Investor's Corner
Tesla a ‘flagship holding’ despite Gigafactory unpredictability: Piper Sandler
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) is a “flagship holding” for Piper Sandler analyst Alexander Potter, who indicated the all-electric automaker’s stock is simply a must-have following the impressive delivery and production numbers the company reported late last week. Even with unpredictability and uncertainty regarding its upcoming Gigafactories, Tesla is still primed to be a big winner in the savvy EV sector moving forward, Potter said in a note.
Tesla reported 184,800 deliveries during Q1 2021, an impressive feat that peaked over Wall Street’s consensus for what was expected in the new year’s introductory quarter. Potter highlights this in a note to investors, where he indicated the Wall Street estimates were bested by Tesla’s real-life performance by over 10,000 units. Apparently avoiding bottlenecks that plagued other automakers with production delays, like the global semiconductor shortage, Tesla seemed to “sidestep” these issues in Q1, bringing together a quickly accelerating production push of its two mass-market vehicles to deliver impressive figures that no analyst could have predicted.
“Tesla apparently sidestepped the semiconductor shortages, battery bottlenecks, and shipping delays that plagued many other automakers during Q1,” Potter wrote, according to TheStreet. Still, the impressiveness of Tesla’s Q1 cannot completely be attributed to the company’s evident ability to defy all odds, even with supply shortages. The more impressive factor was the fact that Tesla was able to accomplish such a monumental quarter while navigating the absence of two of its vehicles: the Model S and the Model X, which are the subject of focus moving into Q2.
While the Model 3 and Model Y continue to gain popularity across the world, the Model S and Model X remain absent from Tesla’s current lineup of deliverable vehicles. Despite the company delivering a few thousand units of the flagship S and X vehicles thanks to inventory, the cars didn’t contribute very much. This is an expectation CEO Elon Musk highlighted several years ago during an Earnings Call, where he said the S and X were still produced for “sentimental reasons.”
Tesla’s Q1 ’21 Deliveries prove Elon Musk was right about the Model S and X in 2019
Despite the company’s inability to scrap its two luxury models, the Model S and Model X were the most recent focus of Tesla’s “refresh” project that spread across all four of its electric models over the past eight months. The Model 3 and Model Y underwent very minor cosmetic changes, while the Model S and Model X were basically overhauled and redesigned on the inside. Slight exterior changes were also spotted upon the vehicle’s first sightings at the Tesla Fremont Factory, but the interior design rehabilitation took center stage when Tesla released images during the Q4 2020 Earnings Call in late January.
Potter believes that S and X deliveries would have increased Tesla’s Q1 2021 delivery figures by around 15,000 units, giving Tesla a massive 200,000+ delivery quarter. The concerns from the Piper Sandler analyst do not have to do with the uncertainty regarding Model S and Model X deliveries to customers, but rather the unexpected delays that Gigafactory projects are experiencing. While Tesla has been extremely vocal regarding the first production dates of its upcoming manufacturing plants, Potter believes that uncertainty with Tesla’s other models could translate to some delays at Giga Texas and Giga Berlin, but it’s not making the analyst change his outlook on the electric automaker.
“We still think these new factories could cause margin pressure, delivery delays, and temporary multiple compression,” Potter said, “but we don’t want to overthink things: TSLA is a flagship holding, and we would own the shares.“
Tesla Giga Berlin is slated to begin production of the Model Y later this Summer, while Giga Texas timeframes remain uncertain at the present time. Tesla planned on Giga Texas being able to produce and deliver the first Cybertruck units by the end of 2021, but Musk recently told Joe Rogan that the company will accomplish this if they’re lucky.
“If we get lucky, we’ll be able to do a few deliveries toward the end of this year, but I expect volume production to be in 2022,” Musk said.
Alex Potter holds an average return of 34.2% and a nearly 5-star rating. He is ranked #328 out of over 7,400 analysts on TipRanks.com.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.
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
