Investor's Corner
Tesla’s veteran problem solver Jerome Guillen is Elon Musk’s most strategic appointment yet
Earlier this month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced a series of strategic promotions that are aimed at taking the company to reach new heights in the years to come. Among the promotions, Elon Musk’s appointment of veteran accomplisher Jerome Guillen as the company’s new President of Automotive stood out. As the end of the third quarter approaches, it is starting to look like Elon Musk’s promotion of the hands-on executive was the correct strategy.
Jerome Guillen joined Tesla back in 2010 as the director of the Model S program. Prior to his employment at Tesla, Jerome served as the project leader for Daimler’s Freightliner Cascadia program, and eventually as head of the company’s Business Innovation unit. By the time he left for Tesla, Daimler’s Business Innovation unit was profitable and self-funding.
When Jerome joined the electric car maker, Tesla was still a fledgling startup that only produced and delivered a small number of its two-door Roadster to a select group of customers. Being the first vehicle that the company designed from the ground up, a lot was riding on the Model S, particularly as critics of the company were quick to dismiss the electric car as “vaporware.” Guillen was a hands-on executive, and for some early customers of the Model S, he became the go-to person when issues arose.
And issues did arise. When Tesla started delivering the Model S to reservation holders, the company lacked sufficient sales and service centers. Tesla was delivering vehicles directly to people’s homes, and while this worked well for the first few hundred handovers in California, it became a big logistical headache for the company when customers from faraway states started ordering the electric car. Elon Musk, for his part, opted to have Jerome add sales, service, and deliveries to his portfolio. The hands-on executive handled the task well, even developing a reputation for being incredibly responsive to emails and concerns from regular customers.
Early Model S adopter Andrew Wolfe of Los Gatos, California noted in a statement to Bloomberg that he was among the customers who were in constant communication with the executive. Wolfe noted that Jerome was always open to suggestions, such as where Tesla should consider opening additional service centers, as well as the company’s points for improvement in terms of loaner vehicles.
Jerome’s work with the Model S program would ultimately help lay the groundwork for the company’s following vehicles, the Model X SUV and later, the Model 3. The executive briefly took a leave of absence from the company in 2015, but later returned to head the Tesla Semi program. Over the past months, sightings of the Semi across the United States would feature Jerome from time to time, accompanying the long-hauler’s hand-built alpha prototype on its road tests.
While he was heading the Tesla Semi program, Jerome’s out-of-the-box problem-solving skills would prove useful for the company’s overall operations. Back in June, Tesla made headlines when Elon Musk revealed that a new Model 3 assembly line had been set up inside a sprung structure on the grounds of the Fremont factory. The line, dubbed as GA4, was ultimately responsible for giving the company’s production the boost it needed to hit its target of producing 5,000 Model 3 a week before the end of the second quarter. Analysts from Evercore ISI who toured the Fremont factory later noted that GA4 “looked very much like general assembly at other auto plants which we have visited,” and that the “facility looks set to be permanent and in theory should be able to support much faster cycle times.” As Elon Musk would later reveal, GA4 was Jerome Guillen’s brainchild.
The appointment of an executive such as Jerome as the President of Automotive could prove to be Elon Musk’s most strategic move this third quarter. At this point in Tesla’s growth, with hundreds of thousands of reservations in line for the Model 3, the company is pretty much in a situation similar to the one it faced when it was struggling to deliver the Model S to customers across the US. From this perspective, at least, Jerome Guillen appears to be the right man for the job.
It remains to be seen what Jerome’s full responsibilities are now that he is serving as President of Automotive, but amidst Tesla’s end-of-quarter delivery push for the Model 3, the company has begun adopting some out-of-the-box solutions for its current logistical problems. In a recent tweet, for example, Elon Musk noted that Tesla is experiencing a bottleneck in the car carrier trailers transporting vehicles from the Fremont factory to its delivery centers. To help address this issue, Musk stated that Tesla has begun building its own car carriers to help foster quicker deliveries. This is speculation, but such an unorthodox solution carries some very Jerome Guillen-like undertones.
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.
Elon Musk handed Grok something no other AI company can get their hands on
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