News
Tesla’s $40M loan that kept the lights on, and what it teaches all of us
Oftentimes, many of us forget to look around and realize how fortunate we are to have what we have. In times where tensions are relatively high based on the current election, a pandemic, and a string of bad luck that we have all seemed to adopt throughout 2020, there are a few appropriate moments that allow us to look back and realize how truly grateful we should be, even when things aren’t looking very promising.
A perfect example of this came earlier this week on November 3rd. On that day, just twelve short years ago, we were reminded that Tesla secured a $40 million loan that kept the lights on and gave the small and unlikely-successful automaker a chance to succeed. It was “the last hour of the last day possible,” CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter. “We were 3 days away from bankruptcy.”
The story of Musk and Tesla’s near destruction twelve years ago puts a lot into perspective. For me, it is reminiscent of an old saying, “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.” While comical, it is true, and it shows that anything can happen while there is still time.
Musk and Tesla were trying to build a car company in arguably the most challenging time for American auto in the country’s history. Numerous companies were seeking government assistance to keep their doors open, jobs were disappearing, and the once-roaring American economy was crippled by the Financial Crisis of 2008.
Not only was it one of the worst times financially to start a car company, but Tesla wasn’t aiming to build a run-of-the-mill gas car. It wanted to completely change the tune of what a car was in the United States. Battery-powered cars were not popular, nor were they widely accepted. They were a dream of many, but never did anyone think they would be a successful passenger transportation source shortly.
Well, everyone but Elon Musk and his team of engineers at Tesla.
Musk acknowledges the hardships of the time head-on. “Extremely difficult to raise money for an electric car startup (considered super quirky back then), while stalwarts like GM & Chrysler were going bankrupt,” he added to his chain of Tweets regarding the situation. And while he was suffering to keep Tesla’s lights on, Musk concluded that the only way would be to put the last of his money into the failing company. “I put in my last money, even though I thought we would still fail. But, it was either that or certain death for Tesla.”
Fast forward a few years to 2017. Tesla is doing well, but it’s working to ramp up the mass-production efforts of the Model 3. Finally, an EV that can fit the budgets of many people worldwide, Tesla was working to create a battery-powered car that had good performance and acceptable range ratings. But it wasn’t easy, and it almost resulted in the company going bankrupt.
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When asked about the Model 3 ramp, Musk said that Tesla was “about a month” away from going broke once again. “The Model 3 ramp was extreme stress & pain for a long time — from mid-2017 to mid-2019. Production & logistics hell,” Musk added.
A few more years forward: let’s look at 2020.
Tesla is the most valuable car company in the world. It has recorded five straight profitable quarters. It is coming off of the most deliveries and production numbers for a quarter ever. It is building more Gigafactories.
Most importantly, Tesla is influencing the automotive industry. Companies that never believed in EVs are being forced to develop them. If they don’t, they’ll inevitably fall behind.
Through all the tough times and adversity that Tesla faced, it always came through. An unlikely competitor entering a market with new technology in a time when companies were hellbent on keeping their doors open by any means necessary, Tesla somehow survived.
In times where the country is almost equally divided on who they would like to run the United States for the next four years, conflicting opinions on a global pandemic are voiced regularly, and other social issues are talked about daily, it is always important to remember stories like these. With almost a negative chance of winning, Tesla somehow pulled through on two separate occasions. Patience, hard work, and a little bit of luck took the unlikely car company from the depths of Chapter 11 to superstardom in the car industry.
If this is the only bit of positivity you read this week, I truly hope it helps you realize how grateful you should be in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes, the cards just aren’t in your favor, and you have a few downswings that make you question whether what you are doing is the right thing. The dark times certainly are tough, but without darkness, then the light would mean nothing to us.
I use this newsletter to share my thoughts on what is going on in the Tesla world. If you want to talk to me directly, you can email me or reach me on Twitter. I don’t bite, be sure to reach out!
Tesla is looking to expand into a new Asian market, strengthening its presence in a region that has been bullish on electric vehicles as a whole.
Tesla officially filed to establish a subsidiary of its business in Vietnam, a report from Reuters suggests. Tesla named the entity “Tesla Motors Vietnam Limited Liability Company.”
The planned entrance into the Vietnamese market is a good sign and move for Tesla, as it has become one of the fastest-growing EV markets in Southeast Asia. It is already among the leaders in the region in both volume and electrification rate. In the first half of this year, Vietnam led Southeast Asia in battery-electric passenger car sales at about 116,000 units, up about 71 percent year over year.
Currently, Vietnamese EV drivers rely on VinFast’s V-Green network, which has about 150,000 ports, but these are primarily reserved for VinFast vehicles. Public third-party charging is fragmented and unreliable for those who do not own chargers that are dedicated to a certain manufacturer’s vehicles.
Tesla has had mixed results in Asia as a whole, and as China remains the core part of its story in Asia, the company is evidently working on expanding its footprint on the continent. Tesla’s domestic retail deliveries fell about 12 percent year over year through the first eight months of 2026.
Model Y remains a standout individual product, holding its position as one of, if not the, best-selling vehicles in the world. However, Model 3 has been weaker than it has been in past years.
Gigafactory Shanghai, the company’s Chinese production facility, still performs very well. Wholesale volumes in terms of exports have more than doubled and now exceed domestic retail sales; Giga Shanghai builds vehicles for Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and other markets. South Korea has been an explicit bright spot, with registrations doubling year-to-date and Tesla frequently appearing as the top imported brand.
Tesla just did something in South Korea that no foreign carmaker has ever done
Tesla’s entrance into Vietnam signals a broader effort to take over the Asian market and grab more market share from rivals.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
Elon Musk’s X Corp and SpaceXAI dropped their Apple antitrust suit, leaving OpenAI as defendant.
X Corp and SpaceXAI, Elon Musk’s social platform and AI venture, have dropped Apple from the antitrust lawsuit that they filed against the iPhone maker and OpenAI last year. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, attorneys for X and SpaceXAI moved to dismiss the Apple portion of the case, first reported by Reuters. The filing does not explain why the companies are dropping Apple or say whether a settlement was reached.
X and SpaceXAI say they intend to keep pursuing the case against OpenAI, which remains a defendant. That resolves the dispute with one company while leaving the core allegation intact against the other, with no public accounting of what changed in between.
The lawsuit dates to August 2025, when xAI and X sued Apple and OpenAI, arguing that Apple’s decision to make ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot built into iOS gave OpenAI an unfair structural advantage. The complaint claimed ChatGPT controlled roughly 80 percent of the chatbot market at the time, while Grok held only a few percent. It sought billions of dollars in damages and asked the court to unwind the arrangement.
Elon Musk’s xAI and X file antitrust suit against Apple and OpenAI over AI exclusivity
The filing followed weeks of Musk publicly complaining that Grok and X weren’t appearing in Apple’s “Must Have” App Store section, though Grok ranked second in the Productivity category and X ranked first in News at the time. He accused Apple of “playing politics” and warned of immediate legal action before following through days later.
Apple and OpenAI tried to get the case thrown out, but a federal judge denied both motions in November, ruling the dispute was better suited to summary judgment than an early dismissal. That decision sent the case into discovery, which is presumably what led to Monday’s filing.
Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either 𝕏 or Grok in your “Must Have” section when 𝕏 is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?
Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know. https://t.co/3wenLZGtwG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025
The timing is notable given how Musk’s sentiment toward Apple has shifted, with Musk noting that he was open to letting Grok power a revamped Siri after a user suggested Apple replace its aging assistant with xAI’s model.
xAI, the AI venture Musk folded into X Corp last year, has since combined with SpaceX under the SpaceXAI brand. That structure now puts X, Grok and SpaceX’s rocket and satellite businesses under one roof as Musk pushes his AI ambitions beyond chatbots.
OpenAI remains the sole defendant going forward, and Musk’s companies have not said if there’s any changes to those original claims. Apple and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing.
News
Why SpaceX is finishing another space-internet system that isn’t Starlink
SpaceX launched three final O3b mPower satellites Sunday, finishing a lesser known SES satellite network.
SpaceX had an 87 minute window opening at 2:49 p.m. Eastern on Sunday to fly a Falcon 9 out of Cape Canaveral carrying the final three satellites for SES’s O3b mPower constellation, a project that has taken more than a decade to finish since Boeing and SES first signed SpaceX on for the work.
Unlike the thousands of Starlink satellites SpaceX has stacked into orbit over the years, O3b mPower flies in a different neighborhood entirely. The three new satellites, tagged F11, F12 and F13, are headed for medium Earth orbit at roughly 5,000 miles up, more than ten times higher than Starlink’s shell around 340 miles but still a small fraction of the 22,000 miles where old school geostationary satellites sit. That middle position is the whole point, because a satellite that far out needs far fewer siblings to blanket the globe than a low orbit constellation does. Essentially, SES only needed 13 satellites total to build a network offering quick, steady service that used to require thousands of spacecraft.
With most people having heard plenty about Starlink and almost nothing about O3b mPower, SES and SpaceX already blend the two networks for some customers. Both SpaceX and SES sell satellite broadband, but they’re aimed at different buyers. Starlink is built for volume, direct to consumers, RVs, homes, small businesses, plus a growing aviation and maritime business. O3b mPower skips consumers entirely and sells enterprise grade connectivity to airlines, cruise lines, offshore energy operators, telecoms needing backhaul, and governments, priced and provisioned more like a dedicated circuit.
A 2023 partnership lets cruise ships combine Starlink’s speed with O3b mPower’s steady capacity depending on what a ship needs at a given moment. Sunday’s completed 13 satellite constellation effectively finishes the medium orbit half of that pairing, years after.
Sunday’s mission was already a something on SpaceX’s manifest well before O3b mPower entered the picture. This flight marked its 29th trip to orbit, a history that includes two crewed Axiom missions, the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope and 22 separate Starlink batches. SpaceX has landed boosters on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas so often that Sunday’s touchdown attempt, if it went as planned, was set to be the 661st successful Falcon booster landing to date.
For a company that pushed the Starlink constellation past 11,000 satellites back in August, almost entirely through bulk launches from California, Sunday’s flight was a reminder that SpaceX’s schedule still has room for someone else’s satellites too. SES gets a finished network built for a narrower set of customers, and Falcon 9 gets one more line on an already long resume.
Tesla looks to expand into new Asian market, strengthening presence
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
