Investor's Corner
Deeper Tesla, Panasonic ties could lead to a Smart Home future
A growing partnership between Tesla and Panasonic on solar cell production and storage batteries may one day eliminate residential reliance on the power grid and provide the capacity to recharge electric cars each night. However, to secure this collaboration on solar cell and module production, Tesla’s proposed SolarCity acquisition must first be approved by shareholders on November 17, 2016.
In the meantime, Tesla and Panasonic have entered into a non-binding letter of intent under which they will begin collaborating on the manufacturing and production of photovoltaic (PV) cells and modules in Buffalo, New York. The Buffalo facility will become the largest solar panel factory in North America, with expectations to employ 1,460 workers and produce up to 10,000 panels per day.
A blog post on Tesla’s website acknowledged that the continued partnership with Panasonic is an important step in creating fully-integrated energy products for businesses, homeowners, and utilities and furthers Tesla’s mission toward a sustainable energy future.
The Relationship between Tesla and Panasonic
The October 16, 2016 announcement confirmed that this newest collaboration extends the established relationship between Tesla and Panasonic, which includes the production of electric vehicle and grid storage battery cells at Tesla’s Gigafactory outside Sparks, Nevada. The $5 billion Gigafactory will produce batteries for the Model 3 electric car and energy storage products for home and utilities.
“We expect that the collaboration talks will lead to growth of the Tesla and Panasonic relationship,” said Shuuji Okayama, vice president of Panasonic’s Eco Solutions unit.
Battery cell production will begin by late 2016 and is expected to reach full capacity by 2018, producing more lithium ion batteries annually than were produced worldwide in 2013. In cooperation with Panasonic and other strategic partners, the Gigafactory will produce batteries that have the capacity to drive down the per kilowatt hour (kWh) cost of a battery pack by more than 30 percent. That anticipated cost drop is crucial, as current battery costs are untenable.
Panasonic plans to begin PV cell and module production at the Buffalo facility in 2017, and Tesla intends to provide a long-term purchase commitment for those cells from Panasonic. The Tesla/ Panasonic collaboration could mean that energy from solar panels will be pumped into home storage batteries. No longer would residential home solar systems follow the traditional model of selling back to utilities.
Panasonic’s Future Home
Panasonic demonstrates a ‘PanoHome’ smart home in Malaysia [Source: Panasonic]
The proposed Tesla/ Panasonic collaboration would shift Panasonic’s historic focus from consumer electronics products and onto housing, automotive information systems, and vehicle batteries, which “would be a win” for Panasonic, according to Bloomberg. Panasonic’s transition to the home electric market began in 2009 with its Tokyo Future Home, which features the latest environmental technologies and a few prototypes. The house is designed to aid natural ventilation and cut down on air conditioning. The walls of the house are lined with a thin and efficient insulator that cuts down on heating and cooling costs. LED lights, which use much less power than incandescent bulbs and last longer than current fluorescent models, are sensor-controlled. Extra generated electricity is stored in a prototype accumulator battery of lithium ion cells for later use. The lights, power, heating, and other apps are controlled in a high-tech in-house network with living room TV at the center.
The aim of Panasonic’s energy-saving house is to be carbon neutral in energy usage.
Tesla’s Smart House Could Utilize Panasonic’s Technology
Tesla is currently developing advanced systems that adapt to the needs of the environment with the goal is to bring top quality affordable systems that provide energy efficiency, quality of life, and home security.
Already, smart home system are able to cut electric energy spending by 50%, or in some cases go off-grid using Tesla batteries combined with solar. Lights, air conditioning, and all other appliances are automatically managed, turning on and off, depending on the time of day, temperature, motion sensors, door and window detectors, and electricity rates. Fingerprint scanner and pin lock, video surveillance, night vision camera, motion sensors, SMS alarms, fire and flood sensors are accessed through a phone.
In 2014, Panasonic opened a smart city near Tokyo that is designed to drastically cut CO2 emissions by 70%, reaching to 1990 levels. It will attempt to reduce water usage by 30 percent and achieve 30 percent renewable energy usage. Called the Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town (SST), the subdivision southwest of Tokyo focuses on solar power and other environmentally friendly technologies.
Together, Tesla and Panasonic may be able to ground ambitious plans for solar-powered systems that charge smart homes and electric cars and make decentralized renewable energy systems that power homes and car a practical reality. “We are excited to expand our partnership with Panasonic as we move towards a combined Tesla and SolarCity,” JB Straubel, Tesla’s chief technical officer and co-founder, said in a statement. “By working together on solar, we will be able to accelerate production of high-efficiency, extremely reliable solar cells and modules at the best cost.”
The Role of the Projected SolarCity Acquisition
The Tesla/ Panasonic collaboration moving forward is contingent on Tesla’s acquisition of SolarCity, but shareholders must approve the move. Tesla’s bid to acquire SolarCity has been fraught with corporate governance issues because the boards of both companies are deeply intertwined.
Tesla co-founder Elon Musk’s effort to unite Tesla and SolarCity has been under close scrutiny, given six of the seven directors on Tesla’s board have SolarCity ties and SolarCity’s CEO, Lyndon Rive, is Musk’s first cousin.
SolarCity, among the top installers of residential rooftop solar panels in the U.S., acquired solar manufacturer Silevo in 2014. The transaction gave SolarCity the factory in Buffalo where Panasonic will begin photovoltaic cell and module production. If the SolarCity acquisition is successful, Tesla will use the cells and modules in a solar energy system that will work seamlessly with Powerwall and Powerpack, Tesla’s energy storage products. With the aid of installation, sales, and financing capabilities from SolarCity, Tesla will bring an integrated sustainable energy solution to residential, commercial, and grid-scale customers.
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.
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