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MyTeslaWeekend & James Stephenson debunk a lot of nonsense surrounding Tesla
MyTeslaWeekend and James Stephenson shared a deep dive into the nonsense and misinformation surrounding Tesla. And they debunked each one. There always seems to be Tesla critics who take things a bit too far. MyTeslaWeekend didn’t hold back. In the video’s description, he said,
“These guys use some really dishonest math. They deduct from one side without accounting for the other. They count something for GM or Stellantis, but not Tesla. They move numbers between columns as if that’s how accounting works. They’re lying liars. Not James’ words, but mine.”
Some of the topics they covered included zero-emissions vehicles (ZEV) credits not being taxpayer money, General Motors (GM) only selling 26 Evs in the last quarter of 2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s actual compensation accounting, the pump and dump myth, and so much more.
ZEV Credits Are Not Taxpayer Money
James pointed out that some people seem to think ZEV credits are taxpayer money when this is not the case.
“Some people get the wrong-headed notion that regulatory credits are a stipend from the government; that governments are giving you taxpayer money. And that is not what’s going on at all. The money you’re making is from selling to your competitors who did not produce enough electric vehicles to comply with applicable law.”
The money, he added is for competitors who don’t want to pay fines to the government for non-compliance.
GM Only Sold 26 Evs In Q4 2021
Despite President Biden’s claim that GM is the EV leader, the automaker only sold 26 EVs in Q4 2021.
“In Q4 of 2021, General Motors sold 26 electric vehicles. They sold 25 Volts and they sold one electric Hummer, I believe, to Mary Barra. I think she was the buyer of the one electric Hummer.”
Tesla, he added, sold over 300,000 electric vehicles.
Elon Musk’s Compensation
Elon Musk as CEO of Tesla doesn’t take a salary and James added that he doesn’t get any cash bonus.
“Most CEOs do have either or both of those as part of their compensation package.”
“What Elon said was, ‘hey if I can’t grow the revenue and the market capitalization of this company, the value of people’s investments in this company by tremendous amounts, you don’t owe me anything. I’ll make zero dollars if I can’t do those things.”
James further explained how the gap accounting treatment works.
“As Elon made progress towards achieving those aggressive goals that I just outlined, Tesla had to record expense relative to the proportion to the twelves tranches that Elon was making progress towards achieving.”
“This is not widely understood. So, another thing that we saw in Q1 of 2022, the most recently reported quarter was ‘Tslaq’ crying foul over the reduction in SG&A year-over-year”
He pointed out that this group, ‘Tslaq’ which is mostly responsible for a lot of the misinformation against Tesla, said that last year, the number was larger than this year. So by the logic of this group, Tesla must be committing fraud.
“‘It has to be fraud. There’s no way your SG&A could have come down by that much year-over-year.’ Well, it’s because a year ago, Elon was still making tons of progress towards achieving these market cap and revenue and even milestones. And this year, the work’s done already. It was almost completely achieved by the end of 2021. So there’s almost nothing left to pay against it.”
‘Elon Musk is a Pump and Dump’ Myth
MyTeslaWeekend shared his biggest pet peeve that he sees all the time which is the constant claim that Elon Musk is nothing but a pump and dump. James shared his thoughts.
“He owns more shares now than he did a year ago or two years ago. And he’s probably going to buy more shares if he can extricate himself from the Twitter situation. So, he still owns more Twitter stock than anybody else does right now. Far more than the people on Twitter’s board combined.”
Elon Musk is also often accused of pumping and dumping Dogecoin however he hasn’t sold his Doge. In fact, he’s recently reaffirmed his support of Doge. In addition to Doge, and Tesla, some critics have claimed Elon has pumped and dumped SpaceX stock and MyTeslaWeekend pointed out that this isn’t a publicly traded stock.
Debunking the nonsense is something that is done on a regular basis and the video, I think is a gem in the treasure box. You can watch the full video below.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk certainly tipped off some details of the Tesla Roadster event with a broadening of information regarding the company’s decision to delay the unveiling for two weeks.
For years, people have speculated about what the Roadster will be capable of. While there have been plenty of things said about what it *could* do, we have not seen or been told by Tesla what it will actually be capable of.
However, over the past few days, Tesla’s weather updates have truly pushed the speculation into Plaid Mode, basically all but confirming the car will have some sort of aerial capability — whether that would be hovering or fully flying remains to be seen — but it definitely seems that it will be able to leave the ground intentionally.
“Because this event can only be held outdoors…”
Tesla posted on Monday that it would delay the Roadster event until October 15, and it indicated that it had to do this because the event “can only be held outdoors.”
With the potential SpaceX collaboration to develop cold-gas thrusters that will help the vehicle go airborne, doing this indoors is probably not a safe, or even plausible, possibility.
Roadster event update
We’ve been tracking the weather closely with local meteorologists, but given the severe conditions predicted & because this event can only be held outdoors, we’ve made the difficult decision to reschedule.
New date is October 15. Additional details to…
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 28, 2026
FAA Airspace Restriction
The FAA gave Tesla a Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) for 10,000 feet above ground level, much higher than the typical 2,000-foot restrictions that are usually placed at SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas site.
Tesla Roadster event requires restricted airspace, and the FAA obliges
Some have said that this massive increase is due to Tesla’s need to restrict unauthorized drone use for spying on the event.
Elon Admits High Winds
“Due to high winds, the new Roadster demo is postponed by 2 weeks,” Musk said in a post on X yesterday.
Due to high winds, the new Roadster demo is postponed by 2 weeks https://t.co/dV3ojDh1iT
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 30, 2026
A reply reading, “What’s strong wind got to do with a car demo with four grounded wheels?” was directly below Musk’s post, satirically and sarcastically probing for more details.
All signs are pointing toward an aerial demonstration for the Roadster.
Tesla has secured $30 billion in fresh credit lines from Citibank and Wells Fargo in an effort to scale its biggest current projects.
Tesla agreed to a $20 billion three-year delayed-draw term loan facility from Citibank, it announced on Tuesday. Additionally, it signed a five-year, $8 billion revolving credit facility and a $2 billion, 364-day term credit facility with Wells Fargo.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that it “may draw” from the $20 billion delayed-draw term “from time to time” and “no more than ten times during the 18 months following the closing date.” This loan matures on September 29, 2029.
The five-year revolving facility from Wells Fargo will also be accessed by Tesla “from time to time,” and will become due and payable on September 29, 2031. Tesla can request two separate one-year extensions.
On the $2 billion, 364-day revolving loan, it becomes due and payable on September 28, 2027. Tesla can also increase its additional commitments to an additional $4 billion across the Revolving Facilities. This would increase the total facilities to $14 billion. Tesla said it does not plan to utilize any of these loans in 2026.
Tesla plans to utilize the money to help prop up its ambitions to scale its biggest products, each of which is either in early launch phases or still in development. Of course, we’re talking about Cybercab and Semi, which have launched, and Optimus, which is still under heavy development and working toward initial release.
All three Tesla products have one thing in common: they’ve all required Tesla to build new manufacturing lines for them.
For the Semi, Tesla built a brand new factory in Sparks, Nevada, adjacent to the Tesla Gigafactory. For Optimus, Tesla sunset Model S and X production at the Fremont Factory, which brought an end to the two flagship models, thus creating manufacturing space for the humanoid robot. Finally, Cybercab is being built at Gigafactory Texas and officially entered production earlier this year.
The cash will help Tesla bolster its finances for the continuing development of these products. Tesla said that it forecasts its CapEx to be over $25 billion, up from just over $8.5 billion last year. These loans surely help with that spending.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
Elon Musk sat beside Trump as AI leaders signed a voluntary White House safety accord.
Elon Musk had the seat right next to President Donald Trump on Tuesday as the White House hosted the leaders of America’s biggest artificial intelligence companies for a lunch that ended with a voluntary industry accord on AI safety.
A seating chart Trump posted on Truth Social placed Musk at the president’s left in the East Room, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on his right, according to an Associated Press reporter. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also attended, along with Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson.
🚨 Elon Musk is currently speaking to the media alongside President Trump after a meeting with AI Leaders in Washington today
Trump says AI is now being called “Super Intelligence” or SI pic.twitter.com/woJJqUVP9B
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) September 29, 2026
After the lunch, Trump told reporters outside the West Wing that the executives had signed “The White House Accord on Superintelligence: A Joint Commitment on Frontier SI Responsibilities.” Johnson described it as a voluntary statement of principles built on “robust internal controls and layers of internal and external review,” while Zuckerberg said company boards would independently review reports from outside auditors. Trump called the document “morally binding,” said he would name a new AI czar within days, and signed an executive order formally renaming artificial intelligence “super intelligence,” CNBC reported.
Musk was not in the room for Tesla alone. Since SpaceX absorbed xAI, he runs the company behind Grok and one of the largest AI training operations anywhere. On September 25, he said another 220,000 Nvidia GB300 chips would come online at Colossus 2 within a week, with more expected in November and December.
“I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
“Thank you.”@elonmusk catches his own slip after calling the technology “A.I.” while speaking alongside President Trump and other tech leaders, quickly correcting himself to “super… pic.twitter.com/fH7CFileNb
— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 29, 2026
SpaceX confirms third massive compute deal at Colossus data center
Musk also used the trip to restate his energy ambitions. “SpaceX is aiming together with Tesla to do 200 gigawatts of solar production per year,” he said at an event in Washington. It is the same combined target he laid out that feeds directly into Terafab, the Tesla and SpaceX chip venture that will need enormous amounts of power.
The showing between Musk and Trump has come a long way, since the two had the very public split in mid 2025 after Musk opposed the “Big Beautiful Bill” and left DOGE. They reconciled at Charlie Kirk’s memorial that September, and Trump later called their relationship “good”. Since then, Musk has joined Trump’s China delegation in May and attended last week’s White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping.
For Tesla, that access to government official could pay dividends. As Teslarati noted in January, federal autonomy rules, NHTSA oversight and a single national standard for driverless vehicles all run through an administration Musk can more easily reach directly as Tesla works to scale Robotaxi and Cybercab beyond Texas.
Elon Musk weather update tips Tesla Roadster speculation into Plaid Mode
Tesla snags $30B in fresh credit lines for expanding its biggest projects
