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Tesla sued by JPMorgan over Musk’s 2018 ‘funding secured’ Tweet

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Tesla is being sued by JP Morgan Chase in a massive $162 million lawsuit over stock warrants linked to CEO Elon Musk’s infamous “funding secured” Tweet from 2018 when Musk hinted toward taking the company private at $420.

Court filings made public on Monday and reported by Barron’s showed JPMorgan Chase is alleging Tesla of branching a contract in regards to the repricing of warrants. Following Musk’s Tweet in 2018 that hinted he was thinking of taking Tesla private at $420 per share, the stock responded with volatility, which caused losses. JPMorgan Chase’s lawsuit outlines a potential payout of $162.2 million, plus interest, fees, and expenses.

JPMorgan filed the complaint in the Southern District of New York, and details a contract with Tesla where the automaker was legally obliged to deliver shares or cash if the stock price passed certain levels by a certain time. This is known as a “strike price.” Barron’s said this was a stock warrant transaction, which is similar to stock options contracts available to retail investors.

The lawsuit’s most critical point is that Tesla did not deliver the cash or shares. JPMorgan was forced to reprice the stock warrants after Musk Tweeted, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured. Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private.”

Musk’s Tweet resulted in a settlement with the SEC, which required the CEO to step down as Tesla’s Chairman, pay a $20 million penalty, appoint two new independent directors to the Tesla board, and “establish a new committee of independent directors and put in place additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk’s communications.”

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The Tweets spiked Tesla’s stock price, which, in turn, caused JPMorgan to readjust the value of the warrants. After Musk and Tesla confirmed a few weeks later that the stock would not be taken private, JPMorgan readjusted the value of the warrants once again. Tesla sold warrants to JPMorgan with provisions that protected both entities from potential volatility that could come from significant corporate transactions, according to JPMorgan. The provisions gave the banking firm the right to adjust and readjust the warrants in cases of significant announcements that could cause stock movement. JPMorgan said the provisions were put in to protect both parties from “exactly the type” of announcement that Musk Tweeted.

Tesla, however, did not take kindly to JPMorgan repricing the warrants and stated that the bank’s move was “unreasonably swift and represented an opportunistic attempt to take advantage of changes in volatility in Tesla’s stock,” according to a letter that was included in the filing.

Credit: Tobias Lindh/Youtube

JPMorgan did not readjust the strike price following the second modification, the filing said, as the warrants expired in June and July 2021. Tesla’s stock rose nearly 900% from the 2018 Tweet to the end of July 2021, most of the growth taking place during 2020, when TSLA shares rose over 700%. The prices were above the original and readjusted strike prices.

The lawsuit said that Tesla and the bank have agreed that the automaker should settle the undisputed number of shares earlier in 2021. However, Tesla is still uneasy with the fact JPMorgan readjusted the strike prices, but JPMorgan said that failure to settle the adjusted strike price could conclude with a default. JPMorgan’s suit said Tesla failed to deliver 228,775 shares, meaning the bank is stuck with an open hedge position that equals the shortfall. “Even though JPMorgan’s adjustments were appropriate and contractually required, Tesla has refused to settle at the contractual strike price and pay in full what it owes to JPMorgan,” the firm said in its complaint. “As a result, more than $162 million is immediately due and payable to JPMorgan by Tesla.”

The case, JPMorgan Chase Bank v. Tesla Inc., 21-cv-09441, is available to read here.

I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.

Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Elon Musk

SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch

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SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.

The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.

Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.

SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.

The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.

As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.

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Elon Musk

Tesla AI boss reveals how big Optimus is going to get

Tesla’s Optimus chief corrected himself on X, confirming a staggering 10 million robot production target.

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Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]

Tesla’s Optimus program has a new number attached to it, after Ashok Elluswamy, the executive who has run the humanoid robot program since June 2025, posted a three word correction on X Thursday, “Correction, 10 million robots.”

The line clarifies the long term annual capacity Tesla is building toward its planned second Optimus production line at Gigafactory Texas, a figure Musk has cited repeatedly since last year’s shareholder meeting.

The scale is worth noting, because ten million robots a year would mean Tesla building more units annually than most countries sell in new cars. Tesla has framed this as a second line, not the first. The buildout is happening in two phases: a roughly one million unit per year line inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, installed on the floor space vacated when Model S and Model X production ended earlier this year, and a much larger dedicated facility under construction at Giga Texas that broke ground on its first steel structure in May. That Texas facility is the one Elluswamy’s correction refers to, and is expected to reach volume production sometime in 2027.

Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress

Elluswamy took over Optimus from Milan Kovac last summer and has spent the months since talking up the program’s trajectory. Elon Musk has also floated the ten million figure at Tesla’s 2025 shareholder meeting.

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Ending Model S and Model X production to make room for the first Optimus line was one of the more consequential manufacturing decisions in the company’s recent history, retiring two flagship vehicles in favor of a robot that has yet to enter mass production. Musk has previously estimated per unit production costs at $20,000 to $25,000 once Tesla reaches a million units a year, though he hasn’t said what that cost looks like at ten times the volume.

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SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

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SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.

The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.

SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters

Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.

SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.

With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.

Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.

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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.

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