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Tesla is on a runaway freight train headed towards the utility industry
Tesla’s vision of the future is a world energized by solar and chaperoned by electric powered autonomous transportation, but the company’s overarching goal is to break our dirty fossil fuel habit. “The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good. That’s what ‘sustainable’ means. It’s not some silly, hippy thing — it matters for everyone.
“By definition, we must at some point achieve a sustainable energy economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will collapse. Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve sustainability, the better.”
The new plan reminds us that #4 on the original Master Plan was to “Provide solar power. No kidding, this has literally been on our website for 10 years.”
And just how does the irrepressible Mr. Musk expect to do that? Simple. “Create a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility (emphasis added), and then scale that throughout the world. One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app.” A new development near Melbourne, Australia dubbed “Tesla Town” because it integrates solar panels with Tesla Powerwall battery storage units may offer a preview of the future.

Suburb dubbed “Tesla town” in Australia will have solar, Tesla’s Powerwall and EV charging in every home.
What Musk is proposing is nothing less than a complete reboot of how the world gets and uses electricity. That simple idea immediately puts in jeopardy trillions of dollars the world’s utility companies have invested in generating plants and grid infrastructure. They are not going to watch their investment evaporate without a fight.
In fact, the first skirmishes in the coming solar power war are already taking place. Warren Buffett’s NV Energy has gotten the Nevada Public Utilities Commission to impose draconian new fees on rooftop solar power. They are so onerous that they make rooftop solar no longer commercially viable within the state. SolarCity earlier this year ceased operations in Nevada — which has an abundance of solar energy available to it. More than 500 employees in Nevada were let go.
Switch, one of the world’s largest data center operators has recently filed suit in Nevada alleging fraud and collusion between the PUC and NV Energy. The local utility’s opposition to solar power is intense and is an indication of how far entrenched interests will go to hold on to their fiefdoms.
If Tesla thought it had a fight on its hands with franchise dealer groups, that is child’s play compared to the forces the utility industry is prepared to bring to bear against the idea of individuals making and using their own solar power. The desire to create one company that makes electric vehicles and the means to harvest the energy to operate them is behind Tesla’s recent proposal to purchase SolarCity in a $2.8 billion stock deal. Musk made explaining the need for the merger an important part of the new Master Plan.
“We can’t do this well if Tesla and SolarCity are different companies, which is why we need to combine and break down the barriers inherent to being separate companies. That they are separate at all, despite similar origins and pursuit of the same overarching goal of sustainable energy, is largely an accident of history. Now that Tesla is ready to scale Powerwall and SolarCity is ready to provide highly differentiated solar, the time has come to bring them together.”
Some quibble that Musk’s grand schemes take too long to mature. They sit back and feel secure in the knowledge that time is on their side. It’s not. Trying to resist his initiatives is like trying to hold back the tide. Just look at the havoc his tiny company that has never made more than 100,000 cars in a year has created in the boardrooms of companies that sell millions of vehicles. They are all scrambling to catch up with Tesla. The fact that the Model 3 has nearly 400,000 pre-orders is testament to the power of Musk’s vision.
The notion that utility companies need monopoly status to survive has been ingrained in our culture since the days when Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse were creating the first utility grids. It’s an idea that has served the industry well. But like franchise dealer laws, it is now out of date. If Musk gets his way, it will soon be little more than an anachronism — like the internal combustion engine.
Elon Musk
How to use Grok Bot to block spam calls and texts
Musk told users to ask Grok Bot to scrub their phone numbers from spam lists.
Elon Musk has a new use case for Grok Bot, and it is the spam call. On Thursday he replied to an X user named Arash with a short instruction: “Ask your @Grok @Bot to remove your phone number from spam call & text lists!” Arash had said he got tired of the calls, had an AI bot find his number on listing sites and file removal requests, and packaged the process as a free skill for others.
The skill is called Spam-Call Scrubber, which is described to find a phone number on people search sites and data brokers, submits the opt outs, completes the confirmation emails those sites send back, and rechecks on a schedule the user picks. Using it requires the Grok Bot app. The pitch is time saved, since most broker opt outs sit behind separate forms on separate sites.
Ask your @Grok @Bot to remove your phone number from spam call & text lists!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 15, 2026
Musk said Grok Bot now gives each bot its own email address, and that it can detect scam emails. On Thursday he also said SpaceX would make users whole if the bot botches a purchase or leaks a card, then told users to shop away from Amazon after the retailer blocked the agent, as Teslarati reported. The terms of service we reviewed at the time put responsibility for what an agent does on the user.
For Tesla owners, Grok Bot is not just a phone app. Tesla brought Grok Bot into its vehicles on September 22, and we argued earlier this week that the Cybercab’s real advantage may be the errands it runs during a ride. Every Cybercab and the rest of the Model Y Robotaxi fleet has it enabled. The more routine tasks like this one become, the more a rider has reason to hand over something personal in the back seat.
The new Spam-Call Scrubber skill can be downloaded for free and works on sites that honor removal requests, while noting that listings can reappear, and illegal robocallers do not check any registry. Whether Spam-Call Scrubber cuts anyone’s call volume is something the first wave of users will find out, and Musk’s endorsement guarantees that wave is coming.
Investor's Corner
Tesla’s flying Roadster just revealed something bigger than the car
Analysts say the Roadster demo puts a Tesla and SpaceX merger back on the table.
The Roadster unveiling near Waco ended Thursday night, and by Friday morning much of the investor reaction had less to do with the car than with who owns the rocket technology inside it.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said the event “puts the Tesla/SpaceX relationship on the table in a tangible way,” pointing to the propulsion, pressure vessel and control hardware sitting on a Tesla product. Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management called the demo “a ridiculous display of engineering” with “no commercial value” beyond embarrassing traditional automakers, though he said it showed Musk wants the two companies together.
The more specific forecast came a day earlier from Barclays. Analyst Dan Levy told clients a deal could be announced before Tesla’s annual meeting, which must happen by December 6, and that an announcement in late October or early November could make shareholder approval harder. Barclays expects SpaceX to be the buyer in an all stock deal, with Tesla holders receiving SpaceX shares at a premium, based on market values of roughly $2.1 trillion for SpaceX and $1.5 trillion for Tesla. If nothing lands around the meeting, the bank still sees an announcement within 6 to 12 months.
The Roadster demo just added more weight to merger speculations. Tesla’s demo used cold gas thrusters and pressure tanks of the kind SpaceX uses on Falcon 9, and Musk described the car as a collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX engineers, as we mentioned in our breakdown of the three Roadster configurations.
Musk has not publicly addressed a deal since the event, as far as we have seen. His most direct answer remains the one he gave at the All In Summit, when he said that with so much collaboration, “who can imagine what action one might take” without ruling anything out. Ives has held to a 2027 timeline since his March note, and Musk pushed back on the China piece of the speculation when ARK floated a year end announcement in August.
The next test is Tesla’s third quarter earnings call on October 21. However, we recall in July that Musk told analysts, “we can’t talk about combining companies and that kind of thing on an earnings call,” so a clear answer wouldn’t be expected.
News
How Tesla’s Roadster fan system and thrusters are built to dominate the corners
Tesla’s Roadster uses fans, active wings and cold gas thrusters to create grip at any speed.
Tesla’s new Roadster is best known for flipping through the air in Texas, but the technology that matters most for a race track is the stuff that keeps it on the ground. Tesla’s Roadster page describes a multi-mode fan and ground sealing system that acts as a downforce generator, pulling air out from beneath the car. Tesla says it provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary.
That is the key difference from the wings and diffusers on a normal supercar. Conventional aero only makes downforce when the car is moving, and it grows with speed, so a car has the least grip in the slow corners and under hard braking. A fan system makes downforce at any speed. Tesla’s patent, which we covered last year, describes fans and deployable skirts that create sealed or partially sealed regions under the car, with the fans extracting air to lower the pressure and increase grip and stability.
Still processing this … the most unreal thing I’ve seen. https://t.co/HtEuvnkZjY
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 16, 2026
Tesla pairs that with active wings, a next generation steer by wire system and a Track Mode that lowers the car and changes the suspension, with high downforce and low drag settings for the circuit. To keep weight down, Tesla points to magnesium, titanium and carbon fiber, manual controls and a fixed seat position, which it says lets the car respond to driver inputs almost instantly.
Tesla Roadster: Three configs, one can fly, 0-60 in 0.8 seconds
The cold gas thrusters are the other half. On the Thrust version they sit at the rear and Tesla says they take the car from 0 to 60 mph in under 0.9 seconds, while the Rocket version adds perimeter thrusters for forward, upward and lateral rotational movement. Tesla says the all electric actuators make micro adjustments within a fraction of a second.
Roadster transforms in Track Mode
These aero features aren’t just for looks: they provide the best passive downforce package of any road car (approaching F1 levels!) with wing actuation driven by the @Tesla_Optimus actuator system https://t.co/AqrC4qUga9
— Tesla (@Tesla) October 16, 2026
Musk has been talking about records for years. In June 2019 he said, “We’re going to do things with the new Roadster that are kind of unfair to other cars.” That September, when a follower asked whether the Roadster would beat the Nürburgring production car record, he replied with one word, “Absolutely,” as we reported at the time. In February 2024 he said Tesla had “radically increased the design goals” for the car and that its sub one second 0 to 60 time would be “the least interesting part.”
There are caveats. Tesla has not published a lap time or a verified cornering figure, so the record talk is still a promise rather than a result. Tesla also says the car is not approved for public road use, and the thruster features are limited to the Rocket trim, which is invite only. Fan cars have also been banned or withdrawn before, and getting a sealed underbody to work on a rough public road is a harder problem than on a smooth track. The first real test will be an official lap at a circuit.