Investor's Corner
Tesla stock (TSLA) holding steady amid signs of Model 3 sustained ramp, vote of confidence from Detroit
Tesla shares (NASDAQ:TSLA) are holding steady following Monday’s steep dive after investors weighed in on the now-deleted wild remarks made by CEO Elon Musk over Twitter. As signs emerge that Model 3 production ramp will remain consistent, bolstered by positive sentiment from Detroit after veteran Sandy Munro concluded that Tesla could exceed a 30% profit margin on its mass-market electric car, investors see these as indicators for potentially more upbeat sentiments to come.
Tesla stock has been a battleground since the company announced that it has hit its target of producing 5,000 Model 3 per week at the end of the second quarter. Amidst reservations from a number of Wall St. analysts who believe that the Model 3’s optimal production pace is unsustainable, the company’s shares took a dive. Tesla stock briefly got a reprieve on July 10, after the company announced its plans of building its third Gigafactory in China. Since then, however, the electric car maker’s stock continued to be volatile, until its notable plunge on Monday, when shares fell over 3.5% amidst controversy resulting from Elon Musk’s controversial and now-deleted statements on Twitter during the weekend. In Monday’s after-hours trading, Tesla shares were at $307.20, a significant drop from Friday’s close of $318.87.
As markets opened on Tuesday, however, Tesla stock began holding, as the backlash from Musk’s incendiary weekend Twitter session appeared to taper off. Behind this weekend’s report of Musk’s donations to the GOP and his Twitter issues, after all, signs are emerging that Tesla’s problems with the Model 3 are ending.
This weekend alone, Tesla started shipping ~100 Model 3 Performance to its showrooms to be utilized as test drive units. This follows the electric car’s successful appearance at the 2018 Goodwood Festival of Speed in England, where it attracted a significant amount of interest from the event’s attendees. Tesla’s VIN registrations have also seen a notable spike since the end of the second quarter, with the company registering more than 19,000 new Model 3 VINs since the beginning of the month. It should be noted that Tesla started manufacturing the Model 3 in mid-2017, and it was only able to hit the 19,000 mark this March.
Apart from signs that the Model 3’s 5,000/week production could actually be sustained, more encouraging news for Tesla came in the form of a new Autoline Network segment featuring Detroit veteran Sandy Munro. Munro, a teardown expert and CEO of Munro & Associates, has been studying the Model 3 for months, and while his initial impressions on the vehicle were predominantly negative, he was eventually won over by Tesla’s battery technology and electronics. According to Munro, Tesla could see more than 30% profit on the Model 3, thanks to the California-based electric car company’s in-house development and optimal utilization of the vehicle’s components.
Munro noted that the Tesla Model 3’s electronics, which he previously compared to a military-grade flight controller, is a “symphony of engineering.” The Detroit veteran also praised Tesla’s 2170 cells for the Model 3, which are 20% larger than the Model S and X’s 18650 cells but carry 50% more power. Perhaps the most notable among Munro’s conclusion, however, was mentioned by Autoline Network in its video’s comments section. According to the network, Munro stated that he expects even the $35,000 Standard Range RWD Model 3 to still make a “double-digit gross profit.”
Munro’s findings are in line with the results outlined by a German teardown company earlier this year, which estimated that the materials used for the Model 3 cost around $18,000 per vehicle. Coupled with Tesla’s pledge to reduce its cobalt use (cobalt is among the most expensive components of its batteries) over the next few years, Tesla’s profit margins for the Model 3 appear to have a lot of potential.
As the dust clears, it seems like Elon Musk’s recent statement in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek will come to pass — Tesla’s production hell with the Model 3 is ending, and the coming year would be very, very encouraging.
As of writing, Tesla shares are trading up 1.34% at $314.12 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
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Tesla Cybercab is coming to Asia this month as US service officially begins
Tesla Asia says Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai this month.
Tesla’s Cybercab is heading to Asia. The official Tesla Asia account posted on X Thursday, inviting Cybercab fans to “Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai.” The post went up within hours of Tesla’s own Cybercab milestone in Texas, where the company said Thursday it had begun offering rides in across Austin.
Exact dates and venues for the Asia tour haven’t been released yet, though Tesla Hong Kong replied to the announcement with “Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong soon,” while Tesla Japan’s response pointed fans to a sign up page for updates. Neither post mentions test rides or a service area, and nothing so far suggests Tesla is launching Robotaxi operations in any of the four cities. Based on how Tesla has run past Cybercab tours, in Europe in late 2024 and at US shopping centers that same December, the Asia stops are almost certainly static displays at Tesla stores or public venues as a means to stimulate buzz for its future driverless ride-hailing service in the big cities.
Cybercab will be on display in Asia this month!
Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai. pic.twitter.com/wGmmEastfX— Tesla Asia (@Tesla_Asia) September 4, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s only prior Cybercab appearance in the region, a booth at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai last November, which Teslarati covered at the time. At that event, Tesla’s regional general manager for Shanghai framed the car as evidence of the company’s broader mission, a message Tesla has since formalized in its Master Plan Part IV, which states that “autonomous vehicles have the capacity to dramatically improve the affordability, availability and safety of transportation while reducing pollution, particularly in our increasingly dense global cities.” The same document is where Tesla lays out its “sustainable abundance” framing for Cybercab and Optimus alike, describing the two as the hardware behind an AI driven push to cut the cost of transportation and labor at scale.
Whether Cybercab actually operates as a robotaxi anywhere in Asia remains an open question, considering China has already pushed an autonomous ride-hailing market that’s run on homegrown players like Baidu’s Apollo Go and Pony AI. For now, the four city tour reads as a marketing push timed to Austin’s momentum.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Tesla Robotaxi will be a 24/7 service: here’s when
Tesla Full Self-Driving will now overtake manual driving to avoid disaster
