Investor's Corner
Tesla’s rumored sale of regulatory credits to VW to last ‘two to three years’
Tesla’s rumored sale of its regulatory credits to Volkswagen to help the German automaker reach emissions targets is likely to last “two to three years,” according to VW Auto Group CEO Herbert Diess.
The sale of credits will help Volkswagen align with regional emissions targets that could affect the company’s ability to conduct business in China and the United States. The emissions targets are different in every country, some with more strict regulations than others. China has some of the toughest emissions regulations globally due to the massive number of passenger vehicles that operate in the country. Due to this fact, some automakers, like Volkswagen, must purchase regulatory credits from other automakers to meet the emissions targets. It helps the purchasing automaker avoid hefty fines, while it can help the selling automaker solidify financial safety and fund projects.
Tesla doesn’t have an issue reaching these targets due to its environmentally-friendly electric powertrains. For over a year, Tesla has been selling regulatory credits to other automakers, a deal that has helped Tesla fund some of its international projects. One of the most notable deals is Tesla’s sale of credits to Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles, requiring FCA to pay Tesla $2 billion through 2023. The sale was to help FCA reach the European Union’s CO2 requirement of 95g per kilometer in 2020. This deal recently ended after Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares stated that the company would no longer need to purchase the credits from Tesla. This was due to the merger between Peugeot S.A. (Groupe PSA) and FCA in January 2021, which ultimately birthed Stellantis. Stellantis now controls 14 traditional automotive brands, including Fiat, Chrysler, Jeep, Maserati, and Peugeot.
However, Tesla isn’t losing all of its deals for its regulatory credits. It appears Volkswagen will still purchase credits from Tesla. Although it hasn’t been officially confirmed who VW will get its credits from, recent reports indicate that Tesla will be the seller. Recent comments from Herbert Diess, CEO of the Volkswagen Auto Group, on the company’s Earnings Call earlier today seem to indicate that the company will continue for several years.
?@VWGroup ‘s Diess confirms they are paying regulatory credits in China and US (likely to @tesla) and says they will continue to for the next “two to three years”, phasing out as the EV roll-out ramps up.
Chinese Q1 BEV volumes just 6,244 units compared to 42,421 in Europe. pic.twitter.com/KrCdgjOafy
— Matthias Schmidt (@auto_schmidt) May 6, 2021
“In Europe, we are confident that we will comply with the fleet targets,” Diess said during the Earnings Call. However, the case is different in China and the United States, and Diess says that the automaker will need to rely on credits to avoid the fines for “the next two or three years.” With VW’s expanding EV strategy, it appears that the German company will no longer need to purchase these credits by 2024 at the latest.
In China, VW will likely be purchasing the credits from Tesla. After a report from Reuters in April indicated that VW’s joint venture with state-owned Chinese carmaker FAW, called FAW-Volkswagen, would be purchasing credits from Tesla to meet the environmental standards set by the Chinese government. Three individuals close to the matter informed Reuters of the deal.
Concerns regarding Tesla’s financials and its ability to remain profitable without the excessive sale of EV credits continue to rage on. However, Tesla has shown that it generates revenue through several mediums, including automotive sales, car leases, and other investments, including the automaker’s Bitcoin purchase in late 2020. The $1.5 billion Bitcoin purchase was a way for not immediately used cash could generate “some level of return…but also preserve liquidity,” Tesla CFO Zachary Kirkhorn said during the company’s most recent Earnings Call.
Ultimately, it isn’t known who Volkswagen will purchase the credits from globally. However, if recent reports are correct, Tesla will be sending its credits to VW in return for hefty $56 per green credit prices.
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.
Tesla Semi is officially headed to Europe
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
