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.
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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.
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Disclosure: Joey Klender is not a Ford Shareholder.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
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Cybertruck
Tesla Cybertruck production snaps back after ugly supplier fight
Cybertrucks are piling up again at Giga Texas after Tesla’s court win against a parts supplier.
Cybertruck production at Giga Texas is showing its first visible recovery since Tesla sued a supplier last month over withheld manufacturing tooling.
Aerial observer Joe Tegtmeyer flew over the Austin factory Wednesday morning and counted roughly 100 or more Cybertrucks filling the outbound lot, a sharp jump from the thin numbers seen in recent weeks. The flyover came a day after a judge granted Tesla a temporary restraining order against Angstrom Automotive Group, the parts supplier at the center of the dispute.
Tesla filed an emergency lawsuit in late July after Angstrom told the automaker it planned to close the Troy, Texas facility where Tesla’s die-cast tools, trim dies and other Cybertruck stamping equipment were housed. According to Tesla’s complaint, a shipment of 700 finished parts never left the building, and when Tesla sent representatives to retrieve its equipment, accompanied by law enforcement, they were turned away. Angstrom allegedly then asked for an extra $250,000 a week to keep operating, which Tesla’s filing described as holding its own property for ransom.
TESLA: U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Wolfe of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division granted Tesla a Temporary Restraining Order and Writ of Replevin in its dispute with Angstrom Automotive (Case No. 6:26-cv-00477).
The order authorizes… https://t.co/E1DKcQSxMn pic.twitter.com/LR8aAiV2Og
— S.E. Robinson, Jr. (@SERobinsonJr) August 5, 2026
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The restraining order gives Tesla immediate right of entry to Angstrom’s facility to recover the tooling. It is temporary, with a fuller hearing still to come, but the speed of Wednesday’s rebound suggests the Angstrom shortage was indeed the main bottleneck limiting Cybertruck output. Outbound lot counts are an imperfect measure of actual production, since finished trucks can sit for days before shipping, but a lot that full after a lean stretch is a meaningful signal.
Cybertruck output at Giga Texas has fluctuated all year as Tesla worked through supply issues and introduced new trims, including a cheaper Dual Motor AWD version that drew strong early demand.
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
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