News
(Op-ed) A neutral look at Tesla’s upcoming Q1 2025 vehicle deliveries
Elon Musk affects Tesla, but his impact on the company’s raw vehicle sales may not be as notable as critics would suggest.
Tesla is such a volatile topic for many that it’s difficult to get a neutral image of the company and its fundamentals today. A look at Tesla news coverage shows this, as even dedicated electric vehicle blogs and tech publications seem to find it difficult to separate Tesla from Elon Musk, who is more polarizing than ever.
This is what I aim to cover in this op-ed. I will be exploring Tesla’s first quarter vehicle deliveries, why they might be underwhelming, the reasons behind them, and why I believe the sky is not necessarily falling.
A likely miss
Analyst consensus for Tesla’s Q1 2025 deliveries currently stands at 418,000 vehicles. That would suggest a year-over-year improvement of 8.06% from the 386,810 vehicles that Tesla was able to deliver in the first quarter of 2024. Considering Tesla’s sales in China and Europe over January and February, 418,000 deliveries seem to be a long shot for the first quarter of 2025.
It would not be surprising at all if Tesla ends up missing Wall Street’s consensus estimates, and by a pretty wide margin. Such is expected considering Tesla’s focus in the first quarter. But what is this focus, really? Elon Musk’s politics? Not necessarily.
A Model Y-shaped hole
Critics and negative Tesla news coverage would argue that the company’s steep drop in sales in several European markets and China is a sign that the company is finished, or that Elon Musk is doing global damage to the Tesla brand. However, Tesla’s sales decline this Q1 may actually be affected in no small part by the company’s transition from the Model Y classic to the new Model Y, which was launched across the United States, China, and Germany.
The Model Y is Tesla’s strongest seller, and it comprises a huge portion of the company’s deliveries every quarter. Considering that the Model Y classic quite literally became the world’s best-selling vehicle by volume in 2023 and 2024, it would not be an exaggeration to state that Tesla’s deliveries have been greatly carried by the all-electric crossover. What would happen then if Tesla implements a transition to the Model Y’s new version across its factories worldwide? Raw Model Y deliveries will go down, at least until Tesla starts deliveries of the revamped all-electric crossover. This is exactly what seems to be happening in China.
A look at Tesla China’s numbers from January and February will show that the company saw fewer registrations this year compared to last year. However, vehicle registrations have since picked up with the start of the new Model Y’s domestic deliveries. Similar trends may emerge in the United States and Europe, as well as territories supplied by Giga Shanghai, Giga Texas, the Fremont Factory, and Giga Berlin.
The Elon Musk factor
There is no doubt that Elon Musk is at his most polarizing today, but to credit Tesla’s low deliveries to the CEO’s political antics is very shortsighted. Yes, Elon Musk affects Tesla, but his impact on the company’s raw vehicle sales may not be as notable as critics would suggest. This could be seen in the results of a poll from German publication t-online, which initially concluded that 94% of Germans won’t buy a Tesla anymore. As it turned out, the survey would end up painting the complete opposite picture once more respondents took the poll. With more than 467,000 respondents on the survey, over 70% stated that they would buy a Tesla.
To state that Elon Musk’s political actions are not adversely affecting Tesla’s appeal to some consumers would not be accurate. There are evidently people who will not be purchasing a Tesla due to Elon Musk and his work with the Trump administration. The impact of the Musk factor, however, may not be as drastic as Tesla critics would suggest. It would not, for example, result in 94% of car buyers suddenly swearing off Tesla. The vast majority of consumers, after all, generally gravitate to the best products in the market, period. Assuming that this is true for most consumers today, Tesla’s vehicles definitely still have a fighting chance this year.
In conclusion
Considering Wall Street’s 418,000 vehicle delivery consensus, it almost seems certain that Tesla will miss this estimate by a notable margin. This would likely result in a wave of reports alleging that demand is drying up worldwide or Musk has completely tanked the brand’s appeal to consumers. With the new Model Y now starting its deliveries across the globe, however, Tesla’s real performance and a clearer view of Musk’s effect on the company’s demand, would likely become more evident in the coming quarters.
Lifestyle
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.
Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.
Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.
Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:
“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”
Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.
The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
A public service announcement. https://t.co/NYa1IpKwBX
— Jason Oppenheim (@OppenheimJason) October 4, 2026
Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.
Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.
In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”
The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.
Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.
The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.
It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”
The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
News
Starlink launches Communities Program for passive income through internet sharing
Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.
Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.
Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.
Big news! SpaceX is introducing a new @Starlink for Communities program that lets you earn money by providing Starlink internet to your neighbors or people nearby, who can pay for access by the hour, day, week, or month.
Neighbors pay for the access they need, while the person… pic.twitter.com/DtOUs0Ekvt
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 1, 2026
The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.
A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.
Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.
Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.
Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.
The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.
The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.