Update: Elon Musk told Teslarati the expansion plans will accommodate Tesla Giga Texas’s “ecological paradise.” Headline and paragraphs have been revised and updated to reflect accuracy based on Musk’s details.
Ecological paradise plans from south portion of Giga Texas to river look great, however we must first get the factory financially on its feet
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 21, 2022
Tesla has revised its application for Giga Texas to reveal a potential 500,000 square foot expansion of the automaker’s electric vehicle production factory located outside of Austin. Tesla added 12 acres to the site’s limits of construction, while adding 522,720 feet of space to the limit. CEO Elon Musk told Teslarati the expansion will accommodate the automaker’s plans for an “ecological paradise” at the factory.
Teslarati discovered Tesla has officially filed a revised application with the City of Austin’s Housing and Planning Department on September 20. The City noted that “[Tesla] is proposing Revision to previously approved Site Plan.”
Credit: City of Austin
Upon inspection of the new filing and comparing it to the old filling, Tesla is proposing a change to the Giga Texas site plan by expanding the limits of construction. The acreage in the previous application was listed at 268. The new application lists it at 280.
Additionally, the square footage of the factory is set to expand by 500,000 square feet. The previous application lists the limits of square footage at 11,674,080. The revised application filed by Tesla yesterday pushes the square footage limit to 12,196,800.
Tesla’s original site plan for Gigafactory Texas (Credit: City of Austin) Tesla’s revised site plan for Gigafactory Texas (Credit: City of Austin)

Musk told Teslarati in a series of Tweets that the area from the South end of Giga Texas to the Colorado River “really will be next-level great & open to public!”
Area from south Giga to river really will be next-level great & open to public!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 21, 2022
Additionally, Musk told us the initial plans for a boardwalk are still a go for the long-term and will stretch to downtown Austin.
Long-term goal is a boardwalk with amenities that goes all the way to downtown Austin, so you can walk, bike or kayak
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 21, 2022
Tesla says Gigafactory Texas covers over 250 acres of land and has over 10,000,000 square feet of factory floor, so the applications both line up with the company’s description of the factory on its website.
Gigafactory Texas currently builds 250,000 vehicles annually, according to Tesla’s most recent Shareholder Deck. However, the factory opened earlier this year and is not fully ramped. A few days ago, Tesla announced that the factory had built its 10,000th Model Y. Eventually, Gigafactory Texas is expected to build upwards of 500,000 vehicles annually.
Tesla has plans to produce the Cybertruck at Gigafactory Texas sometime next year. The vehicle had its design finalized earlier this year, Musk said.
This filing follows several other Gigafactory Texas expansion projects, which Tesla has planned for in the past year. In late June, Tesla filed to expand General Assembly 2 and General Assembly 3 by 500,000 square feet. Additionally, Tesla filed in mid-July to build on a 68.11-acre plot adjacent to the factory. It was listed as a “Production Support Area.”
The most recent development took place in mid-August when Tesla’s application to build a massive battery energy storage system (BESS) project at Gigafactory Texas was approved. The project is listed as a 53.27-acre land plot that will house Tesla Megapacks to support the energy grid by storing excess energy produced by solar panels.
While Tesla did file for an expansion of acreage and square footage, it doesn’t mean that it will expand the factory in the near future. Tesla could be preparing to give itself more real estate to work with in the future, especially if it plans to add even more elements to the Giga Texas campus.
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Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX gets initial stock coverage from Tesla’s biggest bull
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
News
Tesla expands massive safety feature worldwide in latest update
Tesla has expanded the footprint of a massive safety feature worldwide with a recent Software Update labeled as 2026.20.6. The expansion of the “Blind Spot Warning While Parked” feature represents the more widespread availability of the feature, which aims to prevent “dooring.”
Dooring is when a driver or passenger opens a car door into the path of an oncoming road user, usually a cyclist or motorcyclist. It is among the most common types of cycling accidents, the League of American Bicyclists says.
For this reason, Tesla created a feature that warns occupants not to open the door because an object is approaching. The feature will sound a chime, and it will also delay the opening of the door to prevent an incident.
The release notes state (via Not a Tesla App):
“If you attempt to open a door while an approaching object is detected in your blind spot (for example, a bicyclist approaching from behind) a chime sounds, and your door will not open upon initial button press. Wait a short time and press the button a second time to override the warning.”
Tesla initially rolled out this feature back in 2024 with the Model 3 “Highland.” However, it remained with the Model 3 exclusively for over a year; that was until Tesla added it to the Cybertruck this past Spring.
Now, it is making its way to the new Model Y, 2021 and newer Model S, and 2021 or newer Model X.
The prevention of dooring incidents could eliminate many injuries to cyclists, especially in an urban setting. Dooring accounts for 10-20 percent of bike-related crashes in major cities, and over 17,000 dooring-related incidents were treated in the U.S. over the course of a decade. These usually involve fractures, contusions, and head trauma.