Investor's Corner
Tesla has its heart set on Texas for upcoming Cybertruck Terafactory
Tesla will likely select Austin, Texas as the location for its next Cybertruck Gigafactory, but that doesn’t mean they’ll turn down offers from other regions that are vying for their attention, including Tulsa, Oklahoma.
First reported by Electrek, and later confirmed by Teslarati with multiple sources, Texas is the forerunner to become home to the company’s next US factory.
The Elon Musk-led electric carmaker has been scouting for land in the outskirts of Austin and in nearby Taylor, roughly 30 miles northeast of the city, since earlier this year. While there have been no property sale records that link back to Tesla or an entity related to the company, sources tell Teslarati that the company is considering the acquisition of several large parcels of land near the industrial zones in Taylor.
Indicators that Tesla was considering Texas as the site for its next US-based Gigafactory grew stronger in February when CEO Elon Musk tweeted a poll that teased the question, “Giga Texas?”
Musk would later confirm, in March, the company’s desire for a Cybertruck Gigafactory that will be located closer to the east coast than California.
And last week, the company held talks with politicians in the Lone Star State, as confirmed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
“It’s true,” Abbott said over Twitter. “Texas is a perfect fit for Tesla.”
“I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Elon Musk, and he’s genuinely interested in Texas and genuinely frustrated with California. We’ve just got to wait and see how things play out,” the Texas Governor said in an interview with a local television station.
Other cities in Texas, like Fort Worth and Houston, have also welcomed Tesla by making suggestions to bring car manufacturing into their region. Houston stated that Musk could consolidate Tesla and SpaceX operations in its city, according to Mayor Sylvester Turner.
“As we continue our industrial evolution, I invite you to play a leading role in our story. As the only market that can immediately meet the production needs of Tesla and SpaceX, Houston provides a single solution for your operations,” Turner wrote. “Houston offers a broad innovative ecosystem in which industries coverage to solve the world’s greatest challenges in energy, manufacturing, logistics, and space.”
.@elonmusk Houston offers the #CompleteSolution to consolidate @Tesla and @SpaceX operations in one region. Join a city of innovators working to make the world better—just like you. #youbELONginHOU #HOUxTESLA
Read more here https://t.co/292AUyjW7Q pic.twitter.com/GhUZTPGvLs
— Houston Mayor's Office (@houmayor) May 15, 2020
Tesla’s next Gigafactory in the Central US will be geared toward the mass production of its upcoming Cybertruck, and the production of its Model Y crossover for the East Coast market.
While all indicators point to Austin, Texas as being the site for the company’s Cybertruck Gigafactory, a source tells Teslarati that the company is also considering another central U.S. location that’s 450 miles north of Austin: Tusla, Oklahoma.
Recently, State Representative Ryan Martinez and Governor Kevin Stitt invited Tesla to come to the Sooner State.
“Oklahoma is a wonderful place to do business. We’ve got a low tax base, a low cost of living, great incentives and services, and plenty of space to build a manufacturing headquarters and house all of your people,” Martinez said.
Texas appears to be the favorite in the race to become home to Tesla’s next US factory, however, the largely rural areas of Tulsa is also being considered as a region for its manufacturing facility. By having Tulsa in the conversation, along with other states that continue to court the company, Tesla can only benefit through increased leverage in its negotiations for local incentives.
With economic activity taking a massive blow in the face of the ever-changing pandemic, local governments need the economic boom that a Tesla Gigafactory can otherwise spark for the region.
And with Musk at the helm, who’s no stranger to walking the cashflow tightrope and striking at a good deal when it presents itself, rest assured that there’s going to be plenty of FOMO among state politicians before Tesla ultimately picks Texas.
Tesla has scheduled its Earnings Call for Q4 and Full Year 2025 for next Wednesday, January 28, at 5:30 p.m. EST, and investors are already preparing to get some answers from executives regarding a wide variety of topics.
The company accepts several questions from retail investors through the platform Say, which then allows shareholders to vote on the best questions.
Tesla does not answer anything regarding future product releases, but they are willing to shed light on current timelines, progress of certain projects, and other plans.
There are five questions that range over a variety of topics, including SpaceX, Full Self-Driving, Robotaxi, and Optimus, which are currently in the lead to be asked and potentially answered by Elon Musk and other Tesla executives:
- You once said: Loyalty deserves loyalty. Will long-term Tesla shareholders still be prioritized if SpaceX does an IPO?
- Our Take – With a lot of speculation regarding an incoming SpaceX IPO, Tesla investors, especially long-term ones, should be able to benefit from an early opportunity to purchase shares. This has been discussed endlessly over the past year, and we must be getting close to it.
- When is FSD going to be 100% unsupervised?
- Our Take – Musk said today that this is essentially a solved problem, and it could be available in the U.S. by the end of this year.
- What is the current bottleneck to increase Robotaxi deployment & personal use unsupervised FSD? The safety/performance of the most recent models or people to monitor robots, robotaxis, in-car, or remotely? Or something else?
- Our Take – The bottleneck seems to be based on data, which Musk said Tesla needs 10 billion miles of data to achieve unsupervised FSD. Once that happens, regulatory issues will be what hold things up from moving forward.
- Regarding Optimus, could you share the current number of units deployed in Tesla factories and actively performing production tasks? What specific roles or operations are they handling, and how has their integration impacted factory efficiency or output?
- Our Take – Optimus is going to have a larger role in factories moving forward, and later this year, they will have larger responsibilities.
- Can you please tie purchased FSD to our owner accounts vs. locked to the car? This will help us enjoy it in any Tesla we drive/buy and reward us for hanging in so long, some of us since 2017.
- Our Take – This is a good one and should get us some additional information on the FSD transfer plans and Subscription-only model that Tesla will adopt soon.
Tesla will have its Earnings Call on Wednesday, January 28.
Elon Musk
Tesla locks in Elon Musk’s top problem solver as it enters its most ambitious era
The generous equity award was disclosed by the electric vehicle maker in a recent regulatory filing.
Tesla has granted Senior Vice President of Automotive Tom Zhu more than 520,000 stock options, tying a significant portion of his compensation to the company’s long-term performance.
The generous equity award was disclosed by the electric vehicle maker in a recent regulatory filing.
Tesla secures top talent
According to a Form 4 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Tom Zhu received 520,021 stock options with an exercise price of $435.80 per share. Since the award will not fully vest until March 5, 2031, Zhu must remain at Tesla for more than five years to realize the award’s full benefit.
Considering that Tesla shares are currently trading at around the $445 to $450 per share level, Zhu will really only see gains in his equity award if Tesla’s stock price sees a notable rise over the years, as noted in a Sina Finance report.
Still, even at today’s prices, Zhu’s stock award is already worth over $230 million. If Tesla reaches the market cap targets set forth in Elon Musk’s 2025 CEO Performance Award, Zhu would become a billionaire from this equity award alone.
Tesla’s problem solver
Zhu joined Tesla in April 2014 and initially led the company’s Supercharger rollout in China. Later that year, he assumed the leadership of Tesla’s China business, where he played a central role in Tesla’s localization efforts, including expanding retail and service networks, and later, overseeing the development of Gigafactory Shanghai.
Zhu’s efforts helped transform China into one of Tesla’s most important markets and production hubs. In 2023, Tesla promoted Zhu to Senior Vice President of Automotive, placing him among the company’s core global executives and expanding his influence beyond China. He has since garnered a reputation as the company’s problem solver, being tapped by Elon Musk to help ramp Giga Texas’s vehicle production.
With this in mind, Tesla’s recent filing seems to suggest that the company is locking in its top talent as it enters its newest, most ambitious era to date. As could be seen in the targets of Elon Musk’s 2025 pay package, Tesla is now aiming to be the world’s largest company by market cap, and it is aiming to achieve production levels that are unheard of. Zhu’s talents would definitely be of use in this stage of the company’s growth.
Tesla analyst Andrew Percoco of Morgan Stanley teased the company’s dominance in its self-driving initiative, stating that its lead over competitors is “not even close.”
Percoco recently overtook coverage of Tesla stock from Adam Jonas, who had covered the company at Morgan Stanley for years. Percoco is handling Tesla now that Jonas is covering embodied AI stocks and no longer automotive.
His first move after grabbing coverage was to adjust the price target from $410 to $425, as well as the rating from ‘Overweight’ to ‘Equal Weight.’
Percoco’s new note regarding Tesla highlights the company’s extensive lead in self-driving and autonomy projects, something that it has plenty of competition in, but has established its prowess over the past few years.
He writes:
“It’s not even close. Tesla continues to lead in autonomous driving, even as Nvidia rolls out new technology aimed at helping other automakers build driverless systems.”
Percoco’s main point regarding Tesla’s advantage is the company’s ability to collect large amounts of training data through its massive fleet, as millions of cars are driving throughout the world and gathering millions of miles of vehicle behavior on the road.
This is the main point that Percoco makes regarding Tesla’s lead in the entire autonomy sector: data is King, and Tesla has the most of it.
One big story that has hit the news over the past week is that of NVIDIA and its own self-driving suite, called Alpamayo. NVIDIA launched this open-source AI program last week, but it differs from Tesla’s in a significant fashion, especially from a hardware perspective, as it plans to use a combination of LiDAR, Radar, and Vision (Cameras) to operate.
Percoco said that NVIDIA’s announcement does not impact Morgan Stanley’s long-term opinions on Tesla and its strength or prowess in self-driving.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang commends Tesla’s Elon Musk for early belief
And, for what it’s worth, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang even said some remarkable things about Tesla following the launch of Alpamayo:
“I think the Tesla stack is the most advanced autonomous vehicle stack in the world. I’m fairly certain they were already using end-to-end AI. Whether their AI did reasoning or not is somewhat secondary to that first part.”
Percoco reiterated both the $425 price target and the ‘Equal Weight’ rating on Tesla shares.
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