Investor's Corner
How Tesla’s Semi will dramatically alter the trucking industry
The Tesla Semi offers something to the trucking industry that could drastically alter the entire freight moving sector. The trucking industry has seen major changes since it began roughly a century ago and has, despite the assumptions of many outsiders looking in, been one of the more technologically-advanced industries in our nation. Trucks themselves have seen huge changes in the past few decades while the freight industry as a whole has been reinvented and revamped multiple times over in that same time period.
Nasdaq.com contributor Martin Tillier mentions the impacts that the Tesla Semi and others with similar game-changing technologies will have on the trucking industry long-term. Most notably with autonomous trucks and their electric powertrains.
“The technological change that benefits trucking and delivery businesses has been widely reported, but in my experience most people that I ask about it focus on the potential negatives rather than looking for opportunities,” writes Tillier. “..they ignore the biggest beneficiary of all: trucking companies. They are looking at a future where two of their major costs, fuel and drivers, will be dramatically lower..”
Those salient points are much bigger-picture than most commenting on the Tesla Semi and other related vehicles would note. Just about every major manufacturer of commercial vehicles, including Class 8 trucks, is getting in on the electrification game and many are also building towards automation. The companies most often noted, like Tesla and Nikola, are actually side-players compared to the already-established heavy-duty builders like Paccar (Kenworth, Peterbilt), Daimler, Volvo, and the like. Even manufacturers like Cummins are working with alternatives to petroleum-burning drivetrains.
The stakes are huge. According to the American Trucking Associations, over 70 percent of the freight (by tonnage) moved in the United States is moved by truck. There are about ten and a half billion tons of freight moved around the U.S. annually and about 3.6 million Class 8 trucks on the road pulling that freight.
The electrification of trucks is a big step. It won’t happen really quickly, but it will happen eventually. How, exactly, that electrification comes will depend on a lot of things. It could be the battery-powered Tesla Semi or it could be the hydrogen fuel cell-run Toyota-Kenworth collaboration. Or any mixture of things, including the range-extending turbine proposed for the original Nikola design or that of Capstone. Whatever the solution or solutions are, freight-hauling trucks of all sizes are going to become electric. That’s a given.
Why? For the same reason they all went to diesel a few decades ago. It’s more efficient and thus cheaper. Before diesel, most trucks were powered by gasoline and were extremely inefficient, hauling less weight and getting worse fuel economy. Diesel itself saw many changes over time as the engines it powered improved and emissions fell. Currently, trucks use around 38 billion gallons of diesel fuel a year. At four dollars a gallon, that’s about $152 billion in fuel. With electricity, costs could be a fraction of diesel. Roughly a quarter of the cost, in fact, in worst-case assumptions. More optimistic numbers would put it in the 1/16th to 1/8th fractions.
Tesla Semi’s center seating position for drivers
The gains with autonomous self-driving or driving assist technology are even higher. In trucking, the highest cost to the trucking company is the driver behind the wheel, with wages and benefits–not to mention legalities and downtime–having the highest impact on the bottom line. A truck driver can legally drive for 11 hours per day and most drivers average about 600 miles daily. An autonomous truck could drive 24/7, stopping only to load/unload or refuel. Self-driving trucks would also solve a problem that’s long plagued the trucking industry: driver shortages.
Truck drivers will lose jobs, yes. Eventually. Remember, we’re talking decades here, not years. When (not if) automated big trucks take over as the bulk of the industry’s means of moving freight, most drivers will be required to find new careers. We must remember, however, that truck driving is essentially made up of a labor force which has little formal training and mostly on-the-job experience as their primary resume point. These drivers become more skilled with time and hence demand higher wages. The most skilled workers in truck driving tend also be those closest to retirement. Replacements for those skilled drivers are new drivers who’ve completed perhaps three weeks of trucking school and a month of over-the-road training with a slightly more skilled driver as a mentor. This doesn’t make trucking an easy job, but it does mean that those with the most skills are the least likely to lose their jobs when automation becomes the norm.
We can argue until our fingers bleed, typing about the feasibility of the Tesla Semi and Elon Musk’s promises for the truck’s capabilities. Whether Tesla delivers on those promises is moot; as we know that someone, somewhere, and sometime very soon will deliver on similar promises regardless. The trucking industry is going through another sea change. Those in technology, used to a new iPhone every year and who hashtag about cryptocurrencies, might consider a decade or two as a long time to wait. Those in manufacturing and transportation, however, see twenty years as a single generation and their version of 2.0 has huge economic impacts on the nation’s and world’s economies.
The trucking industry knows that electrification and automation are coming. Fast. The Tesla Semi may or may not physically bring that revolution, but it certainly does symbolize it.
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.
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