Tesla has removed wording about having a “majority-minority” workforce in its latest 10-K filing, following recent statements from CEO Elon Musk opposing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives—and a history of allegations of racial discrimination at the automaker’s factories.
In Tesla’s 10-K filing released on Monday, the automaker has changed some of the wording alluding to DEI measures at the company, instead adding a few new paragraphs at the end. The omitted wording from the prior year’s annual report, which can be found near the end of the Item 1, Business section of Tesla’s 10-K filing last year, reads as follows:
“With a majority-minority workforce, empowering our employee resource groups to take charge in driving initiatives that attract, develop and retain our passionate workforce is vital to our continued success.”
Both this and last year’s filings include the same opening line for the section:
“At Tesla, our employees show up passionate about making a difference in the world and for each other.”
However, instead of the “minority-majority” workforce phrasing included in last year’s filing, the 10-K filed this week includes the following language:
“We remain unwavering in our demand that our factories, offices, stores and service centers are places where our employees feel respected and appreciated. Our policies are designed to promote fairness and respect for everyone. We hire, evaluate and promote employees based on their skills and performance. Everyone is expected to be trustworthy, demonstrate excellence in their performance and collaborate with others. With this in mind, we will not tolerate certain behaviors. These include harassment, retaliation, violence, intimidation and discrimination of any kind on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, disability or veteran status.”
The filing goes on to mention Tesla’s anti-harassment training and leadership development programs, encouraging employees to speak up about misconduct by contacting the company integrity line, human resources, and managers, or by submitting concerns through the Take Charge process.
You can see Tesla’s full 10-K filing for the fiscal year 2023 here, along with its 10-K released a year ago for the fiscal year 2022 here. Although the “majority-minority” workplace phrasing has been removed from the 10-K filing, Tesla still says this on its website, adding that underrepresented groups represent 67 percent of the company’s U.S. workforce.
Musk and Tesla have also continually emphasized their opposition to racism in the workplace in response to allegations of discrimination over the years. Musk has instead recently made several statements on X calling DEI initiatives racist, even noting in December that he thinks “DEI must DIE.”
“The point was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination,” Musk added.
“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” are propaganda words for racism, sexism and other -isms.
This is just as morally wrong as any other racism and sexism. Changing the target class doesn’t make it right!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 16, 2023
Earlier this month, Musk reiterated his opposition to these programs, saying that “DEI is just another word for racism.”
Discrimination on the basis of race, which DEI does, is literally the definition of racism
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 3, 2024
Musk has also opposed what he terms the “woke mind virus,” which he has criticized several times over the past few years.
Yeah, we have a lot to fix. The Internet is infested with the woke mind virus.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 11, 2024
Tesla has also faced multiple court cases alleging racial discrimination in the past, each of which the company and Musk have denied.
One such case included the high-profile trial of former contracted elevator operator Owen Diaz, who was denied his appeal by a judge in October for a third re-trial after being awarded $137 million by a jury in 2021. Diaz had worked at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, in 2015, and a second jury last April awarded him a $3.2 million verdict after he rejected a lowered settlement of $15 million from the first trial.
In a lawsuit in California in 2022, the Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) accused Tesla of operating a “racially segregated” workplace at the Fremont factory, to which the automaker responded by denying the claims and filing a formal complaint against the agency.
Earlier this month, Musk paid a visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and to a symposium opposing the rise of anti-semitism organized by the European Jewish Association (EJA), after X faced advertising boycotts and heavy criticism when Musk liked and replied to an anti-semitic post in November.
“I’m sorry for that post. It was foolish of me,” Musk said in an interview following the incident. “Of my 30,000 posts, it might literally be the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done. I think over time it’ll be obvious that I’m far from anti-semitic.”
Tesla accused of race-based discrimination, retaliation by former HR manager
What are your thoughts? Let me know at zach@teslarati.com, find me on X at @zacharyvisconti, or send your tips to us at tips@teslarati.com.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
News
SpaceX is following in Tesla’s footsteps in a way nobody expected
In the span of just months in early 2026, SpaceX has transformed itself into one of the world’s most ambitious AI companies. The catalyst: its February acquisition of xAI.
When Elon Musk founded Tesla in 2003, it was a plucky electric car startup betting everything on lithium-ion batteries and a niche luxury Roadster.
Two decades later, Tesla is far more than a car company. Its valuation increasingly hinges on Full Self-Driving software, the Optimus humanoid robot, the Robotaxi program, and the Dojo supercomputer cluster purpose-built for AI training.
Musk has repeatedly described Tesla as an AI and robotics company that happens to sell vehicles. The cars, in this view, are merely the first scalable platform for real-world AI.
Now, SpaceX is tracing an eerily similar path, only faster and in a direction almost no one anticipated. Founded in 2002 to make spaceflight routine and eventually multiplanetary, SpaceX spent its first two decades perfecting reusable rockets, landing Falcon 9 boosters, and building the Starlink megaconstellation.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
It was an engineering and manufacturing powerhouse, not a software play. Yet, in the span of just months in early 2026, SpaceX has transformed itself into one of the world’s most ambitious AI companies. The catalyst: its February acquisition of xAI.
The xAI deal, announced on February 2, was structured as an all-stock transaction that valued the combined entity at roughly $1.25 trillion—SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. In a memo to employees, Musk framed the merger as the creation of “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.”
The new SpaceX now owns Grok, the large language model family that powers the chatbot of the same name, along with xAI’s massive training infrastructure. More importantly, it has a declared mission to move AI compute off-planet.
Earth-based data centers are hitting hard limits on power, cooling, and land. Musk’s solution is orbital data centers, or constellations of solar-powered satellites that act as supercomputers in the sky.
SpaceX has already asked regulators for permission to launch up to one million such satellites. Starship, the company’s fully reusable heavy-lift vehicle, is the only rocket capable of delivering the necessary mass at the required cadence.
Each orbital node would enjoy near-constant sunlight, vast radiator surfaces for passive cooling, and zero terrestrial real-estate costs. Musk has predicted that within two to three years, space-based AI inference and training could become cheaper than anything possible on the ground.
This is not a side project; it is the strategic centerpiece Musk has envisioned for SpaceX. Starlink already provides the global low-latency backbone; next-generation V3 satellites will carry onboard AI accelerators. Rockets deliver the hardware, while AI optimizes every aspect of launch, landing, and constellation management.
The feedback loop is self-reinforcing, too. Better AI makes better rockets, which launch more AI infrastructure.
Just yesterday, on April 21, SpaceX doubled down.
It secured an option to acquire Cursor—the fast-growing AI coding tool beloved by software engineers—for $60 billion later this year, or pay a $10 billion partnership fee if the full deal does not close.
Cursor’s models already help engineers write code at superhuman speed. Pairing that technology with SpaceX’s Colossus-scale training clusters (the same ones powering Grok) positions the company to dominate AI developer tools, much as Tesla dominates autonomous driving software.
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
The parallels with Tesla are striking. Both companies began in a single, capital-intensive sector: Tesla with EVs, SpaceX with launch vehicles. Both used early hardware success to fund AI at scale. Tesla’s Dojo supercomputers train neural nets on billions of miles of real-world driving data; SpaceX now trains on telemetry from thousands of orbital assets and re-entries.
Tesla’s FSD chip runs inference on cars; SpaceX’s future satellites will run inference in orbit.
Tesla’s Optimus robot will work in factories; SpaceX envisions lunar factories manufacturing more AI satellites, eventually using electromagnetic mass drivers to fling them into deep space.
Critics once dismissed Musk’s multi-company empire as unfocused. The 2026 moves reveal the opposite: deliberate convergence.
SpaceX is no longer merely a rocket company that sells internet from space. It is an AI company whose competitive moat is literal orbital infrastructure and the only vehicle that can service it at scale. The forthcoming IPO, expected later this year, will almost certainly be pitched not as a space play but as the purest bet on AI infrastructure the public market has ever seen.
Whether the orbital data-center vision survives regulatory scrutiny, astronomical concerns about light pollution, or the sheer engineering challenge remains to be seen.
Yet the strategic direction is unmistakable. Just as Tesla proved that software and AI could redefine the century-old automobile, SpaceX is proving that rockets are merely the delivery mechanism for the next great computing platform—one that floats above the clouds, powered by the sun, and limited only by the physics of orbit.
In that unexpected sense, history is repeating. Tesla stopped being “just a car company” years ago. SpaceX has now stopped being “just a rocket company.” Both are becoming something far larger: AI powerhouses with hardware moats so deep that competitors will need their own reusable megaconstellations to keep up.
The age of terrestrial AI is ending. The age of space-based AI is beginning—and SpaceX is building the launchpad.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla (TSLA) Q1 2026 earnings results: beat on EPS and revenues
