military families serving overseas, children in foster care, and more kids in Texas counties near the Shotwells’ home where median family income is $90,000 or less. Elon Musk replied to the announcement with “Cool” and a heart emoji.

Shotwell first announced the donation on July 6, less than a month after SpaceX priced its record IPO at $135 per share on the Nasdaq. IPO filings showed Shotwell owned about 12.6 million SpaceX shares, Quartz reported at the time, which makes the gift roughly one sixth of her stake. At the roughly $146 per share used to value Musk’s own pledge earlier this month, 2 million shares are worth about $290 million.

How the stock would actually reach the accounts had been an open question since July. Treasury guidance acknowledged that stock donations could flow into Trump Accounts, but it did not explain the mechanics for a program whose contributions default into an S&P 500 index fund. Shotwell thanked the Treasury, the IRS, the Dell Foundation, Greater Horizons, Invest America and the law firms Morgan Lewis and Gibson Dunn for “working over the past few months to make this happen.”

The transfer also works as a dry run for a far larger gift. On October 19, Musk said he would give one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America next year and called it “the first of many.” With roughly 72 million children in the country, that pledge is worth about $10.5 billion. President Donald Trump thanked Musk the same day and said the shares would go through Trump Accounts, though neither SpaceX nor the Treasury has published how or when that distribution will happen.

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Shotwell’s recipients also fill a gap in the program itself. Trump Accounts launched on July 4, and the $1,000 Treasury deposit only goes to babies born between 2025 and 2028. Teenagers aged 11 to 17 receive no government seed money, so for many of the families getting a notice on Monday, SpaceX stock will be the first asset in the account. The accounts convert into retirement accounts when the child turns 18.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla has a Cybercab problem nobody saw coming

Tesla’s Cybercab line now builds robotaxis faster than Tesla can deploy them, Lars Moravy says.

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Tesla’s Cybercab line in Texas can now build the two seat robotaxi faster than the company can put it into service, according to Lars Moravy, Tesla’s Vice President of Vehicle Engineering. “We don’t run every day because the line can run so fast. It’s currently outpacing our deployments,” Moravy said in a new Cybercab deep dive from Munro Live. “So, it’s a bit of a race right now. Who’s going to go faster? Right now the manufacturing line’s ahead.”

Tesla’s official Robotaxi account shared a Cybercab analysis video on X on Monday, calling it a “Cybercab engineering deep dive.” Moravy’s comments go further than what he told analysts on the Q3 earnings call last week, when he said the Cybercab line’s listed capacity of more than 125,000 units a year undersells what it can actually run.

The tour shows where that speed comes from. Tesla’s unboxed process splits the Cybercab into front, rear, side and center modules that are built and tested on their own before they meet on a short final line. That final line has just 25 fully automated stations, which Tesla’s team estimated is a fifth to a tenth of what a Model Y needs. The full line is about 78% automated, the framing line is already at 100%, and the layout uses roughly 50% less floor space per vehicle. The stated goal is “100% automation in 10 second cycle time,” or one finished Cybercab every 10 seconds.

Tesla also deleted the paint shop. Only the side modules are coated, and the exterior panels get their color inside the molding machine. Engineers said the car is designed to run at least 500,000 miles, which matters for a vehicle that will spend most of its day carrying riders.

The battery got the same treatment. The Cybercab uses an 88S6P pack of 4680 cells in a steel enclosure, a first for Tesla, with each module potted separately so a single failed module can be swapped instead of the whole pack. Wireless battery management boards replace a wiring harness, and new contactors are fast enough to drop the pyro fuse entirely. Tesla’s battery director graded the pack an A minus, compared with a D for the Model Y structural pack and a B minus for Cybertruck. Up front, the drive unit runs an 11:1 gear ratio versus roughly 9:1 on most Teslas, since the Cybercab does not need a high top speed.

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The deployment side is now the bottleneck Moravy described. Tesla had more than 50 Cybercabs working the Formula 1 weekend in Austin, and Texas records show 463 Cybercabs registered. Tesla said on its earnings call that Cybercab service will launch in Dallas next month, and Moravy said the company is aiming to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of 2026. Every unit built so far has gone into Tesla’s own fleet since the line moved into volume production in April.

Munro Live also asked when it could get a Cybercab to tear down. Tesla’s answer: “Not yet.”

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Elon Musk

Tesla Q3 2026 Earnings results: in-line revenues, slight beat on EPS

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Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the third quarter of 2026, marking a reasonable performance on the various financial metrics. Tesla still plans to hold a call that will field investor questions at 5:30 p.m. ET, 4:30 p.m. CT.

Here’s where Earnings came in:

  • Total Revenues: $28.046 reported vs. $28.34B expected
  • Non-GAAP EPS: $0.48 reported vs. $0.45 expected
  • Operating Margin: 2.6 % reported vs. 2.5% expected
  • Operating Income: $718M reported vs. $721M expected
  • Free Cash Flow: $1.531B reported vs. ~-$4.51B expected

Major Takeaways

Full Self-Driving (Supervised)

“FSD (Supervised)⁴ attach rate continued to grow, reaching over 75% of new vehicle deliveries in North America – our most mature market – a nearly twenty percentage point sequential increase. We believe that FSD is driving demand in markets where it is available, and we continue to work with regulators to get it approved in other markets.”

Tesla Semi

“We began volume production of Tesla Semi, our Class 8 heavy-duty truck. The top variant can go 500 miles at full 82,000 lbs gross combination weight while achieving an efficiency of 1.7 kWh/mile. That efficiency allows the Tesla Semi to use a third of the energy used by a comparable diesel truck to haul the same payload. In a transportation market where energy is one of the largest components of total cost per mile, this will provide a meaningful advantage to Tesla Semi operators.”

SI Compute

“We plan to reach 400 MW of SI training compute by the end of the year, supporting the development of both vehicle and humanoid robot autonomy software. Additionally, we continued construction for the Austin Fab, where we plan to start commissioning equipment in 2027.”

Robotaxi

“We began deployment of Cybercab into our Robotaxi fleet in Austin. We reached nearly two million cumulative unsupervised miles for our Robotaxi service as of the end of the quarter. Operating hours in Austin are now 6am to midnight, and we expect to reduce wait times via increased fleet supply and improvement of Robotaxi orchestration algorithms. Grok is available in Cybercab with access to Grok Bot and Connectors, which allows users to manage their inbox, calendars, files, chats and tasks – all hands free via voice command – making Cybercab a mode of transport, a productivity space and, with our entertainment options, a second living room.”

Interested in ordering a Tesla? Use my referral code for three free months of Full Self-Driving (Supervised) here.

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