Lifestyle
Tesla’s Biggest Enemy: The Spread of Misinformation from the Misinformed
Automotive enthusiast and former Late-Night funny guy Jay Leno hosted Elon Musk and a series of Tesla vehicles on his show, Jay Leno’s Garage, earlier this week on CNBC. While most of the “well-informed” Tesla fans (including me considering it is my job to know anything and everything going on with this company on a daily basis) found the episode to be disappointing and somewhat outdated, it was certainly a good opportunity for people who know about Tesla, but not the company’s finer points, to expand their opinions on the Cybertruck.
Nothing was more entertaining than listening to Leno and Elon Musk talk about the Cybertruck. Even though a lot of what was being said was stuff I already knew, it was cool to see someone like Leno, who has driven/owned some of the coolest cars to ever exist, nearly awestricken by the features of the all-electric pickup.
Despite a lot of super cool things, the segment was really only about 1/6th of the entire episode, while the rest of the TV time was allotted for excessive commercial breaks and a few other interesting portions of the show itself.
From past experiences, I knew mainstream media outlets would hop all over the story to give a summary of what the episode entailed. I also expected to see a lot of people who don’t follow Tesla closely give their uninformed and incorrect points of view on the truck and the company.
This is a preview from our weekly newsletter. Each week I go ‘Beyond the News’ and handcraft a special edition that includes my thoughts on the biggest stories, why it matters, and how it could impact the future.
A big thanks to our long-time supporters and new subscribers! Thank you.
-
I don’t mean cosmetic opinions, because those cannot be right or wrong. What irks me and really drives me wild is that in 2020, an entire eight years after the Model S was released and three years after the most affordable Tesla vehicle was unveiled to the public, people still hold this false pretense that Tesla’s cars are for the rich and the wealthy. I’m here to tell you, they are not.
The first thing I did was head to Facebook and look at the comments on CNBC’s article. Boy, was I in for a treat. The comment I really wanted to dial in on for this week’s newsletter had to do with Tesla’s rumored “inability” to offer the automotive market a reliable and affordable electric vehicle. For some reason, this is still not common knowledge, which is extremely surprising to me considering we are literally years past these cars being “new” to people.
The comment simply states: “Ok he got the technology side. Now he needs to work on the economics. These vehicles are not priced for the average person.”
I really don’t know what to say to this, and I tend to just read these kinds of comments and navigate away from them to avoid pointless arguments. Sometimes I want to get involved just to spread the narrative that Teslas are affordable, but other people usually beat me to the punch.
Some replies to the comment talked about pricing points, the most logical saying “The starting price is slated to be only a few thousand more than what most regular size trucks go for.”
For me, it is still striking that people see the cars as “luxury mobiles that only Matt Damon can afford after his biggest motion picture.” This narrative is effectively killing Tesla from growing even more than it already has in the past few years, and to me, it is the arrogance that prevents some people from doing a simple Google search to find out how much these cars cost.
The most affordable truck costs $39,900. The Base Regular Cab Ford F-150 starts at $28,745 and is missing a lot of features that most people expect with a nearly $30,000 vehicle. Even Cars.com states that one of the drawbacks of the F-150 is that Limited trim not luxurious enough, and the price of High-End configurations of the truck are very expensive. Try over $71,000 for the most expansive version of the F-150. Just a reminder that the price of the Tri-Motor Cybertruck is cheaper than that at $69,990.
-
Here’s my question: Why aren’t people holding this same narrative with gas trucks? Why is it super acceptable to spend $40,000 on a gas truck, but $40,000 on a Cybertruck is key for the misinformed to say that the electric vehicles manufactured by Tesla are “not priced for the average person.”
It goes past the Cybertruck. It goes to the polar opposite of the Cybertruck: The Model 3. There is a $35,000 variant of the Model 3 that is available “off-menu” which is more than affordable for most people. People will spend $40,000 on Honda Type-R and not blink twice, but a $35,000 car that you never have to put gas into is “too expensive.”
So to get to my main point, we as Tesla fans/enthusiasts/owners hold a responsibility to inform the misinformed about the benefits of owning an electric vehicle. We also hold a responsibility to inform those who have misconceptions about the car’s price. It’s not unaffordable, people just want to believe that it is (for whatever reason).
Keep the emails coming! I enjoy talking to all of you!
Elon Musk
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.
Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.
On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.
India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.
The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.
This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.
Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.
-
Lifestyle
Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor
Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”
The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”
We took a ride on a robotaxi on the Suntrax course and it successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.
Impressive! https://t.co/FVAkzFLz3r
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 11, 2026
DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.
SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.
-
Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
-
The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
Tesla Semi gets its largest order yet
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
