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.
“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.
Investor's Corner
Tesla Optimus Gen 3 shows off a cleaner, factory-ready design in new app discovery
Renders hidden inside Tesla’s Android app show Optimus Gen 3’s design before any official reveal.
![Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner.jpg)
Tesla may have accidentally given a first look at its newest Optimus Gen 3 humanoid robot when photos were found in the Tesla smartphone app.
Design files tucked inside a recent Android version of the Tesla app appear to show the third generation humanoid robot next to the older Gen 2.5 prototype. The assets were extracted from the app package by Tesla community member @wholemars, who posted the renders on X late Tuesday night before deleting them. The Tesla Newswire reshared the side by side comparison on Wednesday, and the images have circulated widely since.
Tesla Optimus Gen 2.5 vs Gen 3 comparison via @WholeMars on X
The files are labeled “gen3” and were built as models for Tesla app’s own interface, as validated directly by Grok to be official.
The comparison shows a robot that looks built for a factory line rather than a lab bench. Gen 2.5’s exposed mechanical linkages and gold plating on the knees and shins are gone. In their place, Gen 3 uses matte black fairings on the lower legs, paired with a more contoured champagne gold body. Flexible covers now seal the joint where the torso meets the upper thighs, keeping bearings and moving parts sealed from debris and unnecessary contact.
The body panels fit more tightly, and the hands, which Tesla has said carry 22 degrees of freedom, look far more refined than those on earlier units.
This most recent leak fills a gap Tesla has left open for most of the year. Elon Musk said on March 31 that Optimus 3 was walking around but needed “some finishing touches” before it could be shown, a delay Teslarati covered when Tesla missed its first quarter reveal target. Musk later said Tesla would hold the design back until closer to production, partly to keep competitors from copying it. No reveal date has been announced.
The app itself has been preparing for Optimus for months. In July, code in the Tesla app pointed to a dedicated robot phone key, a consent screen for collecting video and spatial data while Optimus works inside a home, and an alert system for low battery and mechanical faults. Finished 3D models of Gen 3 suggest the interface owners will eventually use is moving past placeholder code toward something Tesla intends to ship.
Manufacturing is moving in parallel. Tesla tore out the original Model S and Model X lines at Fremont this summer to make room for Optimus production, with a planned capacity of one million robots a year. At Giga Texas, the steel frame of a dedicated Optimus factory is nearing completion ahead of a targeted 2027 start, with Musk pointing to an eventual output of 10 million units annually.
Elon Musk
X changed how everyone gets paid, and this lawsuit shows why
X sued a Bitcoin account network over fake payouts as its creator pay model shifts
Elon Musk’s X has taken a Bitcoin-focused engagement ring to court, and the case doubles as a receipt for how differently the platform pays creators today. The company filed suit in the High Court of England and Wales against Vivek Kumar Sen and Zamyang Sherpa, alleging the pair ran six accounts, including @Vivek4real_, @Bitcoin_Teddy and @TrendingBitcoin, as one coordinated operation to fake the kind of engagement that used to translate directly into money.
According to the filing, first reported by Gizmodo, the accounts posted near identical “BREAKING” crypto headlines seconds apart, in one case 11 seconds, then had three more handles like, reply to and repost the material to manufacture what X called “a false appearance of genuine, human communication and interaction.” X says the scheme pulled in at least £207,384, about $278,000, and pegs its own investigation and remediation costs at another £75,000. The accounts were suspended August 18. X general counsel James Burnham announced the case on X last weekend, writing that the company “will act forcefully to protect our platform and the earnings of genuine creators.” Musk’s own reaction, posted shortly after, was three words: “Don’t mess with 𝕏.”
Don’t mess with 𝕏 https://t.co/HSmd5hL6aQ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 21, 2026
The timing lines up with a a recent update to how X pays its creators. The program these accounts allegedly gamed, Creator Revenue Sharing, launched in mid 2023 and paid out based on how much a post got engaged with. Originality was never part of the formula, which is exactly how the platform ended up flooded with recycled clips, copy pasted “BREAKING” posts and replies engineered purely to farm reactions from paying subscribers.
X tried patching the model more than once, including an April cut to aggregator payouts and a March regional weighting change that Musk personally paused hours after it was announced. X retired Creator Revenue Sharing for good on September 7 and opened its replacement, Original Content Rewards, the next day.
Today, we’re launching Original Content Rewards.
The reality is that Revenue Sharing had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned. Creators should be focused on bringing net new content to the platform instead of maximizing payouts. We could have kept adding more… pic.twitter.com/VJIxqlPrjm
— Allegra Jacchia (@allegrajacchia) August 7, 2026
The new math is stricter. Payouts now come only from qualified impressions, meaning unique Home Timeline views from Premium subscribers where at least half the post is visible, and replies no longer count toward eligibility at all. Copied posts, reuploaded media and reposts without meaningful changes are explicitly excluded. Allegra Jacchia, senior product manager for Creators at SpaceXAI, which now runs X’s product and AI work following xAI’s acquisition of the platform, put it bluntly, saying the goal is to reward creators who bring original ideas and perspective, “not those who have become best at gaming the system.”
Read that way, the lawsuit isn’t really about six crypto accounts. It’s X putting a dollar figure on what the old incentive structure cost, then suing to collect it right as the new one goes live. For live updates on how the case and the new rewards program shake out, follow @Teslarati on X.
Elon Musk
Why automakers keep turning down Elon Musk’s Tesla Full Self-Driving offer
Elon Musk confirms no automaker has ever accepted Tesla’s offer to license Full Self-Driving software.
Elon Musk gave a brief answer on X Monday that confirmed that Tesla’s standing offer to license Full Self-Driving to other automakers still has zero takers. Sawyer Merritt wrote that “Tesla has for years openly invited other automakers to license FSD. None of them have accepted,” responding to a prediction from Boom Supersonic founder Blake Scholl that Tesla would eventually open FSD the way it opened its Supercharger network to rival brands. Musk’s reply to Merritt was one word: “Exactly.”
It is not the first time Musk has made this point. He said something similar in November, when he called legacy automakers reluctance to adopt FSD “crazy,” and Tesla has floated the offer publicly since at least 2021. Scholl’s prediction touches on something real. Once NACS became the de facto charging standard, adoption from Ford, GM, Rivian and others followed within about a year. FSD licensing was supposed to work the same way once Tesla built enough of a lead that switching made sense for everyone.
Tesla has for years openly invited other automakers to license FSD. None of them have accepted. https://t.co/kgz4idpoUM
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) September 22, 2026
The case for licensing now is stronger than it was two years ago. Waymo and Zoox are logging hundreds of thousands of unsupervised autonomous miles, along with Tesla’s own Robotaxi fleet. Every automaker still selling driver assist systems that lag FSD has given the robotaxi conversation to Tesla, Waymo and Zoox by default. Licensing FSD would let a GM or a Ford compete on the same field without spending a decade and billions of dollars building a stack from scratch, the same argument Tesla made when it opened the Supercharger network to bring more EVs onto its chargers.
But FSD is not a connector standard. As one reply to Musk’s post pointed out, licensing FSD is not a software license the way NACS was a plug spec. It requires adopting Tesla’s eight camera layout and its onboard compute architecture, meaning a licensee’s cars would effectively become Tesla hardware wearing someone else’s badge. That is the visible obstacle. The less visible one is data. A licensed FSD stack would report back the same telemetry Tesla collects from its own fleet, giving Tesla a continuous read on how a competitor’s cars are actually driven, where they struggle, and how often drivers intervene. For an automaker trying to build its own autonomy program, or simply trying to keep its build quality and safety record private, handing Tesla that visibility could be a bigger cost than the hardware bill. It is the reason the Supercharger comparison only goes so far. Opening a charging plug cost Tesla very little. Opening FSD would cost a rival something it cannot get back.
![Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner-80x80.jpg)
Tesla Optimus Gen 3 shows off a cleaner, factory-ready design in new app discovery
Tesla Semi lands the biggest electric truck deal in U.S. history
