Investor's Corner
Tesla bull posts 10 actions Elon Musk must do to improve sentiments on TSLA
Longtime Tesla bull Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities has been pretty vocal about his reservations surrounding CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter activities and their potentially adverse effects on TSLA stock. But while Ives has expressed his concerns about Musk and his leadership of Twitter, the analyst has maintained an overall bullish stance on the EV maker.
Ives has a $175 per share price target and an “Outperform” rating for Tesla, and in a recent note, Ives stated that CEO Elon Musk must initiate a number of actions to ensure that the negative sentiments surrounding the company are addressed in 2023. These actions cover several decisions surrounding Musk’s activities on both Twitter and Tesla. Among these actions is Musk naming a CEO for Twitter by the end of next month.
Ives also highlighted that Musk must focus his attention back on Tesla, and he must also stop selling stock carelessly. The Wedbush analyst noted that Musk must formally adopt a 10b5-1 plan. This way, Tesla investors would not be caught off guard by the CEO’s TSLA stock sales. Perhaps most importantly, Ives also argued that Musk’s political statements are affecting Tesla and the EV sector negatively.
Following are Ives’ suggestions.
Top 10 Actions Musk Needs to Do at Tesla/Twitter in 2023
- Name a CEO of Twitter by the end of January.
- Stop selling stock and no more boy that cried wolf or Pinocchio situation. Formally adopt a 10b5-1 plan so investors know there is no major selling block around the corner as Musk sold roughly $40 billion of TSLA stock the past year.
- Lay out conservative 2023 delivery and targets given the darker macro. The 50% growth target is not happening in our opinion, with 35%+ delivery growth a more hittable and realistic goal for 2023.
- Focus attention back on Tesla, not Twitter (goes hand in hand with new Twitter CEO being named). Musk is the hearts and lung of Tesla and vice versa.
- Announce Cybertruck deliveries will hit the road by the end of 2023. Timing is key here with competition from all angles and worries production woes will push this into 2024. Giga Austin is up and running and now key to hitting this next growth endeavor for Tesla.
- Board of Directors changes with some more experience around tech and EV leadership. We believe new additions to the Board would be welcomed by the Street at this tenuous time.
- Buybacks, Buybacks, Buybacks. Announcing a major stock buyback program is important/key for the Street’s confidence and with the stock at these levels a no brainer strategic move in our opinion for Tesla given its massive treasure chest.
- More financial metrics and transparency around the margin structure at Tesla. We believe this is a hidden gem at the company with more production/sales in China and Giga Berlin and Austin ramping. Long term margin targets will be key for the Street.
- The more political on Twitter that Musk becomes is a bad thing for selling EV cars to the masses. It’s that simple and this remains a key investor concern.
- Lay out the strategic plan for Twitter. Right now very simply the fear is Twitter is bleeding money with advertisers fleeing (for now) which means more losses and therefore more Musk TSLA stock sales. Once a new CEO is in place lay out the 3- year strategy of Twitter and what this can become, Super App, “X”, WeChat 2.0, etc.
Ives’ 10 suggestions for Elon Musk have been received quite well on social media, with some Tesla bulls noting that the actions were sound and logical. Others, however, have noted that Tesla would be fine even if Musk does not follow any of Wedbush’s suggestions, as the electric vehicle maker’s fundamentals remain strong.
Disclosure: Maria holds TSLA shares.
The Teslarati team would appreciate hearing from you. If you have any tips, contact me at maria@teslarati.com or via Twitter @Writer_01001101.
Elon Musk
X changed how everyone gets paid, and this lawsuit shows why
X sued a Bitcoin account network over fake payouts as its creator pay model shifts
Elon Musk’s X has taken a Bitcoin-focused engagement ring to court, and the case doubles as a receipt for how differently the platform pays creators today. The company filed suit in the High Court of England and Wales against Vivek Kumar Sen and Zamyang Sherpa, alleging the pair ran six accounts, including @Vivek4real_, @Bitcoin_Teddy and @TrendingBitcoin, as one coordinated operation to fake the kind of engagement that used to translate directly into money.
According to the filing, first reported by Gizmodo, the accounts posted near identical “BREAKING” crypto headlines seconds apart, in one case 11 seconds, then had three more handles like, reply to and repost the material to manufacture what X called “a false appearance of genuine, human communication and interaction.” X says the scheme pulled in at least £207,384, about $278,000, and pegs its own investigation and remediation costs at another £75,000. The accounts were suspended August 18. X general counsel James Burnham announced the case on X last weekend, writing that the company “will act forcefully to protect our platform and the earnings of genuine creators.” Musk’s own reaction, posted shortly after, was three words: “Don’t mess with 𝕏.”
Don’t mess with 𝕏 https://t.co/HSmd5hL6aQ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 21, 2026
The timing lines up with a a recent update to how X pays its creators. The program these accounts allegedly gamed, Creator Revenue Sharing, launched in mid 2023 and paid out based on how much a post got engaged with. Originality was never part of the formula, which is exactly how the platform ended up flooded with recycled clips, copy pasted “BREAKING” posts and replies engineered purely to farm reactions from paying subscribers.
X tried patching the model more than once, including an April cut to aggregator payouts and a March regional weighting change that Musk personally paused hours after it was announced. X retired Creator Revenue Sharing for good on September 7 and opened its replacement, Original Content Rewards, the next day.
Today, we’re launching Original Content Rewards.
The reality is that Revenue Sharing had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned. Creators should be focused on bringing net new content to the platform instead of maximizing payouts. We could have kept adding more… pic.twitter.com/VJIxqlPrjm
— Allegra Jacchia (@allegrajacchia) August 7, 2026
The new math is stricter. Payouts now come only from qualified impressions, meaning unique Home Timeline views from Premium subscribers where at least half the post is visible, and replies no longer count toward eligibility at all. Copied posts, reuploaded media and reposts without meaningful changes are explicitly excluded. Allegra Jacchia, senior product manager for Creators at SpaceXAI, which now runs X’s product and AI work following xAI’s acquisition of the platform, put it bluntly, saying the goal is to reward creators who bring original ideas and perspective, “not those who have become best at gaming the system.”
Read that way, the lawsuit isn’t really about six crypto accounts. It’s X putting a dollar figure on what the old incentive structure cost, then suing to collect it right as the new one goes live. For live updates on how the case and the new rewards program shake out, follow @Teslarati on X.
Elon Musk
Why automakers keep turning down Elon Musk’s Tesla Full Self-Driving offer
Elon Musk confirms no automaker has ever accepted Tesla’s offer to license Full Self-Driving software.
Elon Musk gave a brief answer on X Monday that confirmed that Tesla’s standing offer to license Full Self-Driving to other automakers still has zero takers. Sawyer Merritt wrote that “Tesla has for years openly invited other automakers to license FSD. None of them have accepted,” responding to a prediction from Boom Supersonic founder Blake Scholl that Tesla would eventually open FSD the way it opened its Supercharger network to rival brands. Musk’s reply to Merritt was one word: “Exactly.”
It is not the first time Musk has made this point. He said something similar in November, when he called legacy automakers reluctance to adopt FSD “crazy,” and Tesla has floated the offer publicly since at least 2021. Scholl’s prediction touches on something real. Once NACS became the de facto charging standard, adoption from Ford, GM, Rivian and others followed within about a year. FSD licensing was supposed to work the same way once Tesla built enough of a lead that switching made sense for everyone.
Tesla has for years openly invited other automakers to license FSD. None of them have accepted. https://t.co/kgz4idpoUM
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) September 22, 2026
The case for licensing now is stronger than it was two years ago. Waymo and Zoox are logging hundreds of thousands of unsupervised autonomous miles, along with Tesla’s own Robotaxi fleet. Every automaker still selling driver assist systems that lag FSD has given the robotaxi conversation to Tesla, Waymo and Zoox by default. Licensing FSD would let a GM or a Ford compete on the same field without spending a decade and billions of dollars building a stack from scratch, the same argument Tesla made when it opened the Supercharger network to bring more EVs onto its chargers.
But FSD is not a connector standard. As one reply to Musk’s post pointed out, licensing FSD is not a software license the way NACS was a plug spec. It requires adopting Tesla’s eight camera layout and its onboard compute architecture, meaning a licensee’s cars would effectively become Tesla hardware wearing someone else’s badge. That is the visible obstacle. The less visible one is data. A licensed FSD stack would report back the same telemetry Tesla collects from its own fleet, giving Tesla a continuous read on how a competitor’s cars are actually driven, where they struggle, and how often drivers intervene. For an automaker trying to build its own autonomy program, or simply trying to keep its build quality and safety record private, handing Tesla that visibility could be a bigger cost than the hardware bill. It is the reason the Supercharger comparison only goes so far. Opening a charging plug cost Tesla very little. Opening FSD would cost a rival something it cannot get back.
Elon Musk
Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production
Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.
Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.
Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.
Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.
Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.