Investor's Corner
Over 5.8k Tesla investors representing $4.1 billion are speaking out in support of Elon Musk
Thousands of retail Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) investors have banded together to express their support of CEO Elon Musk’s and his 2018 compensation plan, which was rescinded by a Delaware judge last week. The judge’s decision, which concluded a legal complaint started by a thrash metal drummer with nine Tesla shares, was met with polarizing reactions.
The Tesla investors’ goal was simple. They wanted to specifically affirm their vote of support for Musk’s 2018 compensation plan, whose targets have already been met, and they also requested that the Tesla Board of Directors design a new compensation plan for Musk that could take him back to 25% of the EV maker’s voting shares. The group also expressed their support to the idea of Tesla moving its state of incorporation from Delaware to Texas.
The initiative was admirable. What started as a collaborative effort on social media led by accounts such as Alexandra Merz (@TeslaBoomerMama) and Amy Steffens (@_sftahoe) ballooned to 5,821 Tesla shareholders representing 23,337,127 shares signing a letter addressed to the Tesla Board of Directors in just four days. The Tesla investors’ accumulated shares are substantial, as it corresponds to over $4 billion worth of shares as of Monday’s intraday.
?
Have never heard of a company able to mobilize
– in only 4 short days (including a weekend)
the commitment of
– 5,821 shareholders with
– 23,337,127 shares.
Retail investors showing their deep appreciation of @elonmusk and @Tesla's Board of Directors.
Now Austin bound. pic.twitter.com/s9Nr36Yn5m— Ale?andra Merz (@TeslaBoomerMama) February 5, 2024
The Tesla shareholders’ letter can be viewed below.
Shareholder Letter to Tesla’s Board of Directors
The shareholders (listed in the attachment)
- Support unequivocally that Tesla’s state of incorporation is changed from Delaware to Texas, where Tesla is already headquartered. Tesla staying incorporated in Delaware is untenable if Shareholder Votes will be rescinded.
- Would like the Board to explore options to affirm the shareholder vote in support of keeping the Tesla’s 2018 CEO Compensation Plan active and in place. Tesla shareholders don’t want their votes disenfranchised. Tesla shareholders elected the Tesla Board of Directors and were aware of the Board members’ relationship with Elon Musk. The shareholders chose them. The recent decision by Judge McCormick to rescind the 2018 CEO compensation plan is a dangerous precedent for all shareholders in American corporations.
- Would like the Board to design a new CEO Compensation Plan along the lines of the 2018 Plan. The new Plan tranches will require Tesla to achieve ambitious performance and market cap milestones.
- The performance milestones could include FSD reaching level 5 autonomy, Tesla Energy achieving annual kWh goals, the next generation EV platform reaching volume production, and Optimus in volume production. The market capitalization milestones could reflect each $500 billion- or $1 trillion-dollar increase in Tesla’s overall value, or whatever intermediate milestones make sense, as well as one for surpassing the combined value of Saudi Aramco and Apple. The new Plan’s tranches will vest shares to Mr. Musk in such a way as to ultimately grant him 25+ percent of voting shares. If Tesla incorporates in a State allowing super voting shares, we endorse this, too.
The shareholders filling out this form agree that their name and details will be disclosed to the Board of Directors of Tesla and may become public.
TESLA SHAREHOLDER LETTER:
?Final numbers! ?? over 5800 investors representing over 23,335,217 Million Shares. (Or 4.3 BILLION Dollars of shares at current market value).
?Letter is being mailed to Tesla Corporate Secretary. Final letter & Cover Letter and note re:… https://t.co/57KPRJIYSK pic.twitter.com/g3XQHjBHCK— Amy (@_SFTahoe) February 5, 2024
What is quite remarkable about the Tesla investors’ efforts is the fact that it included shareholders from across the spectrum. As per the group’s letter, the 5,821 Tesla shareholders comprise investors that hold anywhere from one TSLA share to thousands of TSLA shares. They also include investors who have been with the EV maker since 2010 and those who only bought shares last month. Overall, the retail investors’ efforts are quite admirable, and they show that Tesla still has a dedicated following among its shareholders until today.
Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to simon@teslarati.com to give us a heads up.
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.
Investor's Corner
Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors: Morgan Stanley
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.