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Elon Musk’s detractors need to stop the character assassination
Elon Musk’s detractors, especially those working in the mainstream media, need to stop the character assassination.
As a writer, I feel that we should not use our positions to tear down individuals just because we may not like them. And this, I believe, is what many in the mainstream media are doing.
The WSJ article, to me, seems like character assassination
The recent article published in the Wall Street Journal claiming that Elon Musk had an “alleged affair” with the wife of Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, is what I think is one example of a character assassination attempt.
Yeah, the character assassination attacks have reached a new level this year, but the articles are all nothing-burgers.
I work crazy hours, so there just isn’t much time for shenanigans.
None of the key people involved in these alleged wrongdoings were even interviewed!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2022
Although I shared my thoughts about this, it’s been over a day now and I find it incredibly disturbing that many in the media seemed to not care about the truth. Even after Elon Musk shared a photo of himself with Sergey Brin on friendly terms, taken after the supposed falling out.
Character assassination over truth
It seems that the collective hatred of Elon Musk takes priority over the truth. What I mean by this is that many people seem to not care about the facts. The facts are that Elon Musk wrote that this incident never happened and he showed photographic proof of his friendship with Sergey Brin.
Yet these unknown sources that WSJ cited didn’t even have any photographic evidence. Or if they did, they kept it to themselves for whatever reason and I doubt this is the case.
And although the majority of the reports have been either revised or updated, the damage has already been done.
Elon Musk Warned Of This
Elon Musk warned that this would happen. No, not that the WSJ piece itself would happen, but he did say that there would be political attacks on him that will escalate dramatically in the coming months.
Political attacks on me will escalate dramatically in coming months
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 18, 2022
Although this attack on him over his personal life isn’t political, there have been many other character assassination attempts on Elon Musk over the past several years. And these attempts influence the average person.
Whether it’s on TikTok, Facebook, or in person, people seem to think that Elon Musk is a bad person. I’ve had friends disown me over my support for him and tell me that I am a bad person. Or that I’ve lost touch over a “billionaire who doesn’t care about you.”
For someone who doesn’t care about me, Elon sure cared when I told him I was nervous when I met him. You can listen to what he said to me in the tweet below.
Short & sweet sound bite from my interview with Elon that won’t be in the podcast.
I was nervous and he was opening fudge I got him from Buccees (hence loud paper sounds)
He wanted to feed @GailAlfarATX and me lol.
Elon is so nice. Good ppl. pic.twitter.com/tbWty5BoEe
— Johnna (@JohnnaCrider1) June 27, 2022
New level of character assassination attacks
Elon Musk pointed out that the character assassination attacks on him have reached a new level this year. This is true and I’ve seen it with my own eyes. He pointed out that the articles aren’t that important and regarding the WSJ article, none of the key people mentioned were even interviewed.
Yeah, the character assassination attacks have reached a new level this year, but the articles are all nothing-burgers.
I work crazy hours, so there just isn’t much time for shenanigans.
None of the key people involved in these alleged wrongdoings were even interviewed!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2022
Elon shared another thought on Twitter about this.
He said that the amount of attention on him has gone supernova. He added that he will do his best to focus on doing useful things for civilization, which is a passion of his.
The amount of attention on me has gone supernova, which super sucks. Unfortunately, even trivial articles about me generate a lot of clicks 🙁
Will try my best to be heads down focused on doing useful things for civilization.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2022
Elon Musk cares about humanity and civilization.
During my interview with Elon Musk earlier this month, he spoke fervently about helping people. We spoke about his work with the Musk Foundation, Starlink, and disaster relief. He shared that one key way to help with poverty is to improve literacy.
“Literacy and access to internet, I think, are fundamentally helpful. Really, we’ve got to think beyond the United States. There are billions of people who have no internet connectivity at all–nothing. Or it’s like a very low bandwidth and it’s insanely expensive. For many parts of the world, this is the case–billions of people.”
He spoke more at length about these topics and you can listen to our interview here.
The Character Assassination of Elon Musk needs to stop.
To be quite honest, I find it disturbing that so many in the media are consumed with hatred of Elon Musk to the point that they seem to have lost all of their senses. They complain about his “behavior” while not even acknowledging that most of the time, Elon is standing up for himself.
Elon Musk isn’t the type of person to let people just walk all over him or mistreat him. He fights back and his detractors don’t like this. This is why many of us in the Tesla community is referred to as a cult.
This is a tactic often used by many of Elon Musk’s detractors. They use these terms to dehumanize supporters so that our thoughts and opinions are rendered valueless.
This needs to stop.
Disclaimer: Johnna is a partial Tesla shareholder with under 1 share currently. She plans on buying more and supports Tesla and its mission.
If you have a tip, feel free to send them to johnna@teslarati.com
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
