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Tesla Supercharger network pitched as charging partner for electric truck startup

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Despite admitting that he thinks moats are lame in Tesla’s Q1 2018 earnings call, Elon Musk cannot deny that the Supercharger network provides a competitive advantage against upcoming rivals like the Porsche Taycan or the Jaguar I-PACE. There are 10,901 Superchargers as of writing, and Tesla is steadily adding more. The company even noted in a recent update that 99% of the United States’ population now lives within 150 miles of a Supercharger station.

The Supercharger network is so far only compatible with Tesla’s vehicles. While addressing this point during the Q1 earnings call, Elon Musk asserted that the Superchargers are not a “walled garden” that is designed only for Tesla’s electric cars. Musk even added that Tesla has been open to sharing the charging network with competitors, provided that they use an adapter and pay a fee. The CEO noted that so far, no other EV maker has expressed interest in getting access to the company’s Superchargers.

“We’ve always said that this is not intended to be a walled garden, and we’re happy to support other automakers and let them use our Supercharger stations. They would just need to pay, you know, share the costs proportionate to their vehicle usage, and they would need to be able to accept our charge rate or at least our connector, at least have an adapter to our connector. This is something that we are very open to, but so far, none of the other car makers have wanted to do this. It’s not because of opposition from us. This is not a walled garden,” Musk said.

This was not the case today. Bollinger Motors, an electric vehicle startup, recently posted a tweet directly asking Elon Musk if its upcoming EV, the B1 all-electric sport utility truck, could use Tesla’s Supercharger network. Neither Tesla nor Elon Musk has posted a response to the company’s proposal in the social media platform yet.

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Bollinger Motors might be relatively new to the electric vehicle industry, but its first offering has been garnering a strong, positive response from the EV community. The company only has one vehicle, called the B1, but the truck has won praise from both EV and truck enthusiasts due to its rugged, aggressive and utility-focused design. With boxy panels, the B1 is not that aerodynamic, but its design and features invoke an image of a vehicle that is as tough as it looks.

The Bollinger B1 all-electric sport utility truck. [Credit: Bollinger Motors]

The B1 is fitted with two electric motors that make 360 horsepower and 472 lb-ft Torque. A 125 kWh battery pack is also expected to give the truck an estimated 200 miles of range per charge. That said, what really sets the Bollinger B1 apart is its utility features. The truck has a 2-speed, high/low gearbox, which could help the vehicle traverse through steep terrain. The B1 also sits high on its massive off-road wheels, thanks to its adjustable suspension that can provide a ground clearance of 10-20 inches. The B1 can also serve as a portable power supply for tools.  

Bollinger has not announced the price of the upcoming vehicle yet, though the company has stated that it has listed around 10,000 reservations to date. Bollinger expects to finalize the B1’s design this year, with initial production estimated to begin sometime in 2019.  

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Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

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Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO

SpaceX has secured an option to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion ahead of its historic IPO.

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SpaceX announced today it has struck a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, securing the option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, while committing $10 billion for joint development work in the interim. The announcement described the partnership as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” and comes just days after Cursor was separately reported to be raising $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion.

The move makes strategic sense given where each company currently stands. Cursor currently pays retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI to the same companies competing directly against it with Claude Code and Codex. That means every dollar of revenue Cursor earns partially funds its own competition. With SpaceX bringing computational infrastructure to the Cursor platform, that could reduce Cursor’s dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude AI as its providers. Access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, with compute equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 chips, gives Cursor the infrastructure to run and train its own models at a scale it could never afford independently. That one change restructures the entire unit economics of the business.

Elon Musk teases crazy outlook for xAI against its competitors

Cursor’s $2 billion in annualized revenue and enterprise reach across more than half of Fortune 500 companies gives SpaceX something its xAI subsidiary currently lacks, which is a proven, fast-growing software business with real enterprise distribution.

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For Cursor, SpaceX’s $10 billion in joint development funding is transformational. Cursor raised $3.3 billion across all of 2025 to reach that $2 billion in revenue. A single $10 billion commitment from SpaceX, even as a development payment rather than an acquisition, dwarfs everything Cursor has raised in its entire existence. That capital accelerates product development, enterprise sales infrastructure, and proprietary model training simultaneously.

The timing is deliberate. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1, 2026, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation, in what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is expected to begin its roadshow the week of June 8, with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley serving as underwriters. Adding Cursor to the portfolio before that roadshow gives IPO investors a concrete enterprise software revenue story to price in, alongside rockets and satellite internet.

The deal also addresses a weakness that became visible after February’s xAI merger. Several xAI co-founders departed following that acquisition, and SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, signaling where its AI talent strategy was heading. Cursor, for its part, faces a pricing disadvantage competing against Anthropic’s Claude Code.

Whether SpaceX exercises the full acquisition option before its IPO or after remains the open question. Either way, this deal reshapes what investors will be buying into when SpaceX goes public.

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Tesla Supercharger for Business exposes jaw-dropping ROI gap between best and worst locations

Tesla’s new Supercharger for Business calculator reveals an eye-opening all-in cost and location-based ROI projections.

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tesla v4 supercharger

Tesla has launched an online calculator for its Supercharger for Business program, giving property owners their first transparent look at what it really costs to install Superchargers on site and what kind of return they can expect.

The program itself launched in September 2025, allowing businesses to purchase and operate Supercharger hardware on their own property while Tesla handles installation, maintenance, software, and 24/7 driver support. As Teslarati reported at launch, hosts also get their logo placed on the chargers and their location integrated into Tesla’s in-car navigation, meaning drivers are actively routed there. The stalls are open to all EVs, not just Teslas.


The new online calculator, announced by Tesla on Wednesday with the note that “simplicity and transparency” have been a problem in the industry, lets any business enter a U.S. address and get a real cost and revenue model. A standard 8-stall V4 Supercharger site runs approximately $500,000 in hardware and $55,000 per post for installation, bringing an all-in price just shy of $1 million. Tesla charges a flat $0.10 per kWh fee to cover software, billing, and network operations. Businesses set their own retail price and keep the margin above that fee.

Tesla expands its branded ‘For Business’ Superchargers

 

Taking a look at Tesla’s Supercharger for Business online calculator, we can see that ROI is not uniform, and the gap between a strong location and a poor one can stretch the breakeven point by several years.

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The biggest driver is foot traffic and how long people stay. A busy rest station, hotel, or outlet mall brings in repeat visitors who need to charge while they’re already stopped, pushing utilization numbers higher and shortening payback time.

Tesla Supercharger for Business ROI calculator

Tesla Supercharger for Business ROI calculator

Local electricity rates matter just as much on the cost side. Markets like California carry some of the highest commercial electricity rates in the country, which eats into the margin between what a host pays per kWh and what they charge drivers. At the same time, dense urban areas with high EV adoption tend to support higher retail charging prices, which can offset that cost if demand is strong enough. Weather also plays a role. Cold climates reduce battery efficiency and increase charging frequency, but they can also suppress utilization in winter months if drivers avoid stopping in exposed outdoor locations. Suburban and rural sites face a different problem: lower baseline EV traffic, which means a site with cheaper power and lower operating costs can still take longer to pay back simply because the stalls sit idle more often. Tesla’s calculator uses real fleet data to pre-fill utilization estimates by ZIP code, so businesses can run their specific address against these variables rather than relying on averages.

The program has seen real adoption. Wawa, already the largest host of Tesla Superchargers with over 2,100 stalls across 223 locations, opened its first fully owned and branded site in Alachua, Florida earlier this year. Francis Energy of Oklahoma and the city of Alpharetta, Georgia have also deployed branded stations through the program, as Teslarati covered in January.

Tesla now exceeds 80,000 Supercharger stalls worldwide, and the calculator makes the economic case for accelerating that number through private investment rather than company-owned sites alone.

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Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet

Tesla’s folding V4 Supercharger ships 33% more per truck, cuts deployment time and cost significantly.

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Tesla V4 Supercharger installation ramping in Europe

Tesla is rolling out a folding V4 Supercharger design, an engineering change that allows 33% more units to fit on a single delivery truck, cuts deployment time in half, and reduces overall installation cost by roughly 20%.

The folding mechanism addresses one of the least glamorous but most consequential bottlenecks in charging infrastructure: getting hardware from factory floor to job site efficiently. By collapsing the form factor for transit and unfolding into an operational configuration on arrival, the new design dramatically reduces the logistics overhead that has historically slowed Supercharger rollouts, particularly at large or remote sites where multiple units are needed simultaneously.

The timing aligns with a broader acceleration in Tesla’s network strategy. In March 2026, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet after more than seven years and 15,000 units, pivoting entirely to V4 cabinet production. The V4 cabinet itself is already a generational leap, delivering up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, while supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. The folding transport innovation layers logistical efficiency on top of that technical foundation.

Tesla launches first ‘true’ East Coast V4 Supercharger: here’s what that means

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Tesla Charging’s Director Max de Zegher, commenting on the V4 cabinet when it launched, captured the operational philosophy behind these changes: “Posts can peak up to 500kW for cars, but we need less than 1MW across 8 posts to deliver maximum power to cars 99% of the time.” The design philosophy has always been about maximizing real-world throughput, not just peak specs, and the folding transport upgrade extends that thinking into the supply chain itself.

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