Investor's Corner
Tesla’s battery tech and software push is starting to make sense for veteran vehicle-makers
When Tesla was designing the Model S, the company made it a point to build the vehicle from the ground up. This means that everything, from the electric cars’ battery packs to its software, are manufactured by Tesla itself. Tesla’s approach to electric cars is the auto equivalent of Apple’s strategy with the iPhone and iOS, and it finally seems to be making sense to some legacy vehicle-makers.
Elon Musk’s private space firm, SpaceX, is known for producing its rockets in-house. Musk took this same approach with Tesla in the company’s early days, and the result of this approach was the Model S, a vehicle like no other on the road, with simple, powerful, all-electric internals and a software that is custom-built for the car. A particularly telling image of this hands-on, in-house approach was taken during the company’s younger days, featuring a much younger CTO JB Straubel assembling one of Tesla’s early battery packs by hand.
And in a lot of ways, this strategy worked. Tesla’s in-house approach for the Model S was a key point in the vehicle’s allure to consumers. This carried over to the Model X, and now, the Model 3. With Tesla’s 2170 cells used in the Model 3 gaining rave reviews from teardown experts like Sandy Munro of Munro and Associates, and with the company preparing to release Software Version 9, Tesla is poised to take even bigger steps in its mission to usher the transition to sustainable mobility.
Tesla’s history is rife with criticism and doubts from the veterans of the auto industry, but now that the company has established itself as a leader in the premium electric car segment, its progress and breakthroughs now seem to be undeniable, even to traditional vehicle makers.
Just recently, a report from German publication Electrive emerged, citing insiders from Jaguar who noted that the veteran carmaker will be using Samsung SDI’s cylindrical 2170 battery cells for the electric cars it would produce from 2020 onwards. This is a big step for Jaguar, considering that the I-PACE, its first all-electric vehicle that can actually compete with the Model X 75D and 100D in terms of performance, is currently using pouch cells from LG Chem.
Using Samsung SDI’s 2170 cells for its electric cars’ batteries would likely benefit Jaguar, considering that the I-PACE is currently being bogged down by reports that the vehicle is lacking in efficiency and range. Jaguar might never admit it, but it’s not difficult to infer that the company’s decision to reportedly commit to 2170 cells was partly influenced by Tesla’s progress in its battery tech.
Tesla Model 3s side by side in a parking lot.
Another vehicle-maker is starting to see the value of software and its relationship to hardware. Earlier today, veteran motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson stated that it is planning to open a dedicated research and development facility in Silicon Valley to support its plans for its upcoming line of electric bikes. Harley-Davidson plans to release its first motorcycle, dubbed the “LiveWire,” sometime next year, and it would be the first of a line that features a “twist and go” system. The LiveWire is set to be followed by other electric bikes in 2022 as the company transitions to producing cleaner and possibly even quicker, more powerful vehicles.
Seemingly taking a cue from Tesla, Harley Davidson is now in full throttle recruiting Silicon Valley talent in electrical, software, and mechanical engineering. Just like Jaguar and its decision to commit to 2170 cells, Harley-Davidson’s decision to establish a Silicon Valley-based team seems to be inspired partly by Tesla and its software-focused electric cars.
Tesla is not a perfect company by any means, and its leader, Elon Musk, is not infallible. Musk himself would be the first to admit that Tesla committed a lot of errors in the past, and it is through these failures that the company was able to fail forward. Tesla is now a much more mature electric car maker that knows its market and knows what it’s doing; and if the recent updates from Jaguar and Harley-Davidson are any indication, it appears that other vehicle-makers are now starting to realize the value of Tesla’s experience.
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SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
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Elon Musk
Tesla AI boss reveals how big Optimus is going to get
Tesla’s Optimus chief corrected himself on X, confirming a staggering 10 million robot production target.
![Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner.jpg)
Tesla’s Optimus program has a new number attached to it, after Ashok Elluswamy, the executive who has run the humanoid robot program since June 2025, posted a three word correction on X Thursday, “Correction, 10 million robots.”
The line clarifies the long term annual capacity Tesla is building toward its planned second Optimus production line at Gigafactory Texas, a figure Musk has cited repeatedly since last year’s shareholder meeting.
The scale is worth noting, because ten million robots a year would mean Tesla building more units annually than most countries sell in new cars. Tesla has framed this as a second line, not the first. The buildout is happening in two phases: a roughly one million unit per year line inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, installed on the floor space vacated when Model S and Model X production ended earlier this year, and a much larger dedicated facility under construction at Giga Texas that broke ground on its first steel structure in May. That Texas facility is the one Elluswamy’s correction refers to, and is expected to reach volume production sometime in 2027.
Correction, 10 million robots https://t.co/0z4nyQNTzp
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) July 30, 2026
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Elluswamy took over Optimus from Milan Kovac last summer and has spent the months since talking up the program’s trajectory. Elon Musk has also floated the ten million figure at Tesla’s 2025 shareholder meeting.
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Ending Model S and Model X production to make room for the first Optimus line was one of the more consequential manufacturing decisions in the company’s recent history, retiring two flagship vehicles in favor of a robot that has yet to enter mass production. Musk has previously estimated per unit production costs at $20,000 to $25,000 once Tesla reaches a million units a year, though he hasn’t said what that cost looks like at ten times the volume.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
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