Investor's Corner
Tesla’s experience in electric cars emphasized anew after Mercedes EQC reveal
Earlier today, Tesla stock was given a Sell rating by Goldman Sachs, citing the arrival of competitors from established automakers. Some of these competitors are dubbed as “Tesla Killers,” such as the Jaguar I-PACE and the Mercedes-Benz EQC. The financial firm’s renewed Sell rating on Tesla appears to have affected the sentiment of some investors, resulting in TSLA stock ending the day down 4.21% at $288.95 per share.
Earlier today, the electric car industry also welcomed its latest vehicle from legacy automaker Mercedes-Benz. At an event in Stockholm, Sweden, Daimler AG Chief Executive Officer Dieter Zetsche unveiled the Mercedes-Benz EQC, an all-electric crossover SUV that symbolizes the company’s commitment to the upcoming electrification of the transport industry.
“There is no alternative to betting on electric cars, and we’re going all in. It is starting right now,” Zetsche said.
Mercedes-Benz tried hard with the EQC, with Zetsche stating that the vehicle will be profitable, and that it would “offer the best package” compared to rivals. The EQC also looks very much like a conventional Merc SUV, with its almost understated lines, its high ground clearance, and its tough stance. The EQC’s basic specs are quite decent, with two electric motors that produce 402 hp and 564 lb-ft of torque. The SUV can accelerate from 0-60 mph in 4.9 seconds and hit a top speed of around 112 mph. That being said, the Mercedes-Benz EQC’s range and production date ultimately prove that it won’t be so easy for legacy automakers to gain EV expertise that is comparable to Tesla’s.
The Mercedes-Benz EQC is equipped with an 80 kWh battery pack, which puts its size between the base Model X’s 75 kWh battery pack and the Jaguar I-PACE’s 90 kWh battery. Despite its generous battery size, the EQC’s estimated range is very conservative at around 200 miles per charge. Charging the vehicle from 10% to 80% is also estimated to take around 40 minutes. The EQC’s apparent lack of range has not gone unnoticed. Alex Roy, a veteran of the auto industry, for one, noted that the EQC’s range was a big “miss” for the established German automaker.
In a way, this could be attributed to Mercedes-Benz’s lack of experience in designing and building all-electric cars. And it’s not just Mercedes-Benz, either. Jaguar’s I-PACE is listed with a 240-mile range, but informal, real-world tests online have noted that the vehicle’s battery consumption is quite high. The same could be true for the EQC. It might have a big enough battery, but it could prove to be the electric equivalent of a gas guzzler.
This is something that Tesla has refined over the years. Elon Musk has opted to develop Tesla’s battery packs and even its software in-house, allowing the company to create vehicles that just work. In terms of range, Tesla’s cars usually come very close to their rated range, in some instances even exceeding it. Even the Model X 75D — one of Tesla’s largest, heaviest offerings — could go as far as 237 miles with a 75 kWh battery. Tesla’s progress in developing and building electric cars ultimately cannot be discounted, as Volkswagen AG, a prominent German automaker, was one of the investors willing to help fund Tesla’s attempted privatization.
Another notable detail from the Mercedes-Benz EQC’s unveiling that validated Tesla’s experience in building electric cars is the German-made SUV’s production timeline. Mercedes expects to start manufacturing the EQC sometime next year, with deliveries beginning in 2020. Compared to Tesla’s hyper-aggressive timetables, Mercedes-Benz’s timeline is very conservative, especially considering that the automaker is looking to build the EQC in some of its existing facilities.
A Tesla Model 3 being assembled.
There is very little doubt that Tesla is the company that ultimately made electric cars desirable, proving to consumers that battery-powered vehicles are actually realistic alternatives to fossil fuel-powered cars. Since starting the production of the Tesla Roadster, the company has gained a lot of experience, a lot of it coming from trial and error. Over the years, Tesla has refined its battery technology, to the point where the company is now attempting to hit a battery pack cost of $100 per kWh. Its 2170 cells that power the Model 3 are also proving to be impressive, with Detroit veteran Sandy Munro praising it as some of the finest batteries he has ever analyzed.
A central part of the Tesla Killer thesis is that competitors from established automakers can easily catch up and overtake the California-based company with vehicles that are far superior in quality and performance. If the range and estimated delivery date of the Mercedes-Benz EQC are any indication, it appears that the arrival of these competitors might be just a little bit too late. After all, by 2020, Tesla is planning to start the production of the next-generation Tesla Roadster, a supercar to end all supercars. The Tesla Model Y, a CUV expected to be even more popular than the Model 3, would likely be in production by then as well.
Watch the Mercedes-Benz EQC’s unveiling in the video below.
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.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
Tesla Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms
