Investor's Corner
Tesla’s mission is bearing fruit despite escalating attacks from critics
Elon Musk dubs Tesla as a company aiming to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable transportation and energy. Since the company started with the original Roadster, Tesla has courted as many dedicated critics as it does supporters. A “Tesla Death Watch” was even published by an online publication back in 2008 as the traditional auto industry waited on what appeared to be the inevitable fall of Tesla.
As history would show, such as thing never came to pass. The Model S was released, followed by the Model X, and now, the Model 3. While the rollout of each of these vehicles was all but problem-free, the electric cars eventually made it to market, and once they did, they were received very well by Tesla’s consumer base. Tesla has grown significantly since the days of the original Roadster and the first-generation Model S, with the company recently manufacturing 5,000 Model 3 in a week during the end of Q2 2018.
In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Tesla CEO Elon Musk stated that the Model 3 ramp was a “bet-the-company” situation, where the failure of the car would have resulted in the electric car company’s crash. During the same interview, Musk also noted that he believes the Model 3 ramp, which has left him with permanent mental scar tissue, is close to leaving production hell. With signs that the company is now attempting to sustain its capability to manufacture 6,000 Model 3 per week, such as more than 19,000 new VIN registrations during the first two weeks of July, Musk’s statements appear to be accurate.
The Tesla Model 3 Performance. [Credit: Tesla]
Despite these, Tesla has been met with continued criticism at every turn. A look at the company’s stock performance in July is indicative of just how divisive the company continues to be. Elon Musk has spent the last few months calling out what he believes is a bias in mainstream media about negative coverage on Tesla’s electric cars. This culminated in a period last May when the CEO openly clashed with journalists on Twitter after Musk suggested that he would start a website evaluating the credibility of news reporters, similar to how Yelp works with businesses. The aftermath of these clashes is still felt today, as proven by a New York Post article published last July 21 dubbing Musk as a complete “fraud.”
In social media, Tesla remains as divisive. Twitter alone is a platform where Tesla’s bulls and bears collide pretty much on an everyday basis. Since the departure of noted Tesla short-seller Montana Skeptic after Elon Musk allegedly called his boss to complain, efforts to undermine the company’s progress have escalated. Today, there is a group keeping the Burbank Airport, a lot used by Tesla to store its vehicles before delivering them to customers across the United States, under 24/7 surveillance. Latrilife, the person conducting the surveillance, claimed on Twitter that he has 350 employees and he deploys 2-person teams to document activity inside the airport lot. Critics of the company are under the impression that lots filled with Model 3 — the Burbank Airport being one of them — were proof that demand for the vehicle was decreasing and that customers are refusing delivery. The misinformation surrounding Tesla in social media has been so prevalent recently that even Vertical Research Group analyst Gordon L. Johnson ended up publishing an inaccurate note to clients about Tesla.
Amidst all this noise and the sensational headlines that Elon Musk triggers on Twitter, Tesla as a company has been quietly making progress in its goal to push the world closer to sustainability. Tesla Energy, a branch of the company that rarely makes the news, was lauded recently by Samoa for helping the island state reach its eventual goal of being powered 100% by renewable energy. During the 2018 Annual Shareholder Meeting, Elon Musk mentioned that another 1 GWh energy project would be announced in the near future. CTO JB Straubel also reaffirmed Tesla’s stance on the residential solar market, stating that the company is in no way stepping back from the residential energy industry.
Tesla’s vehicles are also starting to change the very perception of what cars can do. Jared Ewy, whose video of his family reacting to a surprise Model 3 became near-viral and attracted a Like from Elon Musk, noted in a blog post that he is in no way a “car guy.” Ewy wrote, however, that once he experienced a Tesla Model S, he knew that it was something different. That was why when the Model 3 became available; he opted to order the vehicle immediately. Professional auto journalists are giving Tesla’s vehicles their due as well, with the Model 3 Performance getting rave reviews from seasoned professionals. Among these is the Wall Street Journal‘s Dan Neil, who wrote a glowing review of the high-performance electric car (Neil eventually shut down his Twitter account amidst badgering from short-sellers and Tesla critics).
Even abroad, Tesla’s brand is becoming synonymous with forward-thinking companies that care about the future. In China, Tesla recently released its “Eagle Plan,” a role-playing program designed for children aged 5-12 that would enable kids to be familiar with the company’s products and sustainable energy solutions as a whole. According to information shared by Tesla owner @vincent13031925 on Twitter, the children’s program aims to educate and foster understanding of the company’s corporate mission, as well as its environmental protection significance. In South Australia, a plan is now underway to provide free solar panels and Powerwall 2 batteries to 50,000 low-income housing units as part of a virtual power plant, which could lower electricity bills in the region while providing backup power to the grid.
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.
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.
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Tesla admits to slow Model Y Robotaxi integration, but for a good reason
