Investor's Corner
Ford CEO Farley sees merit in separating EV biz to obtain Tesla-sized market cap
Ford CEO Jim Farley believes there may be some merit to separating the automaker’s electric vehicle project from the company’s main operation. A pure-play EV business, separate from Ford’s reputable brand of combustion engine vehicles that have existed since 1903, may help the automaker obtain a Tesla-sized market capitalization.
Farley sees merit in potentially separating the two different powertrains into separate entities, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg in a new report. Hoping to launch its brand into a value level similar to Tesla’s, Farley believes a spinoff business that focuses purely on electric vehicles could pay dividends, especially as Ford and other legacy automakers have committed to fully-electric futures, void of any combustion engine vehicles.
The mixup may not require a separate brand name or even split the operation. This may prove to be too difficult, and Ford is not considering the option, according to the report. Farley may separate the EV business internally as a “unit,” and it could be the first consideration in Ford’s recently-revealed $20 billion playbook mixup.
A New EV Playbook
In another report, it was revealed that Ford was willing to spend an additional $20 billion of company funds to restructure its EV playbook. Ford plans to use the massive budget to utilize specific strategies that Tesla used to gain its notoriety as the leader in the EV sector.
Ford doubles its F-150 Lightning production target again to 150k units per year
Ford intends to spend between $10 and $20 billion on the project, giving it a sky-high budget and relative free range for business moves. “We are executing our Ford Plus plan to transform the company and thrive in this new era of electric and connected vehicles. We would not comment on speculation,” Ford’s Communications Chief, Mark Truby, said in the report.
Ford also expanded its production goals on Farley’s request. The automaker plans to deliver at least 600,000 electric units within 22 months. With the Mustang Mach-E being the number two most popular EV in the crossover market, the F-150 Lightning set for deliveries in the Spring, and the E-Transit beginning deliveries last month, Ford seems like it has the capacity, plan, and certainly the funding to accomplish its goals.
Tesla’s Massive Market Cap
Tesla is the world’s most valuable automaker by a considerable margin. Led by its massive increase in stock price over the past two years, Tesla has skyrocketed to monumental levels not thought to be possible at one point for a simple automotive company. However, Tesla has revolutionized the way the consumer market looks at vehicles, turning them from machines to technological marvels that receive updates just like a cell phone.
Tesla stock has gained over 856 percent since January 3, 2020. Most of the company’s increased valuation came from profitability, increases in production and deliveries, the introduction of new battery and safety technologies in its vehicles, and a resilience through the COVID-19 pandemic that seemed to exist only in the automaker’s Fremont factory in Northern California. Despite Tesla being a small, scrappy automaker with as few as 80,000 deliveries in a quarter just a few years ago, the company managed to basically evade the entire semiconductor shortage thanks to engineering and stockpiling.
Nevertheless, Tesla is the perfect picture of what an EV company looks like from a financial perspective. A healthy cash flow, plenty of profitability, and continuing and proven growth gets a company to those levels. At least it does in the EV world.
ICE and EV – Like Oil and Water
“Running a successful ICE business and a successful BEV business are not the same. I’m really excited about the company’s commitment to operate the businesses as they should be,” Farley said during Ford’s recently-held Q4 Earnings Call. Farley may have been considering the option of separating the two businesses for some time. Obviously, this was not an idea that sprung up overnight. However, it appears this may have been in the works since 2021.
More Bloomberg sources said Ford had met with advisers to explore additional options for the EV operation. Farley wants to maximize the value of the EV portion of Ford’s business and has considered a potential spinoff company or even a full-on breakup. However, his idea has eventually evolved into an “internal split,” the sources said. This could still prove to be difficult, especially as it could require significant restructuring in the manufacturing layout of the company. Facilities that build both ICE and EV vehicles would need to be separated; an extremely complex task that could take a long time and cost a lot of money. Additionally, employees would have to be separated in the mixup.
Up and Onward
Ford stock spiked on Friday following the initial reports of Ford’s potential EV-ICE business breakup. Shares were up 2.88 percent at 11:57 AM in New York.
Analysts are bullish regarding the potential of Ford’s shake-up, and the F-150 Lightning is leading the way. “Huge step in the right direction as Farley doubling down on EV vision. We believe Ford is in the midst of massive EV transformation led by Electric F-150,” Wedbush’s Dan Ives said.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is not a Ford Shareholder.
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Elon Musk
X changed how everyone gets paid, and this lawsuit shows why
X sued a Bitcoin account network over fake payouts as its creator pay model shifts
Elon Musk’s X has taken a Bitcoin-focused engagement ring to court, and the case doubles as a receipt for how differently the platform pays creators today. The company filed suit in the High Court of England and Wales against Vivek Kumar Sen and Zamyang Sherpa, alleging the pair ran six accounts, including @Vivek4real_, @Bitcoin_Teddy and @TrendingBitcoin, as one coordinated operation to fake the kind of engagement that used to translate directly into money.
According to the filing, first reported by Gizmodo, the accounts posted near identical “BREAKING” crypto headlines seconds apart, in one case 11 seconds, then had three more handles like, reply to and repost the material to manufacture what X called “a false appearance of genuine, human communication and interaction.” X says the scheme pulled in at least £207,384, about $278,000, and pegs its own investigation and remediation costs at another £75,000. The accounts were suspended August 18. X general counsel James Burnham announced the case on X last weekend, writing that the company “will act forcefully to protect our platform and the earnings of genuine creators.” Musk’s own reaction, posted shortly after, was three words: “Don’t mess with 𝕏.”
Don’t mess with 𝕏 https://t.co/HSmd5hL6aQ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 21, 2026
The timing lines up with a a recent update to how X pays its creators. The program these accounts allegedly gamed, Creator Revenue Sharing, launched in mid 2023 and paid out based on how much a post got engaged with. Originality was never part of the formula, which is exactly how the platform ended up flooded with recycled clips, copy pasted “BREAKING” posts and replies engineered purely to farm reactions from paying subscribers.
X tried patching the model more than once, including an April cut to aggregator payouts and a March regional weighting change that Musk personally paused hours after it was announced. X retired Creator Revenue Sharing for good on September 7 and opened its replacement, Original Content Rewards, the next day.
Today, we’re launching Original Content Rewards.
The reality is that Revenue Sharing had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned. Creators should be focused on bringing net new content to the platform instead of maximizing payouts. We could have kept adding more… pic.twitter.com/VJIxqlPrjm
— Allegra Jacchia (@allegrajacchia) August 7, 2026
The new math is stricter. Payouts now come only from qualified impressions, meaning unique Home Timeline views from Premium subscribers where at least half the post is visible, and replies no longer count toward eligibility at all. Copied posts, reuploaded media and reposts without meaningful changes are explicitly excluded. Allegra Jacchia, senior product manager for Creators at SpaceXAI, which now runs X’s product and AI work following xAI’s acquisition of the platform, put it bluntly, saying the goal is to reward creators who bring original ideas and perspective, “not those who have become best at gaming the system.”
Read that way, the lawsuit isn’t really about six crypto accounts. It’s X putting a dollar figure on what the old incentive structure cost, then suing to collect it right as the new one goes live. For live updates on how the case and the new rewards program shake out, follow @Teslarati on X.
Elon Musk
Why automakers keep turning down Elon Musk’s Tesla Full Self-Driving offer
Elon Musk confirms no automaker has ever accepted Tesla’s offer to license Full Self-Driving software.
Elon Musk gave a brief answer on X Monday that confirmed that Tesla’s standing offer to license Full Self-Driving to other automakers still has zero takers. Sawyer Merritt wrote that “Tesla has for years openly invited other automakers to license FSD. None of them have accepted,” responding to a prediction from Boom Supersonic founder Blake Scholl that Tesla would eventually open FSD the way it opened its Supercharger network to rival brands. Musk’s reply to Merritt was one word: “Exactly.”
It is not the first time Musk has made this point. He said something similar in November, when he called legacy automakers reluctance to adopt FSD “crazy,” and Tesla has floated the offer publicly since at least 2021. Scholl’s prediction touches on something real. Once NACS became the de facto charging standard, adoption from Ford, GM, Rivian and others followed within about a year. FSD licensing was supposed to work the same way once Tesla built enough of a lead that switching made sense for everyone.
Tesla has for years openly invited other automakers to license FSD. None of them have accepted. https://t.co/kgz4idpoUM
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) September 22, 2026
The case for licensing now is stronger than it was two years ago. Waymo and Zoox are logging hundreds of thousands of unsupervised autonomous miles, along with Tesla’s own Robotaxi fleet. Every automaker still selling driver assist systems that lag FSD has given the robotaxi conversation to Tesla, Waymo and Zoox by default. Licensing FSD would let a GM or a Ford compete on the same field without spending a decade and billions of dollars building a stack from scratch, the same argument Tesla made when it opened the Supercharger network to bring more EVs onto its chargers.
But FSD is not a connector standard. As one reply to Musk’s post pointed out, licensing FSD is not a software license the way NACS was a plug spec. It requires adopting Tesla’s eight camera layout and its onboard compute architecture, meaning a licensee’s cars would effectively become Tesla hardware wearing someone else’s badge. That is the visible obstacle. The less visible one is data. A licensed FSD stack would report back the same telemetry Tesla collects from its own fleet, giving Tesla a continuous read on how a competitor’s cars are actually driven, where they struggle, and how often drivers intervene. For an automaker trying to build its own autonomy program, or simply trying to keep its build quality and safety record private, handing Tesla that visibility could be a bigger cost than the hardware bill. It is the reason the Supercharger comparison only goes so far. Opening a charging plug cost Tesla very little. Opening FSD would cost a rival something it cannot get back.
Elon Musk
Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production
Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.
Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.
Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.
Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.
Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.