Investor's Corner
Jim Cramer gives inside look at how a Tesla skeptic turns into a TSLA bull
If one were to watch some videos about Tesla back in 2010, one would probably encounter videos of Mad Money host Jim Cramer advising long term investors to stay away from the electric car maker. For a while, Cramer was a Tesla skeptic, at some points even trading barbs with Elon Musk on Twitter. But eventually, Cramer announced that he was no longer bearish against the company, and since then, he has become one of TSLA’s most vocal bulls.
In a recent conversation with Rob Maurer of the Tesla Daily podcast, Cramer shared the inside story behind his change from a bearish skeptic into a full-on TSLA bull. According to the Wall Street veteran, his shift has been nothing short of a religious conversion, and it involved experiences with his daughter, wife, and close friends in the financial sphere.
The Mad Money host noted that one of his initial experiences with Tesla involved his daughter, who drove from Oregon to California. Cramer noted that his daughter was not a car person at all, but she proved very enthusiastic about the all-electric car. This is quite remarkable, as Cramer noted that Tesla essentially turned his daughter into a car enthusiast.
“I think what happened was basically a religious conversion. I went out to California. My daughter had just driven a Tesla from Oregon from where she was living to Los Angeles, and she talked about charging, talked about how fun it was, talked about the flatulence button, and said, you know, ‘Dad, I’ve been driving for 12 years, I’ve never cared about what I drove. It’s never been important.’ She had a beat-up 2008 Ford Fiesta that she’d been driving. She just wasn’t a car person. But Tesla made her into a car person,” he said.
The same enthusiasm over Tesla’s vehicles was interestingly shared by his wife, according to Cramer. Unlike his daughter, his wife is an avid car person, and she loved the company’s all-electric vehicles. But ultimately, the experience that truly changed the Mad Money host’s mind about Tesla was a drive he had with two friends who were Tesla owners. Cramer noted that when he mentioned what he believed were weaknesses in Tesla’s financials, his friend, who was a former CFO, pointed out that the company could raise $2 billion in a snap. That, according to Cramer, was his conversion.
“Then I went out to see a couple of friends of mine. One an executive in a Silicon Valley company, another, a former CFO, and they had all Teslas. And my wife, who is a complete car person, I mean a nut car person, just loves it. Her favorite thing is a ’94 Range Rover that she has. She said, ‘This is it.’ She drove it, and she said, ‘This is it.’ Now we have not bought one yet because she’s frugal enough to be able to say ‘Listen, Jim, you should buy it because you live in Summit, New Jersey, and you can use it as a go-around car.’
“But when I was driving with it, (with) the person who was a retired CFO, I said ‘You know what, my daughter loves it, my wife loves it, it’s so cool, but they don’t have the financials that make it so that I can recommend it at 260 (per share).’ And he looked at me and goes ‘Jim, they could raise $2 billion (just) like that.’ That was a religious conversion. The conversion was right there. Because then, I knew that the balance sheet was not in question,” he said.
Ultimately, Cramer stated that it came to the point where he realized that it was futile to fight progress. And as it turned out, his bullish turn proved to be the correct decision. According to the Mad Money host, surrendering and recommending Tesla became his best call this year. “I said, what am I doing? Why am I fighting progress? So I surrendered, and it’s the best call I’ve made this year.”
Watch Jim Cramer and Rob Maurer’s Tesla recent discussion in the video below.
Investor's Corner
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope heads to orbit this August aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with massive scientific ambitions.
SpaceX is set to play a central role in one of NASA’s most anticipated science missions in years. The company’s Falcon Heavy rocket, currently the most powerful operational launch vehicle in the world, will carry the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit on August 30 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is now in final preparations inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where on June 26 technicians used a crane to lift the observatory into a specialized stand for fueling and pre-launch testing.
Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, whose career helped shape how the agency approaches space science.
NASA chose SpaceX Falcon Heavy because of Roman’s needs to reach a specific orbit far from Earth, well beyond where a standard Falcon 9 can deliver it. The Falcon Heavy, which first flew in 2018, has since become NASA’s go-to option for missions that need serious muscle without the cost and complexity of older launch systems.
Celebrating SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy Tesla Roadster launch, seven years later (Op-Ed)
Roman will carry a field of view at least 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope, meaning it can photograph enormous swaths of the universe in a single shot rather than the narrow slices Hubble captures. That difference in scale is significant. While Hubble reshaped our understanding of the cosmos over 30 years, Roman is built to work faster and wider, surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies at once.
One of Roman’s most compelling capabilities is its potential to discover and photograph planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, and with enough precision to directly image planets that would otherwise be lost. That means scientists could study the atmosphere and surface characteristics of distant worlds rather than simply confirming they exist. Combined with Roman’s sweeping field of view, the telescope could detect thousands of exoplanets, and some of those planets may be in habitable zones where liquid water could exist. No telescope currently in operation has this level of power and capability. That capability alone could change what we know about other worlds, and perhaps finally answer the question: are we the only intelligent lifeforms in existence?
What Roman actually finds once it reaches orbit is an open question, and that is exactly what makes this launch worth watching.
Elon Musk
California snubs Tesla in its newly passed EV incentive that favors Rivian and Lucid
California passed a $135 million EV incentive that rewards Rivian and Lucid while sidelining Tesla
California just drew a line in the EV incentive sand to put Tesla on the wrong side of it. The state recently passed a $135 million program offering first-time electric vehicle buyers a direct incentive with no application required, but the rules were written in a way that leaves Tesla at a structural disadvantage compared to Rivian and Lucid.
The program caps eligible vehicles at $50,000 for new EVs and $25,000 for used ones. That pricing threshold rules out a significant portion of Tesla’s lineup, though some lower-priced Model 3 and Model Y configurations would still qualify. California-based automakers are exempt from the price cap entirely, regardless of what their vehicles cost. Rivian, headquartered in Irvine, and Lucid, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, both benefit from that exemption. Rivian’s R2 starts at roughly $45,000 but has versions above the cap. Lucid’s Air and Gravity start at $70,990 and $79,990 respectively, well above any threshold a non-California company would face.
California hits Tesla Cybercab and Robotaxi driverless cars with new law
Tesla built its reputation and a significant portion of its early market share in California, where EV adoption has consistently led the nation. The company operates its original factory in Fremont, California, and the state was home to Tesla’s headquarters for most of its existence. That changed in 2021 when Tesla moved its corporate headquarters to Austin, Texas. Since then, the relationship between the company and California Governor Gavin Newsom has been openly adversarial, with Musk and Newsom trading public criticism on multiple occasions.
California’s EV incentive landscape has shifted repeatedly in recent years, and Tesla has previously lost eligibility for state-level programs as its vehicles exceeded income-adjusted price thresholds. The federal $7,500 EV tax credit, which Tesla models have qualified for and lost depending on policy cycles, is no longer available after it expired without renewal, making state-level programs more meaningful to buyers than they have been in years.
The practical impact for buyers is more nuanced than the headline suggests. California residents purchasing a Tesla under $50,000 for the first time can still access the incentive. But the exemption written for California-based manufacturers is a structural advantage that rewards where a company plants its headquarters flag rather than where it builds its products, and Tesla moved that flag to Texas.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s newest logo confirms everything about what it’s become
SpaceX officially absorbed xAI under the SpaceXAI brand, completing the largest private merger in history.
SpaceX made its corporate transformation official in May 2026 when Elon Musk posted on X that xAI would cease to exist as a standalone company. “xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX,” he wrote.
A new SpaceXAI logo was announced today, visually embedding the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity, which can be seen as a deliberate design choice that signals the merger is not a partnership but a full absorption and XAi a core function of the same company. The same way Starlink is not a separate brand but a SpaceX product. The announcement closed the loop on a process that began February 2, 2026, when SpaceX acquired xAI in the largest private merger in history, valued at $1.25 trillion. SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion.
We are now @SpaceXAI. pic.twitter.com/ema66xDWC9
— SpaceXAI (@SpaceXAI) July 6, 2026
The reason SpaceX bought xAI was stated plainly by Musk at the time of the deal: to build orbital data centers. SpaceX had simultaneously filed with the FCC to launch up to one million satellites designed to function as AI compute nodes in low Earth orbit, escaping what Musk described as the energy constraints limiting AI development on Earth.
xAI provided the AI software stack, with Grok, the X platform, and the Colossus supercomputer infrastructure in Memphis with over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, while SpaceX provided the rockets, Starlink, and the capital base to fund it. The two companies needed each other. xAI was burning $2.5 billion in losses on $250 million in revenue. SpaceX was generating an estimated $8 billion in profit on $15 billion in revenue and needed an AI narrative to command the valuation it was targeting for its IPO.
What SpaceX has done, regardless of how the orbital AI vision ultimately plays out, is walk into a public market as something no company has been before: a rocket manufacturer, satellite internet provider, AI software company, social media platform, and supercomputer operator under one ticker. Whether that combination is worth $2 trillion depends entirely on which of those businesses you believe in most.