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Tesla supplier Talon Metals on Manchin EV Bill, Tesla & more
Tesla supplier, Talon Metals (TLO.TO) gave Teslarati an exclusive interview and we talked about the Manchin EV Bill, Tesla and more.
I received some great feedback on one of my recent articles from Todd Malan, Chief External
Affairs Officer & Head of Climate Strategy at Talon Metals, one of Tesla’s key suppliers of nickel
and other battery minerals in the USA.
The two companies signed an offtake partnership in January of this year to supply nickel from Talon’s project in central Minnesota. Todd is based in Washington DC for Talon and therefore has a front-row seat to the wrangling among various parties regarding Senator Manchin’s new EV tax incentives in the Infrastructure Reduction Act of 2022.
As of this morning, voting was slated to begin today and the bill is expected to pass on a partisan line vote in the early morning of Monday. If the House passes it next week, it should be on President Biden’s desk by the end of the week.
Manchin’s EV tax credit proposal
Todd shared his thoughts on Manchin’s EV tax credit proposal. On one hand, it’s breathtakingly generous in that it lifts all numerical limits on EVs that are eligible for the $7500 tax credit.
Previously, 200,000 cars per year for each nameplate. On the other hand, Manchin’s proposal sets some new eligibility parameters around the cost of the EV, the income level of the buyer, and the source of the battery raw materials (sourced from the US or countries that have a Free Trade
Agreement with the US).
As I reported last week, some automakers are unhappy with Manchin’s strings on the EV credit, others like Tesla seem to be taking more of a “can do” approach when it comes to the mineral content provisions.
Todd also walked me through the comprehensive approach that Senator Manchin took to
supporting domestic mining and mineral processing across the full bill.
So, Manchin isn’t just telling automakers to buy from domestic sources of minerals and metals from domestic sources and leaving it to them. He also added significant new government support to help the supply chain get up and running on an urgent basis.
The fact that he got commitments from Democratic leaders in Congress and President Biden to reform the permitting process in the US in separate legislation (not just for mines but for solar, wind and hydrogen too) is another signal of Manchin’s holistic approach to ramping up the full battery supply chain in the US and also rely on allies that happen to be mineral powerhouses like Australia and Canada.
Todd had a very optimistic view that all of these provisions, including the EV credit, will help the U.S. address its dependency on China for batteries and scale up its capability in battery mineral production.
The core of his view is that it will take partnerships between miners, automakers,
regulators, recyclers, and other parts of the supply chain to meet the Manchin content
requirements.
Todd thinks Tesla and Ford stand out as companies leading the way in this new
approach to supply chain security.
Some automakers are not happy with Senator Manchin’s EV tax credit proposal
Todd read my article, Automakers are not too happy with Senator Manchin’s EV tax credit
proposal and pointed out that there was not a universal view among the automakers or the rest of the battery supply chain.
“Mazda and Rivian have been out-front in the media complaining about aspects of Senator
Manchin’s EV incentive proposal. I understand the concern that the timeline is very ambitious but on the other hand, Senator Manchin’s draft includes some of the world’s largest producers of battery materials: Canada, Chile, Australia, South Korea, etc.”
“Those countries that don’t have free trade agreements with the US, there is plenty of time (and now incentive) for them to negotiate agreements. Senator Manchin didn’t just confine the provision to the U.S., or even USMCA countries, but all countries that now or in the future have free trade agreements.”
“This is a balanced measure that will encourage domestic mining investment and development while also ensuring we can draw on our allies for secure supplies. It may not be the cheapest option for the automakers, but supply from this broad base of countries can be ramped up to meet the requirements.”
Todd pointed out that other parts of the auto lobby had a more nuanced approach to
Manchin’s proposal to support EV adoption. The Zero Emissions Transportation Association (ZETA), in which Tesla is a lead member, was quick to offer support for Manchin’s EV incentives.
Joe Britton, ZETA Executive Director was quoted in a number of media articles admitting that the domestic and ally content provisions would be hard to meet but that they could be met.
“If you look at the landscape as it exists today, it’s a challenge, but it’s doable,” said Joe Britton, the head of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, which advocates for EV adoption, told Bloomberg.“We can meet these metrics.”
Britton also has been praising the Manchin bill for what it will do for EV adoption. He told
News12 Westchester that he hopes the rebate can entice more people to purchase EVs. Britton said:
“In most areas of the country, especially the Northeast, it is five to six times more expensive to drive your vehicle on gasoline than it is by electricity. So, by making these vehicles more affordable on the front end, you’re really driving down that total cost of ownership”
As with most people that are involved with Tesla as suppliers, Malan was extremely careful to not speak for Tesla or speculate on their positions. But I realized that someone glancing at the headlines without reading through the article might assume that Tesla was of the same view as the legacy auto industry.
We all know Tesla prefers to speak for itself and Elon Musk shared a thought about Senator Manchin on Twitter yesterday. Although many were wondering what his tweet meant, I think it’s pretty clear he thinks Manchin is doing something right.
Thank goodness for Senator Manchin
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 5, 2022
Partnerships across the value chain will be key
Todd pointed out to the Detroit News yesterday that it will take a range of
partnerships to meet the Manchin goals. He pointed out that Tesla and Talon have explicitly described their supply relationship as a partnership. Tesla is working with its suppliers.
Todd told me that everyone will need to work together to meet these goals.
“We need everyone working together to meet these ambitious goals in the Manchin bill.
Mining is the front end of the supply chain and it takes enormous knowhow, capital, and risk tolerance to discover, delineate, permit, construct and then safely operate a mine to supply battery minerals.”
“Processing has been the Achilles heel of the supply chain in the U.S. Luckily. Congress just provided new resources to address this issue in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Everybody’s going to have to work together. The auto manufacturers, the miners, the people that do processing, and government at state and federal level.”
“Senator Manchin and others in Congress realize that governments are going to have to focus on improving the permitting process – not to cut corners in environmental protections but to make the process more certain, efficient, and reliable.”
“Not just for mines, processing or even EV battery factories – but also solar, wind, hydro and hydrogen projects. We can not afford a disorganized, uncoordinated, and inefficient regulatory process that causes unnecessary delays in progress. We need all these projects to come online to address the climate crisis while also ensuring we protect the environment through science-based permitting.”
Talon Metals on Senator Manchin’s proposal.
I’ve seen a lot of mixed feedback on Senator Manchin’s proposal. As noted in my earlier article, many automakers like Mazda and Rivian are lobbying hard to water it down. Not as much has been heard from the companies that source raw materials like nickel and lithium in the United States. So, I asked Todd to share his take–and that of Talon Metals.
“From the standpoint of a company that’s trying to build a responsible nickel mine in
Minnesota, we think that Senator Manchin has struck a good balance in this bill. First, it provides the most generous set of incentives for EV adoption ever enacted in law.
“It also encourages auto companies to work with domestic mines and mines in allied countries like Australia, Canada, and Chile and it provides some time for projects to ramp up. It also provides time for countries that don’t have FTAs to engage with the US and negotiate. Yes, it is a stretch goal but that seems appropriate given the climate crisis and our dependency on countries like China and Russia for battery supplies.”
“This is a carefully balanced bill that does push everyone to rise to the occasion. But that is appropriate because we want to create high-quality jobs in America as part of the energy transition and we don’t want to rely on Russia and China for the supply chain of battery minerals. It’s a matter of national security.”
How can automakers better work with their suppliers?
I asked this question because if automakers truly want to “get aggressive”; as Senator Manchin challenged them to do, then perhaps they need to take a page from Tesla and other leaders’practices.
“Having a Tesla off-take agreement in place has changed the perception of our project in the community. It’s very credentializing and our employees are proud of the partnership. People clearly understand that our proposed mine has a purpose: to supply nickel for the EV battery supply chain and contribute to the energy transition. This has helped shape how people perceive the project. It has a purpose and an important one.”
“Many of the large automakers are helping supply partners apply for some of the significant new funding opportunities being made available through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. The Department of Energy is expected to give out over $1.8 billion in funding from that legislation this fall. This is another example of how the end-users can help the front end of the supply chain for battery materials.”
Todd commented that many auto companies are having a tough time adjusting to the new
reality of scarce commodities.
“They used to only focus on price and quality with a yearly focus on driving down the price. It’s a whole new game now, as they learned in the chip crisis. Some are still adjusting their mindset to scarcity and competition for supply.”
“It requires a change in mindset. No longer can the big auto company demand ever-lower price year over year. Smart end users have changed their mindset to partnership. That means understanding their partners’ issues, helping them to maximize productivity, access newtechnology, ramp up production, improve quality, and provide support during the permittingprocess or help obtain government funding.”
“This is the future, true partnership in the supply chain, from mine to cathode to recycling. That is how we meet Senator Manchin’s challenge and strengthen the supply chain for battery production.”
Todd didn’t come out and say it directly, but it came through in the way he talked about the Tesla. Yet again, Tesla is leading the industry in terms of securing supply from the right countries to feed its factories but also leading practices in working in partnership with key suppliers.
Knowing that I love cool rocks, Todd invited me up to Minnesota to check out what Talon is doing at Tamarack and show me some beautiful nickel samples. Todd also told me about Minnesota’s famous burger concoction, The Juicy Lucy.
Disclaimer: Johnna is long Tesla.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or see a typo, you can email me at johnna@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @JohnnaCrider1
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
News
SpaceX is following in Tesla’s footsteps in a way nobody expected
In the span of just months in early 2026, SpaceX has transformed itself into one of the world’s most ambitious AI companies. The catalyst: its February acquisition of xAI.
When Elon Musk founded Tesla in 2003, it was a plucky electric car startup betting everything on lithium-ion batteries and a niche luxury Roadster.
Two decades later, Tesla is far more than a car company. Its valuation increasingly hinges on Full Self-Driving software, the Optimus humanoid robot, the Robotaxi program, and the Dojo supercomputer cluster purpose-built for AI training.
Musk has repeatedly described Tesla as an AI and robotics company that happens to sell vehicles. The cars, in this view, are merely the first scalable platform for real-world AI.
Now, SpaceX is tracing an eerily similar path, only faster and in a direction almost no one anticipated. Founded in 2002 to make spaceflight routine and eventually multiplanetary, SpaceX spent its first two decades perfecting reusable rockets, landing Falcon 9 boosters, and building the Starlink megaconstellation.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
It was an engineering and manufacturing powerhouse, not a software play. Yet, in the span of just months in early 2026, SpaceX has transformed itself into one of the world’s most ambitious AI companies. The catalyst: its February acquisition of xAI.
The xAI deal, announced on February 2, was structured as an all-stock transaction that valued the combined entity at roughly $1.25 trillion—SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. In a memo to employees, Musk framed the merger as the creation of “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.”
The new SpaceX now owns Grok, the large language model family that powers the chatbot of the same name, along with xAI’s massive training infrastructure. More importantly, it has a declared mission to move AI compute off-planet.
Earth-based data centers are hitting hard limits on power, cooling, and land. Musk’s solution is orbital data centers, or constellations of solar-powered satellites that act as supercomputers in the sky.
SpaceX has already asked regulators for permission to launch up to one million such satellites. Starship, the company’s fully reusable heavy-lift vehicle, is the only rocket capable of delivering the necessary mass at the required cadence.
Each orbital node would enjoy near-constant sunlight, vast radiator surfaces for passive cooling, and zero terrestrial real-estate costs. Musk has predicted that within two to three years, space-based AI inference and training could become cheaper than anything possible on the ground.
This is not a side project; it is the strategic centerpiece Musk has envisioned for SpaceX. Starlink already provides the global low-latency backbone; next-generation V3 satellites will carry onboard AI accelerators. Rockets deliver the hardware, while AI optimizes every aspect of launch, landing, and constellation management.
The feedback loop is self-reinforcing, too. Better AI makes better rockets, which launch more AI infrastructure.
Just yesterday, on April 21, SpaceX doubled down.
It secured an option to acquire Cursor—the fast-growing AI coding tool beloved by software engineers—for $60 billion later this year, or pay a $10 billion partnership fee if the full deal does not close.
Cursor’s models already help engineers write code at superhuman speed. Pairing that technology with SpaceX’s Colossus-scale training clusters (the same ones powering Grok) positions the company to dominate AI developer tools, much as Tesla dominates autonomous driving software.
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
The parallels with Tesla are striking. Both companies began in a single, capital-intensive sector: Tesla with EVs, SpaceX with launch vehicles. Both used early hardware success to fund AI at scale. Tesla’s Dojo supercomputers train neural nets on billions of miles of real-world driving data; SpaceX now trains on telemetry from thousands of orbital assets and re-entries.
Tesla’s FSD chip runs inference on cars; SpaceX’s future satellites will run inference in orbit.
Tesla’s Optimus robot will work in factories; SpaceX envisions lunar factories manufacturing more AI satellites, eventually using electromagnetic mass drivers to fling them into deep space.
Critics once dismissed Musk’s multi-company empire as unfocused. The 2026 moves reveal the opposite: deliberate convergence.
SpaceX is no longer merely a rocket company that sells internet from space. It is an AI company whose competitive moat is literal orbital infrastructure and the only vehicle that can service it at scale. The forthcoming IPO, expected later this year, will almost certainly be pitched not as a space play but as the purest bet on AI infrastructure the public market has ever seen.
Whether the orbital data-center vision survives regulatory scrutiny, astronomical concerns about light pollution, or the sheer engineering challenge remains to be seen.
Yet the strategic direction is unmistakable. Just as Tesla proved that software and AI could redefine the century-old automobile, SpaceX is proving that rockets are merely the delivery mechanism for the next great computing platform—one that floats above the clouds, powered by the sun, and limited only by the physics of orbit.
In that unexpected sense, history is repeating. Tesla stopped being “just a car company” years ago. SpaceX has now stopped being “just a rocket company.” Both are becoming something far larger: AI powerhouses with hardware moats so deep that competitors will need their own reusable megaconstellations to keep up.
The age of terrestrial AI is ending. The age of space-based AI is beginning—and SpaceX is building the launchpad.
Elon Musk
Tesla Earnings: financial expectations and what we should to hear about
In terms of discussions, Tesla earnings calls are usually a great time to get some clarification on the company’s outlook for its current and future projects.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) will report its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 this evening after the market closes, and analysts have already put out their expectations from a financial standpoint for the company’s first three months of the year.
Additionally, there will be plenty of things that will be discussed, including the recent expansion of the Robotaxi program, the Roadster unveiling, and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) approvals across the globe.
Financial Expectations
Wall Street consensus expectations put Tesla’s Earnings Per Share (EPS) at $0.36, while revenues are expected to come in around $22.35 billion.
This would compare to an EPS of $0.27 and $19.34 billion compared to Tesla’s Q1 2025. Last quarter, EPS came in at $0.50 on $29.4 billion of revenue.
Tesla beat analyst expectations last quarter, but the next trading day, the stock fell nearly 3.5 percent. We never quite can gauge how the market will respond to Tesla’s earnings; we’ve seen shares rise on a miss and fall on a beat.
It really goes on the news, and investor consensus, it seems.
What to Expect
In terms of discussions, Tesla earnings calls are usually a great time to get some clarification on the company’s outlook for its current and future projects. Right now, the big focus of investors is the Robotaxi program, the Roadster unveiling, and what the outlook for Full Self-Driving’s expansion throughout Europe and the rest of the world looks like.
Robotaxi
Tesla just recently expanded its unsupervised Robotaxi program to Dallas and Houston, joining Austin as the first cities in the U.S. to have access to the company’s ride-hailing suite.
Tesla expands Unsupervised Robotaxi service to two new cities
Some saw this move as a quick effort to turn attention away from a delivery miss and an anticipated miss on earnings. However, we’ve seen Tesla be more than deliberate with its expansion of the Robotaxi suite, so it’s hard to believe the company would make this move if it were not truly ready to do so.
The company is also working to expand its U.S. ride-hailing service outside of Texas and California, and recently filed paperwork to build a Robotaxi-exclusive Supercharger stall.
Expansion is planned for Florida, Nevada, and Arizona at some point this year, with more states to follow.
Roadster Unveiling
The Roadster unveiling was slated for April 1, and then pushed back (once again) to “probably late April,” according to Elon Musk.
It does not appear that the Roadster unveiling will happen within that time frame, at least not to our knowledge. Nobody has received media or press invites for a Roadster unveiling, and given the lofty expectations set for the vehicle by Musk and Co., it seems like something they’d want to show off to the public.
The Roadster has become a truly frustrating project for Tesla and its fans; evidently, there is something that is not up to the expectations Musk and others have. Meanwhile, fans are essentially waiting for something that is six years late.
At this point, also given the company’s focus on autonomy, it almost seems more worth it to just cancel it, remove any and all timelines and expectations, and surprise people with something crazy down the line, maybe in two or three years. There should be no talk of it.
Full Self-Driving Global Expansion
We expect Musk and Co. to shed some details on where it stands with other European government bodies, as it recently was able to roll out FSD (Supervised) to customers in the Netherlands.
Spain is also working with Tesla to assess FSD’s viability as a publicly available option for owners.
With that being said, there should be some additional information for investors as they listen to the call; no talk of it would be a pretty big letdown.
Optimus
There will likely be a date set for the Gen 3 Optimus unveiling, and we’re hopeful Tesla can keep that date set in stone and meet it. Not reaching timelines is a relatively minor issue, but a company can only do this for so long before its fans and investors start to lose trust and disregard any talk about dates.
It seems this is happening already.
Optimus has been pegged as Tesla’s big money maker for the future. The goals and expectations are high, but it is a privilege to have that sort of pressure when investors know the company’s capability.
Tesla (TSLA) Q1 2026 earnings results: beat on EPS and revenues
SpaceX is following in Tesla’s footsteps in a way nobody expected
