Tesla’s current Referral Program offers a variety of incentives for owners who wish to share the Tesla experience with their network of friends and acquaintances. Among these prizes is a free Model Y that’s granted quarterly to a lucky Tesla owner. But inasmuch as the program has been ongoing for some time now, accounts of Model Y raffle winners have been very rare.
Back in March, reports emerged that the first Tesla Model Y Referral Program winner has been drawn, and the lucky owner was from Taiwan. During the brief discussions of the raffle online, it was revealed that the Taiwan-based Tesla owner only had two referrals, which makes the win even more remarkable. And as it turned out, it appears that the next free Model Y winner will follow the same trend.
Tesla Model 3 owner-enthusiast Tesla Raj recently featured one of the recent winners of the electric car maker’s free Model Y raffle on his YouTube channel. The owners, Teresa and Mark, provided some interesting insights about what exactly happens when one wins a free Tesla Model Y. Needless to say, the experience was something truly noteworthy.
According to Mark, he and his wife had bought a Tesla Model 3 after their 13-year-old Hyundai Veracruz needed to be replaced. Being retired himself and having worked on software and hardware, Mark knew that cars were becoming more and more connected. Thus, the decision to purchase a Model 3 was made, since it was a vehicle that would likely last the couple for some time. Interestingly enough, this was not to be the case.
Mark and Teresa were casual Tesla owners, though they did get one referral credited to their account. And as luck would have it, they eventually received an email from the electric car maker informing them that they had won a free Model Y. Mark admitted that he was initially skeptical of the email, especially considering the prevalence of online scams today. Teresa was just as skeptical, though both decided to respond to the email just the same.
Needless to say, the email that the couple received was not a scam. It was real, and a free Model Y was indeed coming to the couple. Teresa and Mark exchanged calls and emails with Tesla, with a representative from the company asking the couple to sign some forms online. As indicated by the Tesla representative that reached out to the couple, the company would create a reservation number for the free Model Y on the back end so Teresa and Mark could avoid the $100 deposit. Interestingly enough, the couple was not asked to configure their free Model Y.
As noted by Mark in a conversation with the Tesla Raj host, Tesla pretty much threw every option available in the free all-electric crossover, such as the Full Self-Driving suite and the Performance Package. The company even gave the couple a Midnight Silver Model Y, which was the same color as their Model 3. That being said, Tesla sent over a Model Y with black interior to the couple, which is different from the white interior Teresa and Mark ordered for their Model 3. The delivery process of the free Model Y was seamless and touchless, and after some inspections of the vehicle, the couple received their free Model Y.
Mark and Teresa’s experience shows that Tesla’s Referral Program is definitely ongoing, and free vehicles are indeed making their way to lucky owners. That being said, those who end up winning free Model Ys in the future should expect to pay about $401.00 in their Tesla account online to cover various fees, so the crossover is not completely free. As noted by Mark, though, such an amount is minuscule considering the cost of the free vehicle. The couple’s experience also highlighted the insane demand for the company’s vehicles, as the Model 3 that the free Model Y replaced found a buyer just a day after it was posted for sale.
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Watch Tesla Raj’s feature on the free Model Y winners in the video below.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.
Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”
You will get flying cars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2026
The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.
However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package
But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.
In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:
“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?'”
However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.
Contrary to press reports, I’m not against flying cars. Just said it was important to consider both pros and cons.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2015
Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:
“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”
Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.
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 CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
