Investor's Corner
How Elon Musk’s biography led to a Tesla investor retiring at 43
In 2017, a Canadian accountant named Spencer was looking for something to watch on YouTube after cutting his cable, until he stumbled upon interviews with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Four years later, at the age of 43, he is retiring from his job because his investment in Tesla stock has solidified his finances for the future.
In what started as a routine evening on the couch, Spencer probably never could have imagined that stumbling across interviews on the world’s largest library of videos would lead to an exceptionally early retirement. Elon Musk’s mission always struck a chord with him, but that night, everything shifted.
“I have always been concerned with climate change,” Spencer said. “That night, I started watching YouTube and stumbled across Elon’s interviews. Then, I read the Ashlee Vance biography on Elon, and I watched other great Tesla related content creators. The rest is history.”
‘The Rest is History.”
Spencer is just one of many people who poured money into a small, relatively unknown electric car company called Tesla in 2017. It was a no-brainer. After doing his own personal research, he knew that it was the answer he had been looking for in terms of financial stability. “I began slowly building my position. The more I learned, the more I realized that Tesla was an extraordinary company and opportunity from an investment standpoint. It was something that could significantly change my life over the long term.”
And it has.
This morning I submitted my retirement notice to employer .. thx to @elonmusk and $TSLA I’m retiring at age 43 ..
— ?Tesla Army? (@TeslaArmy) January 4, 2021
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At just 43 years old, Spencer decided to e-mail his colleagues who work alongside him at a Victoria, British Columbia accounting firm, tendering his resignation due to his gains from his Tesla holdings. It wasn’t a surprise to Spencer’s co-workers that he had made a substantial amount of money because of his Tesla investments. It was a surprise to see a 43-year old finishing up his professional career at such a young age; none of the fellow accountants or executives expected him to leave.
“Most of the coworkers close to me knew what was happening with my situation,” he told Teslarati. “However, others were caught off guard when I informed them I’m going to retire at the end of January 2021 by e-mail. I’ve provided context on how and why I’m retiring to my bosses over several phone calls.”
Spencer’s e-mail to his colleagues detailed the tumultuous year of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But while many around the world lost their jobs or were forced to retreat and call their place of residence their office, Spencer was thriving financially due to his investments. He was relatively unphased even though he never experienced a layoff because most mornings, his portfolio was going up in value.
“2020 was an extraordinary year thanks to C19, but it was also an extraordinary year for me financially from an investing standpoint to the point where I have spent that last month or so considering retirement. The end result is my plan is to retire at the end of this month – January 2021,” he wrote to co-workers.
Tesla’s Stock Surge
Tesla stock surged over 700% in 2020. At the beginning of the year, shares were valued at a shade over $86. On New Year’s Eve, Tesla closed at $705.21.
Some investors got in earlier than others. While some took advantage of the company’s $17 initial public offering in June 2010, some didn’t get in until a few years later when Tesla launched the Model 3. Regardless, if you got in before January 2020 and held on, you’re probably pretty happy with your earnings. Where it goes from here, well, that lies in the eye of the beholder.
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Credit: Yahoo
Tesla is still among the most shorted companies on Wall Street, despite the surge in price in 2020, casting $38 billion in losses to those who have bet against it. Some bears have taken such a big hit that they have admitted defeat and lowered, or even sworn off, their short positions on the stock altogether. One of them is Kynikos Associates founder Jim Chanos, who stated that he had trimmed his short against the stock.
“It’s been painful, clearly, Chanos said in a recent interview with Bloomberg. “I’d say, ‘job well done so far,” Chanos said when confronted with the question on what he’d tell CEO Elon Musk.
Moving forward, Spencer plans to consider contract work with accounting firms, but most of his focus will lie on bettering himself physically and financially.
“After my retirement, my plan is to focus on my mental and physical health, as well as developing a strategy for managing my investment portfolio to generate income. Both are near-term areas of focus. Long-term, I’m not sure what the plan is yet,” he said. His days will probably be filled with joyrides in the Model 3 he purchased in 2018.
When I asked Spencer what he would advise anyone reading this article to do about TSLA stock, his answer was simple.
“I’m not a financial advisor, and everyone’s circumstances are different. But, my view is TSLA stock will likely be the most profitable stock investment of all-time by a long shot when it’s held long-term.”
Spencer operates the @TeslaArmy Twitter feed. Be sure to give him a follow!
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Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
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Cybertruck
Tesla Cybertruck production snaps back after ugly supplier fight
Cybertrucks are piling up again at Giga Texas after Tesla’s court win against a parts supplier.
Cybertruck production at Giga Texas is showing its first visible recovery since Tesla sued a supplier last month over withheld manufacturing tooling.
Aerial observer Joe Tegtmeyer flew over the Austin factory Wednesday morning and counted roughly 100 or more Cybertrucks filling the outbound lot, a sharp jump from the thin numbers seen in recent weeks. The flyover came a day after a judge granted Tesla a temporary restraining order against Angstrom Automotive Group, the parts supplier at the center of the dispute.
Tesla filed an emergency lawsuit in late July after Angstrom told the automaker it planned to close the Troy, Texas facility where Tesla’s die-cast tools, trim dies and other Cybertruck stamping equipment were housed. According to Tesla’s complaint, a shipment of 700 finished parts never left the building, and when Tesla sent representatives to retrieve its equipment, accompanied by law enforcement, they were turned away. Angstrom allegedly then asked for an extra $250,000 a week to keep operating, which Tesla’s filing described as holding its own property for ransom.
TESLA: U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Wolfe of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division granted Tesla a Temporary Restraining Order and Writ of Replevin in its dispute with Angstrom Automotive (Case No. 6:26-cv-00477).
The order authorizes… https://t.co/E1DKcQSxMn pic.twitter.com/LR8aAiV2Og
— S.E. Robinson, Jr. (@SERobinsonJr) August 5, 2026
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The restraining order gives Tesla immediate right of entry to Angstrom’s facility to recover the tooling. It is temporary, with a fuller hearing still to come, but the speed of Wednesday’s rebound suggests the Angstrom shortage was indeed the main bottleneck limiting Cybertruck output. Outbound lot counts are an imperfect measure of actual production, since finished trucks can sit for days before shipping, but a lot that full after a lean stretch is a meaningful signal.
Cybertruck output at Giga Texas has fluctuated all year as Tesla worked through supply issues and introduced new trims, including a cheaper Dual Motor AWD version that drew strong early demand.
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