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
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
New drone footage shows Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory steel frame nearing completion at Giga Texas.
Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory at Gigafactory Texas is closing in on a finished steel frame, according to drone footage posted Thursday afternoon by longtime site observer Joe Tegtmeyer. In the video, Tegtmeyer said structural steel assembly is now about five column grids away from reaching the building’s north perimeter beam, putting the primary skeleton in its final stretch roughly six months after Tesla broke ground on the North Campus site in late March.
The Giga Texas Optimus Factory latest update … construction keeps moving fast!
Steel assembly is now only about 5 column grids from the north perimeter beam. Concrete is going in on the three upper floors, rebar is still being laid for more pours, and footing / grade-beam work… pic.twitter.com/qvFPvwnYzW
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 17, 2026
Tegtmeyer’s footage shows concrete already going in on three upper floors while crews continue laying rebar and pouring grade beam footings at ground level. That kind of parallel work, steel rising at one end of the site while concrete sets at the other, is a scheduling approach Tesla used at the original Giga Texas building and appears to be repeating here to save time before the plant’s targeted 2027 production start.
Teslarati has tracked the building’s progress since Tesla confirmed construction was officially underway in May, when the first steel structure went up on what was then bare, reclaimed land. The facility is part of a more than 5.2 million square foot expansion of Giga Texas’s North Campus that Tesla has said will eventually run nearly the length of the existing vehicle factory, over 4,000 feet, while sitting somewhat narrower. Musk has pegged the long term output target at 10 million Optimus units a year once the line is running at full capacity, a volume that would dwarf the one million unit pilot line Tesla is standing up separately at its Fremont, California factory.
Tesla Giga Texas to feature massive Optimus V4 production line
The Texas facility sits alongside another major buildout on the same campus. Terafab, the joint Tesla and SpaceX chip fabrication plant that will eventually supply the silicon running Optimus units in the field. Housing robot assembly and chip production on the same grounds is a deliberate supply chain decision, cutting down on the shipping and lead time that would otherwise sit between the two.
Tesla has not given an updated timeline beyond its previously stated goal of bringing high volume Optimus production online at the site in the summer of 2027. Fremont’s smaller pilot line began mass producing the current Gen 3 robot in January, with that plant expected to build tens of thousands of units this year primarily to generate the real world data Tesla needs to refine the robot’s software before Giga Texas ramps up. Six months of visible construction progress, tracked almost entirely through Tegtmeyer’s recurring drone flights, gives the clearest outside look yet at how seriously Tesla is treating that 2027 deadline.
Investor's Corner
Tesla and SpaceX take “Terafab” Trademark fight to Federal Court
Tesla and SpaceX sue a small Illinois firm after cease and desist letters over Terafab.
Tesla and SpaceX are asking a federal judge to rule that their planned Terafab chip factory does not infringe a small Illinois company’s trademark, a request that arrives only after months of quiet negotiation broke down this summer.
The dispute traces to May 18, when Tesla filed three U.S. trademark applications for “Terafab” and “Tesla Terafab,” covering semiconductor chips and related chip making services. TERA-print LLC, a nanotechnology company that has held a federal trademark for “Tera-Fab” since 2021, responded five days later with a cease and desist letter. According to the lawsuit, first reported by Reuters, TERA-print argued that Tesla and SpaceX’s use of “Terafab” would confuse consumers familiar with its own trademark, which covers a desktop photolithography printer sold to researchers for sensor and bioengineering work.
What stands out in the filing is the timing of TERA-print’s own paperwork. One day before sending that cease and desist letter, on May 22, TERA-print applied to expand its existing registration to cover semiconductor materials, silicon chips, nanoelectronic devices and AI design services, categories it had not previously claimed. Tesla and SpaceX call that filing opportunistic in their complaint, noting it arrived two months after Tesla’s public Terafab announcement and just days after Tesla’s own trademark applications went in.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
By June 10, TERA-print was threatening to sue for federal trademark infringement, false designation of origin and unfair competition, the complaint states. Rather than wait to be sued, Tesla, SpaceX and SpaceXAI met with TERA-print six separate times between June and August trying to resolve the dispute directly. Those talks collapsed, and the companies filed for declaratory judgment this week in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, asking a judge to find that “Terafab” does not infringe TERA-print’s mark before TERA-print can file a claim of its own.
TERA-print isn’t backing down. The company told PCMag it discussed a settlement with Tesla as recently as September 2 and feels misled by what it called Tesla’s professed interest in settling. Its CTO, Andrey Ivankin, said TERA-print holds a Defense Department contract to fabricate semiconductors and partially owns Mattiq Inc., an AI company built on TERA-print’s products, and that the company will vigorously defend its rights.
Tesla and SpaceX argue the overlap is superficial. Terafab is planned as a $16.8 billion complex spanning roughly 100 million square feet at the Grimes County site SpaceX confirmed last month, built to produce chips for Optimus robots, Tesla’s AI computing needs and SpaceX’s orbital data center ambitions, a scale and purpose the companies say no reasonable consumer would confuse with a tabletop lab printer. TERA-print’s product line has stayed focused on lithography tools for biological and sensor research since it registered its mark in 2021.
The trademark fight is the second legal dispute tied to the Terafab project in the past week, following a separate SpaceX suit aimed at keeping company records about the facility out of public view, as KBTX reported. Whether construction proceeds under the Terafab name now depends on a federal judge in Austin.
In a new interview on Wednesday, Tesla uber bull Ron Baron said that anyone looking to buy the company’s stock should do so as soon as they can.
Baron, founder and CEO of Baron Capital and one of Tesla’s most persistent institutional bulls, used a CNBC Squawk Box appearance on Wednesday to deliver a familiar message with fresh urgency: In his opinion, Tesla stock is a buy:
“The time to buy the stock is now. FSD is catching on, and it’s going to be bigger and bigger. 55% of new buyers are buying it (Teslas) with FSD. It’s going to be everywhere. It’s safer.”
The Baron Capital frontman’s case is built around Full Self-Driving. Tesla reported 1.48 million active FSD subscriptions in the second quarter, up 56 percent year over year, and company officials have said roughly 55 percent of new North American deliveries left with a subscription enabled.
Baron framed that attach rate as proof the product is moving from enthusiast extra to default expectation, and as a reason software, not just vehicle volume, should drive the next phase of value.
His conviction on Tesla shares is not theoretical, as Baron Capital made its first Tesla investment in 2014, after years of meetings that began around the 2010 IPO roadshow. The firm later built a large SpaceX position starting in 2017.
Ron Baron today in new interview on Tesla:
“The time to buy the stock is now. FSD is catching on, and it’s going to be bigger and bigger. 55% of new buyers are buying it (Teslas) with FSD. It’s going to be everywhere. It’s safer.” pic.twitter.com/Rv5PB0bVZ2
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) September 16, 2026
Baron said those Musk-led bets have generated about $30 billion of the $71 billion in profits Baron Capital has produced for clients. He put the firm’s current exposure at roughly $25 billion in SpaceX and $5 billion in Tesla. Personally, he described SpaceX as his largest holding, at about $5 billion, with about $1.5 billion in Tesla and additional Tesla exposure through the firm’s funds.
That concentration is also a statement of loyalty. Asked about talk of a SpaceX-Tesla combination, Baron said he had already walked Elon Musk through arguments for and against a deal, then declined to repeat them on air. His public position was simpler: “Whatever you decide is better is what I’m going to support,” he said to Musk.
Baron also said that he picked up the farewell edition of the Model S after Tesla decided to sunset the vehicle earlier this year, calling it his favorite car he’s ever driven.
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
Tesla and SpaceX take “Terafab” Trademark fight to Federal Court
