Investor's Corner
The Elon Musk moonshot approach – missed deadlines are a good thing
Tesla skeptics never tire of pointing out the company’s history of missing target dates for vehicle deliveries and other milestones. They do have a point. The most egregious example is of course Model X, which Tesla began delivering many months after the originally announced date. The latest offender is Model 3 – the company did technically deliver it on time, but so far production numbers are running far short of predictions, and the majority of buyers who signed up for the promised $35,000 EV are likely to be waiting until well into 2018. The development of Autopilot 2 also seems to be behind schedule – it looks like the promised driverless run from New York to LA will be pushed into next year.
However, the naysayers are dead wrong when they say Elon Musk hasn’t fulfilled his promises. Except for a few things, most of which nobody really wanted (battery swapping, a rollercoaster to get around the Tesla campus), the Iron Man has delivered in a big way. He promised a compelling electric sedan, an SUV with towing capability and eye-catching Falcon Wing doors, a reusable rocket that can land on a barge at sea (!), and other achievements straight out of the science fiction books, and all of these are now reality. Nevada Gigafactory? Open and producing batteries. Solar roof tiles? Rolling off the line in Buffalo. World’s largest battery array? Check (and this one was on time).
Considering Tesla’s stock market performance and the company’s legions of adoring fans, it’s clear that most people value accomplishment over punctuality. As Trent Eady, writing on Seeking Alpha, put it, “If Musk promises you the moon in six months and delivers it in three years, keep things in perspective: you’ve got the moon.”
What if Musk and company’s habit of missing self-announced deadlines is not a bug but a feature? Tesla Motors Club member Patrick C argues in a recent blog post that the “dream big and deliver late” strategy is actually the key to Tesla’s (and SpaceX’s) success.
Above: Check out the historic landing of a Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral with Elon Musk and the SpaceX team (Youtube: National Geographic)
Those of us who’ve been watching this show for a while have learned not to trust Musk’s predicted timelines. So why do his words still carry so much weight? Because we believe in what he’s doing, and we can see how hard he personally is working towards these goals, moving his “desk” to wherever the latest bottleneck is, and camping on the roof of the Gigafactory. “If Musk [were] viewed as just a wild dreamer, he would not have the following that he does,” writes Patrick C. “Musk is trying to do something that is important, something that’s never been done before, and that many people would like to see succeed. When this is the case, many are likely to give you some slack on the schedule, as long as you are working hard and showing progress.”
The most consistent carping about missed timelines comes from stock market analysts, because they focus on meeting quarterly forecasts. This obsession with short-term results is a major failing of today’s corporate world – as Patrick points out, it leads executives to think small, concentrating on things that can be done in three months. But Musk does not think small. He thinks in terms of “moonshots,” or “big hairy audacious goals,” which aren’t guaranteed to succeed, and can’t be done on a firm quarterly schedule. “To accomplish something of magnitude, you have to be willing to fail and you have to be willing to disappoint the Street,” says Patrick.
But if Musk and those around him know all this, why make over-optimistic predictions? Why not just say, “Here’s what we mean to accomplish, and it’ll be done when it’s done?”
Popular economist Danny Kahneman offered an answer in a recent episode of Freakonomics Radio: “If you realistically present to people what can be achieved to solve a problem, they will find that uninteresting. You have to overpromise in order to get anything done. When you look at big successes, the people that carried out those big successes were unrealistically optimistic. This may be necessary to get the initial resources and it may be necessary to get the enthusiasm that is needed to achieve anything at all, because there is so much inertia that realistic promises are at a major disadvantage.”
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Above: Patience… the Model 3’s are coming — a look at Tesla prepping for Model 3 Christmas deliveries (Reddit: tesla99)
Another pertinent quote comes from Mikhail Bakunin: “By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible.”
As Patrick puts it, “If you want to move people off the status quo, you have to present them with something exciting. A promise of something 10 years from now will be discounted to the point of insignificance and ignored by most.”
A case in point: the timid promises made by major automakers, who announce plans to launch new lines of electric vehicles by 2025, or by politicians, who pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by such-and-such an amount by 2050. These goals may be better than nothing, but they don’t excite anybody, because we all know that the people who set them will be on the golf course (or maybe we’ll all be underwater) by the time set for their completion.
In contrast, when Musk makes a promise, we know he stands behind it. The timeline may be shaky, but the goal is never in doubt. And the goals are important ones, innovations that can improve all of our lives and lead to a more sustainable society. In a world where politicians constantly harp on things we can’t afford, and problems that we can’t hope to solve, while the corporate world focuses on trivia like how to design a better razor or a quicker way to share videos of our cats, Musk is one of very few leaders who inspire people with a hopeful vision of the future. Humans can still accomplish great things, but only if we’re patient, and are willing to accept some failures and missed deadlines along the way.
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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com, by Charles Morris
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
Tesla surges Robotaxi fleet ahead of Cybercab launch event
Tesla Cybertruck windshield protection just got cheaper
