Tesla Giga Berlin will have a battery cell production facility, and the question just comes down to when. Appropriately enough, when the company finds the help it needs to get the cell production portion of the facility underway, Tesla will start manufacturing batteries. The real shortcoming is the fact that the required talent isn’t available, and high rates of employee turnover could lead to delays in the company’s plans to produce cells in Germany.
Jefferies analyst Philippe Houchois asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Senior VP of Powertrain and Energy Engineering Drew Baglino what issues Tesla may encounter on its journey toward full-scale cell production at the future German plant.
“Will there be the battery capacity consistence with the amount of assembly volume you expect to come out of the — And if not, would you be able to source your battery requirements out of Europe? Or would you have to import batteries from outside Europe to ensure production in Berlin,” Houchois asked the two Tesla execs during the Q2 2020 Earnings Call.
Musk confirmed that Giga Berlin would have cell manufacturing that would handle the production load that comes out of the facility, but Drew Baglino gave more detail on what the delays could be. Hint: It has to do with a lack of available talent.
Baglino mostly added onto Musk’s comment, confirming that a cell production facility would be in Berlin eventually. Still, it depends on when the company can put together a sufficient battery manufacturing team at the new Gigafactory.
“Like the same goes in all areas of cell, supply chain, manufacturing materials, design, we are solving this problem, and we’re treating it like any other problem that we have solved. We will solve this problem, talented people to join us as we solve this problem,” Baglino said.
Once the workers get there, they need to stay. They can’t be in “the garden,” as Musk calls it.
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“My biggest concern for getting our talented people is just probably Berlin because the labor mobility in Europe is not as low. I would recommend changing this. Like somebody wants to leave and join another company,” Musk said. “Sometimes they have to spend six months on garden leave. It’s called garden, hanging out in the garden basically, and like this is not a good use of people’s time. I mean, if they want us to hang out on the garden, that’s fine, but they shouldn’t have to.”
Interestingly enough, workers leaving Tesla to join other companies is a relevant issue. Tesla has filed multiple lawsuits, most recently against fellow electric carmaker Rivian, that accused the company of poaching employees. Tesla also has an open case with China-based Xpeng.
But either way, Tesla needs the workforce, and manufacturing jobs for Giga Berlin are of high availability, according to the company’s Career page.
Earlier in the call, Musk and Baglino both talked about the need for manufacturing workers who would be willing to help the company improve production lines.
For a long time, Musk has stated that Tesla is looking for brilliant minds to help revolutionize the way the company manufactures vehicles. The CEO has said that too many smart people end up going into medicine or law, and improvements to manufacturing are needed as well.
Battery cell shortages were inhibiting Tesla from starting projects in other locations. One of those projects was the Tesla Semi, which Elon Musk indicated would begin a “volume production” push later this year.
The issue with producing the Semi beforehand was a shortage of battery cells. But now that the company has openly committed to building the commercial truck at Giga Texas, there is an indication that battery shortages are not an issue any longer.
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The cells are there, but the workers are not. Tesla will eventually build these cells in Germany. Still, there needs to be an accommodating team to handle the workload, especially considering half a million vehicles a year will be rolling off the production lines starting in July 2021.
SpaceX performed a secret test on a specific portion of Starship with its recent 13th test flight last week, CEO Elon Musk revealed.
Starship’s 13th test flight took place last Friday, and in many aspects, it was one of the most overwhelmingly successful launches in the project’s history.
All of the mission objectives were met without incident, both the Super Heavy Booster and Ship managed to perform safe splashdowns in the Gulf of America and the Indian Ocean, respectively, and the deployment of Starlink satellites came and went without any complications.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
However, there was more on the agenda for SpaceX with Flight 13. Musk revealed an internal test of the ship’s heat shield tiles, as the space exploration company wanted to push them to the limits after previous issues.
Many noticed that Starship’s initial launch seemed to be more accelerated than normal, and that was not a mistake. Musk revealed that SpaceX decided to give Flight 13 an intentionally aggressive acceleration rate in an effort to test how well the tiles would remain attached to the ship:
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This flight intentionally had much higher acceleration to test how well the heat shield tiles would remain attached at high dynamic pressure.
Test was successful.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
SpaceX had issues with some of the heat shield tiles remaining attached early on in the Starship program. The first six test flights presented some kind of anomaly with them, so the company’s big focus with them was to figure out a way to keep them intact through the duration of the flight.
Things truly improved as Flight 10 showed that ceramic tiles generally stayed attached to the ship far better due to refined attachment, as SpaceX utilized pins instead of adhesives. Flights 10 through 13 truly showed some clear progress with the heat shield tiles, and this latest test seems to be where some real progress was noticed, especially by Musk.
The 13th Starship launch last Friday was the second with Starship V3, SpaceX’s latest and greatest iteration of the spacecraft. Goals and ambitions are getting even grander as the project continues to progress. Musk has already hinted that SpaceX will likely try to catch Starship with Flight 14.
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Elon Musk
Tesla FSD takes owner on a 20,000+ mile joy ride
Tesla owner David Moss just pushed his intervention free FSD streak past 20,000 miles total.
Tesla Model 3 owner David Moss has spent the better part of eight months turning his vehicle into a rolling stress test for Full Self-Driving, and this week he pushed his single, continuous FSD streak past 20,000 miles without a human intervening.
Moss, a Tacoma, Washington resident who sells LiDAR scanning equipment for a living, first drew wide attention in December 2025 when he logged 10,000 consecutive miles on FSD v14.2. Days later he drove from the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, covering 2,732 miles in two days and 20 hours with zero disengagements, the first verified coast to coast autonomous drive in Tesla’s history. Tesla even featured the trip as an official customer story in March. That original streak eventually reached 12,961 miles across 30 states before ending in rural Wisconsin in January, when snow and single digit temperatures forced Moss to take over.
Tesla FSD successfully completes full coast-to-coast drive with zero interventions
He started over, and this run has gone further. In late May, Moss drove 3,760 miles across Canada with two companions, from Horseshoe Bay in Vancouver to a Tesla showroom in Halifax, again without a single intervention, a trip Tesla AI software VP Ashok Elluswamy publicly congratulated him for on X. In June, he pushed the same unbroken streak south, aiming to link the Canadian border to the Mexican border, and crossed 10,000 miles on Tesla’s newly added in car streak counter along the way, the first driver to do so since Tesla began showing confetti animations for the feature.
20,000 Mile Tesla FSD Screen Streak!
Special thank you to @DevinOlsenn, @scotsrule08, & @OwenSparks for helping co drive during all these fun adventures these last couple of months
Also thank you to @wholemars for always tracking me along the journey verifying it all with his… pic.twitter.com/CZ2yO6Ev0X
— David Moss (@DavidMoss) July 27, 2026
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It’s worth noting that every mile is logged through the FSD Database, a community run tracker built by Tesla influencer Omar Qazi, well known as @WholeMars on X, that pulls telemetry straight from the car and records disengagements down to a tenth of a mile. That verification is what separates Moss’s numbers from casual claims on social media.
The streak itself is a fairly recent addition to Tesla’s software. FSD v14.2 introduced a Self Driving Stats panel tracking the ratio of autonomous to manual miles, and v14.3.4 added the live streak counter in June, which resets the moment a driver brakes, wrenches the wheel or cancels navigation. Reaching 20,000 miles on that counter means a single Tesla drove itself through countless highways, city grids, construction zones and Supercharger stalls without a single reset.
Moss has said the goal was never to set a record for its own sake, but to show, mile by verified mile, what the software can already do.
Elon Musk told The Economist that artificial intelligence will likely surpass the combined intelligence of every human on Earth within about five years, and that humans may not remain in charge once that happens. In a wide-ranging interview with editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, recorded at Giga Texas for the outlet’s Insider series, Musk compared the widening gap between AI and human intelligence to the gap between humans and chimpanzees.
“It’s hard to imagine that the chimpanzee would be in charge,” he said, addressing what happens to human authority once AI moves far beyond us.
Elon Musk reiterates his most optimistic prediction yet with “UHI” forecast
Musk’s timeline stretches out from there. Five years for AI to out-think humanity combined, ten years before humans lose meaningful control, and by 2036, he says, money itself may stop mattering.
Musk notes that if robots and AI produce more goods and services than people could ever consume, currency loses its purpose. He told Beddoes that governments could respond with direct payments, what he called “universal high income,” a term he first used in an X post last August describing a future where “everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else.”
There will be universal high income (not merely basic income).
Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else.
Sustainable abundance.
-— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 24, 2025
He also floated a more surprising prediction that deflation, and not inflation, would become the bigger economic problem, since expanding the supply of goods and services faster than the money supply grows would push prices down rather than up.
None of this is new territory for Musk, who has spent years describing an “age of abundance” built on Optimus and autonomous vehicles. What’s notable is the timing. The interview landed the same week Tesla shares dropped roughly 19 percent following a second quarter earnings report that beat on revenue but missed badly on profit, and as SpaceX stock continues to slide from its post-IPO peak.
Musk’s own net worth has fallen close to $700 billion since mid-June, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, even as he describes a future where personal wealth stops being the point.
Musk did not dodge the risk side of the equation either. He put the odds of AI contributing to human extinction somewhere in the 10 to 20 percent range, then arrived at what he called his “philosophical conclusion” since the technology cannot realistically be stopped and the arguably better response is to keep building it and hope the outcome leans toward abundance rather than catastrophe. “I’ve gone from exhilaration to terror regarding AI,” he told Beddoes, “even intraday.”
Elon Musk reveals SpaceX performed secret Starship test on Flight 13
Tesla FSD takes owner on a 20,000+ mile joy ride
