Tesla is working hard to make what Reuters called a fantasy into a reality. In reality, Tesla has already achieved the impossible several times.
Just after the Tesla Q2 2022 earnings call last Wednesday wrapped up, Reuters published this article about Tesla’s investors betting on “recovery and fantasy.”
The article said that Tesla is losing some of its specialness yet its valuation still projects that specialness. To me, the article seemed a bit on the negative side and was trying to match the tone of the headline. It seemed to imply that Tesla’s shareholders who believe in Elon Musk and the company are delusional.
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landside,
No escape from reality— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 21, 2022
The author didn’t say that, but the tone was there. However, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk handled the insult pretty well. And it was an insult not just to Tesla’s shareholders, but also to its hardworking employees.
Tesla’s employees are as revolutionary as Tesla itself is
Hiro Mizuno, a member of Tesla’s board of directors, shared his thoughts about the article on Twitter and he is, in my opinion, 100% on point. Hiro pointed out that it’s always those working hard to make the fantasy a reality who change the world.
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While someone call it a fantasy, some others are working hard to make it a reality.
It’s always the latter who change the world and will be enjoying the toast while the others bite the dust. https://t.co/nyt93cVORQ— HIRO MIZUNO (@hiromichimizuno) July 20, 2022
It’s almost never talked about but Elon Musk is always giving credit to Tesla’s employees. Even during the earnings call itself, Elon made a point to highlight Tesla’s employees.
“I think people will be amazed at what we’re able to show off on AI Day. So basically, there’s a tremendous amount to look forward to in the second half of this year. And I want to thank all of our employees and suppliers for their super hard work during these challenging times. Super appreciate it.”
Tesla has already achieved the impossible
Tesla has already achieved the impossible many times over. One notable achievement that resurfaced in my own Twitter feed was Tesla proving that it could produce 500,000 EVs in 2020.
I wrote about this in 2021 for CleanTechnica. For Tesla, 2020 was a year that seemed like the company was the lead actor on stage. It had four acts. The first act recapped the 2014 article published in Seeking Alpha that claimed Tesla selling 500,000 cars in 2020 was absurd.
The following two acts were results of the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. First, the newly opened Gigafactory Shanghai was closed down. Then once it opened up, the Fremont factory closed down.
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Despite all the challenges that 2020 presented for Tesla as well as the world, Tesla still met its goal.
Tesla is transforming ‘fantasy’ into reality
Tesla has already done the impossible, several times over. And all the while doing it, critics were there, mocking and criticizing every move of Elon Musk. It’s still doing this today.
And it seems to overlook the fact that Tesla has a history of achieving the unachievable. No one thought 6 years ago that EVs would be so popular. We have Tesla to thank for that.
Elon Musk is, in many respects, one of the biggest and most influential figures in modern-day artificial intelligence.
Given that Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI are all looked at in their respective fields as leaders to an extent, each of them has a heavy influence on the future of AI, even though two of them are not thought of, at face value, as AI companies.
Musk has grand expectations for what is to come with AI, not only as a form of assistance to make human lives easier, but to make humans multiplanetary and solve some of the biggest issues that face us today. But even he is astounded by AI’s pace of progress.
He believes that in two years, AI will be so mind-blowing it might be unrecognizable.
Given that AI from 2 years ago feels so old that it should be in a museum, then obviously AI 2 years from now will be mind-blowing https://t.co/TcsKZ8o8OE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2026
This progress can be seen in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most popular way people have shown AI’s progress, especially on social media, is through an incredibly arbitrary way of watching Will Smith eat spaghetti:
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The progression in AI of Will Smith eating spaghetti (2023 – 2026) pic.twitter.com/VDv82mB5gs
— internet hall of fame (@InternetH0F) February 10, 2026
This is a great way to show people how AI is improving, especially from a perspective that examines how it can manufacture images and video from prompts. AI is an incredibly complex concept, however, and it goes much deeper than Will Smith eating Italian food.
Musk’s most widely adopted method of AI is likely Tesla Full Self-Driving, which impacts millions of people as they utilize it to increase safety with their travel. Musk has routinely pushed incredibly aggressive timelines for self-driving, especially unsupervised.
Perhaps this perspective is why he feels that things will be solved in a timeframe that is much more aggressive than most of us would think. Regardless, the progress of AI is moving fast, and it seems that Musk’s expectations for it could be high.
But if it can actually achieve full-length motion pictures and even more realistic production value, it will be hard to distinguish between reality and AI very soon.
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Tesla just officially confirmed it has built its 10 millionth car, a major milestone for the company that started producing sustainable electric powertrains less than two decades ago.
In that time, Tesla has truly revolutionized the automotive industry, disrupting the idea of what a car should be, how it should be fueled, and how it truly impacts day-to-day life.
10 million vehicles produced globally.
Congrats to all Tesla teams! pic.twitter.com/JkcraR63bs— Tesla Manufacturing (@gigafactories) July 30, 2026
Tesla achieved this feat across four production facilities: the Fremont Factory in Fremont, California, Gigafactory Shanghai in China, Gigafactory Berlin in Germany, and Gigafactory Texas in Austin, Texas.
The 10 millionth vehicle was a Diamond Black Model Y.
Over the course of the past roughly 18 years, Tesla has evolved its lineup from a sporty sedan built on a Lotus body to a lineup of various body styles, performance metrics, and other characteristics that make each one unique.
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This is an incredible achievement for a company that is young compared to what it goes up against. When Tesla entered the automotive market, Ford, GM, and Stellantis widely dominated the playing field. Since then, Tesla has caused such a disruption that these three massive brands had to scramble to create EV projects of their own.
Despite their best efforts, they have not been able to match the prowess or the effectiveness of Tesla. They are all reliant on Tesla’s charging infrastructure, their software is inferior, and their self-driving projects are elementary in comparison.
Tesla felt its fair share of growing pains over the years as well. As recent at 2019, there were complaints about build quality, paint quality, and overall luxuriousness. These things have all been improved upon through the company’s maturity, and these strides in quality have led to this 10 million vehicle production achievement, something that other small-and-scrappy EV makers will hope to accomplish one day.
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.
Elon Musk has a crazy prediction about AI in two years
Tesla just built it 10 millionth car
