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Tesla’s Elon Musk strikes diplomatic note on climate change, oil and gas in podcast interview
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been outspoken on many issues over the years, and as the leader of the most successful electric car company in the world, it’s not surprising when his comments are aimed at skeptics of climate change and promoters of oil and gas industry expansions. That said, Musk is also quite aware of the nuances involved with industry that make things less binary than green energy advocates often frame them. In a recent podcast hosted by Kara Swisher called Sway, the serial entrepreneur took a more diplomatic tone than usual when discussing our planet’s future, fossil fuels, and the people involved in their production.
Swisher’s interview style is straightforward, and her opinions on matters under discussion are barely veiled. After a rocky start that prompted Musk to become a bit combative in his replies (“Sell your stock, I don’t care. What’s the point of this podcast?”), their discussion made its way to the emerging climate-focused market and steps being taken by governments both in the US and around the world. “I think these are all indications that the end of fossil fuel vehicle is nigh,” Musk replied in reference to his thoughts on California Governor Gavin Newsom’s latest executive order banning the sale of new fossil fuel vehicles by 2035.
Building further on that topic, the Tesla CEO also offered less-dire thoughts about where Earth is headed if the transition to sustainability is hindered. “I do not think this is actually the end of the world. I just think things get riskier,” Musk said after referencing the unprecedented growth of CO2 ppm currently in the atmosphere. “We need to think in terms that are not super binary… The actions that we take change the probability that the future will be good.” While his comments were somewhat positive, he still kept a realistic focus. “If you think of how civilizations have developed, we’ve put ourselves right on the edge of the water. If that water level rises even a little bit, you’ve got major problems.”
In yet another unusual diplomatic stroke, Musk also had sympathetic words for people who’ve worked in the oil and gas industry as a career. “Honestly, I feel a bit bad about hating on people in the oil and gas industry,” he admitted. “For a lot of people in the oil and gas industry, especially that are on the older side, they kind of built their companies and did their work before it was clear this was a serious issue… And now…people are kind of making them out to be villains when for the longest time they were just working hard to support the economy and didn’t really know it was gonna be all that bad.”
Swisher pointed out that it was odd for Musk to speak on behalf of the industry he’s been so tough on in the past, but Musk reminded her that his foray into electric cars was more about running out of oil vs. the dangers of burning it and releasing the CO2 into the atmosphere. In his early years, the Tesla chief wasn’t aware of the environmental impact of fossil fuels as much as understanding that running out of them would bring the collapse of civilization.
Musk’s diplomacy then made it all the way to the White House. “Arguably, he’s been as supportive as he can be on the electric car front, recognizing that a massive part of the Republican support is coming from oil and gas,” he noted in reference to US President Donald Trump after Swisher inquired about his political positions in the upcoming elections. After a further challenge from the podcast host over policies taken up by political parties, the CEO refrained from taking a hard-and-fast position. “If you’ve got a two-party system, then the problematic issues are gonna kind of fall somewhat randomly into one party or the other. Like, it’s not clear to me that there’s a cohesive set of reasoning why these things are in one party vs. another. They seem semi-random.”
The Sway episode touched on nearly every topic Musk is involved in – artificial intelligence, Neuralink, and SpaceX included. There was one other issue, though, that he had not-so-diplomatic words to offer. “The press coverage of [Battery Day] was sad. Most of the press takeaway was a sad reflection of their understanding, really,” he lamented. “I’m also not trying to convince people that much. The results will speak for themselves… We have had cars driving with those cells since May.”
You can listen to the full Sway podcast interview with Swisher and Musk here.
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS –Â $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues –Â $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow –Â $1.444 billion
- Profit –Â $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
