Lifestyle
Tesla leads the EV charge, but others are getting the credit
Tesla has an overwhelming amount of influence on the automotive sector, and for a company that has only been building cars for 12 years, that’s pretty impressive. Not only has the company shown that cars can be powered by batteries and still be cool, but it is changing other, more subtle details. For example, cars don’t need buttons and knobs for every function they hold. Other car companies are adopting minimalistic designs, simply because Tesla showed that they are just as, if not more, effective as all those annoying buttons that used to dominate car interiors.
In addition to those subtle details, the overall adoption of the EV sector by consumers can basically be attributed to Tesla’s mass appeal. While Elon Musk has always said that branding is dumb, Tesla has a great “brand.” Forever, people thought that EVs were these whining cars that could only go 80 miles before you’d have to plug it in again. But Tesla is different. Tesla has a mystique about it, a certain brand appeal. People look at $35,000 Teslas the same way they do a $200,000 Lamborghini.
But what might be more impressive about Tesla than its appeal to consumers is the fact that car companies that have been around for over 100 years are chasing after a 12-year-old car company run by a guy who loves video games, silly jokes, and is more interactive with followers than any other CEO on the planet.
The fact of the matter is, Tesla changed the game. While they might not have invented the first electric car, they made the idea better. While they may not be the first company to make a semi-autonomous car, they made the idea better. And while they may not have built the first battery that ever went into an EV, they made the idea better.
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Now, everyone is hopping on board. This is where I ask: Do you think that Volkswagen, GM, Ford, and others would be developing EV tech if Tesla never existed?
I don’t think so. I think this is where examining the influence on the automotive market as a whole that Tesla has had so far is worth noting. But when you have this influence, there come some negatives.
This week, Tesla news has been flooded by reviews and examples of the Full Self-Driving Beta. It’s been out for about a week and a half, and we’ve seen the self-driving tech in a variety of settings and environments. We all know that this is a rough draft of what will be released in a few months to more owners, and we know that there are going to be critiques and criticisms about what Tesla could have done differently.
However, there are already reviews, like the one from Consumer Reports, claiming that Tesla Autopilot is a “distant-second” to GM’s Super Cruise. Unbelievably, the Tesla community has come to expect that mainstream publications and journalism outlets will side with other companies. It is something that has not surprised anyone when it comes to Tesla and another carmaker.
Interestingly, Super Cruise was not widely talked about by media outlets until Tesla’s FSD Beta was released. Now, the idea that GM has this all-capable Super Cruise that is so much better than Autopilot is supposed to be accepted. If this was the case, why was nobody really mentioning Super Cruise before? All we heard about was Tesla Autopilot.
Another case of Tesla “leading the herd” and influencing other car companies, is batteries. When Tesla started talking about a million-mile battery a few months back, everyone outside the community was skeptical. Telling family and friends about their developments was like trying to convince them Santa Claus is real. They just weren’t buying it.
However, GM then said that they were closer to a million-mile battery than ever before. Did they outline their plan? No. Did they say where they were sourcing material from? No. They just said, “We have a battery. It’s better than Tesla’s.” That was that, and everyone outside the community bought it.
What does Tesla do? Has an entire day devoted to batteries and cell development. Showing the new 4680 cells, breaking down how it will be better but more affordable, and how it will be on par with gas car pricing was something to admire. However, after showing the cell, how they were building it, and outlining that it was already being produced right down the street from Fremont, people still didn’t believe it.
GM was all talk, and it was believable. Tesla showed it, and it was unbelievable.
GM watches Tesla go from “graveyard-bound” to inspiration in pursuit of million-mile battery
Media will go after what is familiar and side with the established and long-lasting carmakers before it will ever admit that what Tesla is doing is groundbreaking in every sense of the word. With FSD, we see that Tesla is head and shoulders above GM with Super Cruise. However, these MSM outlets continue to give GM credit, stating that Super Cruise is better than Autopilot, and it isn’t close.
I know that this is likely due to money. It usually has to do with that. But the fact is, Tesla made all of these topics relevant, and the company truly gets no credit. Tesla made EVs relevant, but other car companies are getting the hype, even if their tech doesn’t even exist yet. Tesla made battery cell development relevant, but other companies are getting the credit and the praise, even if they don’t have an EV in production. Tesla made self-driving cars a real possibility. While Waymo was around, GM’s Super Cruise is now being talked about all because Tesla released the FSD Beta.
The reality is, legacy automakers are becoming relevant off of Tesla’s name because they’re following whatever Tesla does. None of these car companies would have changed their strategies if Tesla didn’t exist. This is all proof that Tesla is the most powerful car company on the planet, and everyone is chasing them.
The influence is more than just consumers. It is about an industry as a whole, which is now being controlled by a company that was “graveyard bound,” according to a former GM executive. Now, GM, along with the rest of the automotive world, is chasing after the little guy.
I use this newsletter to share my thoughts on what is going on in the Tesla world. If you want to talk to me directly, you can email me or reach me on Twitter. I don’t bite, be sure to reach out!
A former Vancouver police sergeant with ALS accounts his journey to become a patient for Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain-computer interface technology.
“I’m texting you from my brain right now.” That was the first message Lee Marten sent after waking up from Neuralink surgery, five hours and one migraine after dozens of threads were stitched into his motor cortex.
Marten, a former Vancouver police sergeant, is one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain implant, and the 26th recipient overall. He tells his story in a first-person account published by Maclean’s.
Marten recounts how he was a healthy, athletic Vancouver police sergeant until April 2022 when symptoms of muscle twitching and balance loss, were followed by a bad fall that broke his leg. He would eventually be diagnosed with ALS in early 2025 at the age of 47. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that progressively destroys the motor neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, eventually taking away a patient’s ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. There’s no cure, and most patients live two to five years after diagnosis.
He describes the devastation of the diagnosis and how he began preparing for it while connecting with other young ALS patients through a WhatsApp group called Young Guns. Through that group he learned about a Neuralink clinical trial at Toronto Western Hospital and, after a roughly seven-month vetting process (physical assessments, psychiatric evaluation, a final interview with the Neuralink team), was accepted this past April as the trial’s 26th recipient and the first Canadian ALS patient to get the N1 implant. He recounts the May surgery in detail, including the robotic system that stitched 64 threads into his brain, and describes the app, Link, translating his neural signals into cursor control, which he was using within hours of waking up.
Marten walks through what daily use looks like, including weekly “brain training” exercises, a real-time neural-activity display, charging the implant via a beanie-mounted MagSafe charger, and using the implant for emailing, texting, social media, and gaming via a “Magic Box” that connects it to other devices. He also gives brief context on brain-computer interface history and quite candid about Musk, calling him “divisive” but saying he found him “easy to admire.
The piece closes on a heavier note, with Marten seeking to pursue medical assistance in dying as his symptoms progressed, noting that he’ll be able to communicate his final words to his family through Neuralink rather than facing a silent decline. He expresses hope the data from his case will help future ALS patients, even without a cure in his own lifetime.
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
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.
Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.
On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.
India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.
The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.
This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.
Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
Tesla Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms
