Investor's Corner
Tesla at $420 is a bargain considering its Autopilot data is key to a self-driving future
Questions continue to swirl around the fate of Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) as the market waits for updates about Elon Musk’s initiative to make the company private. Tesla’s privatization, provided that it does go through, will be the largest one in history, amounting to around $70 billion at Musk’s target of $420 per share. While this amount is substantial, $420 is actually a pretty good deal for Tesla’s would-be funding partners, considering the volume of Autopilot data the company has gathered from its Model S, Model X and Model 3 fleet.
Tesla’s possible privatization has caused wild swings in Tesla’s stock price, though not too far a departure from its usual volatility. Upon Musk’s announcement, shares climbed up 11%, before falling back as reservations emerged from critics about the plausibility of the company’s privatization. On Thursday’s after-hours, Tesla stock recovered some of its losses as the company’s board of directors issued a statement stating that they would formally review Musk’s plans.
Gene Munster, Managing Partner at Loup Ventures believes that there is more than a 50% chance that Tesla would become a private company. Munster noted that while concerns about the possible repercussions of Musk’s go-private Twitter announcement might affect the stock, the effects would only be felt at the very short-term. Ultimately, the venture capital firm believes that neither Tesla nor Elon Musk is at legal risk, especially since the company stated on a 2013 Form 8-K that social media might be used as an outlet for disseminating company information. Loup Ventures also estimates that Tesla would need around $25-$30 billion to take the electric car and energy company private.
If Loup Ventures’ calculations prove accurate, the entities providing the company with the funding to go private would be getting quite a deal at $420 per share. Apart from Tesla’s electric car and energy business — both of which are growing at an immense rate — investors would also be buying into a company that holds what could very well be automotive world’s most extensive amount of real-world driving data. As of July, a report from MIT’s Lex Fridman estimated that Tesla had acquired around 1.2 billion miles on Autopilot and approximately 7.8 billion miles in Autopilot “Shadow Mode.”
In comparison, Waymo’s fleet of vehicles have driven a total of 5 million real-world miles in self-driving mode and an additional 5 billion miles in simulation as of May this year. GM Cruise, another leader in self-driving technology, does not release the numbers of its fleet, but accident and disengagement reports based on autonomous miles driven provide a rough estimate of the miles Cruise’s vehicles have traveled so far. Between June 2015 and November 2017, the California Department of Motor Vehicles estimated that GM Cruise’s self-driving cars covered a total of 141,691 miles in CA. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas estimates Waymo to be worth $175 billion. GM Cruise, on the other hand, is valued at $11.5 billion after securing more funding from Softbank’s Vision Fund earlier this year.
Tesla’s development of self-driving technologies has taken a backseat in the media coverage of the company, particularly during the past year as the company struggled with the Model 3 ramp. Regardless of this, Keith Wright, a professor from Villanova University, notes that Elon Musk’s decision to invest heavily in AI would likely pay off soon. Among the participants in the self-driving race, Tesla is the company with the most real-world experience. Elon Musk once noted that it would likely take around 6 billion real-world miles before regulators would approve self-driving technology. So far, Tesla is the company closest to that mark.
Tesla’s focus on data gathered from real-world miles was emphasized by Nidhi Kalra, a senior information scientist for the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. According to the information scientist, simulations such as the ones used by Waymo to train its fleet of autonomous vehicles are a “simplification” of the real world.
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“The problem with any simulator is that it’s a simplification of the real world. Even if it stimulates the world accurately, if all you’re simulating is a sunny day in Mountain View with no traffic, then what is the value of doing a billion miles on the same cul-de-sac in Mountain View? I’m not saying that’s what anyone’s doing but without that information we can’t know what a billion miles really means. Real-world miles still really, really matter. That’s where, literally, the rubber meets the road, and there’s no substitute for it,” Kalra said.
And Tesla is just getting started. In Tesla’s Q2 2018 earnings call, the company provided an update on its efforts to develop its own self-driving hardware. According to Pete Bannon, who leads the development of Hardware 3, the company’s new hardware is different from the industry standard.
“We did a survey of all of the solutions that were out there for running neural networks, including GPUs. We went and talked to other people like at ARM that were building embedded solutions for running neural networks. And pretty much everywhere we looked, if somebody had a hammer, whether it was a CPU or a GPU or whatever, they were adding something to accelerate neural networks. But nobody was doing a bottoms-up design from scratch, which is what we elected to do.”
“We had the benefit of having the insight into seeing what Tesla’s neural networks looked like back then and having projections of what they would look like into the future, and we were able to leverage all of that knowledge and our willingness to totally commit to that style of computing to produce a design that’s dramatically more efficient and has dramatically more performance than what you can buy today.”
Tesla could very well be approaching its most significant turning point in years. Regardless of whether Tesla becomes private or not, one thing seems sure — once Tesla starts rolling out its first full self-driving features, and once Hardware 3 makes it to the company’s fleet, leaders in the self-driving industry would probably be forced to recognize the presence of a new, possibly dominant player.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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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Elon Musk
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.
![Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner.jpg)
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.
Correction, 10 million robots https://t.co/0z4nyQNTzp
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) July 30, 2026
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.
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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