Connect with us

News

Over 1,700 Tesla investors are responding to Elizabeth Warren’s call for Musk investigation

Credit: Andrea Conway/X

Published

on

Over 1,700 Tesla shareholders are responding to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who recently wrote a letter to Tesla Board Chair Robyn Denholm asking the EV maker’s Board of Directors to investigate CEO Elon Musk’s alleged conflicts of interest. As per the Tesla shareholders, the US Senator’s efforts are better directed towards matters that directly relate to her home state. 

US Senator Warren’s letter to the Tesla Board of Directors was made public last week. The official outlined several concerns in her letter, such as Musk’s alleged diversion of Tesla’s resources to xAI, his alleged conflicts of interest, and the alleged neglect of corporate governance duties from the Tesla Board of Directors. Warren also argued that Tesla shareholders have “suffered” from a lack of oversight at the EV maker. 

In their response, the TSLA shareholders noted that they are concerned about the US official’s focus on Tesla, especially since the EV maker is not domiciled in Massachusetts. The stockholders, who number over 1,700 as of a recent update, also addressed some of the US Senator’s concerns in her letter. 

Following is the Tesla stockholders’ letter to US Senator Warren. 

Dear Senator Warren,

We, the undersigned Tesla shareholders, are writing in response to your letter dated August 8, 2024, addressed to Dr. Robyn Denholm, Chair of the Board of Tesla. We must express our deep concern and disappointment regarding your unwarranted interference in Tesla’s affairs.

Advertisement
-

First and foremost, we question the basis of your involvement in this matter. Tesla is not domiciled in your state, and to our knowledge, you are not a shareholder. Your attempt to exert influence over a company in which you have no direct stake is, frankly, perplexing and concerning. 

We cannot help but view your actions as politically motivated, particularly given the timing of your letter during a Presidential election period. This appears to be an attempt to generate political pressure rather than a genuine effort to address shareholder concerns. 

Your letter conspicuously fails to acknowledge Tesla’s significant contributions to the American economy, the global shift to EVs and to a sustainable future. As the most American car maker, Tesla has created tens of thousands of jobs across the country. Moreover, Elon Musk’s other ventures have further bolstered American innovation and employment. Your silence on these crucial points is telling.

Addressing Your Specific Points:

1. Diversion of Al Resources: The allocation of resources across Musk’s companies often leads to synergies that benefit Testa. This is a matter for the Board and shareholders to address, not external politicians.

2. Founding of xAI: The potential for collaboration between XAl and Tesla could drive innovation in ways that ultimately benefit our company and shareholders.

Advertisement
-

3. Conflicts of Interest: The Board is well aware of its fiduciary duties and is capable of managing potential conflicts without external political pressure.

4. Board’s Oversight: We have confidence in our Board’s ability to provide appropriate oversight. Your assertions of failure are both premature and presumptuous.

5. Shareholder Concerns: While some concerns exist, many shareholders continue to support Mr. Musk’s vision and leadership. We prefer to address these matters internally, without political interference.

6. Your Questions: While your questions are noted, we believe they should be addressed to the Board by legitimate stakeholders, not by politicians seeking to make headlines.

Senator Warren, while we respect your role as a public servant, we strongly believe your energies would be better directed towards matters that fall within your purview as a Senator from Massachusetts.

Testa’s corporate governance is a matter for its Board, its shareholders, and the appropriate regulatory bodies.

Advertisement
-

We kindly request that you refrain from further interference in Tesla’s affairs. Instead, we suggest focusing on creating an environment that fosters innovation and job creation – areas where Tesla and Elon Musk’s other ventures have demonstrably excelled.

We stand firmly behind Testa’s mission and leadership, and we will continue to work constructively with the Board to ensure the company’s ongoing success and adherence to proper governance standards.

Sincerely,

Tesla Shareholders

This is not the first time that Tesla or Musk has found itself in the crosshairs of the US Senator. Back in December 2021, Warren called for changes in the US tax code so that Elon Musk would stop “freeloading off everyone else.” In December 2022, Warren sent a letter to Tesla’s Board of Directors asking them if Elon Musk has been diverting the EV maker’s resources to Twitter. In July 2023, Warren also sent a letter encouraging the SEC to investigate Tesla and its Board of Directors, citing potential “conflicts of interest, misappropriation of corporate assets, and other negative impacts to Tesla shareholders” related to Elon Musk’s acquisition of social media platform Twitter. 

Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to simon@teslarati.com to give us a heads up.

Advertisement
-

Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

Advertisement
Comments

News

SpaceX completes another secret Pentagon launch, adding to suspected Starshield buildout

SpaceX launched the classified USSF-385 mission from Vandenberg, landing its booster on a tenth flight.

Published

on

By

US Golden Dome space defense system (Concept render by Grok)

SpaceX launched another classified mission for the U.S. Space Force from California early Saturday morning, and the Falcon 9 booster that carried it landed on a drone ship in the Pacific for the tenth time. The USSF-385 mission lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 7:00 a.m. PT.

Booster B1100 touched down on Of Course I Still Love You roughly eight and a half minutes after liftoff. It was the booster’s tenth flight and tenth successful landing, following the NROL-95 national security mission and eight Starlink launches. Its previous flight, a Starlink Group 15 mission on August 22, came just 35 days earlier. SpaceX ended its livestream shortly after the landing, which is standard for classified payloads, and neither the company nor the Space Force has said what the rocket carried.

USSF-385 is the fourth Space Force launch from the same Vandenberg pad in roughly six weeks, following USSF-366 on August 15, USSF-153 on September 10, and USSF-259 on September 17. When SpaceX flew USSF-366 in August, independent trackers noted that the rocket’s stage drop zones matched SpaceX’s Starlink Group 15 missions, pointing to Starshield, the government version of the Starlink satellite bus. The Space Force later cataloged 23 satellites after both USSF-366 and USSF-153, while USSF-259 placed 17 satellites into a different orbital plane, per KeepTrack. Launch databases describe USSF-385 the same way, though the payload remains officially unidentified.

Starlink’s Starshield wins contract with US Space Force

The cadence lines up with the contracts, because in July, the Space Force awarded SpaceX $1.6 billion in task orders for 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg through the end of 2027. SpaceX also holds contracts to build pieces of that same network, which pushed its Pentagon contract total for 2026 past $8 billion.

Saturday’s flight was also the sixth and final Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg in September, according to Spaceflight Now, while only one Falcon 9 flew from the East Coast this month as SpaceX shifts its Florida infrastructure toward Starship. Launch trackers list it as SpaceX’s 112th mission of 2026 and the 108th Falcon 9 flight of the year, with SLC-4E turned around about six and a half days after its previous launch.

The West Coast pad will not stay quiet for long, considering SpaceX has another Starlink mission scheduled from SLC-4E on September 30. Meanwhile, in Texas, the company is two days away from Starship Flight 14, which is targeting Monday at 7:15 a.m. CT for the vehicle’s first attempt to reach orbit.

Continue Reading

News

Tesla hints at new Roadster design in surprise clip

Tesla ended its Semi event with a Roadster teaser revealing a new front light bar.

Published

on

By

Tesla Battery Day event (Credit: Ryan McCaffrey/Twitter)

Tesla closed out its Semi event in Nevada on Thursday night with a nod to its own history, dropping a short Roadster teaser that suggests the production car will look noticeably different from the prototype first shown in 2017.

“We can’t have a Semi event without the Roadster,” Tesla engineering executive Lars Moravy told the crowd before the clip played. The line was a deliberate callback. Tesla first revealed the next generation Roadster in November 2017 by driving it out of the back of a Semi trailer at the truck’s original unveiling in Hawthorne, California.

The new video opens on trailer doors swinging apart in the dark. A thin white light bar glows across what appears to be the nose of the car, Tesla and SpaceX logos flash over the frame, and the Roadster name appears before the clip ends on “See you next week.” Tesla posted the nine second clip on X after the livestream wrapped.

The light bar is the most concrete design detail so far. The 2017 prototype used two separate curved headlamp pods, while a connected front light strip would bring the Roadster in line with the Cybertruck, Cybercab, Semi, and refreshed Model Y. Sawyer Merritt was among the first to point out what looked like part of a SpaceX logo in the video, something Tesla has not addressed.

That logo fits the buildup around the optional SpaceX Package, which Elon Musk has long said would use cold gas thrusters to improve acceleration and possibly allow the car to briefly leave the ground. Tesla’s “Go for launch” post on September 12 set the October 1 date, and invitations sent to reservation holders place the event in Waco, Texas, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Waco sits roughly 20 minutes from SpaceX’s McGregor rocket test site, where the FAA has put a temporary flight restriction in place from September 18 through October 2, covering a 1.5 nautical mile radius from the surface up to 10,000 feet.

Tesla is also taking money ahead of the reveal. The company reopened Roadster reservations earlier this week with a $5,000 refundable card payment, followed by a $45,000 wire transfer due within 10 days. That puts buyers at $50,000 committed before Tesla has published a price.

The original pitch set a high bar: 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds before any upgrades, 620 miles of range, a top speed above 250 mph, and production in 2020. That timeline has slipped repeatedly, and Tesla has since pointed to production at Gigafactory Texas no earlier than 2027. The company has said next Thursday’s event will include pricing, specifications, and production targets, the three details original reservation holders have been waiting on for nearly nine years.

Continue Reading

News

Tesla Full Self-Driving release in the EU gets delayed

Published

on

Credit: Grok Imagine

Tesla Full Self-Driving’s release in Europe is set to be delayed by at least a few months.

The European Union will not vote on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on October 6. The draft agenda for the 119th meeting of the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles lists only a 25-minute “continuation of discussions” on the Netherlands’ Article 39 request, not a decision. The next scheduled TCMV session is in December, which is now the earliest date a bloc-wide vote could occur.

Tesla Europe had pointed to October 6 as a possible EU-wide vote after the Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted the first European type approval on April 10.

That approval, under UN Regulation 171 plus an Article 39 exemption in EU Regulation 2018/858, is the legal file other member states have been recognizing one by one. The same committee has already discussed the request twice without voting.

Elon Musk’s reply to the delay was a single word: “Sigh.”

Seven EU countries have now cleared FSD Supervised on their own roads: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, and Czechia. Those seven states represent about 53 million people, or roughly 12 percent of the EU population. An EU-wide authorization still needs a qualified majority: at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population, about 292 million people.

Germany, France, Italy, and Spain remain the decisive markets. France has already rejected the current system; several other governments have flagged speed-limit compliance as the main sticking point.

The safety case Tesla is putting in front of those governments is now public. On September 1, Tesla Europe said FSD Supervised was in use by more than 70,000 customers, covering over 1 million kilometers a day, and was 4.1 times less likely to be involved in a crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on EU public roads.

An earlier mid-year cut of the same fleet data, covering 65 million kilometers in five approved countries, put the collision advantage at 5.2 times, with zero highway collisions over 41.9 million kilometers. Tesla also reported far fewer automatic emergency braking events, harsh accelerations, and hard swerves than in comparable manual Tesla driving. Those figures are company-reported, not independently audited.

Tesla Full Self-Driving is taking over Europe: fourth country gets FSD approval

The public-health backdrop is harder to dispute. European countries recorded about 19,400 road deaths in 2025, or roughly 53 a day, most of them attributed to human error. FSD Supervised is not unsupervised autonomy; the driver remains legally responsible. But the software is already legal and in daily use across seven member states.

Until TCMV votes, the rest of the EU remains a patchwork: available in Prague and Amsterdam, locked behind review in Paris and Berlin. December is now the next chance to close that gap.

Continue Reading