News
Tesla thrown under the bus in dinner conversation with Donald Trump
Tesla has grown much over the years, as evidenced by the domination of the Model 3 in the premium sedan segment and the rise of factories like Giga Shanghai. Yet, at the same time, the level of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) that the company and its supporters have had to deal with have also intensified over the years. Even today, with TSLA stock at record levels, and with the company overtaking Volkswagen as the second largest automaker in the industry by market cap, anti-Tesla FUD is still at an all-time high.
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, one must acknowledge a rather inconvenient truth. There is a massive misinformation campaign against Tesla, and it has been going on for years. One simply needs to look at a recently leaked recording of a 2018 White House dinner with US President Donald Trump to see proof of this.
Recently, a 90-minute recording of Trump and several dinner guests was shared with the public by a lawyer for Lev Parnas, a Soviet-born businessman who was reportedly involved in ousting American diplomat Marie Yovanovitch, the US’ ambassador to Ukraine. Several topics were discussed in the recording, one of which was electric vehicles in the United States and Tesla’s chances of survival.
During a particularly alarming part of the recording, which came at around the 58-minute mark, several individuals in the dinner started talking about electric vehicles. The US President asked how electric cars are doing in the market, and his inquiry was immediately met with a prompt “Not good.” A guest of the dinner then went on a long tirade against Tesla, filled with, unsurprisingly, a ton of FUD. Granted, Tesla was in a far more challenging place at the time when the recording was taken, but the sheer dislike for the company is quite shocking nonetheless.
“Tesla’s broke. 100%. They can’t produce them. The auto companies have caught up to him. He’s never generated anywhere close to positive cash flow. He’s subsidized by 25,000 per vehicle. It’s over. The other thing people forget about it it’s great to have an electric vehicle, but you gotta plug it in and get a charge somewhere.
“And, the carbon footprint of this phone is the same as a refrigerator running. You need to generate the power. And generating it with wind and solar, wind and solar only generates 3.5% of our power usage today. You would take 50 years to get up to 5% at the rate we’re growing. It is still fossil k generating power. You have to have nuclear, you have to have oil and gas, and you have to have coal,” the guest said.
This statement, of course, is rife with misinformation. Since the time when the recording was taken, Tesla had only reported negative cash flow two times. The company posted positive cash flow four times. The alleged $25,000 subsidy that Teslas receive is also a complete fabrication, as the electric car maker’s federal credits only topped around $7,500. Of course, the comparison between the carbon footprint of a smartphone being comparable to the footprint of a running fridge is equally false.
The conversation only gets stranger from this point, and even with US President Donald Trump bringing up the topic of Tesla’s stock price, the attendees of the dinner were dismissive of the company. A guest even threw some shade at Elon Musk, stating that the CEO is “a little off socially.”
Fortunately for Tesla, the company appears to have reached a point where its results already speak for itself. Even with the FUD being thrown at Tesla’s efforts in China, for example, the company started MIC Model 3 deliveries before the facility’s construction hit the one-year mark. Despite all the alleged demand problems for the Model 3, the all-electric sedan has also maintained its momentum in regions such as Europe, driving down the point that there is a genuine demand for Tesla’s electric cars.
Watch US President Donald Trump and his dinner guests discuss electric vehicles, Tesla, and Elon Musk in the video below.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
The in-car Tesla Theater is among the most unique features available within the cars. When charging, parked, camping, or just hanging out, vehicle occupants can access a variety of streaming platforms on the large center screen, helping keep them entertained during downtime.
However, the Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms, something that owners have requested for some time.
Tesla owners recently discovered that visiting Apple TV in the vehicle browser can launch a fullscreen interface that looks and behaves like a dedicated application rather than an ordinary webpage:
Today I learned that if you go to Apple TV in the Tesla browser, it will open up an actual Apple TV app, fully functional. Not just the site.
Apparently there are more apps than just the few that show on the apps page. pic.twitter.com/os1Ypfm4JR
— Jason W (@jmwilt21) August 20, 2026
The experience drops the usual address bar and browser chrome, presenting catalogs, continue watching rows, and playback controls in the same window Tesla Theater already uses for its listed services. Independent testers soon found similar treatment for HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Disney+, and Prime Video when those sites are opened from the car browser.
This shift is a plausible early signal that Tesla is widening Theater support without a formal software note. Theater has long been a set of web views rather than native applications, so recognizing extra domains and stripping the browser frame is a small server-side change that can expand the catalog quickly.
Owners still lack permanent Theater icons for the newly recognized services, and video remains limited to Park, yet the smoother launch is a meaningful step toward a broader lounge while charging.
Tesla Theater arrived with software version 10 in September 2019. The first video services were Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu, available only while parked and originally tied to WiFi. Spotify arrived in the same era as music rather than Theater video. Disney+ joined officially in July 2021 with the 2021.24 update, giving owners another major catalog on the center screen. Twitch and TikTok later appeared among the default Theater tiles, and Tesla Tutorials remained a persistent educational tile.
Not every addition stayed put. In December 2023, a Holiday software build removed the Disney+ tile for many United States owners after a public dispute involving advertising on X. Hulu stayed visible even though Disney owned it. Visiting disneyplus.com in the browser often restored the tile, which suggested the removal was a recognition list change rather than a complete block. Owners have also reported occasional blank Theater grids after updates, usually fixed by language toggles, resets, or later firmware.
Tesla axes Disney+ from vehicles with Musk-Iger rivalry, but there’s a workaround
Code archives from 2024 listed many unused source names, including Apple TV and Prime Video, that never became official icons, which now looks like groundwork for the current fullscreen browser behavior.
Now that this hint toward an expanded Theater experience has been recognized, Tesla could follow through with these additional shortcuts as a sign that more streaming platforms are available in Teslas than ever before.
Tesla recently received its largest order for the all-electric Semi from Einride, a Swedish transport service, for 500 units, a groundbreaking invoice to receive before the first deliveries begin.
Even more remarkable, Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli said in a recent interview that he expects his company to take delivery of all 500 — the entire order — before the end of 2027. He even expects to have 75 Tesla Semi units in the Einride fleet before the end of this year.
🚨 Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli on the Tesla Semi partnership:
“If we start with the Amazon announcement that we did earlier this year, that was on the back of having gone through a proving period together with them and proving out our technology. Then we took that next step in… pic.twitter.com/oazkXjwoig
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 28, 2026
Charli said the Tesla partnership was part of a broader push, along with its earlier partnership with Amazon. Einride is assisting Amazon with the use of its Saga AI platform, which helps eliminate questions about budgeting and forecasting for logistics companies.
The Semi, as well as Tesla’s production and subsequent delivery of the units to Einride, will help the company “to have a good supply of vehicles that we can deploy on the [Saga AI] platform,” Charli said. “Tesla is also a relationship we’ve had for a while, and as the Tesla Semi deliveries are firming up, we decided to do a larger commitment to that and deploy that on our platform.”
In its initial announcement, Einride said it anticipated taking delivery of the trucks over the next two years, but now it appears the company is expecting all 500 units within the next 16 months.
Built at a dedicated factory in Sparks, Nevada, the Tesla Semi has been perhaps the biggest and most intensive testing process the company has ever had for a single vehicle model. For the past several years, Tesla has been working with many companies, most notably Frito-Lay and PepsiCo, to gain knowledge on the performance on regional routes.
Tesla plans to launch the Semi officially on September 24, five months after production started ramping.
Additionally, drivers have said they are happy about the Semi’s performance and that its numerous safety and productivity features have made their jobs and routes much easier.
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
Tesla Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms
