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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk teases next-gen Starlink satellites, Starship factories
CEO Elon Musk has shared a slideshow from a recent SpaceX all-hands meeting, revealing the company’s current priorities, sources of pride, and the first official renders of a few future projects.
Falcon and Dragon
The last seven or so months have been a landmark period for SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. For the first time ever, the company is actually matching or exceeding extremely lofty launch cadence targets publicly revealed by Musk earlier this year. In the first five months of 2022, SpaceX has completed 22 successful launches. In the last seven months, SpaceX has completed 30 launches. SpaceX also has at least five launches nominally planned for June, meaning that the company is on track to launch just over once per week in the first half of the year after Musk revealed a goal of 52-60 launches in 2022.
SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft continue to excel, as well. Cargo Dragon is on the brink of its 26th space station cargo delivery, while Crew Dragon remains the United States’ only way to launch NASA astronauts to the International Space Station it spent tens of billions of dollars to help build. Crew Dragon’s private career is also off to an excellent start, with two all-private launches already down and a third and fourth planned in late 2022 and early 2023 on top of regular NASA transport missions.
Starlink
According to Musk’s slide deck, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet constellation has secured close to half a million customers in 32 countries two and a half years after operational satellite launches began. The constellation has almost 2400 working satellites in orbit, of which almost 1800 are operational. There’s a good chance that half of all active satellites will be owned and operated by SpaceX within the next few months. SpaceX has also delivered more than 15,000 Starlink dishes to war-torn Ukraine and announced its first airline connectivity partnerships within the last few months.
Lastly, the CEO published the first official renders of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink V2.0 satellites and the massive Pez dispenser-style mechanism Starships will initially use to deploy the massive spacecraft in orbit. Based on the renders, SpaceX appears to have more or less upscaled its existing rectangular Starlink V1.x satellite design by a factor of two, producing a spacecraft that will measure about 7 x 3 meters (23 x 10 ft). Curiously, the Starlink dispenser and tiny payload ‘slot’ shown only appear to allow Starship to carry around 60 satellites, suggesting that the company will need to develop a different deployment method to achieve its ultimate goal of launching 110-120 satellites at once.
Starship
Finally, on top of sharing the first photo of Raptor engine installation on Super Heavy Booster 7, which could support Starship’s first orbital launch attempt later this year, Musk also revealed the first official renders of a pair of next-generation Starship factories SpaceX has already begun building. In South Texas, SpaceX is both expanding its existing Starship factory and replacing the three main sprung structures (tents) where most pre-stacking work has been done for the last two years with a single massive, permanent building.
At a new and rapidly growing SpaceX facility located on NASA Kennedy Space Center property, the company is simultaneously building a second next-generation Starship factory to supply multiple planned Florida launch sites with their own Starships and Super Heavy boosters.
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS –Â $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues –Â $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow –Â $1.444 billion
- Profit –Â $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
