Investor's Corner
Tesla streamlined Model 3 battery pack production time by 96%, says Elon Musk
Tesla CEO Elon Musk stated during Wednesday’s Q1 2018 earnings call that the company has managed to reduce the time it takes to produce a Model 3 battery pack by 94%, from 7 hours to under 17 minutes. According to Musk, addressing the over-generalization of the Model 3’s design, as well as the excessive automation in Gigafactory, proved beneficial to the improvement in the manufacturing rate of the car’s battery packs.
“This still remains to be fixed, but in any case, overgeneralizing the design. For example, the current battery pack has a port for front drive units, which we then put a steel blanking plate on. So essentially, we punched a hole in it and put a blanking plate at the hole. And (we had to) do that for all rear drive unit cars, which is kinda crazy.
“It would have added cost, it would have added a manufacturing step, it would have added a failure mode; and four ports was unnecessary… That’s changed. So, the result was we had a rapid improvement in battery pack production, from taking 7 hrs to make a pack 3 weeks ago to under 17 minutes now. We’re able to also achieve a sustained rate of 3,000 vehicles a week, so we’re actually slightly ahead in battery module and pack production than expected.”
With the optimizations to the line in place, Musk revealed that Tesla is now producing 3,000 battery packs per week at the Nevada Gigafactory, with peak hours of production hitting a rate of 5,000 per week.
“In the last 24 hours at the Gigafactory, we managed to keep a sustained rate of over 3,000 packs per week. We actually reached a peak hour, extrapolated outward would be a rate of over 5,000 cars per week… Every hour is as good as its peak. If you can achieve it even once in an hour, then with continued refinement of the system, and improved operational time of the machinery, you can achieve that sustained rate with more refinement.”
Musk reiterated his previous statement about the company automating too much of its production line. According to Musk, Tesla “went too far and automated some pretty silly things,” including an incredibly complex “fluff machine” that ended up making production complicated.
“One of the things we’ve found is that there are some things that are very well suited to manual operations, and there are some things are very well suited to automated operations. The two should not be confused. We did go too far in the automation front, and automated some pretty silly things.
“One example would be, we have these fiberglass mats on top of the battery pack. They’re basically fluff. We tried to automate the placement and bonding of fluff to the top of the battery pack, which was ridiculous. ‘Flufferbot,’ which was really an incredibly difficult machine to make work. Machines are not good at picking up pieces of fluff. Hands are way better at doing that.
“So we had this super-complicated machine, using a vision system to try and put a piece of fluff on a battery pack. The line kept breaking down because Flufferbot would frequently fail to pick up the fluff, or put it in a random location. So, that was one of the silliest things we’ve found.”
The revelations about the improvements in the pace of Model 3 battery pack production are in line with Elon Musk’s recent statements about relying too much on automation. Musk mentioned this in an interview with Gayle King of CBS This Morning, and later in a tweet, where he coyly stated that humans are “underrated.”
Nevertheless, Tesla pointed to strategic automation as key in its Q1 Update Letter. The company, for one, credits the quality improvements in the Model 3 line to the automation that is involved in manufacturing the vehicles. Tesla expects the Model 3 line to be optimized once more after a planned 10-day shutdown in production during the second quarter. With a hiring ramp underway, Tesla is aiming to adjust overtime hours and staffing levels to meet its production goals even further.
Tesla’s first-quarter earnings for 2018 saw the electric car maker posting $3.4 billion in revenue and beating earnings estimates with a loss of $568 million. Losses per share was listed at -$3.35 per share, lower than Wall Street estimates of -$3.58 per share.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk handed Grok something no other AI company can get their hands on
Elon Musk says SpaceX will feed engineering data into Grok’s next model, avoiding restricted material.
Elon Musk said Tuesday that SpaceX will feed its internal engineering data into the next major training run for Grok, the AI model now folded into SpaceX following February’s merger. In a post on X, Musk wrote that SpaceX’s “massive corpus of world-class engineering data,” excluding anything restricted under U.S. arms export law, will be added during supplemental training of what he called the “2T run,” a reference to a roughly two trillion parameter model that would nearly double the parameters behind the latest Grok 4.5 that’s rolling out.
SpaceX’s massive corpus of world-class engineering data (excluding material blocked by ITAR) will be added during supplemental training of the 2T run.
This will dramatically improve Grok’s engineering capabilities. https://t.co/BbQEViFByn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 21, 2026
The excluded material that Musk is referring to would fall under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which restricts export of technical data tied to defense and space hardware. That likely rules out propulsion specifics for Merlin and Raptor engines along with guidance and control details for SpaceX’s launch vehicles, but leaves manufacturing knowledge, materials science, and Starlink hardware design on the table.
The announcement extends a pattern that has been building since SpaceX’s Nasdaq debut in June, when the company went public with Grok and xAI’s Colossus supercomputer folded into the pitch to investors.
Days after that listing, SpaceX closed its $60 billion all stock acquisition of coding startup Cursor, giving xAI both enterprise software distribution and a stream of real world developer data to train on. Grok 4.5 launched July 8 running partly on that Cursor training data, with Musk describing it as roughly comparable to Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 but faster and cheaper to run.
Feeding SpaceX’s own engineering data into the next AI model follows the same logic Musk has applied across xAI’s sister companies. Tesla supplies real world driving data and manufacturing expertise, X supplies conversational data, and now SpaceX supplies aerospace engineering data built up since 2002.
Musk did not give a release date for the upcoming AI model, referred to elsewhere as Grok 4.6. He has said the two trillion parameter run is in its final training phase and expected to wrap this week.
In a pointed message on X, Elon Musk warned that firms maintaining significant short positions in SpaceX over time face “very low” survival probability.
The statement comes amid post-IPO volatility for the rocket company, now trading under the ticker $SPCX.
The survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2026
Five weeks after what was described as the largest IPO in history, the stock had fallen roughly 30% from its peak above $2.6 trillion, briefly surpassing Microsoft and Amazon in market value. Short sellers celebrated gains of about $8.7 billion, but Musk’s reply underscores his long-term conviction.
The warning directly echoes a detailed bullish analysis arguing that Starship’s cost reductions could unlock a multi-trillion-dollar space economy. Projects ranging from solar power beamed from orbit and asteroid mining to orbital data centers and Mars terraforming were projected to create over $100 trillion in new market capitalization.
In this vision, SpaceX acts as the essential infrastructure provider, akin to AWS for cloud computing, capturing monopoly-like revenues from launches, crew transport, and data traffic across a rapidly expanding frontier.
This is far from the first time Musk has targeted short sellers. With Tesla, he has repeatedly framed persistent bears as destined for major losses. In July 2024, Musk declared that once Tesla achieves full autonomy and volume production of Optimus robots, “anyone still holding a short position will be obliterated. Even Gates,” referencing Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ reported short bets.
Elon Musk reveals what Tesla stock surge could do to Bill Gates
Earlier, in 2018, he taunted shorts that they had “about three weeks before their short position explodes,” a remark followed by sharp stock gains. Musk has also called short selling “value destroying” and once suggested it “should be illegal,” viewing it as betting against innovation and progress.
Critics often dismiss Musk’s optimism as hype, especially when near-term metrics like quarterly deliveries or stock fluctuations disappoint.
Yet his pattern remains consistent: framing short positions against his companies as fundamentally misjudging exponential technological leaps. For SpaceX shorts, the message is clear: betting against multi-planetary ambitions and the infrastructure monopoly they enable carries existential risk for the firms involved.
As Musk and supporters see it, the space economy’s upside dwarfs Earth-bound valuation models, making today’s dips temporary in a decades-long ascent.
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship Flight 13 aborted at Zero and Musk just told us what broke
Four Raptor engines failed to ignite at T-zero, forcing SpaceX to scrub Starship Flight 13 Thursday.
SpaceX scrubbed the Starship Flight 13 launch attempt Thursday evening at the last possible moment, after four of the Super Heavy booster’s 33 Raptor 3 engines failed to ignite during the startup sequence. The 90-minute window had opened at 6:45 p.m. EDT from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, and the countdown had proceeded without issue all day, with more than 11.5 million pounds of liquid methane and liquid oxygen being fully loaded into the rocket before the automated abort triggered. SpaceX’s launch directors posted on X, “Standing down from today’s flight test attempt,” and shut down the livestream shortly after.
Musk confirmed the root cause within hours. “Some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort,” he wrote on X. “To be confident of a good flight, 2 Raptors will be removed and replaced. Most probable launch timing is early next week.” SpaceX engineers began draining propellant tanks immediately and Booster 20 was rolled back to its hangar for inspection.
The timing adds a layer of significance that did not exist during any of the previous 12 Starship flights. This is the first time SpaceX has attempted to launch Starship since the company made its stock market debut in June, listing under ticker SPCX at $135 per share. Public investors are now watching every Starship outcome in real time, and a last-second abort carries more visibility than it would have six months ago.
Flight 13 was designed to be one of the most consequential tests in the program’s history. It was set to carry 20 Starlink V3 satellites, the first operational payload Starship has ever attempted to deploy. Six of those satellites carried external cameras to photograph Starship’s heat shield from the outside during flight, which would act as a self-inspection approach SpaceX has never attempted before. The mission also needed to complete a Raptor engine relight in space, a step SpaceX skipped on Flight 12 in May after losing an engine during ascent. That Flight 12 booster also flipped 90 degrees off course during its boostback burn when five engines failed to reignite.
SpaceX has not announced an official next launch date. Musk’s “early next week” window points to July 21 or 22 at the earliest, pending the engine swap and a return to the pad.
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Elon Musk handed Grok something no other AI company can get their hands on
