Investor's Corner
Tesla’s planned layoffs to affect 3% to 3.5% of total workforce: “We grew a little too fast in some areas”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has set the record straight about the electric vehicle maker’s layoffs. Tesla’s efforts to optimize its workforce have been met with some confusion, partly due to Musk’s own updates about the matter. And with the layoffs now being reported across social media platforms such as LinkedIn, some Tesla employees have taken the legal route to complain about their termination.
Earlier this month, a leaked email from Musk revealed that the CEO was looking to cut off about 10% of the company’s workforce. Musk later clarified this statement, stating that the cuts would be implemented on salaried employees. The headcount for hourly employees would actually be increased. Musk also noted that Tesla would not be terminating employees that are working on key tasks such as vehicle and battery production.
During his virtual appearance at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday, Musk was asked to clarify Tesla’s headcount reduction plans. Musk explained that Tesla actually grew too fast in some areas, so some reduction is pertinent for now. However, considering that salaried workers only comprise about 1/3 of the company’s employees, Musk noted that his 10% job cut estimate would result in just about a 3% to 3.5% reduction in Tesla’s total headcount.
“Tesla is reducing the salaried workforce roughly 10% over the next probably three months or so. We expect to grow our hourly workforce, and I should be quite clear that we expect to grow our hourly workforce. But we grew very fast on the salaried side. And we grew a little too fast in some areas, and so it requires a reduction in the salaried workforce.
“We’re about two-thirds hourly and one-third salary. So I guess technically, a 10% reduction in the salaried workforce is only roughly a 3%, 3.5% reduction in total headcount,” Musk said.
This past weekend, two former Tesla employees filed a lawsuit against the company. According to the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Tesla had violated US labor laws when it initiated “mass layoffs’ in its workforce. As per the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, employers are required to provide 60 days of advance notice of a mass layoff or plant closure. This was reportedly not done in Tesla’s case.
Elon Musk, however, seemed to dismiss the lawsuit when asked about the topic at the Qatar Economic Forum. The CEO noted that the lawsuit “has no standing” and is of “minor consequence.” He added that anything Tesla-related typically gets a lot of attention, so even trivial legal efforts against the company are at times blown out of proportion.
“We did make an announcement on that. Let’s not read too much into a pre-emptive lawsuit that has no standing, that is a small lawsuit of minor consequence. Anything related to Tesla gets big headlines, whether it is, you know, a bicycle accident or something much more serious. It seems like anything related to Tesla gets a lot of clicks, whether it is trivial or significant.
“I would put that lawsuit you’re referring to in the trivial category. So a year from now, I think our headcount will be higher in both salary and obviously in hourly, but in the short term of the next few months, we expect to see, like I said, roughly a 10% reduction in salaried workforce, which is actually just really only a 3%, 3.5% reduction in total headcount and not super material,” Musk explained.
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Tesla Cybercab is coming to Asia this month as US service officially begins
Tesla Asia says Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai this month.
Tesla’s Cybercab is heading to Asia. The official Tesla Asia account posted on X Thursday, inviting Cybercab fans to “Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai.” The post went up within hours of Tesla’s own Cybercab milestone in Texas, where the company said Thursday it had begun offering rides in across Austin.
Exact dates and venues for the Asia tour haven’t been released yet, though Tesla Hong Kong replied to the announcement with “Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong soon,” while Tesla Japan’s response pointed fans to a sign up page for updates. Neither post mentions test rides or a service area, and nothing so far suggests Tesla is launching Robotaxi operations in any of the four cities. Based on how Tesla has run past Cybercab tours, in Europe in late 2024 and at US shopping centers that same December, the Asia stops are almost certainly static displays at Tesla stores or public venues as a means to stimulate buzz for its future driverless ride-hailing service in the big cities.
Cybercab will be on display in Asia this month!
Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai. pic.twitter.com/wGmmEastfX— Tesla Asia (@Tesla_Asia) September 4, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s only prior Cybercab appearance in the region, a booth at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai last November, which Teslarati covered at the time. At that event, Tesla’s regional general manager for Shanghai framed the car as evidence of the company’s broader mission, a message Tesla has since formalized in its Master Plan Part IV, which states that “autonomous vehicles have the capacity to dramatically improve the affordability, availability and safety of transportation while reducing pollution, particularly in our increasingly dense global cities.” The same document is where Tesla lays out its “sustainable abundance” framing for Cybercab and Optimus alike, describing the two as the hardware behind an AI driven push to cut the cost of transportation and labor at scale.
Whether Cybercab actually operates as a robotaxi anywhere in Asia remains an open question, considering China has already pushed an autonomous ride-hailing market that’s run on homegrown players like Baidu’s Apollo Go and Pony AI. For now, the four city tour reads as a marketing push timed to Austin’s momentum.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Tesla Cybercab launch catches NHTSA’s attention who wants to know more
Tesla Cybercab is coming to Asia this month as US service officially begins
