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Tesla Cybertruck saves a life even before its deliveries begin
The Tesla Cybertruck was met by a wide range of emotions when it was unveiled last November. It was celebrated, it was mocked, it was met with anger, and it was met with enthusiasm. The all-electric pickup is not yet being delivered to customers, but even now, the vehicle continues to inspire the creativity of many. And if a story from a Tesla owner is any indication, it appears that the Cybertruck may have already saved a life.
Tesla owner u/Jeriath27 recently shared his and his family’s experience surrounding the all-electric pickup on the r/TeslaMotors subreddit. His story started about a year ago when his family took delivery of a Tesla Model 3. The EV enthusiast actually reserved a Model 3 years prior, but circumstances prevented him from going through with the purchase when the vehicle was initially released. Fortunately, the Tesla enthusiast was able to justify a Model 3 purchase last year, on account of a long commute, a new job, and the vehicle’s gas savings.
Interestingly enough, u/Jeriath27’s wife was quite skeptical about the Model 3 at first, especially as she would be the one driving it about 95% of the time. But in true Tesla fashion, the Model 3 promptly endeared itself to the EV enthusiast’s wife, to the point where she actually started doing some Uber and Lyft on the side. This was quite notable, considering that she has bad anxiety and is generally uncomfortable with strangers. Everything seemed to be in place then, but things fell apart when summer hit.
While visiting a friend in another state, u/Jeriath27’s spouse experienced a bad episode, which stemmed from deep-rooted PTSD. She ended up in a medical facility, and it took the Tesla owner fighting the court just to get her home. By this time, she was pumped with so much medicine that she was a shell of her usual self. As noted by the Tesla owner, his wife ended up having cluster seizures and vivid nightmares for months, and she fell into an extremely deep depression. She started seeing a therapist and her doctor worked to get her medicine figured out, but the healing process was very deliberate.
Then came November 21, 2019. As related by the Tesla owner, his wife had been sleeping as usual and he was just waiting for the unveiling of the Cybertruck. He was aware that the Cybertruck’s design will probably not be for everyone, and sure enough, when Elon Musk brought the massive all-electric pickup onstage, u/Jeriath27 was not really that excited. He thought the Cybertruck’s design was interesting, but it was not something that he was immediately drawn to. Nevertheless, he opted to show the Cybertruck to his wife the next day.
As it turned out, u/Jeriath27’s spouse loved the all-electric truck’s unique XY design. She spent the next few hours watching and rewatching the Cybertruck’s unveiling. Seeing how his wife was reacting to the vehicle, the Tesla owner promptly reserved a unit for themselves. He then printed the email confirmation and showed it to his wife. She was ecstatic for the first time in four months.
Interestingly enough, the family’s reservation for the all-electric pickup truck provided a small push that provided some timely motivation to u/Jeriath27’s wife. With the couple deciding that they would save up for the vehicle together, the Tesla owner’s spouse started feeling more motivated. She put up charts and motivational pictures to encourage herself, and she started providing Uber rides in the family’s Model 3 once more. She even started getting into conversations with other Tesla owners at Superchargers during road trips.
Of course, it should be noted that it’s not really healthy to have someone’s motivation tied to a single consumer product. In later comments, the Tesla owner noted that he and his wife are aware of this, and they are determined to continue therapy to help her recovery further. That being said, it’s difficult to deny that it was the presence of a strange-looking vehicle that brought the Tesla owner’s spouse out of a severe downturn. Her current enthusiasm for the Cybertruck, if any, has allowed her to open up more to her therapist, which could hopefully expedite her healing.
At the end of the day, sometimes, one just needs to have something to look forward to. Even if that something is a massive all-electric pickup.
Read u/Jeriath27’s full post about his family’s Tesla Cybertruck story here.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a photo of himself standing with the Optimus production team inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, arms crossed amid workers in hard hats and safety vests. The image captures a pivotal industrial shift: the same facility space once dedicated to building Tesla’s flagship Model S sedan and Model X SUV is now home to the company’s humanoid robot manufacturing line.
Walking the Optimus production line in Fremont pic.twitter.com/ABS0tuRibW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2026
Tesla’s Fremont Factory, acquired in 2010 from the former NUMMI joint venture between Toyota and GM, has been the company’s original U.S. manufacturing hub since Model S production began in 2012.
The Model X followed soon thereafter. These premium vehicles offered lower annual volumes, recently around 30,000 combined, compared to the high-volume Model 3 and Model Y lines that continue around the site. Over their combined run, the S and X accounted for roughly 610,000 units.
In late January 2026, during Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Elon Musk announced the end of Model S and Model X production in Q2 2026. The final vehicles rolled off the line in early May. Rather than retooling for another vehicle, Tesla chose to convert the dedicated S/X assembly area into a dedicated Optimus Gen 3 production line.
Model 3 and Y manufacturing remains unaffected. Tesla’s official Fremont Factory page now lists Optimus alongside the 3 and Y as core products.
The conversion was executed with remarkable speed. After production stopped, crews dismantled the existing vehicle line and installed entirely new modular equipment—including lines sourced from Germany and dozens of sub-lines for actuators, batteries, and other components—in roughly four months.
Musk described the timeline as “insanely fast,” noting it would be unprecedented for any other manufacturer. Initial Optimus output is expected to ramp slowly due to the robot’s roughly 10,000 unique parts and the brand-new production processes involved. The Fremont line targets an eventual capacity of 1 million Optimus units per year.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Optimus Development Timeline
- August 19, 2021: Optimus (then called Tesla Bot) formally announced at Tesla’s first AI Day. A concept video showed a person in a suit demonstrating the vision for a general-purpose humanoid capable of dangerous, repetitive, or boring tasks using the same AI architecture as Full Self-Driving.
- 2022: Early prototypes displayed. At the second AI Day in September, semi-functional units demonstrated walking across a stage and basic arm movements
- 2023: September videos showed improved capabilities, including sorting colored blocks, precise limb awareness, and holding a Yoda pose.
- 2024-early 2025: Factory integration videos showed Optimus navigating workspaces and handling objects like battery cells.
- January 2026: Gen 3 mass-production activities began at Fremont, with reports of over 1,000 Gen 3 units already operating inside the factory for real-world learning and AI training
- April 2026: Musk confirms Optimus production on converted Fremont line would begin in late July or August 2026. The Gen 3 reveal, originally eyed for Q1, was pushed closer to production start. A second, much larger Optimus factory at Giga Texas is under construction, with volume production targeted for Summer 2027 and long-term capacity of 10 million units annually
- July 1, 2026: Musk’s on-site visit and team photo confirm the Optimus line is operational and the transition is actively progressing
Tesla positions Optimus as potentially its largest project ever, leveraging vertical integration, AI expertise, and car-like manufacturing know-how to scale humanoid robots first for its own factories and later for broader industrial and consumer use.
The Fremont conversion serves as a critical proving ground for this ambitious new chapter in Tesla’s already-rich history.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
