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Tesla SolarCity merger may be delayed by shareholder lawsuits

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A special stockholder meeting in connection with Tesla’s proposed SolarCity acquisition is coming soon.

Over the weekend, Tesla published two items related to the acquisition: a notice of an upcoming event, the Record Date for the Upcoming Tesla Special Stockholder Meeting in Connection with SolarCity Acquisition, and an update the the S-4 Registration Statement, a.k.a the Merger Proposal.

In the first announcement Tesla intends to inform Tesla investors that the “record date for the determination of Tesla stockholders entitled to […] vote at the Tesla special stockholders meeting in connection with the SolarCity acquisition will be sometime during the week of September 19, 2016.”  In layman terms, this means that sometime this week, anyone that “settled” a TSLA stock purchase 3 days prior to this date will have the right to vote at the Tesla special stockholders meeting.

Because of the  T+3 system of settlement presently used in North America whereby stock trades settle three business days after the transaction is carried out, anyone purchasing TSLA stock this week will likely be unable to vote at the Tesla special stockholders meeting.

The second filing is an update to the original S-4 Registration Statement of August 31, 2016. Comparing the two version of the Merger Proposal, shows that the documents are effectively identical, except for a section entitled “Litigation Relating to the Merger” (on page 23 of the latest PDF).

In this section of the Merger Proposal, Tesla discloses that “between September 1, 2016 and September 14, 2016, four lawsuits were filed in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware by purported stockholders of Tesla challenging the proposed Merger.” These lawsuits were filed by the City of Riviera Beach Police Pension Fund, Ellen Prasinos, the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, and P. Evan Stephens.

In the lawsuits it is alleged “that the members of the Tesla Board breached their fiduciary duties in connection with the proposed Merger and, in some cases, that SolarCity and members of the SolarCity Board aided and abetted breaches of fiduciary duties and that certain individual defendants would be unjustly enriched by the proposed Merger.”

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Additionally the lawsuits claim that “Member of the Tesla Board [..] [in the S-4 document] filed on August 31, 2016 allegedly failed to disclose material facts in connection with the proposed Merger.”

The main goal of the lawsuits is the rescission of the proposed Merger. Tesla of course believes that the actions are without merit.

What does this all means? Probably not too much. The record date will be announced this week, and soon after the Tesla special stockholders meeting in connection with the SolarCity acquisition will be held. Approval is expected, given that most of the large shareholders, Mutual Funds and major Hedge funds, have already announced their approval.

The lawsuits, unless thrown out by the appointed judge, will likely only delay the actual closing off the agreement. One thing to also note is that almost every merger agreement results in shareholders lawsuits, so the Tesla situation is fairly common.

TSLA Stock Action

TSLA stock is now officially back on the run. Looking at today’s chart, most of the technical indicators have now turned positive: we have 3 green bars of the Heikin-Ashi chart (the pay-day-cycle, showing the momentum is on the upside), the MACD has turned positive and the MACD averages are “pinching”. This was enough for me to initiate a buy on Friday of TSLA January 2017 $200 calls.

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Elon Musk

SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch

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SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.

The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.

Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.

SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.

The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.

As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.

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Tesla AI boss reveals how big Optimus is going to get

Tesla’s Optimus chief corrected himself on X, confirming a staggering 10 million robot production target.

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Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]

Tesla’s Optimus program has a new number attached to it, after Ashok Elluswamy, the executive who has run the humanoid robot program since June 2025, posted a three word correction on X Thursday, “Correction, 10 million robots.”

The line clarifies the long term annual capacity Tesla is building toward its planned second Optimus production line at Gigafactory Texas, a figure Musk has cited repeatedly since last year’s shareholder meeting.

The scale is worth noting, because ten million robots a year would mean Tesla building more units annually than most countries sell in new cars. Tesla has framed this as a second line, not the first. The buildout is happening in two phases: a roughly one million unit per year line inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, installed on the floor space vacated when Model S and Model X production ended earlier this year, and a much larger dedicated facility under construction at Giga Texas that broke ground on its first steel structure in May. That Texas facility is the one Elluswamy’s correction refers to, and is expected to reach volume production sometime in 2027.

Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress

Elluswamy took over Optimus from Milan Kovac last summer and has spent the months since talking up the program’s trajectory. Elon Musk has also floated the ten million figure at Tesla’s 2025 shareholder meeting.

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Ending Model S and Model X production to make room for the first Optimus line was one of the more consequential manufacturing decisions in the company’s recent history, retiring two flagship vehicles in favor of a robot that has yet to enter mass production. Musk has previously estimated per unit production costs at $20,000 to $25,000 once Tesla reaches a million units a year, though he hasn’t said what that cost looks like at ten times the volume.

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SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

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SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.

The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.

SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters

Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.

SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.

With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.

Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.

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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.

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