Lifestyle
Tesla on Mars: A vision of an all-electric infrastructure on the Red Planet
The words Elon Musk and Mars find themselves in the same sentence frequently, and for good reason. After all, why would Musk just be content merely working on the problems of Earth knowing full well that it would only take one extinction-level event to wipe it all out? If we manage to avoid all major asteroids, the Sun is still going to expand and burn us up in about 5 billion years, so we should probably practice living somewhere else in the meantime. Or so goes the argument. [For what it’s worth, I don’t need the existential argument to want to colonize other planets.]
SpaceX and Musk have big plans to shuttle the first long-term residents of Mars to their new regolith-covered home. But in the meantime, Musk is also running an all-electric car company that’s expanding by the minute and keeps selling more and more cars. Tesla and SpaceX have already seen some relationship crossover, and two places particularly stand out: Musk’s cherry red Roadster sent into space by the maiden launch of Falcon Heavy, complete with Starman as its passenger; and the upcoming SpaceX thruster package that will be an option on the next generation Roadster.
Now, imagine if that relationship were expanded to a colony-level scale on Mars…
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The year is 2050, and you’ve caught a seat on the last cargo ship bound for Mars full of red planet editions (rpe) of Models S, 3, X, and Y on their way for delivery to Colony Bravo. This is one of the last shipments to come from Earth before the Terafactory finishes construction and begins manufacturing on site. The company’s production lines were retooled to build the vehicles to work without air or air pressure and under extreme temperatures and high levels of UV radiation, along with a few other things to help traverse the planet’s surface better. However, skipping the satellite clean room procedures will be a welcome change for Tesla as it’s just one less thing their factory has to comply with to meet planetary protection regulations.
You’re on your way to visit your niece and nephew who were among the first humans to be born on Mars. Since the journey and stay on the planet will be long, you’ve taken up a contract job repairing Tesla tiles on habitation modules. That’s how you scored this economy class flight and can finally afford to see your brother for the first time since he and his wife left Earth for an Autopilot programming job at Tesla’s Gale Crater headquarters a few years ago.
Your brother picks you up in his Roadster (rpe). He tells you a bit about the work he’s doing training Tesla’s neural net to map out the red planet as you drive along and take in the sights. The mapping has been very useful to the researchers on Mars for route and site planning. Licensing deals are now in the works with relocation companies to help the next wave of colonists pick out prime real estate. One of the groups is going to set up the first terraforming projects using some type of silicon aerogel.
After arriving at your brother’s house, you finally meet your niece and nephew and the team of doctors monitoring their development. It seems a little invasive to have medical people in and out of their personal space so frequently, but your brother’s wife swears it’s become normal for them. You take note that the family’s habitat has both a top dome with Tesla tiles for electricity and an underground residence that’s connected to the larger city infrastructure via tunneled highways. A couple of them run on Hyper-T technology, Tesla’s Martian-modified version of the Earth-based Hyperloop, and the oldest tunnels were put in place by The Boring Company; however, several other digging and construction companies have since moved in, and Boring decided to just license its tech on Mars so it could focus on all the Earth projects it was busy with.
You get a quick tour of your brother’s local community and see that large facilities and shopping centers are also underground, but most garden pods are open to the surface with similar top domes to what your brother has, albeit much taller. You pass a battery storage center full of Tesla Megapacks (rpe) that are connected to solar panels at the surface.
Your brother next takes you to the lodging facility that Tesla contracted for you. According to the area’s website, you’re staying in a modified Tesla Semi (rpe) that’s been converted into a type of RV. Since the big rigs were already climate controlled and pressurized for construction work throughout the planet, the retro fits were pretty cheap and give newcomers affordable housing while they settle into their new lives and contract one of the digging companies to bore out a residence.
On the way to your lodging, your brother sees a geologically interesting patch of regolith and wants to grab a few bits for his rock collection. Using the Roadster’s split-chamber function, an airlock is formed around the driver’s seat after a clear divider goes up between the two of you and seals into place. He zips his walkaround suit up to the atmospheric helmet stored under his seat and goes outside for a bit.
After he comes back inside, he remembers that he didn’t offer to feed you lunch at his house and asks if you want to check out one of the local Supercharger stations where there’s a nice retro-themed restaurant. You don’t have to report to Tesla until tomorrow, so you’re up for it. Once there, you enter a car-sized airlock before moving into the charging area. Your brother mentions some things about how the Superchargers work there and how they need a pressurized environment like this one, prompting you to look upward. Somehow you missed the giant bubble encompassing the whole facility.
You both exit the Roadster and start heading towards Maye’s Diner a few hundred feet away. There’s an arcade in a building next door and before you ask about it, your brother tells you it was his favorite place to go when he first moved to Mars. It has all the old Teslatari classics, but the real draw is the virtual reality (VR) games from Tesla’s Full-Self Driving (FSD) launch.
You remember the cool looking sunglasses that were sent to customers who’d purchased FSD that turned out to be VR headsets with games and experiences integrated with the Autopilot. Game obstacles were mapped from the actual roads as the cars were driving. Your brother reminds you that’s what inspired him to move to the red planet – the Total Recall VR experience that came pre-loaded in his Model S. The two of you then grab a bite to eat at Maye’s and head out.
Once at your RV habitat, you watch the local news streamed from your included Starlink-M Internet plan, and then notice you have mail already. It’s just marketing, but you read it anyway, kind of like you would read flyers for tourist attractions on vacation. The ad says Amazon Red has a new members deal for Earth classic deliveries. “A taste of home!” it says, along with explaining how the company makes deliveries to Mars every two weeks, regardless of orbital synchronization, and that all products are certified sterile by the Planetary Protection Food & Drug Agency. You wonder if the food items need to be reconstituted but then decide you’ve had enough information for one day and head to bed.
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So, do you think Tesla will have a big presence on Mars once Musk et al. get there??
Elon Musk
Elon Musk talks Tesla Roadster’s future
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster as Tesla’s last manually driven car, with a debut coming soon.
During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Elon Musk made a brief but notable comment about the long-awaited next generation Roadster while describing Tesla’s future vehicle lineup. “Long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he said. “Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo.”
That single statement is the entire Roadster update from yesterday’s call, and while it represents another timeline shift, it comes as no surprise with Tesla heads-down-at-work on the mass rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the industrial scale production of the humanoid Optimus.
The fact that Musk specifically framed the Roadster as the last manually driven Tesla is significant on its own. As the rest of the lineup moves toward full autonomy, the Roadster becomes something rare in the Tesla-sphere by keeping the driver in control. Driving enthusiasts who buy a $200,000 supercar are not doing so to be passengers. They want the physical connection to the road, the feel of acceleration under their own input, and the experience of controlling something with that level of performance. FSD, however capable it becomes, removes that entirely. The Roadster signals that Tesla understands this distinction and is building a car specifically for the people who consider driving itself the point.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
The specs for the Roadster Musk has teased over the years are genuinely unlike anything in production. The base model targets 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and up to 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery. The optional SpaceX package takes it further, rumored to add roughly ten cold gas thrusters operating at 10,000 psi, borrowed directly from Falcon 9 rocket technology. With thrusters, Musk has claimed 0 to 60 mph in as little as 1.1 seconds. In a 2021 Joe Rogan interview he went further, stating “I want it to hover. We got to figure out how to make it hover without killing people.” Tesla filed a patent for ground effect technology in August 2025, suggesting the hover concept has not been abandoned. The starting price remains $200,000, with the Founders Series requiring a $250,000 full deposit. Some reservation holders placed those deposits in 2017 and are approaching a full decade of waiting.
With production now targeted for 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, the Roadster remains Tesla’s most audacious promise and its longest-running delay. But if what Musk is testing lives up to even half of what he has described, the demo alone should be worth waiting for.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster unveiling could be done “maybe in a month or so.”
He said it should be an extraordinary unveiling event. pic.twitter.com/6V9P7zmvEm
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Elon Musk
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
SpaceX has secured an option to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion ahead of its historic IPO.
SpaceX announced today it has struck a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, securing the option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, while committing $10 billion for joint development work in the interim. The announcement described the partnership as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” and comes just days after Cursor was separately reported to be raising $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion.
The move makes strategic sense given where each company currently stands. Cursor currently pays retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI to the same companies competing directly against it with Claude Code and Codex. That means every dollar of revenue Cursor earns partially funds its own competition. With SpaceX bringing computational infrastructure to the Cursor platform, that could reduce Cursor’s dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude AI as its providers. Access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, with compute equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 chips, gives Cursor the infrastructure to run and train its own models at a scale it could never afford independently. That one change restructures the entire unit economics of the business.
Elon Musk teases crazy outlook for xAI against its competitors
Cursor’s $2 billion in annualized revenue and enterprise reach across more than half of Fortune 500 companies gives SpaceX something its xAI subsidiary currently lacks, which is a proven, fast-growing software business with real enterprise distribution.
For Cursor, SpaceX’s $10 billion in joint development funding is transformational. Cursor raised $3.3 billion across all of 2025 to reach that $2 billion in revenue. A single $10 billion commitment from SpaceX, even as a development payment rather than an acquisition, dwarfs everything Cursor has raised in its entire existence. That capital accelerates product development, enterprise sales infrastructure, and proprietary model training simultaneously.
The timing is deliberate. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1, 2026, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation, in what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is expected to begin its roadshow the week of June 8, with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley serving as underwriters. Adding Cursor to the portfolio before that roadshow gives IPO investors a concrete enterprise software revenue story to price in, alongside rockets and satellite internet.
The deal also addresses a weakness that became visible after February’s xAI merger. Several xAI co-founders departed following that acquisition, and SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, signaling where its AI talent strategy was heading. Cursor, for its part, faces a pricing disadvantage competing against Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Whether SpaceX exercises the full acquisition option before its IPO or after remains the open question. Either way, this deal reshapes what investors will be buying into when SpaceX goes public.
Tesla Summon got insanely good in FSD v14.3.2 — Navigation? Not so much
Tesla plans to resolve its angriest bunch of owners: here’s how
