Investor's Corner
BMW CEO reportedly risks replacement amid poor sales, weak EV strategy, and the rise of Tesla’s Model 3
BMW CEO Harald Krüger has always preferred to work in the background. Content to leave the stage for others, Krüger has mostly led BMW in an almost understated manner. Yet, in a recent meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and fellow executives from rivals Volkswagen and Daimler, the CEO proved assertive, announcing that BMW will be looking to sell around 300,000 electric and electrified vehicles annually by 2021.
Krüger’s assertive stance on EVs is likely due to pressures that BMW is feeling in the electric vehicle market, which has, in more ways than one, started affecting the security of the CEO’s post. The 53-year-old BMW executive’s contract expires in May 2020, and theoretically, the company’s Supervisory Board could extend it. Unfortunately, reports are now emerging that Krüger’s contract as BMW’s chief executive might not be extended anymore, according to information gathered by German news agency Handelsblatt.
Amidst BMW’s current challenges, the publication alleges that the automaker no longer considers an extension of Krüger’s CEO contract as the most plausible scenario in the near future. Talks of tensions in BMW’s leadership have emerged, and an insider has even noted that there is “high pressure in the boiler.” If Krüger is not able to keep his CEO post, two board members are reportedly set to take over his seat: the ambitious Head of Development Klaus Fröhlich and the more tempered Oliver Zipse, who took over BMW’s production department from Krüger back in 2015.
BMW is currently facing a number of challenges. The company has initiated a group-wide “hiring freeze,” and the CEO’s critics were quick to point out that despite BMW’s “biggest model offensive in the company’s history,” sales have stagnated. Over the past nine months, the German automaker surprised with two profit warnings, and margins for its vehicles are under pressure. Krüger, for his part, remained cautiously optimistic, stating that “In the second half of the year, we expect a tailwind” amid the upcoming release of large vehicles like the BMW X7 SUV.
Hiring freezes and poor sales aside, one thing that has notably irked the German automaker’s shareholders is its poor electric vehicle strategy. In 2013, Krüger’s predecessor, Norbert Reithofer, launched the BMW i3, a curiously futuristic electric car that was compared to the Tesla Model S. BMW has not released a pure battery-electric vehicle since then. Jaguar has started its push with the I-PACE, Audi has released the e-tron, and Mercedes-Benz has already unveiled the EQC. BMW’s iX3, on the other hand, won’t be ready for at least another year. Speaking to the publication, a competitor noted that “BMW was ahead, now they are suspended.”
The emergence of Tesla as a player in the premium sedan market has also become a painful pill to swallow for BMW. With its international rollout, the Tesla Model 3 continued to hack away at the sales of BMW’s iconic 3-Series sedan. Tests from publications such as Top Gear, which have been traditionally pro-petrol in the past, have also recognized the Silicon Valley-made Model 3 as superior in more ways than one to a BMW. Tesla’s rise has not escaped the attention of BMW’s investors, who appear to be getting quite impatient with the German automaker’s delayed, if not half-hearted EV strategy.
These sentiments were expressed during BMW’s annual shareholder meeting in May. Addressing the company, shareholder protector Daniela Bergdolt did not mince words. “I now expect an electric offensive that sweeps Tesla off the table,” she said, and the company did not really have a strong response. There’s the i4 and the iNext, but both vehicles don’t currently have a concrete release date. The impressive BMW Vision M Next, which was recently revealed, is also an eye-catching concept vehicle, but it still remains to be seen if or when the car will enter production.
Elon Musk
SpaceX (SPCX) IPO is live today at $135: Here’s exactly what you need to know
SpaceX priced its historic IPO at $135 per share today, raising a record $75 billion.
SpaceX officially priced its initial public offering at $135 per share, offering 555,555,555 shares of Class A common stock and raising $75 billion in what is the largest IPO in stock market history. Shares are set to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on Friday, June 12, under the ticker symbol SPCX. The previous record holder was Saudi Aramco’s 2019 offering at $29 billion, followed by Alibaba’s $22 billion offering in 2014.
At $135 per share and roughly 555.6 million shares, the implied valuation sits near $1.75 trillion, which would make SpaceX roughly the seventh largest company in the United States, just above Tesla’s current market cap. Regular investors can request shares at the IPO price through Robinhood, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, SoFi, and E*TRADE, though the deal is heavily oversubscribed and most retail allocations will be partial or unfilled. Once trading opens June 12, anyone with a brokerage account can buy SPCX on the open market.
SpaceX’s amended S-1 is sparking a major Tesla merger conversation
The valuation is anchored primarily by Starlink. Starlink crossed 10 million subscribers as of February 2026 and is adding 750,000 to 1.5 million new users per month, with the connectivity segment already posting a $1.19 billion profit last quarter. The offering also bundles in xAI following SpaceX’s all-stock merger earlier this year, adding Grok and the Colossus supercomputer to the investment thesis. As Teslarati reported, Starlink ended 2025 with $10 billion in revenue, a figure analysts project could reach $24 billion by end of 2026.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has been vocal in his support. “I think the time is right,” Ives said, adding that the offering expands the Elon Musk ecosystem rather than competing with Tesla. An average 12-month price target of $165 per share represents roughly 22% upside from the IPO price. Not everyone agrees – Motley Fool noted xAI is spending $1 billion per month playing catch-up to OpenAI and Anthropic.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with a single stated purpose. “Elon founded SpaceX with a goal to change humanity, to make us a multi-planet species,” CFO Bret Johnsen said in the company’s retail roadshow video this week. Musk himself has been more direct: “We are building the systems and technologies necessary to provide global connectivity on Earth and beyond, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”
Investor's Corner
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.
Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.
While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure
The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.
Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet
Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.
Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.
As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.
Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.
First Folding Unit Superchargers in Europe 🇪🇺 https://t.co/KNfYWJukkL pic.twitter.com/YR1udIpH1i
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) June 10, 2026
Tesla Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is currently listed as a Level 2 suite in terms of its passenger cars. As its Robotaxi platform continues to move quickly, it has been recognized as a Level 4 ride-sharing program by the State of Texas, as Tesla recently self-certified itself.
However, a Wall Street analyst is arguing that Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) has effectively achieved Level 4 autonomy in most conditions in all of its vehicles, drawing on personal experience and data released by the company.
Alex Potter of Piper Sandler said in a note to investors on Wednesday that “Tesla has solved the self-driving puzzle,” pointing to decisions to offer insurance discounts for FSD-enabled policies as a signal of confidence, which is backed up by stellar safety records compared to human driving.
Investing.com initially reported on Potter’s new note.
Additionally, Potter looks at the recent start of Cybercab production at Giga Texas as a potential indication that Tesla is ready to offer some level of unsupervised driving at least in the near future. The Cybercab has no steering wheel or pedals, completely eliminating the ability for human input.
He also sees Tesla’s allocation of “several hundred million USD (if not $1B+)” as confidence internally, seeing as it would be tough to set aside that amount of capital toward a project that the company does not see as relatively near-term.
Forward thinking, especially as Cybercab has no human controls, it would make sense that Tesla is at least close to self-driving. How close is another question.
Tesla has routinely teased that unsupervised FSD is close, but there are still a lot of things it feels as if the company has to roll out some more capability, including unsupervised parking features, known as “Banish,” better operation with regional self-driving performance, and other improvements.
That is not to say that Tesla FSD is super impressive already. It has already completed coast-to-coast drives across the United States and Canada, it routinely takes the stress out of driving for most people, and it has proven through Tesla Safety Reports that it is safer and involved in accidents less frequently than humans.
🚨 These are the first-ever FSD safety statistics out of the Netherlands, showing it was over 3.5x safer than human driving on Dutch roads.
The most recent numbers out of Tesla for North America show:
-Over 5.5 million miles between accidents for Teslas using FSD
-660k miles… https://t.co/XKlRzgSGEh pic.twitter.com/HX6kzh0ZKc— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) June 9, 2026
Even Potter believes it is capable, as he used it to go from Missoula, Montana, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, back in April.
“There’s no substitute for personal experience,” he wrote.
SpaceX (SPCX) IPO is live today at $135: Here’s exactly what you need to know
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
