Elon Musk
OPINION: Tesla Vandalism lawsuit should be the first of many
The filing of a lawsuit by a Tesla owner who had his vehicle vandalized by a brainwashed member of what is being called the “Tesla Takeover” movement should be the first of many.
For the past few months, we have seen so many instances of intimidation by those who oppose Tesla, CEO Elon Musk, and President Donald Trump. These occurrences have been incredibly frequent and have varied in terms of their severity. It’s been as arbitrary as keying a car, and as violent as gunshots and Molotov cocktails being shot and thrown at showrooms.
The side of the perpetrators seems to be under the impression that President Trump and Musk are punishing those who have differing viewpoints as if their very livelihoods are under attack. The problem is, although government spending and some government programs are being modified or eliminated, there is no specific group being targeted, which is a big reason the use of the word “Nazi” has been baffling to me over the past few months.
That other side will have you believe there is a right-wing force that has taken over the government and aims to violate the rights of everyone who is unlike them. Ironically, it is precisely what the “protestors” are doing. Don’t agree with us? Okay. We’ll damage your vehicle.
Although the Trump administration and the FBI have set up specific measures to investigate instances of vandalism and hopefully eliminate it altogether, things have not truly calmed down. In fact, it seems it is getting worse.
However, a lawsuit filed by a victim of one of these senseless attacks has set a new precedent: damage my car, you will find yourself in a lawsuit:
🚨 The first-ever lawsuit against a man caught on video using Sentry Mode as he vandalized a Tesla has been filed.
An anonymous Tesla owner has sued Rafael Hernandez, who was arrested after Sentry Mode caught video of him keying a vehicle.
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-The Plaintiff is suing for infliction…
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) March 26, 2025
In actuality, this might be the best strategy for minimizing the instances of vandalism we have seen over the past several months. Nothing seems to be working, and the attackers, who appear to be of all shapes, sizes, and ages, only seem to be doing it more often, despite being caught on camera by Sentry Mode.
The suit that was filed against Rafael Hernandez, who keyed a Model X at DFW Airport, seeks $1m in damages. While it is unlikely he will be awarded that significant sum, what Hernandez ends up paying could be significantly more than just the amount of repairing the scratch.
This all funnels down to one specific point: Tesla drivers are simply that, people who drove to buy and drive a Tesla. Driving a car is not a political statement; it is, in many ways, simply a choice of convenience. People choose EVs for many reasons, with home charging, performance, and look being several of them.
Ask 100 Tesla owners why they bought the car, and I’m sure many would not say, “Because I love Elon Musk and agree with everything that comes out of his mouth.”
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I am an Elon Musk fan, but I don’t agree with everything he has done or will do. I don’t agree with everything my parents, my friends, or my family do. I am not a loyalist to anyone except myself. This is where I find the vandalism to be so distasteful.
If Toyota’s CEO came out and said things that were controversial, for example, “We’re not transitioning to EVs because we don’t feel it’s the right time with demand,” something that was stated a few years ago as a part of their strategy, do you think Tesla owners were keying Toyotas? No.
Support brands that line up with your ideologies. Avoid ones that don’t. People of all ages do this peacefully. If you want to hurt a brand, don’t give them or their customers your money. Keying a Tesla might result in both with this initial lawsuit.
The point is, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about this. Vandalism is not the right way. Not only are you disrupting someone’s life who has nothing to do with Tesla, but now you’re putting yourself in the line of fire for a particularly substantial sum of money. Additionally, you’re not winning over any fans with this type of reaction. Nobody said “I now see their point since they keyed my car, I agree with them.”
I am hopeful that this lawsuit will encourage Tesla to go after the violent vandals who have attacked its stores. I am hopeful that this lawsuit will encourage Tesla owners to go after the violent vandals who have had their cars damaged by senseless people who have differing political views.
Perhaps this is the move that will start to bring down the frequency of these attacks.
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Elon Musk
Inside Tesla’s secretive $10 Billion “Project Crystal Sun” filing
Tesla filed for a $10.1 billion Fort Bend solar factory, but the site isn’t confirmed.
Tesla has filed paperwork in Texas for a second massive manufacturing project in the same week it locked down its chip fabrication site, this time for a $10.1 billion solar cell plant in Fort Bend County. The filing, submitted July 22 under the state’s Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act and first surfaced by Sawyer Merritt on X, lists an internal project name of “Project Crystal Sun” and targets a site off FM 762 and FM 1994 near Richmond, about 40 minutes outside Houston.
Tesla is planning to build a $10.1 billion vertically integrated solar cell manufacturing facility in Fort Bend County, Texas, about 40 minutes from Houston, according to a new public application filing.
Tesla is aiming to start construction this year and finish in 2028, with… pic.twitter.com/f3HIK5HGST
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 7, 2026
The application, prepared by Kroll Tax Services on Tesla’s behalf, spans five parcels totaling roughly 3,000 acres within the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District. Tesla wants a 10 year property tax limitation in exchange for the investment, split as $1.5 billion in real property and $8.6 billion in equipment and personal property. The company projects 9,712 permanent jobs once the plant reaches full operation, with 1,147 peak construction jobs during a build window running from this year through 2028 and commercial operations targeted for the first quarter of 2029.
Tesla is not fully committed to Fort Bend County yet. The filing states the company is weighing the site against an unnamed out of state alternative, and frames the tax abatement as what would make Texas competitive against that option. If the district and county decline the incentive, Tesla says it may build elsewhere.
Tesla Megapack Megafactory in Texas advances with major property sale
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The plant would handle the full solar cell production chain in one facility, according to the filing, covering wafer and ingot manufacturing, coating, metallization and printing lines, cell testing, automated material handling and cleanroom infrastructure. That scope points to Tesla vertically integrating a part of its supply chain it currently sources largely from overseas partners, mirroring the approach behind its expanding Megapack production in Brookshire, Texas, where Tesla has already built out two buildings for its grid battery business.
The timing lines up closely with Tesla and SpaceX’s other big Texas commitment this month. SpaceX confirmed its Terafab chip factory would land in Grimes County days before this filing surfaced, with construction on that $16.8 billion project starting almost immediately after local officials met with residents. Terafab is meant to produce the AI chips running Tesla’s Optimus robots and Full Self-Driving software, while a solar cell plant would feed a different part of the business, the panels and storage systems Tesla sells to homeowners, businesses and utilities, and increasingly needs to power its own data centers.
Musk has talked about building domestic solar manufacturing capacity before, tying it to the amount of power Tesla’s AI ambitions will require.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
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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Inside Tesla’s secretive $10 Billion “Project Crystal Sun” filing
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
