Elon Musk
This Tesla vandal caused thousands in damage, but she was let off the hook: Here’s why
A Tesla vandal in Bloomington, Minnesota, caused $3,200 in damages to a car after keying it. However, the local police department, as well as the owner of the Tesla, let her off the hook.
As a Tesla sat in the parking lot of a Cub Foods grocery store, it was damaged in an act of vandalism that we are unfortunately seeing all too frequently. Police managed to locate the woman responsible for the damage, aiming to hold her responsible for the scrapes she applied to the vehicle.
However, in an act that many might not be able to perform, the owner of the Tesla did not want to pursue any criminal charges. Instead, they just wanted their car fixed.
Police Chief Booker Hodges said (via Minnesota Star Tribune):
“The victim in this case just wanted their car fixed, and they just wanted the suspect to pay for that. Based on the totality of the circumstances here, and along with our core value of being compassionate, this is the best outcome for everybody involved in this case.”
It was an incredible act of forgiveness, as many of those who have had their Teslas damaged in response to CEO Elon Musk likely would not have been able to do the same thing. One person who had their vehicle keyed filed a civil lawsuit against the vandal, who damaged their car while it was parked at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, seeking $1 million in damages.
Chief Hodges finished his remarks about this specific situation by calling out the leaders who have spread a hateful narrative about Musk and Tesla, and the company’s vehicle owners as well:
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“We need our leaders to start leading and stop feeding this rhetoric. People should be able to drive whatever car they want without fear of going into a store and someone scratching their car or people yelling at them because of the car that … they choose to drive. It’s time for all of us, you know, just to start getting along and knock this stuff off, man. People should be able to be left alone.”
While Chief Hodges did not mention anyone specifically, Minnesota politician and former VP candidate Tim Walz said earlier this month that he “gets a boost” when Tesla stock falls. He later retracted his statement by stating it was just a joke.
Elon Musk
Another Tesla SpaceX merger prediction by ARK Invest has Elon Musk talking
Elon Musk again denies a Tesla China split as new SpaceX merger speculation resurfaces quickly.
Elon Musk restated that Tesla has no plans to separate its China business from the rest of the company, responding to a new round of merger speculation from ARK Invest.
On the firm’s “Brainstorm” podcast, Cathie Wood’s team, including chief futurist Brett Winton and research director Nick Grous, argued a Tesla and SpaceX combination remains likely, with an announcement possible before the end of the year even if the deal itself would not close that quickly. Winton called Tesla’s Shanghai operations a “small ish wrinkle” for a merger rather than a real obstacle, since SpaceX’s national security work with the U.S. government sits uneasily next to Tesla’s manufacturing base in China.
Musk pushed back on the framing directly. “China is awesome. I strongly encourage people to visit,” he wrote on X. He also repeated language he first used in late July, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Tesla executives had been told to prepare for a possible spinoff, sale, or closure of the China business ahead of a SpaceX tie up. Musk called that report “absurdly fake news” at the time, adding that a separation had “never even come up in a discussion ever,” a line he echoed again this week.
The repeated denial has not settled the underlying question, because Shanghai’s role in Tesla’s business is exactly what makes a merger complicated. Gigafactory Shanghai still ships more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries and functions as the company’s main export hub for Europe and Asia. Teslarati previously reported on Musk’s initial denial, and the merger conversation itself has been building since SpaceX’s IPO gave it public shares to use as acquisition currency.
Wedbush’s Dan Ives has pegged the odds of a Tesla SpaceX merger at 80 to 90 percent by early 2027, and ARK’s prediction of a year end announcement adds another data point to that timeline, even as Musk keeps rejecting the specific mechanics reporters have described. Neither position rules out the other. Musk can deny a China spinoff was ever discussed while analysts still expect some form of combination to move forward, since ARK and Ives are both describing convergence at the corporate level, not necessarily the internal restructuring the Journal described in July.
For now, Tesla’s China business remains intact, and Musk’s comments this week make clear he has no interest in publicly walking that position back, no matter how often the merger question resurfaces.
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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
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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.
Elon Musk
Inside Tesla’s secretive $10 Billion “Project Crystal Sun” filing
Tesla filed for a $10.1 billion Fort Bend solar factory, but the site isn’t confirmed.
Tesla has filed paperwork in Texas for a second massive manufacturing project in the same week it locked down its chip fabrication site, this time for a $10.1 billion solar cell plant in Fort Bend County. The filing, submitted July 22 under the state’s Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act and first surfaced by Sawyer Merritt on X, lists an internal project name of “Project Crystal Sun” and targets a site off FM 762 and FM 1994 near Richmond, about 40 minutes outside Houston.
Tesla is planning to build a $10.1 billion vertically integrated solar cell manufacturing facility in Fort Bend County, Texas, about 40 minutes from Houston, according to a new public application filing.
Tesla is aiming to start construction this year and finish in 2028, with… pic.twitter.com/f3HIK5HGST
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 7, 2026
The application, prepared by Kroll Tax Services on Tesla’s behalf, spans five parcels totaling roughly 3,000 acres within the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District. Tesla wants a 10 year property tax limitation in exchange for the investment, split as $1.5 billion in real property and $8.6 billion in equipment and personal property. The company projects 9,712 permanent jobs once the plant reaches full operation, with 1,147 peak construction jobs during a build window running from this year through 2028 and commercial operations targeted for the first quarter of 2029.
Tesla is not fully committed to Fort Bend County yet. The filing states the company is weighing the site against an unnamed out of state alternative, and frames the tax abatement as what would make Texas competitive against that option. If the district and county decline the incentive, Tesla says it may build elsewhere.
Tesla Megapack Megafactory in Texas advances with major property sale
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The plant would handle the full solar cell production chain in one facility, according to the filing, covering wafer and ingot manufacturing, coating, metallization and printing lines, cell testing, automated material handling and cleanroom infrastructure. That scope points to Tesla vertically integrating a part of its supply chain it currently sources largely from overseas partners, mirroring the approach behind its expanding Megapack production in Brookshire, Texas, where Tesla has already built out two buildings for its grid battery business.
The timing lines up closely with Tesla and SpaceX’s other big Texas commitment this month. SpaceX confirmed its Terafab chip factory would land in Grimes County days before this filing surfaced, with construction on that $16.8 billion project starting almost immediately after local officials met with residents. Terafab is meant to produce the AI chips running Tesla’s Optimus robots and Full Self-Driving software, while a solar cell plant would feed a different part of the business, the panels and storage systems Tesla sells to homeowners, businesses and utilities, and increasingly needs to power its own data centers.
Musk has talked about building domestic solar manufacturing capacity before, tying it to the amount of power Tesla’s AI ambitions will require.
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