TESLA SPACE 🤝 RISE ROBOTICS

The Electrification of Heavy Machinery Has a Ground Floor

Tesla did it to cars. Now the same shift is coming for excavators, forklifts, cranes, and military equipment. The difference is that nobody has owned this moment yet — until RISE Robotics.

Their technology strips hydraulics out of heavy machinery entirely and replaces it with a patented electric actuator. No fluid. Full digital control. Built for the autonomous machines that are coming whether the industry is ready or not. The Pentagon is already a customer.

Last Round Oversubscribed. $9.7M in revenue already on the board. Dylan Jovine of ‘Behind the Markets’ spotted it early. The Wefunder community round lets anyone invest alongside institutional backers.

Limited Shares Allocation Available.

X OF THE WEEK

Inventory is closing out,

Tesla has also now raised the price on all remaining new and demo Model S and Model X vehicles left in inventory by $15,000. New starting prices for the new models are (they come with the Luxe package):

Model S AWD: $109,990
Model S Plaid: $124,900
Model X AWD: $114,900
Model X Plaid: $129,900

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TESLA NEWS

A Tesla Model Y in Israel sustained a hit from falling rocket debris, but its glass roof absorbed the impact without cabin penetration. The incident occurred on March 30 in Netanya during a rocket attack, according to the vehicle’s owner, who documented the damage on social media

“The glass roof took the full impact… It absorbed the blow and deflected the metal piece to the ground. In that moment, I realized: a Tesla isn’t just a car. It’s real security and a profound sense of trust, even in extreme situations.” — Lara Shousterman, Model Y owner

got hit

what hit it

This reminds me of the equally crazy Tesla vs. Meteorite story from Australia, where the Tesla even kept going on FSD while the driver was impaired from the impact with the glass.

Tesla Q1 numbers

Tesla Q1 sales numbers are in. Up 6% year over year.

These results mean Tesla is now again bigger than BYD in BEV sales, retaking the #1 spot in the world.

Tesla has jumped a lot in sales in March across Europe (including triple-up in 🇫🇷 France, double-up in 🇳🇴 Norway, same in 🇸🇪 Sweden, quadruple in 🇩🇪 Germany).

🇰🇷 Also in South Korea: Tesla just pulled off a historic first in South Korea. For the first time ever, the American EV maker has ranked as the #1 imported car brand on a quarterly basis, effectively shattering the long-standing dominance of players like BMW. Not just in EVs — across vehicles of all fuel types.

This was such great news, that even Elon himself reposted Sawyer’s post with our findings and article link (we worked for a while on that thumbnail there):

Model Y also leads the EV sales in 🇦🇺 Australia, and it also became the third best-selling vehicle of any kind there, with the only two ahead of it being the utes Toyota Hilux and Ford Ranger.

We also got Tesla Energy numbers for Q1, which, somewhat surprisingly, dropped YoY, at 8.8 GWh today. Here’s a great chart on the historical view in MWh deployed:

Quick takes:

• The NHTSA's probe into Tesla ASS has been withdrawn. 
  Yes, we said it — U.S. regulators closed a probe into Tesla’s Actually Smart Summon (ASS) after finding incidents were rare and limited to minor, low-speed impacts.

“Out of millions of Summon sessions, a fraction of 1% resulted in an incident… Due to low incident occurrence and low incident severity, this preliminary evaluation is closed.”
— NHTSA

• Tesla pushed back on a German investigation that found no evidence of illegal recording at its Giga Berlin facility, arguing in a statement that the contested incident may still have occurred. “Not very surprised… Creating a recording and saving it on a laptop was not the only technical possibility.” — Tesla statement says

• Watch tip: Here’s a video of Tesla Semi driven through NY and Times Square by Current Trucking (which I assume was from their fleet or pilots).

• Terafab: Tesla (no wait… SpaceX, no…. xAI, no…. all of them?) partners with Intel to help refactor silicon fab technology.

• Click tip: Terafab now has a great new website that actually explains the mission: terafab.ai

• “EVs and Espressos Tee” & “CyberDemitasse Espresso Set” are now available
  …exclusively at Tesla Diner:

  

ROBOTAXI, FSD

FSD video that is spreading through the internets: a 34-second dashcam video shows the car braking precisely and navigating past a hazard-marked truck with Nevada plates amid zero visibility from a likely crash plume.

The thing is, although it handled the aftermath remarkably well, most people would likely see the plume of smoke and break BEFORE that. Some sources say however, that this was only Tesla AP taking over from a human. Nevertheless, impressive.

60 robotaxi-ready Model Ys were found parking in Phoenix, likely ahead of service rollout.

A FSD video: “A man walked straight into traffic in heavy fog/rain at 65+ mph. The Model 3 spotted him and swerved safely. Could’ve been fatal for both the pedestrian and my cousin driving. Insane reaction time.”

Elon quotes it with:
“Tesla self-driving saves a lot of lives – the statistics are unequivocal.
That doesn’t mean it’s perfect, of course.

Even when we improve safety 10X, saving 90% of the million lives lost in auto accidents every year, Tesla will still get sued for the 10% who did die. The 90% who are still alive mostly won’t even know that Tesla saved them.

Nonetheless, it is the right thing to do.”

OPTIMUS

TESLA ENERGY

Supercharger network Q1 stats are now published.

Tesla’s Supercharger network delivered a record 1.8 TWh of energy in Q1 2026, added 2,500 new stalls in the quarter (up 19% YoY), while total charging sessions rose 26% to 53 million. Tesla also sold 9,800 Tesla Diner milkshakes in Q1:

Despite rapid infrastructure growth, the Supercharger network is seeing higher usage per stall.

Internal data shows average global daily sessions per stall per day have increased from roughly 3–4 in 2019 to around 7–8+ in early 2026, indicating stronger demand and improved network efficiency.

The rise in Supercharger utilization can be seen in the graph:

At the same time, wait times in Superchargers have declined significantly over the years. The percentage of users experiencing delays dropped from peaks near 2–2.5% in prior years to approximately 0.5% or lower in Q1 2026.

Q1 2026 is already off to a good start in terms of energy delivered: annual energy delivery reached nearly 7 TWh in 2025, with Q1 2026 alone already accounting for 1.8 TWh, exceeding what the same network did for the full year of 2021.

Tesla Senior Director of Charging Max de Zegher added that Tesla interconnected 1.4 GW of “precision-located” Superchargers across more than 450 utilities over the past year.

Tesla also just reached its 80,000th Supercharger stall built, with a large site in France with solar & amenities

Here’s an actually good joke from Tesla's European Supercharging team:

Tesla opened a new Supercharger station in Wolfsburg, the true home of Volkswagen, and made good use of the irony with a friendly jab at VW ID. Series: the large white lettering painted on the ground reads “I’D CHARGE HERE.”

A real gem: we found a diamond shop in Florida that installed its own Tesla Superchargers:

Custom-branded Tesla Supercharger stations are being installed at a luxury retail site in Boca Raton, Florida. The installation includes four V4 Superchargers and a dual-port charging unit from ChargePoint.

The Superchargers feature exclusive branding tailored to the retailer, Diamonds by Raymond Lee (DBRL). The project is being deployed by EnviroSpark Energy Solutions, which is handling engineering, installation, and customization of the chargers.

MUSKONOMY

SpaceX

First Starship V3 flight now scheduled for May, not April anymore (Elon says it’s 4 to 6 weeks away, on April 3rd).

Just seen on filings: Flight 12 will be suborbital, but Flight 13 is written as orbital.

SpaceX vs Amazon rivalry (if you can call it that, it’s more of an elephant vs an ant currently) continues: SpaceX has filed a letter with the FCC, accusing Amazon of continuing to violate its approved orbital debris mitigation plan.

SpaceX IPO is the big thing everyone are waiting on (SpaceX has filed confidentially for an initial public offering), but Elon shut down some of the chatter about it being $2T valuation target:

“Don’t believe everything you read.
Bloomberg publishes bs.”

By the way, the confidential filing still means that the public filing will come after the feedback rounds within the SEC, so after its approval, we’ll get to see the S-1.

Neuralink

Brad, the “ALS cyborg” that got the title thanks to Neuralink, toured all Elon's facilities and wrote a lengthy newsletter post about it here.

Also on Neuralink, Elon says: "I am confident that Neuralink will restore hearing one day, just as we will restore vision with our Blindsight implant"

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X OF THE WEEK

Oh, and he didn’t stop there:

None of us has a real clue what this proposed vehicle will look like, but we did go and try to render the CyberSUV based on the small clay model images that we saw teased back in the Master Plan 4 video last September:

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TESLA NEWS

Just when we thought we were done with guys like this… this is in from tonight in Australia:

Tesla showroom and three Teslas in Parramatta, Australia were burned down. Tesla confirms it was not vehicle-related, likely arson.

Three Teslas were burned down and at least two more sustained damages in the apparent attack, though no injuries were reported. Tesla Australia spokesperson confirmed:

There’s no info around the motives so far, but it doesn’t take much to guess…

The interesting part is, that Tesla is actually looked mostly favorably in Australia and the sales has been on a rise.

Quick takes:

• 🇯🇵 Tesla goes Big… in Japan. Tesla is planning to more than double its service centers in Japan to over 30 locations in 2026 as its customer base expands.
  This comes after a sharp increase in vehicle sales in Japan. The company delivered roughly 10,600 vehicles in 2025, up about 90% year-over-year and surpassing its previous peak of 5,900 units in 2022.

  Elon also writes: "Tesla is making a big investment in Japan with service & Superchargers. Many of the parts in Teslas are made in Japan. Panasonic has been our biggest strategic supplier over the past 2 decades."

• 🇩🇪 Tesla vs IG Metall saga over the laptop recording continues:

  Police concludes there was no recording.
  Tesla's statement: “Not very surprised… Creating a recording and saving it on a laptop was not the only technical possibility.”

• Tesla recently released two new videos from inside Giga Berlin, showing the inside manufacturing and worker benefits. Some of them are 'funny', kind of like lifestyle content.

• Tesla’s Q1 2026 delivery consensus stands at roughly 365,000 vehicles, based on recently released company-compiled analyst estimates.

  This equates to an 8.6% YoY increase from Q1 2025 and a 12.5% QoQ drop from Q4 2025.
  Also, after 13 months of negative year-over-year trends, Tesla’s European registrations saw an 11.8% uptick in February.

• 🇩🇰 Denmark: Tesla has joined Denmark’s Virksomhedsberedskabet (The Business Emergency Management Network), a nationwide coalition of private companies that make their resources and skills available in crisis situations.

• 🇳🇿 GO Rentals New Zealand announced a NZ$4 million investment in 51 new Tesla Model Y Long Range vehicles, more than doubling its existing fleet. Tesla API and Tesla for Business support the company’s operations.

• xAI security is now using these black Cybertrucks:

ROBOTAXI, FSD

Is this the highest FSD usage recorded in the world? Keith Wisner has driven 52,176 out of 52,356 miles on FSD, since V14.2 came out.

Jesse posted news on the unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin: “Tesla Unsupervised Geofence expanded! It’s across the river now and taking me downtown.”

Tesla has lowered their Robotaxi minimum rider age to 8 years old (from 13 years old). "Riders aged 8-17 must be accompanied by a parent, legal guardian, or other authorized adult for the duration of the ride."

Here’s a good drone view to compare the real size of the Cybercab to the Model Y, by Joe Tegtmeyer:

Elon on Tesla FSD simulation training:

Although to be fair, I can specifically remember a video that had this exact situation in real life, with Tesla performing exactly like that. I should go look it up…

FSD video, although maybe a little exaggerated in caption: "Tesla FSD saves a school bus full of children! My Model Y Performance braked so hard that everything on my seats ended up on the floor."

FSD video: "This Cybertruck on Tesla FSD (Supervised) v14.2.2.5 reversed by itself at an intersection to create space after a semi truck took a very wide turn."

Tesla has released a new video on their blog showcasing David Moss and his recent cross-country trip on FSD (Supervised) with zero disengagements. The funny part is David is actually a LiDAR salesman... although for construction purposes.

OPTIMUS

A new Tesla Optimus video teases upgraded hands, engineers share manufacturing insights. The caption starts with “Optimus will be the biggest product ever made.”

Also, a new Optimus team picture from around Christmas time shows, I think, for the first time an Optimus without the chest panel, showing where its "brain" is:

for some reason, there were a lot of “handless” Optimi on the picture

Tesla was supposed to show Optimus Gen 3 in Q1, which ends… today. Elon shared that “Optimus 3 is walking around, but needs some finishing touches before it’s ready to be shown”

TESLA ENERGY

Tesla deployed a new FU

… Superchargers.

The first live Folding Unit Superchargers deployed, in Columbia, SC - Bush River Road (8 stalls of 500kW)

Tesla has introduced its Folding Unit Superchargers, a new pre-assembled charging solution designed to reduce costs by 20% or more and significantly accelerate deployment, seemingly by 2x. Here’s a video of it in action.

• V4 cabinet with 500kW charging

• 8 posts per unit

• 2 units per truck

• 2 configurations: folded, unfolded

Tesla Super Highway in China

China: Tesla launches Supercharger Highway project, deployed 55 highway service area V4 Supercharger stations in Chongqing, China. The initial rollout covers 55 service areas with 212 charging stalls across 10 major highways.

I wish Tesla would do such great graphics work also in the North American side:

… a roughly machine translated version:

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TOGETHER WITH 🤝 1440

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Every headline satisfies an opinion. Except ours.

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Read the newsletter trusted by 4.5 million fact-seekers.

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DEEP DIVE: TERAFAB

By the way, this deep dive today is jointly written with Simon Alvarez, whom you might recognize as the main writer from Teslarati. It so happens that Simon has now joined me (Jaan) at my EVwire news publication full-time instead. And this means you will start seeing some more of his insights around Tesla Space, too! Anyway, to the story…

Elon Musk has formally announced the Terafab Project, a joint effort from Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI designed to scale AI compute far beyond current global capacity.

In short, it’s about chips. The ones going to the humanoids, cars, and to the AI satellites. Mostly the latter.

If you want to check out the full livestream yourself, you can find it here. (jump to 21st minute, and it lasts another 28 minutes)

At its core, the Terafab is a vertically integrated chip manufacturing facility.

First phase: advanced fab in Austin

Its first phase will begin with an advanced technology fab in Austin, Texas, that would build lithography masks, produce chips, test them, and iterate designs in-house.

That’s what this building shown on the livestream was about.

Keep in mind that this is not the 1 TW/Year factory — something that a lot of people assumed at first. We’ll come to that building later on.

During the project’s launch, Elon Musk explained the importance of having a chip factory that can iterate on the go:

The Terafab addresses a critical chip supply constraint

A key reason for building the Terafab is the growing gap between AI compute demand and global chip supply.

According to Musk, all existing chip fabs combined currently produce only a fraction of what would be required for Tesla’s long-term AI goals.

Tesla is already a massive client of the world’s top chipmakers like TSMC and Samsung, but Musk stated that “there’s a maximum rate at which they’re comfortable expanding, but that rate is much less than we would like.”

The Terafab will power Optimus, Robotaxis, and AI infrastructure

The Terafab is being built to produce two primary types of chips: edge inference chips for Tesla’s products, such as Optimus and the Cybercab, and high-performance compute chips for large-scale AI workloads.

Edge chips will power Tesla’s Full Self-Driving systems and Optimus humanoid robots. Musk suggested that humanoid robot production could eventually reach 1 billion to 10 billion units annually, or about 10 to 100 times the current global vehicle output.

At the same time, the Terafab will also develop and produce chips optimized for space environments, where power, radiation, and thermal constraints differ significantly from those of Earth-based systems.

Musk outlined plans for AI satellites, with early “mini” systems operating at around 100 kW and future versions scaling into the megawatt range.

Musk stated that SpaceX has the potential to deliver 10 million tons to orbit in a year through Starship, while Tesla is building up to produce a terawatt of solar panels. The “missing ingredient,” then, would be the compute needed to achieve the terawatt scale.

That’s where the Terafab comes in.

But achieving a terawatt of compute is just a step. During the closing parts of the Terafab launch event, Musk teased an electromagnetic mass driver on the moon that could launch satellites directly into space.

This, Musk said, would be a way to achieve petawatt-scale computing.

Twitter tweet

A “Gigafactory 1” moment for Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI’s AI programs

Musk framed the Terafab as part of a broader push toward scaling AI, energy, and robotics, which are key components of what he has described as a path to “amazing abundance.”

The project mirrors Tesla’s decision from 2014 to build Gigafactory 1, which was created to secure battery supply and accelerate electric vehicle production at scale.

When Gigafactory 1, now called Giga Nevada, was announced, a dedicated factory for EV batteries didn’t sound so sensible. At the time, Tesla was only producing mid-volume vehicles like the Model S and Model X.

What critics failed to see then was that Tesla was already building for its future. The Model 3 needed Gigafactory 1 to be feasible, and the company believed that it would dominate the EV sector and break into the mass market vehicle segment. It did, and the rest is history.

In a similar way, the Terafab is designed to secure AI chip supply for Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI’s future products and infrastructure.

If Elon Musk’s AI bet pays off like his EV battery bet with Gigafactory 1, then the Terafab could go down as one of the most important investments of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI combined.

The real size of the Terafab:

According to Elon, Tesla’s planned Terafab could span around 100 million square feet.

This would make it the largest manufacturing facility ever conceived and far larger than any existing factory or major tech campus today.

The Terafab’s actual size estimate emerged after initial observations suggested that the facility would be a ~2 million square foot building near Gigafactory Texas — which was actually the image on Advanced Technology Fab instead.

Prior to the Terafab launch event, Tesla and SpaceX watcher Joe Tegtmeyer observed that a large piece of land near the Giga Texas main building was being prepared for construction. Speculations then suggested that the area would be the site of the Terafactory.

Sure enough, a render of a large facility in the exact area was shown during Elon Musk’s speech at the Terafab announcement. But in a reply on X, Musk clarified that the building featured in his presentation is only a small advanced technology fab used for chip design iteration.

“No, that’s just the little advanced technology fab… We couldn’t possibly fit the Terafab on the Giga Texas campus,” Musk wrote.

And in a post on X, industry observer Phil Beisel provided a rough framework for the scale of the Terafactory.

Based on Tesla’s stated goal of reaching one terawatt of AI compute, and assuming individual chips operate at around 250 watts, Beisel estimated that a terawatt would require something on the order of four billion chips per year.

Producing that volume using current semiconductor manufacturing approaches would require thousands of acres of land and potentially hundreds of millions of square feet of production space.

Beisel suggested that with significant efficiency improvements, a facility on the order of 100 million square feet would be a reasonable estimate.

Musk responded positively to Beisel’s estimate, writing, “Yeah, 100M sq ft is the right order of magnitude.”

What 100 million square feet for Terafab really means

A factory with 100 million square feet of manufacturing space is unprecedented, and it makes all existing factories today, including Tesla’s massive Gigafactories, look small in comparison. 

For context, Gigafactory Texas, already one of the largest buildings in the world, spans about 10 million square feet. The Terafab would be roughly ten times larger than Giga Texas.

Twitter tweet

To compare, Apple Park, Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, has roughly 2.8 million square feet of office space. Microsoft’s Redmond campus spans a little over 8 million square feet across dozens of buildings. 

At 100 million square feet, the Terafab would be roughly 35 times larger than Apple’s HQ and about 12 times larger than Microsoft’s Redmond campus.

The Terafab will be the size of a small city

For a more fun comparison, the Terafab will be about three times the size of the City of London.

The insane size of the Terafab aside, it’s important to remember that the factory is not being designed around today’s manufacturing scale, but around future demand for AI chips. Think Gigafactory 1 before the Tesla Model 3.

Pushing the limits

The Terafab Project will push the limits of semiconductor manufacturing, but Elon Musk has outlined how Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI plan to achieve the initiative’s extremely ambitious targets.

The discussion began after industry observers pointed out that the Terafab combines mask production, fabrication, testing, and packaging into a single system.

These processes are typically separated across different facilities, and integrating them under one roof is considered highly complex.

One engineer on X described the concept as “unicorn territory,” noting that simply achieving this level of integration would already be a major step beyond current semiconductor practices.

Still, advanced chip manufacturing is one of the most complex engineering fields, with the engineer noting that the Terafab could very well be more complicated than actual rocket science.

Musk acknowledged the Terafab’s challenge in a reply, but suggested that other projects undertaken by his companies may be even more difficult. This is one of the rare Elon’s lengthy replies:

“Given that several companies make advanced chips, but no companies have ever made fully reusable rockets or achieved SpaceX scale, I think Starship is harder, but we shall see.”

The Terafab will support Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI at the same time

Elon’s comments about the strategies to achieve the Terafab’s targets are classic Tesla. Focusing on simplicity is a typical trademark of Tesla, as shown in its development and use of Gigacasts and a software-heavy driver interface. 

Among all of Elon Musk’s companies, Tesla is also the most experienced when it comes to scale of operations, with the company having produced the world’s best-selling vehicle by volume, the Model Y, for the past three years using only four factories across the United States, Germany, and China.

OTHER NEWS

We actually don’t have that much room in this email anymore (it literally is limited how much we can push to you in one email), so let’s speedrun through some other news without sections this time:

• Apparent Tesla Model Y L body-in-white spotted at Giga Texas. Will it mean the model might be closer than ‘not before the end of year, or ever’ that Elon said before?

  

• Courtyard Supercharger: Fredericksburg, Texas gets its first third-party Tesla charging site. The eight-stall Supercharger site is situated at a unique… well, a courtyard, with a boutique grocer, a champagne lounge, an events venue, and a wine bar:

• Europe: Tesla FSD now closer after RDW completes testing, results on 10th of April.

• Tesla is developing a conductive charging system for the Semi, which is aimed at achieving a zero-penalty workflow for the Class 8 all-electric truck.

  In a recent episode of Jay Leno’s Garage, Tesla Semi program lead Dan Priestley and Design Chief Franz von Holzhausen explained several key details of the vehicle's updated version, which will enter high-volume mass production this year in Nevada.
  Tesla says that there are currently a few hundred Tesla Semis out in the real world that have traveled a combined 13.5 million miles, with one truck that has traveled 440,000 miles. Fleet has 95% uptime.

• The NHTSA has officially denied a 2023 petition seeking a recall of all Teslas over unintended acceleration.

• On one of the recent viral videos and media hit pieces, Elon says the driver of this Cybertruck disengaged Autopilot four seconds before crashing, which means the driver was manually driving during this entire clip that Fox shared.

  Elon: "As anyone knows who uses it, that video is not how Autopilot drives."

• Elon says FSD V14.3 will be released wide in a few weeks.

  “It’s in testing right now.”

• Neuralink: “I am The Man Who Speaks With His Mind.” A video of Kenneth Shock, Neuralink patient, who has ALS which has gradually taken away his ability to speak. “Through Neuralink’s VOICE clinical trial, he’s exploring how a brain-computer interface designed to translate thought to speech could help restore autonomy in his daily life.”

• Boring Company: Tunnel Vision contest winners announced:

  • NOLA Loop: New Orleans

  • Ravens Loop: Baltimore

  • University Hills Loop: Dallas

  The Boring Company will pay to build all three, pending due diligence and feasibility, as well as two additional tunnels: Hendersonville Utility Tunnel (Hendersonville, TN) and Morgan's Wonderland Tunnel (San Antonio, TX), if those last two are feasible and can get approved.

The Book of Elon

I’ll end today with a book recommendation.

This one isn’t affiliated with us in any way, but comes from a real quality source that put it together, Eric Jorgenson. Some of you likely read one of his best-sellers (and one of the most-highlighted books on Kindle), on Naval Ravikant. Well, now Eric took five years of his life and published The Book of Elon.

There’s even a blurb from Mr. Beast. Oh, and he got the approval from Elon on the idea to launch this.

The fun part is that if you act fast, you can get the book for free. That’s because David Senra, the founder of one of the top podcasts out there called Founders and something I religiously listen to, just made an episode with Eric (this video, I highly recommend it too), and is giving away 1,000 copies of this book. I

f you fit within that thousand (still live as of now), you’ll only pay shipping.

So I can vouch, for once, that this website isn’t a scam and can actually get you the Book of Elon, physical copy, for free: elonbookgiveaway.com. I ordered one.

Or get it right from the founder for the regular price here.

Let me know if you got it, and later if you liked it. Want to see the impact of this here.

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Before we kick it off — in case you missed it, I published a deep report on Tesla vs Robotaxi Industry, part II for all our Tesla Space Insiders. We’d love to have you with us!

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X OF THE WEEK

There’s a lot to unpack here and to be frank, it (currently) even goes over my own head a bit.

Elon also dropped the casual follow-up: ”Oh, and it works in all AI4-equipped cars, so your car can do office work for you when not driving. We’re also deploying millions of dedicated Digital Optimus units in the field at Superchargers where we have ~7 gigawatts of available power."

Max de Zegher from Tesla Charging expanded on this plan:

"Tesla Charging teams will be helping to get Digital Optimus units energized.

Especially at long-distance Superchargers, we have large interconnections built for dependable travel on peak days, but sit mostly idle outside of holidays. We’re going to need a lot of compute and make efficient use of the grid through distributed compute."

… 7 GIGAWATTS?! Now we’ve know the build-out for the ~80k Superchargers have been large, but still, wow.

We’ve seen Elon play the compute play better than nearly all of the industry. He has talked of the cars being interference nodes before. So interesting to see Superchargers coming into play!

We’ll keep an eye on MACROHARD. And once I understand more, perhaps I’ll drop a deep dive on it if you guys want (let me know).

TESLA NEWS

Elon says:

"Terafab Project launches in 7 days"

Related, likely: Joe Tegtmeyer shows a large plot of land next to Giga Texas and writes:

"So … am I going to need to get a more powerful drone? Massive construction site prep just north of the factory off Giga Texas property and now Elon hints at the start of the Terafab project in addition to a 10M/year Optimus factory & supporting facilities?

The scale of the area under development rivals that of the original site for the main factory building … something big seems to be underway here!”

Quick takes:

• Video: Elon live interview at Abundance Summit.

• Tesla has sued its former supplier Matthews International in California federal court for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to Tesla's battery-manufacturing process and sharing them with its competitors. Bonne Eggleston (lead of 4680 cell program) writes a longer post starting with: "
  Buyer beware: Matthews International stole Tesla's DBE technology and is now subject to an injunction and liable for damages."

• 2026 Model Y's are getting a software update feature "Comfort Braking": "Your Tesla now provides a smoother feel as you come to a complete stop during routine braking."

• Elon: “New Roadster unveil probably in late April”. Interestingly, the next earnings call will take place on April 22nd… I also saw an interesting comment from Travis Kalanick, the founder and former CEO of Uber:

  “When I’ve run into people who are in the know, I inquire, they tell me nothing, but their eyebrows raise and their eyes widen in a way that can only mean something of sorcery and magic is coming…”

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ROBOTAXI, FSD

Tesla Cybercab was shown in Austin for the SXSW event, along with Optimus. Tesla drove the Cybercab in (or …around?) in that glass box we've seen before, pulled by Cybertruck:

We learned a couple of new small details about the Cybecab, like Eric Earley, the lead engineer of Cybercab saying:

He also said elsewhere that "This combined with the door kinematics, a wheelchair can park parallel to the seat with plenty of room unlike traditional doors."

Cybercab will also have braille on both the interior door releases as well as the hazards button for blind/visually impaired people. The hazard button is also an emergency STOP button for the vehicle.

There were also new Robotaxi decals on the body which lit up, seen well in evening pics here:

yes, the puddle light shows the logo too

Video: Tesla Cybercab new lights were powered, you can see team open frunk & flip the switch to power off the car in this video (while hiding what's under the hood).

Oh, and there’s an ambient lighting strip also running all across under the seats:

Image: @CernBasher, link above

Tesla was reportedly using a phone to control the Cybercab when it was being put into position.

Here’s how the Cybercab charge port looks like now. I would not be at all surprised if a charge port does make it to production version of Cybercabs for the time being despite Elon saying it won’t have one (due to wireless charging), even if for a backup solution.

Optimus was there too. Here is a close-up video of Optimus’ hands when handing out water. The dexterity is crazy.

Video: Just like a human would. “Full Self Driving goes around huge wrecked tour bus, FSD handled it amazing! Went around completely off the road and through super bumpy grass / dirt”

Also just in, we get a little breadcrumb on the Cybercabs we’ve seen testing on the roads:

TESLA ENERGY

Tesla has released a new blog post, a deep dive with all you need to know, really, about Supercharger for Business. Here’s my favorite bit from there, detailing exactly what the business, whether it’s a gas station, real estate owner or even another charging network (as we’ve seen) gets or needs to handle:

U.S. Government has officially announced that Tesla and LG ​Energy have signed an agreement to ‌build a $4.3 billion lithium iron phosphate (LFP) prismatic battery cell factory in Lansing, Michigan, with a 2027 start of production.

Tesla Charging says: “Gigafactory New York built their last V3 Supercharger cabinet, marking the end to 15k+ V3 cabinets over 7 years. V4 cabinet line is ramping up!”

Tesla has enabled free Supercharging at these locations in the UAE, Doha and Saudi Arabia due to the ongoing conflict in the region.

Tesla Energy: Tesla can soon start supplying British homes with electricity after it was granted a licence on Thursday.

The country's energy regulator Ofgem said Tesla Energy Ventures, a unit of Tesla, had now been approved as an electricity supplier after a process which began last July.

MUSKONOMY

xAI (now part of SpaceX)

Elon says: "xAI will catch up this year and then exceed them all by such a long distance in 3 years that you will need the James Webb telescope to see who is in second place"

For anyone interested, I calculated that this means the second place to xAI will be roughly 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers or ~0.01 AU) away in 2029.

He seems to mean it, too:

Elon also: "xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up. Same thing happened with Tesla.”

and 

“Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview at xAI. My apologies, @BarisAkis and I are going through the company interview history and reaching back out to promising candidates."

xAI is also clearly going back into bulding it's coding features out, which Elon has admitted they are behind on, has SpaceX/xAI has just hired Jason Ginsberg and Andrew Milich, two senior leaders from Cursor.

Elon said on future builds: “By this weekend, xAI will have three Grok Build models in training simultaneously”

Elon on the OpenAI lawsuit: “Btw, the proceeds of any legal victory in the OpenAI case will be donated to charity. I will in no way enrich myself.”

SpaceX

SpaceX has officially crossed 10,000 active Starlink satellites in orbit tonight. Over two-thirds (66%) of all satellites currently in orbit are now SpaceX satellites.

Remember how I shared that Amazon has filed a formal petition calling on the FCC to deny SpaceX’s 1 million-satellite proposal for orbiting data centers, going as far to claim the project would "take centuries to deploy”?

Well, the FCC just officially fired back at the nonsense:

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X OF THE WEEK

AGI = Artificial General Intelligence, for those not that deep in the AI realm, is “a theoretical, advanced form of AI that matches or exceeds human cognitive abilities across virtually all tasks, including learning, reasoning, and planning.”

It is also what most of the AI companies are racing towards, to get to something even resembling AGI first. Not a bad race to be in the lead in, for Tesla.

TESLA NEWS

The Tesla's works council vote we talked about last week in Giga Berlin? It went well for Tesla, with union IG Metall not getting a lot of seats, which should be good for Giga Berlin’s future. Here is Andre Thierig's post about it:

Sendil Palani, Tesla's Vice President of Finance, has announced he is leaving the company after 17 years. That is a long time with a company, and must feel like a lifetime in a company like Tesla. He leaves on good terms, obviously:

Tesla has published a patent for what could be the seat in the upcoming next-generation Tesla Roadster, a one-piece composite seat frame.

We also get the very first hint of Tesla robotaxi plans in Europe: Tesla is looking to hire an Electrical Design Engineer at Giga Berlin for Robotaxi Autonomous Vehicles, per a job posting.

"The Low Voltage Hardware team at Tesla designs circuit boards which control hundreds of devices (motors, actuators, sensors, LEDs, etc) across all electrical systems (steering, seats, doors, HVAC, safety, chassis, lighting, etc) in Tesla’s autonomous robotaxi vehicles."

Tesla's larger Model Y L will launch in Australia and New Zealand in 2026 and in South Korea soon, too.

Tesla reduced the referral program perks in the US. Model S and Model X from the referral program. New owners also no longer get a $1,000 referral discount on a new Cybertruck Premium AWD or Cyberbeast. Instead, you now get 3 months of FSD (Supervised).

Tesla has also reduced the loyalty discount to $500 (from $1,000) that existing Tesla owners get when buying a new Model S, Model X or Cybertruck (Cybertruck dual-motor AWD not eligible).

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TESLA SEMI NEWS

Ashlee Vance — yes the original Elon Musk biographer — took a trip to Tesla Semi factory. The video is not fully published yet.
There are two shorts — here from the factory showing Tesla Semi cabs moving down the line, and here of the interior of a Semi.

They also posted a few images from the tour:

Dan Priestley, head of Semi program, in the middle. Ashlee Vance on the left.

Semi cab mid-assembly

Dan Priestley, head of the Semi program, captioned it "Factory is epic. Manufacturing teams have high rate of install and commissioning. Noticeable changes every day."

Tesla also shared three images from Semi winter testing in Alaska:

And here's an image of someone spotting the two trucks charging in Alaska:

Tesla also just opened its first Tesla Semi Megacharger in Los Angeles. 750kW charging with seemingly upgradeable to 1.2MW and all Tesla Semi customers are welcome. This is the very first Megacharging site open to public that is not at a Tesla factory or at customers’ depot.

Hight Logistics was showing off their new Tesla Semi, with the CEO Rudy Diaz saying they plan to add more Tesla trucks to their current fleet of 25 e-trucks:

Okay, perhaps that’s enough of the Semi for today.

ROBOTAXI, FSD

Video: Cybercab’s side camera washers are surprisingly strong.

Tesla has raised the base cost of its Robotaxi rides in Austin to $3.25 (from $1). The cost per mile on top of that is still $1.

From Tesla Robotaxi Tracker

This, for most cases, should still make the robotaxi service cheaper than most Uber and Waymo rides, unless on specific surge pricing, from what I’ve seen.

Tesla now runs paid ads on Facebook & IG & Threads in the US, advertising FSD Supervised. I found out quite a few details 🕵️‍♂️ :

• Tesla actually started these on Feb 2nd, and it has 12 variations.

• Tesla uses 4 different videos that you can expand the ad to.

• US ads only, no other regions. Runs on FB, IG, Threads.

• Tesla put up the official page in 2024, and 62 people manage it (58 from US).

TESLA ENERGY

Alpharetta City, Georgia, goes down in history as the first US public body (and first in the world, really) to deploy Tesla Superchargers through their third-party Supercharger for Business program.

The four 325kW city-branded Superchargers are deployed next to the Alpharetta Department of Public Safety on Old Milton Parkway, and available to both the two Tesla Model Ys in the Alpharetta City police department fleet, and to the public.

400 Superchargers in ONE location?

Why not.

Tesla is planning an absolutely massive Supercharger expansion in Yermo, California!

Over the course of 6 phases, Tesla is set to add over 400 V4 stalls in a commercial development known as Eddie World 2. The first phase, which should begin construction sometime this year, will feature 72 V4 stalls. Canopies included, too.

bk World and Tesla have opened their first charging lounge in Spain, in Villagonzalo Pedernales, right along the E5. This 20-stall site also happens to feature Tesla’s 1,000th Supercharger in Spain, and is wrapped accordingly.

Yes, that is a pizza vending machine.

Tesla Solar

the new panels on a roof

Tesla has announced that it has completed more than 500,000 installations of its solar panels worldwide, and has released a new blog post about its redesigned residential solar panels. Engineered in CA and assembled at Gigafactory NY. Here’s how Tesla wins:

MUSKONOMY

Optimus: looks like Elon is also keeping an eye on Figure, the other US-based humanoid company…

SpaceX

Starbase at night is truly spectacular to see — they’ve literally created a city!

Pad 2 in full glory!

Is it me or is the catch position even more on the edge here?

SpaceX says "Over the coming days, we’ll conduct a series of tests to activate Pad 2 at Starbase, exercise new propellant loading operations, and operate a vehicle with new Raptor 3 engines installed for the first time"

Elon says "Starship V3 first flight in about 4 weeks"

Elon also admits SpaceX almost died three times and, surprisingly, commented: "Gwynne and I didn’t tell the company, as it would have been demoralizing"

It was also surprising that Elon answered this to no other than Tom Mueller saying “SpaceX "almost died 3 times"? I guess I missed the other two”

Amazon has filed a formal petition calling on the FCC to deny SpaceX’s 1 million-satellite proposal for orbiting data centers, going as far to claim the project would "take centuries to deploy." I mean sure, Amazon, it would take centuries for you to deploy these.

xAI (now part of SpaceX)

Elon says on xAI’s X Money: “𝕏 Money early public access will launch next month”

X Money is actually now in Beta and they rolled out testflight access to 1,000 users. Here's what the 𝕏 Money App (Beta) looks like. Some details:

• All-black 𝕏 card

• Direct deposit

• Can earn 6% APY

• Cashback on eligible card purchases. Rewards.

• Deposits are held by Cross River Bank, Member FDIC and are insured by the FDIC up to $250k per individual"

The first person to get the access to the Beta and share it with others? William Shatner.

Yes, that William Shatner.

Boring Company

The Boring Company's Prufrock-2 digging machine has just emerged next to Westgate in Las Vegas. Fun facts:

• 2.28 miles long

• Longest single Vegas Loop tunnel drive (previous TBC record was 2.26)

• 4th tunnel at Westgate Vegas

• ~68k cubic yards of dirt moved

• ~4.8 miles of continuous conveyor belt driven w 6 motors totaling 825 hp

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TESLA NEWS

Here's a 24-minute interview with Elon Musk and André Thierig, the head of Giga Berlin. Yes, you read that right.

There's a lot of buzz around Giga Berlin this week, because the vote is happening today (2nd-4th March), likely why this interview took place now. Elon is essentially saying that the acceleration of Giga Berlin is hanging in the balance, determined to whether it can be free in its actions ( = free or union pressures).

I also found André firing back with facts at the misreporting from Handelsblatt on Tesla. The German media site has turned into a mouthpiece of IG Metall, the one trying to unionize Giga Berlin.

For added context, Tesla also caught someone from IG Metall secretly recording a team meeting, and had police escort them out.
Giga Berlin also has a huge banner in front of the lobby now:

By the way, on the interview, Elon also said FSD (Supervised) will likely be approved for use on customer cars on March 20th in the Netherlands. That's huge for Europe.

Quick notes:

• Victor Nechita, Vehicle Program Manager for the Cybercab, is leaving Tesla. This made big news headlines, but it's actually quite common for Tesla PMs to leave exactly when a large milestone of a program has been moved to the next big stage. In this case, it's Cybercab starting production. For example, there was quite a few exits right at the 10/10 robotaxi event.

• The Tesla Cybertruck dual-motor AWD, which was at $59,999 for 10 days, is now back at $69,990. Demand increased quite a bit during this “demand testing”, it seems, because the wait times went all the way to April 2027 (from Sept-Oct 2026 before)!

• Meanwhile, some of those buyers might have been somewhat fooled into thinking they can transfer their FSD from their old Tesla — as Tesla suddenly changed the eligibility terms on timing… You now have to take delivery by March 31, 2026 to be eligible, and if your order window is beyond March 31, 2026 or you end up not being able to take delivery by March 31, 2026, Tesla will offer you a refund of your $250 order fee.
  Before, Tesla's website said: "customers who place an order for a new Tesla vehicle by March 31, 2026 may qualify for transferring FSD (Supervised)." Not anymore.

• UK: Tesla opened its largest delivery center in the UK, a 155,000 sqft location in Manchester, and it even has a "rave cave" that can only be experienced by Tesla owners upon purchase of their new car.

  The site features a Manchester Bee-inspired LED mural, 360 degree rotating car photobooth, as well as deconstructed Tesla vehicles on display throughout.

• The upgraded Tesla Semi has now been recorded without the top (aero) side of the daycab by Zanegler.

• And Joe Tegtmeyer's video shows Cybercabs ready for crash tests, also without steering wheels. And on the other picture, Joe spotted a total of 25 Cybercabs in the most recent flyover!
  Reminder: we are less than a month from Cybercab full production starting.

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ROBOTAXI, FSD

FSD is getting natural language inputs!

Important milestone: Tesla was granted a waiver allowing it to use Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radio technology for its wireless EV charging system that will be used to wirelessly charge the Cybercab. Normally, this kind of radio must be handheld and can’t be installed outdoors on fixed equipment. Tesla’s charging pad is fixed and could be outdoors, so they needed an exception.

Some remarkable FSD videos:

• FSD video: "Tesla Robotaxi saw truck coming in the distance and backed up and went the other way."

• FSD video, actually really cool too: "Model Y on FSD (Supervised) v14.2.2.5 identifies a possible collision ahead of the car in front of it and reacts accordingly."

• FSD video: "Driving down a curvy mountain road, my car PULLED OVER for a speeding tailgater." …and then seamlessly went back on the road, showing it really was intentional.

• FSD video: "FSD just saved my life. It detected an obstacle on the highway, slowed down instantly, and steered safely around it."

Another great FSD safety story: "I unintentionally fasted for 17 hours, took some medicine, and had a severe allergic reaction. My body shut down—I passed out while driving on the freeway, mid-conversation with my wife on the phone.

Thank God my Tesla had Full Self-Driving engaged. It detected I lost consciousness (thanks to the driver monitoring system), immediately slowed, activated hazards, and safely pulled over to the shoulder. No crash. No danger to anyone else on the road."

Tesla’s first FSD (Supervised) road trials have officially begun in Abu Dhabi in the UAE. Tesla has also applied to conduct local FSD (Supervised) testing in the city of Jönköping, Sweden. Now that FSD is close to ready for actual worldwide release, you can see the regulatory work gaining more importance.

TESLA ENERGY

I happened to break the news on Tesla about to start deploying Megachargers in Europe, based on a recent job posting.

Tesla has released a Tall Pedestal for Wall Connector for $900.

Tesla has released a new blog post: Solar Panel Payback Period.

Tesla Cafes at Supercharging stations? A user shared a rendering of one saying:

"I wish there were little Tesla coffee shops at Supercharging stations. Humans could get charged up while their cars are charging."

Elon replies: "Looks cute, we should probably try this out. For sure with Optimus!"

If it were me, I'd call it SNACS. And in Europe, I'd call it SNACCS. If you know, you know ;)

MUSKONOMY

SpaceX

I’m voting for whatever future THIS is. Image by SpaceX

Elon gave two short updates on Starship:
"Starship V3 SN1 headed for ground tests.
I am highly confident that the V3 design will achieve full reusability."

and

"Should note that SpaceX will only try to catch the ship with the tower after two perfect soft landings in the ocean. The risk of the ship breaking up over land needs to be very low."

More than 5,700 commercial aircraft either already have Starlink installed or are under contract to receive it.

That would account for ~19% of the active global commercial aircraft fleet when all installs are completed.

The first airline in Asia, ZipAir, also just announced adoption.
Also, first eVTOL partnership announced: Archer.

Related: MrBeast says, on video, that once enough airlines start using Starlink, he’ll only book flights that have it. I didn’t know that MrBeast and myself are so much like, who would’ve guessed.

Microsoft has announced a new collaboration with Starlink to expand internet access in rural, agricultural, and hard-to-reach communities

Starlink Mobile (now rebranded from Starlink Direct-to-Cell) is growing like crazy. Now partnering with German telecom giant Deutsche Telekom to launch Starlink Mobile service for over 140 million people in 10 European countries.

Starlink Mobile website (starlink.com/business/mobile) got an update, along with a new video and coverage map that shows where the service is currently available and where it's coming soon:

Starlink Mobile is now:

• Available on 40+ apps and on 100+ devices. Future service will offer video calls, streaming, emails and more.

• 32+ countries (covering 1.7+ billion people)

• The next generation of Starlink Mobile satellites - V2 - will deliver full cellular coverage to "places never thought possible via the highest performing satellite-to-mobile network ever built."

• V2 Starlink Mobile satellites will use custom SpaceX-designed silicon and phased array antennas. The satellites will support thousands of spatial beams and higher bandwidth capability, enabling around 20x the throughput capability as compared to a first-generation satellite.

• V2 will enable full 5G cellular connectivity with a comparable experience to current terrestrial service.

Here is the 20-minute talk from Gwynne Shotwell and Michael Nicolls at the MWC26 conference in Barcelona with added subtitles. The scale of Starlink operations today just boggles my mind…

xAI (now part of SpaceX)

There's some interesting cross-pollination of Tesla & xAI team members I discovered:
a team member going from
at Tesla Energy working with xAI → at xAI working with Tesla Energy

On Grokipedia, the Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales calls Grokipedia a "ridiculous idea" that "will never work." Elon’s reply:

If there’s anyone on this planet that can provide receipts that they have proven the ‘this will never work’ people wrong and spectacularly so, it’s Elon…

Boring Company

Boring Company shared a quick video: "Tunneling has begun in Nashville - we are 2.5 feet in! Looking ahead:

• Weeks 1-3: Prufrock-MB1 launches and undergoes a series of tests and calibrations (low production)

• Weeks 4-6: scale to high production

• Week 7: Prufrock-MB2 arrives

This is announced super fast, right after approval on Feb 25th from the Tennessee DOT to officially begin construction on the Music City Loop tunnel in Nashville. Interestingly, Elon commented under the post that "Any fully autonomous electric cars can use the tunnels"

This hasn’t been too clear before. Will some automakers/robotaxi players bite and partner up?

Boring Company also announced 16 Tunnel Vision contest finalists, from 487 entries:

Neuralink

Neuralink is planning to expand Austin operations with $8.2M in renovations and new hires. The building:

Why does it remind me of the Avengers? Anyone?

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X OF THE WEEK

The story started with this, a huge milestone as the first actually not hand-built Cybercab rolled off the production line:

Now, keep in mind that although this one is off the actual production line at Giga Texas, we aren’t seeing the mass production fully yet. Elon says April, and then a ramp-up begins.

and it all progressed to this thing about Marques Brownlee (MKBHD).

If you’ve missed how the guy comes into play, Marques ‘famously’ said on his video a year or two ago that if Tesla sells a Cybercab to a customer for $30k or less before 2027, then he will shave his hair. It’s become quite a joke around the socials since then.

And then, perhaps most importantly for us, Elon confirmed that they aim a customer getting a Cybercab for <$30k by the end of this year:

It will be interesting to watch how that exactly takes place — there’s still a lot of constraints for such a sale.

Elon wrote the post talking about April production actually on this video which shows how 10 years ago, Elon predicted cars would later have no steering wheels. The audience laughed.

TESLA NEWS

• Doug DeMuro ranked the Tesla Model S as the #1 most important car of the last 30 years in his new video: “The Model S really changed the world. It made you think that EVs could be cool, fast, luxurious.” Elon reposted it with: “Model S & X are great cars! Order yours before we sunset the program in a few months.”

• The Murphy Police Department in Texas gets two new Model Y patrol vehicles:

  

• The Grok with Navigation Commands is now also starting to roll out to

  Tesla owners across Europe.

• Tesla has introduced 0.99% APR financing for all new Model 3 and Premium Model Y orders in the US on loan terms of up to 72 months, dropping from 2.99% APR

• Forbes has named Elon Musk #1 on their "America's 250 Greatest Innovators" list.

Quite a quiet week this one… but I’ll bet it won’t stay like this for long!

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ROBOTAXI, FSD

From Giga Texas on Friday: “at least a half dozen different Cybercabs driving and testing production processes today.”

Source: Joe Tegtmeyer

Cybercabs, Cybercabs everywhere!!

Tesla went ahead and did it: FSD can not be bought outright in the US anymore, now only available as the $99/mo subscription. It also ends in Australia on March 31st.

Some publications were recently trying to clickbait people into thinking Tesla’s 5 reported Robotaxi incidents in Dec–Jan were all serious “crashes.” Here’s what actually happened:

• A stopped Tesla Robotaxi hit by a bus

• Extremely minor backing up into a fixed object at 1mph

• 2mph backed into a pole/tree

• Drove into a straight object on the street 17mph, minor damage

• 4mph low-speed contact with a heavy truck, very minor damage

No hospitalizations, no airbags deployed, no towing required.

Even with all that, Tesla's Robotaxi fleet safety in Austin, Texas, reportedly improved by 2X between Dec 2025 and January 2026, with estimated miles per incident now at 417,000 miles, up from 208,000. Here’s some extrapolation of that data:

Tesla has announced that Tesla owners have now driven over 8.2 billion miles on FSD (Supervised) — the FSD miles driven counter thus jumped by 500M on their counter on their FSD Safety website.

An important bit from Elon on how the increased traffic from the autonomous future fits in with Boring Company:

Quick notes:

• Video showing how Tesla FSD (Supervised) V14.2.2.4 stops at a DUI checkpoint in Mexico, then proceeds all on its own after the driver briefly talks to the cop.

• Some fun with the Cybertruck & Optimus (video).

• Tesla is now hiring AI chip designers in South Korea. “This project aims to develop AI chip architecture that will achieve the highest production volume in the world in the future.”

• Tesla Shop: Tesla has released a "Love Autonomy Destiny Tee" in North America for $69. It seems to be in the style of one of the posters Tesla had in 10/10 robotaxi event. Meanwhile, for Valentine’s, Tesla posted “Love bots”:

• Another addition to the shop is the "Tesla Mezcal Design Studio Edition” ($450), where Director of Product Design Javier Verdura and Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen have personally signed 50 boxes, which will be randomly assigned to orders. “Each limited-edition bottle is packaged with a specially designed box sleeve featuring early sketches of the bottle design as well as printed signatures from the designers themselves."

TESLA ENERGY

Tesla opened a beautiful new Supercharger in Taiwan to celebrate installing its 700th Supercharger stall in the country.

It also reached another milestone for Supercharging in APAC: 500th Supercharger in Hong Kong!

Tesla has reportedly hired an additional 350 employees at its Giga New York factory — as it starts towards the 100GW/year solar panel production. It has now started the production of said panels. Tesla also says it has invested $350 million in supercomputers on the site, which should mean the DOJO.

MUSKONOMY

SpaceX

We covered the Mars Moon plans of SpaceX quite a lot last week, but here’s Elon saying this might actually help the Mars plans accelerate:

“To be clear, we are still going to do Mars. I don’t think this change affects the time to a Mars city being self-growing by more than 5 years and it might turn out to accelerate Mars.”

SpaceX is aiming to increase production to 50,000 Starlink kits per day in 2026. That’s up from 15,000 kits per day in Q1 2025. Starlink says they have removed waitlists for Starlink in every country where Starlink is available today.

Just imagine the scale. SpaceX recently crossed 10 million active Starlink customer across ~160 countries & territories. In 2025, the company achieved a delivery rate of 70+ satellites per week, and should reach 10,000 satellites in orbit in March!

The first Starlink version 3 satellites are expected to launch later this year on Starship, which will bring gigabit connectivity and 20X capacity.

News says that apparently the Trump administration covertly sent 6,000 Starlink terminals into Iran after the regime's brutal crackdown on demonstrations last month, US officials have said, an effort to keep dissidents online following Tehran's stifling of internet access.

Southwest Airlines has now also announced it will equip all its planes with Starlink by the end of this year, and the service will be free to all passengers. Sidenote: I just recently went on a flight with Starlink enabled and it truly felt like we’ve finally emerged from the Stone Age. United Airlines and Southwest Airlines adopting Starlink means that it now has 2 out of 4 largest US commercial airlines, with ~1,800 planes between the two.

xAI (now part of SpaceX)

The 45-minute xAI company all-hands was shared live on X. xAI announced it’s new org structure and “reorganizing” means some of the team was let go. Elon said: “xAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve speed of execution. As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve just like any living organism.
This unfortunately required parting ways with some people. We wish them well in future endeavors. We are hiring aggressively. Join xAI if the idea of mass drivers on the Moon appeals to you.”

Here’s what xAI has accomplished in just 2.5 years after starting:

Here’s an image from the presentation showing the mass driver to shoot satellites into space.

It’s also now clear that 𝕏 Money is coming: to be launching in 1-2 months in a limited external beta, and then worldwide to all 𝕏 users later. Elon said: "This is intended to be the place where all the money is. The central source of all monetary transactions. It's going to be a game-changer."

They also shared this render of “the world’s largest supercomputer… again!”
The “MACROHARD” Phase 1 has 330,000+ GPUs, and the Phase 2 “MACROHARDER” adds 220,000 Nividia GB 300s.

There was also a quick look inside here

xAI also writes: “From Day One, xAI has been upgrading grid infrastructure and ensuring ratepayers don’t pick up our tab. Today, we are continuing our commitment by installing our own power lines to power our MACROHARD facilities.”

Boring Company

Boring Company plans to connect Universal Orlando Resort’s north campus to Universal Epic Universe.

The proposal describes a twin-tunnel configuration, with one tunnel in each direction. It also noted that permitting, design, and construction could take roughly a year and a half once approvals are secured

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X OF THE WEEK

(Andre Thierig is the head of Tesla Giga Berlin)

Wow. This won’t help the union’s goals over there… In case you aren’t familiar, IG Metall has been looking to unionize Tesla Giga Berlin workers from when they launched the factory, unsuccessfully because Tesla's own working conditions are great. Now, as we've also seen elsewhere, it seems to have turned to dirty tricks...

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TESLA NEWS

An Optimus Academy?

Elon said, on the Cheeky Pint podcast:

Quick notes:

• Tesla launches officially in Morocco, here's (one of their best in my opinion) launch video. I loved the start:

• Consumer Reports has named the Tesla Model Y the best electric vehicle for 2026.

• Tesla has leased a large 267,000-square-foot advanced manufacturing space near its Fremont factory. Is it for Optimus?

• Tesla launched the Model Y Standard AWD at $41,990. But: Tesla doesn't call the Standard models "Standard" anymore, it's just the Model Y AWD, and the other versions are "Premium"

• Tesla has filed for some new trademarks recently:

  • “Cybercar” and “Cybervehicle,” because some states don’t allow the Cybercab to be called a cab or a taxi.

  • Roadster trademark, here's the wordmark and logo (the latter really looks like something you get as a template in Canva lol):
    

    

  • Also, the wordmark "Anapozz" ...which is something to do with lithium refining.
    

• Tesla Is adding 'Hey, Tesla' wake word feature in China, with spatial awareness.

  That means car will not only listen for commands from everywhere in the cabin, but also be able to intelligently determine where the voice came from.

  PS, I experienced this, voice commands applied to a specific seat in the vehicle, in a NIO electric car exactly four years ago... so certainly doable. ;)
  

• Tesla released quite a lot of new high-quality pictures of the vehicles in its gallery. I always love it, makes for good thumbnail material.
  

• Lake Alfred, Florida Fire Department has purchased a Tesla Cybertruck to operate as a brush truck. It’ll be equipped with a 150-gallon water tank to support firefighting

a render from UnpluggedTesla

• Tesla has announced PowerShare / V2G for Cybertruck owners (finally), in Texas and California:

• Tesla updated its Semi truck website, showing the final production trims before customer deliveries start in the coming months, listing Standard Range Trim and Long Range Trim. The Semi is reportedly quoted for $290k, but take that with a grain of salt for now, as there’s no official pricing available.

  I believe Tesla is also the only truck manufacturer to include the words "badass" on their home page.
  
  Tesla has also shared, in some irl materials, that it has plans to build ~20 dedicated Tesla Semi service locations across the US: "Service centers offer same-day support for common repairs (warranty and non-warranty) as well as preventative maintenance. We also offer Mobile Service and have a network of Tesla-approved collision centers that have trained Tesla technicians on site."

ROBOTAXI, FSD

The numbers to watch: Tesla unsupervised robotaxi offering (meaning nobody else in the vehicle but you) is slowly ramping up, we’re at 7 such spotted today. Tesla now has at least 197 (supervised) robotaxis doing rides in SF Bay Area and 49 in Austin, and 7 of the latter are running unsupervised.

Source: teslarobotaxitracker, the best resource to get the real picture.

Tesla has put an AI training center into operation in China, according to Tesla China VP Grace Tao. The training center focuses on deploying Tesla's AI capabilities locally for assisted driving and AI applications in China.

A must-read: “FSD helped save my father's life during a massive heart attack. This is our story”. Essentially, a dad has a heart attack behind the wheel, son reroutes the Tesla from his app (while away himself) to nearest hospital emergency, they save the life.

The Lemonade Tesla insurance that gives up to 50% off the insurance orice for those using FSD, is now also available in Oregon.

A small feature update: Tesla is to increase dashcam recording history, keeping up to last 24 hours of footage. With a 128GB drive, you’ll now retain up to 3 hours of rolling footage. 1TB Drive (or larger), you’ll now have up to 24 hours of rolling footage

SUPERCHARGING

Tesla has now put Tesla Semi Megachargers on their public charging network map — and there’s 63 locations they’ve shared. Here’s a direct link to find them.

Biggest representations are in Texas (19) and California (17).

There are currently two operational and others marked as "coming soon."

These likely include the Pilot J megawatt sites we covered earlier.

Tesla Energy has shared the recap video of their Solarama event at Tesla Diner LA, launching our new Solar Panel + Mount.

MUSKONOMY

SpaceX pivots to Moon first, then Mars.

I know. Elon has previously said Moon is a distraction.

If we know anything, Elon is also able to change his mind rapidly once new information presents itself. I’ve gathered all that Elon shared on X about the Moon pivot for you, so you’d know the reasoning (excuse my dark mode):

So I guess… Moon city, here we come??

Elon on a SpaceX recruiting post: "Not many companies have cyclotrons!" (which I believe is basically a small particle accelerator)

Spain will be the first country in the European Union to launch Starlink Direct-to-Cell this year.

Starlink: The UAE and Starlink are partnering to provide education to more than 100 very remote villages in the world via Digital School.

As a first for any Elon's company, SpaceX has created its first Super Bowl ad for Starlink.

Boring Company

RTA Dubai shared this in a new video, on which Elon commented “Excting!”: Dubai is building a 6.4km (4-mile) long Boring Company loop tunnel with four stations linking the Dubai International Financial Centre and Dubai Mall, with an eventual length of ~14 miles:

Not a Phone Company

Elon says, per rumors of Starlink developing a phone:

Although it's interesting he'd say that directly considering that just a few weeks ago, he commented under a "Starlink phone would be so sick" post:

So it seems a not-a-phone phone might still be in the cards somewhere.

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X OF THE WEEK

Below is the reason he put Elon posted this 👇️ 

xAI, now a part of SpaceX

Yes, it really happened. Officially. I’d imagine the signing ceremony went down as something like this:

I’ll just leave full Elon’s blog post from SpaceX for you here to explain where all this is heading.

xAI joins SpaceX to Accelerate Humanity’s Future

“SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform. This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!

Current advances in AI are dependent on large terrestrial data centers, which require immense amounts of power and cooling. Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term, without imposing hardship on communities and the environment.

In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. To harness even a millionth of our Sun’s energy would require over a million times more energy than our civilization currently uses!

The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space. I mean, space is called “space” for a reason. 😂

By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will transform our ability to scale compute. It’s always sunny in space! Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization, one that can harness the Sun’s full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity’s multi-planetary future.

Orbital Data Centers

In the history of spaceflight, there has never been a vehicle capable of launching the megatons of mass that space-based data centers or permanent bases on the Moon and cities on Mars require. Even in 2025, the most prolific year in history in terms of the number of orbital launches, only about 3000 tons of payload was launched into orbit, primarily consisting of Starlink satellites carried by our Falcon rocket.

The requirement to launch thousands of satellites to orbit became a forcing function for the Falcon program, driving recursive improvements to reach the unprecedented flight rates necessary to make space-based internet a reality. This year, Starship will begin delivering the much more powerful V3 Starlink satellites to orbit, with each launch adding more than 20 times the capacity to the constellation as the current Falcon launches of the V2 Starlink satellites. Starship will also launch the next generation of direct-to-mobile satellites, which will deliver full cellular coverage everywhere on Earth.

While the need to launch these satellites will act as a similar forcing function to drive Starship improvements and launch rates, the sheer number of satellites that will be needed for space-based data centers will push Starship to even greater heights. With launches every hour carrying 200 tons per flight, Starship will deliver millions of tons to orbit and beyond per year, enabling an exciting future where humanity is out exploring amongst the stars.

The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth.

My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. This cost-efficiency alone will enable innovative companies to forge ahead in training their AI models and processing data at unprecedented speeds and scales, accelerating breakthroughs in our understanding of physics and invention of technologies to benefit humanity.

This new constellation will build upon the well-established space sustainability design and operational strategies, including end-of-life disposal, that have proven successful for SpaceX’s existing broadband satellite systems.

While launching AI satellites from Earth is the immediate focus, Starship’s capabilities will also enable operations on other worlds. Thanks to advancements like in-space propellant transfer, Starship will be capable of landing massive amounts of cargo on the Moon. Once there, it will be possible to establish a permanent presence for scientific and manufacturing pursuits. Factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space. By using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing, it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power.

The capabilities we unlock by making space-based data centers a reality will fund and enable self-growing bases on the Moon, an entire civilization on Mars and ultimately expansion to the Universe.

Thank you for everything you have done and will do for the light cone of consciousness.

Ad Astra!

Elon

Ad Astra!

If you read all the above, you know why this had to happen. Even if mainstream media is frantically trying to frame this merger as a bad thing, saying it’s meant to cover xAI’s debts and whatnot. Anyone closely watching knows that xAI is one of the core frontier AI models today, battling at the very top with OpenAI and Claude.

The valuations in this merger were (reportedly) set as $250B for xAI, and $1.25T on the combined entity. A newly updated business filing in Nevada lists the business name as K2 MERGER SUB 2.

Per a leaked email through WSJ, as part of the xAI-SpaceX deal, the xAI shares will be converted into 0.1433 shares of SpaceX stock, and employees will have the option to cash out.

K2 here means a Kardashev Type 2 civilization.

What about Tesla?

So, what does it mean for the other, rumored potential Tesla <> SpaceX merger?

We’re not sure.

Some say that this won’t happen.

Others say this is the exact perfect move to create conditions for a Tesla merger, too.

Shareholders (well, most of them) would certainly love the idea, even if it comes with some dilution. It won’t be as easy of a merger, however, since Elon owns less of Tesla as he does of xAI or SpaceX, and it’s a public company.

In one of the previous newsletters, I asked whether you’d buy shares in a SpaceX IPO.
70.4% of you answered that you would “Certainly buy some shares”; 22.4% said maybe and 7.2% would not buy any shares.

Given that we have north of a thousand of you holding TSLA shares, you are now by default also investors in SpaceX → because as I wrote in our last newsletter, Tesla announced it invested $2B in xAI’s Series E funding round earlier in January. This means that Tesla is now a minor shareholder in SpaceX (due to xAI now being a part of it), and so are all of you who own Tesla shares.

Congrats.

We’ll now certainly look whether Tesla will join this convergence of Elon’s companies, or remain independent. After all, Elon did say this late last year:

Meanwhile, taking all of Elon’s companies now, they have a combined valuation of $2.6 trillion.

The good thing coming out of all this is certainly the memes. Here’s one:

I also seemed to play a prophet and posted this on X about 5 hours before the merger announcement:

Fun times ahead. I’ll certainly add to my resume that I have received a paycheck from SpaceX. I mean the $70 bucks or so they paid me through the creator program there.

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TESLA NEWS

Tesla, the solar company.

Tesla released its new residential solar cell.
Here's unboxing video by one of the installers.

Solar Panel is now 420W (of course) and “uses same cascading cell technology as our Solar Roof cells to create 18 power zones (3x more than conventional panels). This reduces energy loss in shaded conditions & produces more energy.”

Panel Mount:
– 33% faster installation by using a groove-based frame system for streamlined assembly (eliminating traditional rails & clamps)
– Up to 15% fewer roof penetrations while preserving structural integrity & lowering costs
– Low-profile finish that is universally compatible with shingle, tile, metal & flat roofs

Now, this is important to note — we’re not talking about the Solar Roof here. It’s solar panels.

Tesla announced it is scaling up its Giga New York factory to an initial solar module capacity of 300MW per year. Tesla has historically relied on third-party solar panels, but now the company is assembling them in-house in the United States.

Now comes the scale bit:

Tesla is looking to deploy 100GW of solar manufacturing from raw materials on America soil before the end of 2028, according to new Tesla job listings.

100GW of solar is enough to power roughly 20 million homes.

Elon said, at the World Economic Forum recently: "The SpaceX and Tesla teams are both separately working to build to 100GW of manufactured solar power in the U.S. That will probably take us about 3 years." The WEF full interview is here.

Elon also said on Tesla's Q4 earnings call:

I've been saying this for a long while now that Elon's next business will be building solar at scale… looks like we’re here!

While we’re at the integration and everything, it looks like a 100GW/year Tesla Terafab is coming, as Elon writes: "100GW/year of solar-powered AI satellites requires 100GW/year of AI computers..."

This comes as the news that you naturally already know about the SEC filing from SpaceX for orbital data centers that has 1 million satellites written in it, even mentions Kardashev II scale:

Quick notes:

• 🇲🇦 Tesla will launch in Morocco on Feb 6th, its first country entry in Africa.

• Tesla has expanded its Fremont footprint with a 108,000-square-foot R&D lease near the factory. Also, Giga Berlin reportedly raises production target from 500,000 to 800,000 annual capacity. Elon wasn't kidding on the previous earnings call that they'll start producing more vehicles now that FSD is close to ready - even though Tesla sales in Europe have been down by a lot in 2024.

• China has now banned concealed door handles on electric vehicles due to safety, requiring cars to have mechanical release both on the inside and outside. Yes, this is why Franz has been talking about redesigning the Tesla door handles a few months ago:

SUPERCHARGING

Agustín Amoretti, Director of Tesla Chile, and Copec CEO Arturo Natho

In Chile, Tesla made a deal with utility company Copec to jointly build Superchargers every 200km on the country’s highways.

As part of the project, Tesla Superchargers will be installed at Copec filling stations at intervals of 200 kilometres. One such corridor will connect the cities of La Serena and Puerto Montt, which are approximately 1,500 kilometres apart.

Each location will feature four charging points with a capacity of up to 250 kW (so, it’ll be V3 it seems), powered by renewable energy from Copec Emoac. While not explicitly confirmed, these are likely Superchargers from the white-label programme for third-party customers we’ve reported about here before.

MUSKONOMY

SpaceX & xAI

xAI launched Grok Imagine 1.0, with 10-second videos; 720p resolution and a lot better audio.

xAI provides generators for Tennesseans for help to those without power, soon providing Tesla Powerwalls too.

Just interesting: Starlink capped the speed of non-Ukraine-registered Starlinks in Ukraine territory at 75km/h, so Russians couldn’t use Starlink on their drones to attack. Elon says: "Looks like the steps we took to stop the unauthorized use of Starlink by Russia have worked. Let us know if more needs to be done."

Also, SpaceX has developed a novel Space Situational Awareness (SSA) system, called Stargaze → starlink.com/stargaze "To maximize safety for all satellites in space, SpaceX will be making Stargaze conjunction data available to all operators, free of charge."

It seems a Starlink phone isn't out of a question, as Elon says: "Not out of the question at some point. It would be a very different device than current phones. Optimized purely for running max performance/watt neural nets."

Neuralink

Neuralink, per its latest video and article “Two years of Telepathy” has now successfully implanted its "Telepathy" brain chip into 21 humans, up from 9 humans six months ago.

DJ Seo, a cofounder of Neuralink, says:

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X OF THE WEEK

More on this below…

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TESLA Q4 2025 EARNINGS CALL RECAP

First off, as usual, the resources should you want to dig deeper yourself (encouraged!):

• The Shareholder Deck, 35 pages.

• The Q&A audio of the earnings call with Elon, about 1 hour.

• Shareholder Q&A questions and answers in written format on Say.

And now, time for my recap of anything important. The feel: Tesla is all-in on autonomy, robotaxis, and robotics. Energy and cars are a side business to make it work.

In fact, Elon said:

My first thought was "hey Elon, what about Tesla Semi”. But then I realized. These will be fully autonomous. Silly me.

However, there’s something else that gets axed in the process:

Model S & X will be phased out by June 30th, 2026.

Yes, the time has finally come.

Tesla confirmed it will wind down production of the Model S and Model X next quarter.

Elon says: "We are going to convert that production space to an Optimus factory. It's part of our overall shift to an autonomous future."

There has been about 740,000 of the Model S (launched in 2012) and Model X (in 2016) delivered to date. The small delivery numbers in the late quarters likely sealed the fate.

In 2025, the S/X accounted for 2.8% (estimate) of Tesla’s total revenue and only 1.8% of vehicle deliveries

This is to increase factory floor space in Fremont to support the construction of the Optimus production lines.

For buyers, Tesla will continue to support the S and X programs for the foreseeable future.

Tesla invested $2 billion into xAI

If the valuation estimates of the xAI Series E are correct at around $200B, this means Tesla now owns about 1% of xAI, pending regulatory approval. And consequently, some of us reading this are now shareholders of xAI as well.

Here’s Tesla’s statement on this (from the shareholder deck, page 12)

Robotaxi rollout update

Tesla showed which cities it’ll target next for the robotaxi coverage:

Tesla has cracked the 4680 dry cell

The shareholder deck re"We now produce dry-electrode for 4680 cells with both anode and cathode made in Austin. We expect both domestic cathode material in Texas and LFP lines in Nevada to begin production in 2026."

Optimus 3 unveiled in months

Elon said: We will probably unveil Optimus 3 in a few months. It's going to be quite capable; Because it is a new supply chain, the normal S-curve of the manufacturing ramp will slower. I'm confident we'll get to 1 million units a year at Fremont. Long-term Optimus will have a very significant impact on the U.S. GDP”

On Optimus competitors, Elon said:

"We currently don't see any competitors outside of China. Optimus will be much more capable than any robot under development in China. There's three hard things about robots: Hands; Real-world AI; Scaling production. Those are the hardest problems for robots, and Tesla has all three of those components."

"It's not in usage in our factories in a material way. It's just so it can learn. We don't expect any significant Optimus volume production until the end of this year."

By the way, Tesla started listing its Energy and Robotics business to manufacturing chart:

More on production from the deck: "Preparations continue in North America for the production ramps of Tesla Semi and Cybercab, both commencing 1H26, and production of the next-generation Roadster."

On Robotaxi, FSD & Cybercab:

As of the end of 2025, Tesla's Robotaxi fleet has cumulatively driven 650,000 miles since June 2025.

Elon says “We expect to have fully autonomous vehicles in probably 25-50% of the U.S. by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval.""

Elon says there are currently 500 Model Y Robotaxis combined across the Bay Area and Austin giving paid rides.

On Cybercab, Elon says: "It does not have a steering wheel or pedals. It either drives itself or it does not drive."

Tesla currently has ~330,000 people globally paying monthly for FSD (Supervised). : And for the first time, Tesla has revealed how many people are subscribed or have purchased FSD (Supervised) in 2025: 1.1 million.
They also gave us the backlog: 800k in 2024, 600k in 2023, 500k in 2022, 400k in 2021.

The Austin full robotaxis (no safety driver, see last week’s announcement) now have no chaser car as of Tuesday, per Elon! Confirmed so by David Moss, see on robotaxi section below.

Chips: Elon says chip production is the biggest limiting factor for future growth at Tesla.

"I think Tesla needs to build a terafab. Even when we look at the best case output of all our key suppliers, it's not enough. In order to remove the probable constraint in 3-4 years, we'll have to build a very big fab, domestically. I know fabs are hard, but we do a lot of hard things."

The shareholder deck also gave an update:

“Development of our in-house, custom designed AI5 and AI6 inference chips for autonomy progressed during the quarter, with production planned for 2027 and 2028, respectively. We are targeting a 50x improvement in performance for AI5 relative to AI4 thanks to 10x raw compute, 9x memory capacity and 5x hardened block quantization and softmax function (the latter enabling efficient low-precision computing without sacrificing model accuracy)."

And compute: "In the first half of 2026, we plan to more than double the size of onsite compute in Texas (in terms of H100 equivalents). We aim to maximize capital efficiency by scaling training compute judiciously, including when the training backlog gets too long or in anticipation of greater demand from our engineers to support our AI-related offerings."

Tesla goes Solar

Elon also touched on solar topics, twice on the call:

“The solar opportunity is underestimated; We are going to work toward 100GW/year of cell production, integrating across the entire supply chain."
and
"We're going to be a big manufacturer of solar cells."

I had this written in one of our other sections, but I’ll bring it here:

Elon recently said, at the World Economic Forum: "The SpaceX and Tesla teams are both separately working to build to 100GW of manufactured solar power in the U.S. That will probably take us about 3 years."

(The WEF full interview is here)

It also seems Elon is thinking of domestic production of solar cells: "Importation of solar cells is very expensive due to tariffs, but production domestically can and will be done".

I've been saying this for a long while now that Elon's next business will be building solar at scale… looks like we’re getting closer.

Financials

Tesla reported $24.9 billion in total revenue for Q4 2025 (a 3% YoY decrease).
GAAP Net Income was $0.8 billion, Non-GAAP $1.8 billion for Q4
Operating cash flow was $3.8B, with Free Cash Flow at $1.4B for Q4
Automotive Revenue was $69.5B, down 10% YoY

Tesla saw increased demand in smaller markets, while there was a demand pull-back in the United States due to the end of the Federal EV Tax Credit

Energy Revenue was $12.8B, up 27% YoY
Tesla’s bitcoin holdings were marked down 23% in Q4
Automotive gross margins of 18% (excluding credits) and Energy margins of ~30%.

Tesla Energy's total gross profit rose, both sequentially and year-over-year, to a record $1.1 billion, marking the fifth consecutive record quarter.

Tesla’s cumulative cash flow (so all the negative+positive cashflow since inception) has reached $21.7B:

Tesla now has a record $44.1 billion of cash on hand, up from $41.6B in Q3 2025.

Other tidbits to note:

• Tesla expects record capital expenditure in 2026 — $20 billion! To compare, the highest ever so far was 2024 with $11.3B and last year had $8.5B.

• On EV sales, CFO Vaibhav Taneja says "We ended 2025 with a bigger (vehicle order) backlog than in recent years.""

• Elon on the future of the Cybertruck: "We will transition the Cybertruck line to a full autonomous vehicle line. An autonomous Cybertruck could be very useful."

FSD & ROBOTAXI & SOFTWARE

We’ve got two new angles for the Tesla Cybercab (or rather the running prototypes) that nobody has really seen before:

There’s a hidden Supercharging port in the rear bumper, found by Josh West:

And here a peek of what is under the hood of the Cybercab in a video

Keep in mind, this isn't likely the mass production version yet. Seems likely we won't see a frunk, however.

They also need a large windshield washer tank, given that all the cameras need (and will be) cleaned often. We already saw Tesla install rear and side camera washers for the newer Model Y robotaxis in Austin.

For HW3 owners:

I know there are many among us here, so I’ll keep you updated on this particular situation with HW3 and FSD access.

Elon confirms with "yeah" the words again he said about HW3 upgrade in Q3 2024 earnings call, where he said Tesla will upgrade the HW3 FSD owners for free once they've launched unsupervised with HW4. Here are his exact words from back then:

Tesla has added 40 new Model Ys to its Robotaxi/ride-hailing fleet in the last 9 days, with 23 of those vehicles being added in Austin within the last 4 days.

As we talked about last week, Tesla removed safety drivers from some of the robotaxis in Austin — but there were still ‘chaser cars’ spotted. Now, it seems they’ve already been removed.

15 Cybercabs have been spotted on the roads so far. On Cybercab production, Elon says:

"With the important caveat that initial production is always very slow and follows an S-curve. The speed of the production ramp is inversely proportional to how many new parts and steps there are. For Cybercab and Optimus, almost everything is new, so the early production rate will be agonizingly slow, but eventually end up being insanely fast."

Tesla also removed Autopilot from options completely (which people mostly consider as a bad move).

Tesla owners who previously purchased Enhanced Autopilot can now subscribe to FSD (Supervised) for $49/month, reduced from the previous $99/month.

Elon says the FSD prices will increase: "I should also mention that the $99/month for supervised FSD will rise as FSD’s capabilities improve. The massive value jump is when you can be on your phone or sleeping for the entire ride (unsupervised FSD)."

This comes as Tesla said you can only buy FSD outright until Feb 14th a few weeks ago.

SUPERCHARGING

I tried to render what the site would look like lol

Pilot J and Tesla announced they'll build charging sites for heavy-duty electric trucks together. These will be located at Pilot J's premium truck stops initially across five states, feature 1.2MW per stall, and four to eight stalls per site.

Construction of Tesla's Semi Chargers will begin in the first half of 2026 at select Pilot travel centers planned across California, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas.

Another third-party Tesla Supercharging deal launches - with Wawa.

Wawa has so far been the largest partner for Supercharging deployments in the US (223 sites, 2,115 stalls), and now wanted to launch its own sites with Tesla.

A bit of backstory here from Max:'

And the Tesla 3rd-party Superchargers that we wrote about that were put up by this bakery in Idaho, called the Pie Safe Supercharger?

Turns out they’ve got some cool tree decals on them:

Tesla shared some statistics that the Tesla Diner is the highest usage Supercharger in the world, delivering 43k sessions or 1.5 GWh each month.

That's about 18 sessions per stall per day, which I think is roughly 1.5x of Tesla's average in the US per previous numbers they've share.

Also, you can rent out the Tesla Diner Skypad for your own parties now. Who’s up for a Tesla Space meetup?

THE BIG NEWS: REAL ROBOTAXI

There are now publicly available robotaxis in Austin with no safety driver in the vehicle.

You can find the video of this first-ever public real Tesla robotaxi ride by an ex-Tesla AI engineer here.

And Joe Tegtmeyer, the OG drone observer for Giga Texas, managed to get one of these rides too, filming the whole experience. 

Some of the things the Tesla AI team said when reposting the two videos:

Dhaval Shroff: “Our safety monitor called in sick this morning. So we just decided to drive off without them.”

Ashok Elluswamy: “Robotaxi rides without any safety monitors are now publicly available in Austin. Starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robotaxi fleet with safety monitors, and the ratio will increase over time.”

Julian Ibarz (Optimus AI Lead): “Robotaxi has scaled so far with safety drivers, now we're starting to scale with no safety drivers. Huge accomplishment by the team, excited to see how fast we can scale this service this year.”

PS! If you enjoy our work, you should join us as a Tesla Spacer Insider.

You’ll get Inside knowledge, Insider Alerts when something breaking happens, and a bunch of other perks.

Upgrade to Tesla Space Insider

Xs OF THE WEEK

Our X of the week is connected to our YT video this time:

Elon is talking about chips again.

And yes, Dojo is back, as Elon says: “Now that the AI5 chip design is in good shape, Tesla will restart work on Dojo3”

And on that post, we got a little peek behind the curtain as Clive Chan, who previously led workload on Dojo1 (now at OpenAI), quoted this saying:

And then, while we’re at it, Elon also noted that AI5 was existential to Tesla, which he hasn’t said very often, so it carries some weight:

TESLA NEWS

wrap job done by me and my buddy Gemini

Tesla enters Slovakia

Tesla has officially opened its operations in Slovakia, with a pop-up store in Bratislava, a local SK configuration page, and a three-day opening event at the Eurovea Mall Promenade in downtown Bratislava.

The Tesla Owners Slovakia club gave a warm welcome to Tesla in the form of a light show in front of the Slovak National Theater:

By the way, this is what the Tesla pop-up store looks like:

via huntinspeed .sk

Per the local EV site MojElektromobil.sk, this is also where Tesla plans its new Showroom (and likely service center?) replacing a former Jeep and Dodge dealership after finishing renovation of the building.

Tesla has used the pop-up Store approach several times by now when launching in a new country, such as in Czechia and Lithuania. This might also give us a hint on the timeline: in Lithuania’s case, the pop-up Store was opened in September 2024, while the Service center was opened on December 18th, 2024, so within three months.

Tesla has been quite busy in new market entries recently — just a week before this, I broke the news about Tesla officially entering Estonia and Latvia, there’s also some buzz around Morocco, and in case you missed it, one of the recent official launch was in Colombia.

Quick notes:

• Tesla’s Q4 and Full Year earnings call is next week (January 29, 2026, 12:30 AM EET), and the retail & institutional questions are up on Say for the Q&A part. These are the highest-voted questions so far:
  

  

  
  

• Tesla released a new 2-minute video about its Lithium Refinery

• Cybertruck deliveries in the UAE have started. Here’s a lightshow done by the fleet there, seems like 70-100 units were delivered. Here’s a fresh video by Tesla of the delivery event

  

  Cybertruck really fits in such habitat doesn’t it

• The 35-year-old man who set a Tesla Cybertruck and showroom building on fire in Mesa, Arizona last spring has been sentenced to five years in prison.

• Canada removed the 100% import tariffs for 49,000 Chinese EVs per year, replacing them with just 6.1% in the latest deal between the countries.

  Tesla should ideally win quite a lot through this, as it can start shipping from Giga Shanghai (other Chinese EV makers would just start creating a dealer network & presence there).

• There were media reports of Tesla cutting 14% of the staff in Giga Berlin — this turned out to be untrue. "Compared to 2024, there has been no significant reduction in the number of permanent staff. Nor are there any such plans," Tesla said in an emailed statement to news outlets.

• Marques Brownlee has released his new Model Y Performance review video, says: "It is the best self-driving in any car I've ever tried; I think this is the best looking back of any Tesla ever."

• Tesla Shop in China has added a Lunar New Year item, the “Special Edition of the Year of the Horse” Optimus figure:

FSD & ROBOTAXI & SOFTWARE

Well, all the other news on robotaxi, after the big breaking news we already covered up front.

Tesla has begun informing U.S. customers that the free FSD transfer offer will end on March 31, 2026.

This seems likely connected to the end of the FSD lifetime purchase option by Feb 14th.

After that, only FSD monthly/yearly subscription will be available.

Also, I believe Tesla might untie the FSD from the car and onto the owners’ account after this, but note that it’s just my opinion and there’s been no info about this so far.

On the Cybercab production that should start in <100 days, Elon says:

“With the important caveat that initial production is always very slow and follows an S-curve. The speed of the production ramp is inversely proportionate to how many new parts and steps there are. For Cybercab and Optimus, almost everything is new, so the early production rate will be agonizingly slow, but eventually end up being insanely fast.”

And on ARK Invest predicting Cybercab will cost less than $0.20 per mile at scale in 2030, Elon replied: “probably true”.

Cybercab was now spotted in Massachusetts

Cybercab seen on Chicago streets, seems Tesla has added a rear camera washer. Wondering if this will trickle down as a feature for other models, too.

And a Cybercab found in Austin testing, which (finally) has no mirrors.

A (currently) small US insurance startup, Lemonade, has announced that it will offer a 50% rate cut for drivers of Tesla vehicles when FSD is steering because it has data showing it is reducing accidents.

HW3 <> HW4

Will Tesla replace the HW3 at all? Seems that a new patent shows what Tesla wants to do: let modern, high-precision AI models run on older, lower-precision hardware using clever math and software, instead of requiring brand-new silicon.

Instead of forcing high-precision data into low-precision hardware, Tesla splits the data into smaller chunks that AI3 can handle.

Someone mentioned this "Requires 4x the operations though (if doing full precision multiplication). So effective clock speed is only 1/4 of whatever HW3 baseline is (for those operations)." Elon answered: "This has already been implemented and is used only for longer bit length operations, which are relatively rare. Overall compute is extremely efficient."

MUSKONOMY

Elon vs OpenAI

Elon vs OpenAI heats up, Elon is looking for $79B up to $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft.

But things do look to be in his favor thought with the recently surfaced conversations there.

The big part that came out was this where it seems that Brockman's discussions with Sama showed they know very well what they did in pushing Elon out and planning to go non-profit to profit, knew it was wrong and did it anyway.

Elon said a bit after this: "Can’t wait to start the trial. The discovery and testimony will blow your mind." So there's more incoming…

Elon vs Ryanair

The Elon vs CEO of Ryanair went viral, and… Ryanair's CEO (& marketing dept) are milking it as much as they can.

The CEO of Ryanair, Michael O'Leary is known for getting different kind of viral ways of publicity with usual antagonist takes, and looks like Elon walked into it.

It started with Ryanair CEO saying they don't plan to add Starlink: "We don't want to install Starlink because of the 2% increase on drag and our customers don't want to pay for it."

(It's a super low-cost airline, so it would kind of make sense)

Elon first said something more polite in a discussion on X over drag (the actual Starlink numbers estimated by Nicolls, VP of Starlink Engineering there) including the "Also, they will lose customers to airlines that do have Internet."

Elon also sai that: "He is being misinformed. I doubt they can even measure the difference in fuel use accurately, especially for a one hour flight, where the incremental drag is basically zero during the ascent phase due to high angle of attack. And compared to most other connectivity solutions, there would actually be gains in efficiency."

But then the CEO of Ryanair went personal on some podcast or news show, saying Elon knows nothing about drag and that he is an idiot, a rich one, but still an idiot.

Things escalated.

As I said, Ryanair takes all chances at publicity, so they created a whole campaign: (yes this is real)

At a press conference, O’Leary said:

See the full talk of his in this video posted by Sawyer Merritt.

By the way, over 2,500 airplanes now have Starlink installed, including 16 commercial airlines.

xAI

Colossus 2 goes live, the first Gigawatt training cluster in the world. Upgrades to 1.5GW in April. It also features ~600 Tesla Megapacks

The Boring Company

Boring Company launched the Tunnel Vision Challenge, where you can submit a proposal on where that tunnel should be, and one 1-mile tunnel will be built by TBC for free.

Also, The Boring Company is working with a Nevada state-affiliated group to study a tunnel project that would go under the nine-mile stretch of highway from Reno to Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory, which could help alleviate traffic.

Watch tip: here's a 47-minute video by Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley who spent 4 hours with Steve Davis, company President, viewing the operations etc. Davis talked a lot of details (like a lot).

X OF THE WEEK

Interesting. Elon gives a one-month deadline and after that, nobody gets the ‘lifetime’ version that costs $8k. I wonder if there’s a specific milestone behind this (either technology or FSD take rate-wise), or just a move towards more recurring revenue?

It’ll also be interesting to see what it means for existing owners that would want to transfer the FSD to a new car.

What if this means Tesla will untie the current 'lifetime' FSD from the car and onto the owner? This would essentially mean a lifetime transfer window for existing byers, and no real risk of problems since there are no new lifetime members created.

TESLA NEWS

Euro NCAP, the safety testing body in Europe, awarded the updated Model 3 as the safest Large Family Car and the Model Y as the top Small SUV, both with five-star ratings from tests in May and November 2025. 25.

The Model 3 scored 90% for adult protection, 93% for child safety, 89% for vulnerable road users, and 87% for safety assist, while the Model Y hit 91%, 93%, 86%, and 92% in those categories. Tesla now claims Best in Class for every model tested in Europe.

Tesla increased its EV market dominance in the US in Q4 to 58.9% share, and for the full 2025, Teslas made up 46.2% of all EVs sold in the US, per Cox Automotive.

The top five EV models:

1. Tesla Model Y: 357,528

2. Tesla Model 3: 192,440

3. Chevy Equinox EV: 57,945

4. Ford Mustang Mach E: 51,620

5. Hyundai Ioniq 5: 47,039

Every fourth EV sold in the US in 2025 was still a Tesla Model Y.

Quick notes:

• Model Y Premium in the US now seats up to 7. Meanwhile, the comment section is, rightly so, filled with people saying they want Model Y L brought to the US instead.

Also, all configurations of Premium & Performance now come with black headliner and a larger 16" center touchscreen.

• Tesla became the #1 luxury car brand in China in yearly sales for 2025, with 627,100 vehicles delivered there, beating BMW, Audi, and Mercedes.
  

• Tesla has introduced a new Model Y trim in Europe called the Model Y Standard Long Range, with 350 miles of range, which has 23% more range than the cheaper MY Standard in Europe. Depending on the country, it costs anywhere between 1-9% less than the Model Y Premium Long Range RWD.
  

• Model Y Standard is now also available in Canada, starting at CA$49,990
  

• Tesla’s recent filing shows a 5-year contract extension for the Senior Vice President Tom Zhu, including about 520,000 Tesla shares that only fully vest after five more years of service.
  

• Tesla Insurance is to launch soon in Tennessee and Indiana. The proposed effective date is March 1, 2026. An FSD discount is listed, which will be based on the percentage of miles driven on FSD each month. And also the same for Indiana.
  

• Tesla has introduced a 5-year, unlimited-kilometer warranty for the Model 3 & Model Y in Australia and New Zealand, and I think I saw it pop up in some places in Europe, too.

FSD & ROBOTAXI & SOFTWARE

There are now at least ten Cybercabs testing on public roads between Austin, the Bay Area, Buffalo, and Chicago.

Yes, you read that right - Buffalo NY cybercab was spotted, likely for cold(er) weather testing (Tesla does have that Giga NY in Buffalo for a good base):

And also, Tesla chose to put up a pic of Cybercab in Chicago on the official robotaxi account, writing nothing but “Da cab”:

The Cybercab was also seen testing on the highway near Austin, as seen on this (beautiful) slow-mo video.

There was also this image that has been circulating, showing a (broken down?) Cybercab. However, without context, it’s safe to assume this was just how the vehicle was transported back to whatever base needed.

Meanwhile, Tesla has sent out notifications in the robotaxi app for users in the Bay Area:

The Robotaxi tracker has so far discovered 156 different vehicles in Bay Area, 38 in Austin.

Elon says: "Roughly 10 billion miles of training data is needed to achieve safe unsupervised self-driving. Reality has a super long tail of complexity."

Not sure what those training data miles are exactly. If on FSD, then Tesla is at ~7.2B according to its FSD Safety page, probably reaching the 10B on current trends by the end of Q1 / mid Q2.

Tesla is looking to hire an engineer to make its iOS Robotaxi app feel “magical.”

Job description: "You will take full ownership of features - from architecture design to robust implementation - delivering delightful and polished experiences that make Robotaxi not just functional, but magical In addition to working on groundbreaking Robotaxi features, you'll also contribute to the broader Mobile App experience used by millions of Tesla owners worldwide."

Oh, and I also found the perfect job listing for all true Tesla geeks: Tours Coordinator at Tesla Giga Nevada. A full-time (dream) gig.

SUPERCHARGING

I happened to break two stories about Supercharging myself this week, both connected to the Supercharging for Business side of things:

First off, I found that Francis Energy partnered with Tesla to install Superchargers at its sites in Oklahoma.

Francis Energy held a (re)opening ceremony for one of their existing sites yesterday, which now features… four Tesla Superchargers. I’ve also confirmed that this Norman, Oklahoma site won’t be the last, and there are several already finishing works before going live.

My analysis has shown that Oklahoma is today the only US state that does not have Tesla running the show as the charging operator with most stalls deployed. Back in September 2025, the Oklahoma state charging scene was absolutely dominated by Francis Energy, here are the top three CPOs:

1. Francis Energy with 716 DC ports over 123 sites

2. Tesla with 54 DC ports over 5 sites,

3. Electrify America with 12 ports over 3 sites.

For context, one reason for the dominance in the state ties back to the distribution of the VW dieselgate settlement funds for fast charging rollout.

The Supercharge.info site that specializes in tracking the Supercharger deployments has already listed several more sites in development:

screenshot via John Baker

Now, the other story that I managed to get to first was bp pulse installing Tesla 750kW MCS Megachargers at its first public e-truck depot in California.

The first of such depots is now about to go live at their new Ontario, California site, with 2x 750kW Tesla MCS pull-through bays, installed next to 4× 400kW (looks like Alpitronic) CCS pull-through bays.

Tesla plans to build the largest Supercharger station in the world, extending the current 56-stall site in Firebaugh, California, to 304 charging stalls in total, including 16 Tesla Semi charging stalls. Like with Tesla Oasis, this site will also include an amenity area.

Dan Priestley, the head of the Tesla Semi program, comments: “Lots of trucks to electrify on I-5.”

Over 184 new Tesla Wall Connector for Business sites with over 1,400 Wall Connector chargers have opened around the world in the last two months. I've been watching the team jump on that angle for a while now, clearly ramping up recently.

MUSKONOMY

SpaceX:

SpaceX has won $739 million worth of new Pentagon contracts for U.S. Military launches, the full amount of the contract.

Meanwhile, the FCC gave authorization to SpaceX to deploy and operate their satellite count of the satellites from 7,500 to 15,000.

Starlink updated its Roam plan, boosting high-speed data from 50GB to 100GB for no extra fees.

Lufthansa announced it will install Starlink on its entire fleet of 850 aircraft. I’ll be flying with one of Starlink-equipped planes next week, will report back.

Also, here’s an unexpected benefit of the airplanes installing Starlink: it’s a smaller unit compared to the regular antennas, which in turn helps save fuel on every flight!

xAI

Grok had a scandal of some users being able to generate inappropriate images (some headlines saying it was of minors), and now the Grok Image generation feature on 𝕏 is only available to 𝕏 Premium and 𝕏 Premium+ subscribers. Seems most likely a guardrail issue, as X has done the most to fight against exploitation since Elon took over, visible by statistics against FB, IG and other giants.

Unrelated, Elon posted: "We will make the new 𝕏 algorithm, including all code used to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users, open source in 7 days. This will be repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed."

xAI's Colossus 3 AI datacenter has been announced: an 800,000 sqft building seen from the inside (empty) in this announcement video.

Here's a good aerial look at Colossus 2 and Colossus 3.

Combined with Colossus 1 and 2, xAI’s total datacenter footprint is estimated at ~2.5M sqft. Together, the three sites will form a nearly 2GW supercomputer, with well over 1 million GPUs, likely costing over $35B combined

And xAI has now confirmed it raised $20B in the Series E funding round:

It writes on the announcement: "Grok 5 is currently in training, and we are focused on launching innovative new consumer and enterprise products that harness the power of Grok, Colossus, and 𝕏 to transform how we live, work, and play. This financing will accelerate our world-leading infrastructure buildout, enable the rapid development and deployment of transformative AI products reaching billions of users, and fuel groundbreaking research advancing xAI's core mission: Understanding the Universe."

Tesla Roof

It has been a while since we had an update on this…

Tesla has started deliveries, it seems, of its new redesigned residential solar panel. Notably, it is now 420 Watts, up from 410W (true to Tesla’s nature), and includes other changes like a thicker architectural frame while sitting closer to the roof, having 18 power zones so that the shade impacts are less, etc.

The Boring Company

The Boring Company says that, during CES,

It provided transportation to:

• 90k+ passengers

• 22k+ passengers to/from Resorts World, Encore, and Westgate

• Full Self-Driving trips between the Convention Center and Encore

Here's a video of a ride through the loop, now fully on FSD.

Also, Boring Company released a lot of details of the Las Vegas Loop and future in this article, as journalists there were given an exclusive tour.

As many as 1,200 Tesla vehicles will be in Vegas Loop when it's done building 68 miles of tunnels and 104 stations in the next few years.

And the article says the phase 4 plans see a dedicated underground airport station directly serving the terminals.

X OF THE WEEK

Well, someone was in a merry mood over Christmas…

but… “Amazing Abundance”? Seriously?

TESLA NEWS

wrapped these in our flag colors

In news that I myself happened to break today: Tesla’s official entities have recently registered two new business entities for market entry: in Latvia (Tesla Latvia SIA) and in Estonia (Tesla Estonia OÜ). If the market entry follows the timeline of Lithuania, we’ll see the official Tesla Store and Service locations up in March or April.

These are two small countries in Eastern Europe that won’t move the needle for Tesla on the large scale, but nevertheless help the few thousand current owners with service centers (Model 3 is the most-registered EV in both even without any official presence), and any new prospective owners.

I happened to mostly sniff this out just because I myself live in that little country called Estonia. Yes, that’s why my name looks so weird. ;)

Tesla’s Q4 and 2025 numbers are in.

For the whole year, Tesla produced 1,654,667 and delivered 1,636,129 vehicles (-8% compared to 2024).

We expected a rough even or a drop of Tesla’s sales so that -8% Year over Year (YoY) is fine, and actually much less than all the doomsayers predicted once Elon got ‘politically active’.

The energy storage deployments continue to break records, at 46.7 GWh (+49% year over year).

If Elon’s Q3 earnings call discussion was anything to go by, we’ll see Tesla ramp up vehicle production significantly considering he counts FSD mostly solved. Earnings call January 28th 5:30 p.m ET

But perhaps this is a good time to take a quick look at where Tesla has come — Sawyer put Tesla’s deliveries into historical context:

2012: ~3,000
2013: 22,442
2014: 31,655 (+41% YoY)
2015: 50,517 (+59% YoY)
2016: 76,243 (+51% YoY)
2017: 103,091 (+35% YoY)
2018: 245,491 (+138% YoY)
2019: 367,656 (+50% YoY)
2020: 499,535 (+36% YoY)
2021: 936,222 (+87% YoY)
2022: 1,313,851 (+40% YoY)
2023: 1,808,581 (+38% YoY)
2024: 1,789,226 (-1% YoY)
2025: 1,636,129 (-8% YoY)

As great timing, Tesla just produced its 9-millionth vehicle globally, at Giga Shanghai:

Oh, and per Elon (unconfirmed for now):
"Tesla Model Y is now officially the world’s best-selling car for the third year in a row!"

Peter Diamandis just released a 2h25min interview out of Giga Texas with Elon called “Elon Musk’s 2026 Vision: AGI Timelines, China’s Rise, Job Markets, and Clean Energy”

Somenotes (I’ll have more next week):

Elon on Roadster: “It will be a cool demo. If safety is your #1 goal, don’t buy the Roadster. We’ll aspire not to kill anyone in this car. It’ll be the best of the last of the human driven cars.”

Elon on Tesla’s next-gen Cortex 2 GPU training cluster: “That will be 500MW and operational middle of next year (2026).”

“I think they’re getting clean rooms wrong in these modern (chip) fabs. I’m going to make a bet here, that Tesla will have a 2nm fab, and I can eat a cheeseburger and smoke a cigar in the fab.” 2nm?!

Some quicker notes:

• 🇺🇸 Leasing is now available for the Model 3 & Y standard and new Model Y Performance in the US.

• The redesigned Tesla Semi was spotted by Zanegler’s drone for the first time

notice the lightbar up front

• Tesla has posted a new video on their career website, featuring Cybercab testing, Optimus building, crash testing, cell manufacturing, and more.

  They also now have specific job sections for Robotaxi, Optimus, FSD (Supervised), vehicles, Megapack, etc.

PS! Did you know we released the Robotaxi Report right before the holidays, to our Tesla Space Insiders?

It’s Part I of III of my exclusive research in the robotaxi industry and how Tesla places in it. Part II dropping soon 👀 

FSD & ROBOTAXI & SOFTWARE

Cybercab at night, by Adan Guajardo. Imagine how our streets will look like with thousands of these…

There are now at least 7 Tesla Cybercabs testing on public roads in Austin and the Bay Area, per this (magnificently built) robotaxi tracker.

ridin’ together

The tracker currently shows Tesla has 35 rider vehicles still in Austin spotted and logged by people, and 137 in Bay Area.

Now, the Tesla 2025 recap video showed ‘Started Cybercab Production’ which caused some buzz in the community. Elon calmed it down saying: “Just testing the production system. Real production ramp starts in April.”

Elon wrote, on Christmas day: "A Tesla with no safety monitor in the car and me sitting in the passenger seat took me all around Austin on Sunday with perfect driving".
Ashok also shared a video about one such ride.

Elon comments on Cybercab: "And there is so much to this car that is not obvious on the surface"

Also, on the robotaxi scale-up in case you missed the news — Tesla has registered 1,655 vehicles for its Bay Area ride-hailing service with the CPUC. These aren’t in service yet but shows a likely massive push from Tesla soon.

A recent US Coast-to-coast, no-intervention FSD ride done by a Tesla owner David Moss went really wide on the Internet in the NY eve. He has done 11,654.2 miles without interventions by now, find his coast to coast story and stats, verifiable straight from Tesla’s system through APIs in this thread.

FSD Competition from NVIDIA?

NVIDIA has been putting together a full AI stack for self-driving for a while, and has been partnering with a lot of automakers & robotaxi players that will run it. Now, NVIDIA released Alpamayo at CES 2026, which is basically the first real competitor to FSD, not relying on LiDAR but pure vision. NVIDIA calls it “the world’s first thinking, reasoning, autonomous vehicle AI.”

Elon’s response is important here, and two-fold in different spots across X. I’ll gather ‘em for you. One:

Two:

On another spot, he said: “I honestly hope they succeed”

Meanwhile, Jensen Huang just praised Elon/Tesla on a Bloomberg interview: “

“I think the Tesla stack is the most advanced autonomous vehicle stack in the world. I’m fairly certain they were already using end-to-end AI. Whether their AI did reasoning or not in somewhat secondary to that first part.

Ours is also vision based, we also have radar and LiDAR. Elon’s approach is about as state of the art as anybody knows. It’s a stack that’s hard to criticize. I wouldn’t criticize it. I would encourage them to continue doing what they’re doing. They’re doing a great job.”

SUPERCHARGING

Tesla Supercharging launched Q4 stats continue to be mind-blowing. +19% YoY in network growth with 3.8k Supercharger stalls opened, 1.8 TWh delivered (+27% YoY).

52 million Supercharging sessions in Q4 alone. Superchargers have delivered 6.7 TWh in 2026:

To give you a quick comparison, that’s roughly as much as my country’s total yearly consumption, for the whole country. Or enough to power ~600k US homes for a full year.

And outside China, Superchargers delivered more energy than all other fast chargers combined

If you’re into the charging side, Tesla also put together a 2025 Charging Highlights article on X.

Tesla released a video of the Tesla Semi reaching a 1.2MW (1,206kW) charging speed. And the redesigned Tesla Semi was also filmed live for the first time.

Myth-busting: this Autoblog FUD-filled headline is false.

Autoblog runs a story calling Tesla Diner a Ghost Town which also was picked up by others. A very recent video from the spot show that absolute opposite is true, people literally waiting in line, others confirm. The diner generated over $1M in Q4 revenue, selling over 30k burgers and 83k fries orders, more than an average McDonald's.

MUSKONOMY

SpaceX:

Elon on a comment about SpaceX producing Starships like they're airplanes: "Yes, at massive volume. Maybe as high as 10,000 ships per year."

Elon also says "Starship 4 will be another 10% to 20% longer", commenting on this image showing the current Starship iterations compared to everything else:

SpaceX's launched the 2025 Starlink Progress Report (75-page pdf here), confirms they are aiming to double Starlink Kit production in 2026 to nearly 50,000 kits per day on average, all made in the USA.

Starlink direct-to-cell now has 6 million monthly customers.

Over 400 million people now have access to Starlink direct to cell across 22 countries and 6 continents. In 2025, Starlink added 4.6 million new customers (9.2 million now!), served 20+ million cruise passengers, served 21+ million airline passengers, equipped over 1,400 commercial aircraft and 800 business jets, 150k vessels/boats, etc.

All in that report, with some good charts and images, go check it out.

Meanwhile, I found this interesting post of VP of Starlink engineering at SpaceX sharing how Starlink is beginning a significant reconfiguration of its satellite constellation focused on increasing space safety, including lowering all the satellite orbits:

xAI

xAI just announced reaising a $20B Series E funding round. That means they’ve now raised more than $37B in total over the past 18 months.

I’m waiting until they get to Series X 😆 

xAI's Colossus 2 latest progress pictures. Notice the letters spelling out “MACROHARD” on the building, clearly referencing to Microsoft.

The third building xAI just bought there, Elon says: "xAI has bought a third building called MACROHARDER. Will take xAI training compute to almost 2GW."

Currently, xAI has announced that it now has over 450,000 GPUs active across all its sites, with construction in progress to bring that number to 900,000 GPUs by Q2 2026.

Neuralink

Elon writes, on Neuralink:
"Neuralink will start high-volume production of brain-computer interface devices and move to a streamlined, almost entirely automated surgical procedure in 2026.
Device threads will go through the dura, without the need to remove it. This is a big deal."

The Boring Company

The Boring Company has officially begun limited Vegas Loop rides to Harry Reid International Airport. "

The ride includes both a tunnel portion and a long surface portion, with the latter shifting to subsurface when the 2.25 mile Airport Connector twin tunnels open, hopefully in Q1 2026."

That second thing I wanted to note is that I just recently sent out a massive robotaxi report to all our Tesla Space Insiders. I can’t believe there are already over a million paid robotaxi rides done every week globally now.

4,064 words, 15 images or charts, and so many insights. And that’s just part 1 of 3 of this report!

You can access it here (members only):

Either way, I meant it when I said we appreciate you.

Join us as an Insider, if any of that sounds great to you.

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X OF THE WEEK

SpaceX to IPO soon?!

Elon says, under a post from Eric Berger who argues how it will take a lot of cash to design and build the satellites and launch the rockets to deploy data centers in space:
"As usual, Eric is accurate".

This created a lot of buzz, I’m keeping an eye on what Elon says about it next. We do know Elon has said previously that Tesla shareholders are going to be able to get in before others in some kind of a preferred manner, but we’re not sure how much room he will actually have to do that.

The latest SpaceX valuation inside the inner investors/employees circle is said to have been at around $800B, and it seems estimations for the IPO are already going beyond a trillion, making it easily the largest IPO valuation ever.

I’m curious about your thoughts, so let’s run a quick poll among our readers:

Since Elon always says the “most entertaining outcome is the most likely” due to us potentially living in a simulation… then I’m pretty sure the stock tricker $SEX is still available.

It’s short for SpacEX, the company that previously went by Space Exploration Technologies Corp, of course.

TESLA NEWS

Since we’ve got more great posts to share from Elon this week, I’ll go for it:

Also in the Tesla shortlist:

• The 2026 Tesla Model Y Standard went 337 miles in the Edmunds EV range test, beating its EPA estimate of 321 miles, and the best result any Model Y has ever achieved on Edmunds’ test.
  

• The head of Giga Berlin, André Thierig, says: “Today, we informed our great Cell Team that we will invest close to 100m to enable 8GWh of cell production starting in 2027! Vertical integration at its best! From cell to vehicle in one factory - unprecedented in Europe! The future is great!”
  

• Tesla Optimus visited Europe for the first time, showing up in London, UK Westfield showroom, here’s the after-video.
  

• A new Tesla patent application describes an RF-transparent roof assembly capable of embedding satellite and cellular communication hardware directly into the vehicle’s structure. Tesla could be laying early groundwork for Starlink-enabled vehicles.
  

• A new Giga Texas permit for Tesla's upcoming Cortex 2 datacenter confirms it'll have a capacity for up to 200MW of power… it’ll be used to train Optimus.
  

• Model Y ranks #1 Electric Vehicle in Malaysia for November 2025. The fun part is here is that when Elon reposted the news with "Congratulations", I made a meme about him congratulating himself (you know, the Obama one), and it got 2.2k likes.
  

• Tesla has introduced a new High Voltage Battery and Drive Unit Extended Service Agreement for Model 3 and Model Y in the US & Canada for US$2,000 / CAD$2,800. Coverage for up to 24 months or 30,000 miles, whichever comes first.

• Here’s a short aftermovie of the Holiday Party at the Tesla Diner by Tesla. Looks like it was a magical experience.

source: @Brand0n on X

Tesla Diner also set up a mini racetrack around the New Model Y Performance for kids to race the mini Cybertrucks around:

• Tesla Shop has released a high-end Plaid Pickleball Paddle and bag by Selkirk for $350. Backstory here for any paddle geeks among us. The face material is Florek Carbon Fiber. Sold out for now, of course.

  

• Tesla history: Sendil Palani, Tesla VP of finance, shares an early story from the Roadster days (from ~2008, see the video above it):

PS! If you’re liking the Tesla Space newsletters, you’ll love the Tesla Space Insider membership.

FSD & ROBOTAXI & SOFTWARE

Biggest news this week is certainly the two nobody-inside Tesla Robotaxis driving in Austin: one on short video here and the other one here.

Elon comments:

I managed to catch another fitting post from Tesla around this right on my timeline there 👆️ .

In fact, this video was quote posted by a lot of Tesla members, from Tom Zhu to high-level Tesla engineers (including Ashok saying “And so it begins!”), which means it was likely also a high internal milestone. Even Tesla official account hyped with a "The fleet will wake up via over-the-air software update" post.

This now happened quite a few weeks before Elon’s latest timeline of “drivers out before end of year”. Let’s see if they can remove the safety drivers from the whole fleet.

Interestingly, the spot in Austin is very near the exact same spot where the first-ever robotaxi with a safety driver was spotted. And it yet again came from an account that hadn’t been posting on X before — makes me think these are “leaked” on purpose by Tesla employees.

Anyway, the cars are followed by a chaser car, probably to intervene if there’s any trouble. Standard procedure for the start of going fully driverless.

Meanwhile, on Waymo, Elon comments: "Waymo never really had a chance against Tesla. This will be obvious in hindsight."

For context, Waymo just announced it completed 14 million paid robotaxi trips in 2025… so while it’s a lot harder (or near impossible) for Waymo to scale up as massively as Tesla can, and even harder to do so profitably, it is the largest robotaxi fleet out there today with ~2.5k robotaxis on the road.

And on Luminar, the LiDAR maker filing for bankruptcy, Elon writes:
“Amazingly, some companies are still betting on LiDAR 🤦‍♂️”

Here's a closer look at the new design of the Cybercab in a Tesla showroom at Tesla Santana Row in San Jose:

wish the licence plate wouldn’t ruin the look

the carpet is an interesting choice…

Elon mentioned: “AI5/AI6 engineering is my biggest time allocation at Tesla. AI5 will be good, AI6 will be great.”

On the software side - check out Grok in action for the Tesla navigation in this video — “ I just asked Grok in my Model Y to navigate to three different destinations, and it automatically added them all at once, in the correct order, to the navigation in my car. Grok can also remove or edit destinations.”

SUPERCHARGING

On my “other gig”, I have recently launched a large interactive Supercharging Report that is meant for EV businesses (hence the heavy price tag) to understand the Tesla Supercharging network down to the stall, globally across 72,335 stalls.

I’m sharing some insight nuggets from the report also on socials, and here are the first two:

Here’s how the Tesla Supercharging stalls are spread across the world:

46.2% of all Tesla Superchargers deployed are in the US
26.8% in Europe
16.3% in China
3.7% in Canada
1.6% in South Korea
1.3% in Australia & NZ

And the other insight I have put together so far is about the share of Tesla Superchargers globally that are open to all EVs (read the post for more):

Did you find the easter egg? :)

Tesla opened North America's northernmost Supercharger in Fairbanks, Alaska, with 8 stalls.

Turns out that one of the cool features of Tesla's new Supercharging Live Site Maps feature that I showed you last week, is that it shows you a stall is unavailable when an EV is taking up two spots due to their different charge port location. This will be great for crowded sites so you don’t park in a spot that another EV is taking:

Max comments: “Superchargers know when another EV, with a charge port on the front left or rear right is plugged into a short-cable Supercharger stall.” Now that’s just… smart.

Tesla has announced that the Powershare with Powerwall feature is still in development and is now scheduled for release in mid-2026.

Wes comments on the Powershare with Powerwall feature delay addressing the disappointments, and shares what the tough part has been:

“It turned out to be much harder than anticipated to make powershare work seamlessly with existing Powerwalls through existing wall connectors. Two grid forming devices need to negotiate who will form and who will follow depending on state of charge of each, and they need to do this without a network and through multiple generations of hardware and test and validate this process through rigorous certifications to ensure grid safety.”

MUSKONOMY

Elon's companies now valued at combined $2.5 trillion:

Tesla: $1.5 trillion
SpaceX: $800 billion
xAI: $230 billion
Neuralink: $9 billion
The Boring Company: $7 billion

SpaceX:

Elon gives more details on AI satellites, says it's easier, not harder, than the Starlink V3 design:

Also, says: "Harnessing even a millionth of the Sun’s energy would make every human a billionaire in purchasing power."

Mr Beast has been spotted touring Starbase, with employees seen giving him a private walkthrough. Will there be a SpaceX video?

🌍️ In partnership with Airtel Africa, Starlink Direct to Cell will connect more than 170 million people in Africa across 14 countries, powering life-saving connectivity when it’s needed most. This marks the sixth continent for the satellite-to-mobile service and expands Starlink’s mission to end mobile dead zones.

The service will begin by delivering data that enables voice, video and messaging, and will advance to providing high-speed broadband service to smartphones with 20x improved data speeds.

xAI

xAI shared a photo of Elon with engineers standing with the caption "24/7/365. Rain or shine. CEO midnight meetings. All hands on deck building the world’s best data centers with maniacal speed and efficiency."

xAI also shared photos of its new Tesla Megapack battery energy storage system at its new Colossus 2 datacenter in Memphis, the largest in the world. There are ~420 Megapacks worth about $400 million. Says "BIG FANS of Sustainable Battery Solutions."

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X OF THE WEEK

Elon dropped a gem this week on the longer horizon:

This is also the "And one other thing that is arguably most significant by far” he mentioned but didn't specify when talking about SpaceX’s valuation the other day, when refuting that SpaceX is raising money at $800B.

Elon follows up with saying: "Exawatts or you’re not really trying"

He also wrote “Once there are lunar factories, robots and mass drivers on the Moon, such that the entire loop is closed, the system probably decouples from conventional currencies and operates autogenously in watts and tonnage”

TESLA HOLIDAY UPDATE

Here’s what Tesla has been cooking for the owners among us for the Holiday software update:

Grok with Navigation Commands (Beta)
Grok can now add & edit navigation destinations if you tell it to, becoming your personal guide. (There’s a video that shows Tesla navigation changing based on a voice prompt from the driver).

Nice to see Tesla bringing actual agentic AI workflows into Teslas.

Tesla Photobooth
Located in Toybox menu, you can now turn your car into a photobooth, taking selfies with the internal camera & “give yourself a makeover with fun filters, stickers, and emojis.” You can share it with others right from the Tesla app. Here it is on video.

Dog Mode Live Activity
I love this one. When Dog Mode is active, you’ll see a Live Activity on your iPhone featuring periodic snapshots of your vehicle’s cabin along with live updates on temperature, battery & climate conditions:

Dashcam Viewer Update
Dashcam clips now include additional details such as speed, steering wheel angle & self-driving state

Santa Mode
…gets an upgrade, adds festive snowmen, trees, a lock chime & snow effects for a 3D visual treat. There’s also a new Light Show called Jingle Rush.

Custom Wraps and License Plates on screen
You can now personalize your Tesla avatar with window tints, custom wraps & license plates. Use one of many preloaded designs or create and upload your own using a USB flash drive to make your vehicle unique. Location: Toybox > Paint Shop

what’s up with the avocados 🥑 

Navigation Improvements

Reorder your navigation favorites & set Home or Work by dropping a pin anywhere on the map. You can also view suggested destinations based on your recent trips and habits while parked

Supercharger Site Map
This one is my favorite. You can now see a 3D view of select Tesla Superchargers by tapping "View Site Map". When navigating to a pilot location, the site layout and live occupancy (Available / Occupied / Down) will be displayed upon arrival. Here is a video of what it looks like in action.

Max from the Supercharging team said:

“It's amazing what Tesla can do with its vertical integration. This should make Supercharging a little more magical, especially at larger & busy sites. We'll keep refining it and enable it for all Superchargers.”

Automatic HOV Lanes Routing
Navigation now includes an option to use high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) carpool lanes. Your route will automatically select the carpool lane when eligible, based on time, location, passenger count & road restrictions

Phone Left Behind Chime
Your vehicle will chime a few seconds after the doors close if a phone key is inside the cabin or a phone is left on the wireless charger and no occupants are detected. Phone key detection requires UWB-supported devices.

Charge Limit per Location
You can now save a charge limit for your current location while parked & it will be applied automatically next time you charge there

SpaceX ISS Docking Simulator (in Arcade)
Yes, really. What a nice cross-reference in Muskonomy! “Become an astronaut and prove your skills by docking with the International Space Station. Control & guide the spacecraft in this 3D docking simulator game using a set of controls based on actual interfaces used by NASA astronauts.”

Some smaller improvements:

• Enable or disable wireless phone charging pads

• Add Spotify tracks to your queue right from the search screen & scroll through large Spotify playlists, albums, podcasts, audiobooks & your library seamlessly, without paging

• Rainbow colors in Rave Cave. Accent lights color will change along with the beats of your music.

• Lock Sound now includes Light Cycle from Tron Mode.

Of course, as always the feature availability subject is to vehicle hardware & region… but we usually see most of these trickle down to most regions and most hardware over time. There’s usually a few ‘undocumented’ changes included in these updates, so we’ll report back when the rollout is done and Tesla geeks have inspected every bit. :)

Actually, one of those already dropped: New Storage Space for Dashcam feature, that shows how much space you have used and remaining on your USB drive.

TESLA NEWS

Tesla held an event over the weekend called Autonomy Visualized in Miami Design District for The Future. Here's a video from the spot, and here's the teaser video saying:

"Every day, petabytes of driving data are processed by Tesla vehicles across North America. All of the following renders are generated using this real-world driving data. This is the world through the eyes of Full Self-Driving.”

This event also seems to have provided the absolute funniest video I could imagine with Optimus. Yes, I still root for Tesla’s Optimus to come to life en masse, but this one is still funny to watch.

Twitter tweet

The fall seems to have been caused by the operator taking off the headset.

Also in the shortlist:

• Elon’s podcast with Katie Miller drops today at 6pm ET (teaser here).

• Milestone: Tesla produced its 4-millionth vehicle at Giga Shanghai, just 6 years after production initially started at the factory.

• Tesla Model 3 Standard is now available in Europe

• DHL, after testing Tesla Semis earlier this year and praising it, has now taken delivery of its first.

  DHL plans to add more Semis in 2026 as Tesla begins its volume production

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FSD & ROBOTAXI & SOFTWARE

Robotaxi app is now live to be able to download (don’t mistake this with the service itself being live) in all countries where FSD is also available… and then some: US & Canada & Mexico, and Thailand, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, Macau, New Zealand.

Remember how I showed you ~2k miles of FSD driving with no interventions last week?

It seems we have a new record: 3,000.2 miles.

And yes, this is important. It’s the first time we’re seeing such long stretches driven without interventions, and it’s looking a lot closer to fully unsupervised driving.

However, don’t take the media headlines saying Elon now endorses texting and driving too seriously. As usual, they blow it larger than it is. Here’s what Elon actually said:

What he is saying is that when you previously got nagged/disengaged for watching your phone while you had to be supervising the car, you’ll see less of that now if Tesla deems the conditions right.

Btw, Tesla now allows owners to gift FSD (Supervised) in the US as a monthly gift card.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, in a new interview on Elon Musk being the first customer for his next-gen DJX1 GPU ten years ago:

“When I announced this thing, nobody in the world wanted it. I had no purchase orders, except for Elon. He goes, ‘I have a company that could really use this.’

SUPERCHARGING

Tesla introduced the “Charging Passport” in the Tesla app, a new yearly summary of your charging, showing badges for visiting specific chargers, all kinds of info.

Just tap on “Charging” from the home page of Tesla app and you’ll see it:

Tesla said Supercharger usage in the U.S. hit an all-time record high over the 5-day Thanksgiving holiday:

→ 11.4 sessions/day/stall and only 0.76% waiters

→ 2 M+ sessions and 70+ GWh delivered

MUSKONOMY

SpaceX:

Starlink is set to receive $661 million in government funds as all 50 states move forward with their plans to expand high-speed internet in underserved regions; to deliver satellite internet to 478,073 locations across the US.

SpaceX has also filed to trademark "Starlink Mobile" and "Powered by Starlink".
Is it getting serious about a mobile carrier launch?

And… here’s the kind of some swag SpaceX holiday party had this year:

Oh, and here’s a cool peek behind the scenes: New Starbase building lobby in Texas has a giant floating Mars on top of the admin desk:

Neuralink

Neuralink hosted a discussion (video here) with Synapticure, where Brad, Jake, and Nick shared their experiences living with ALS and using their Neuralink devices as participants in our clinical trials.

‘Also, here's a great 21-minute video from Neuralink visting a school to provide an overview of the company. Some new info bits as well, for example, they said Neuralink has over 10,000 people on the waiting list to receive their Telepathy brain chip!

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X OF THE WEEK

To many, this news was… disappointing.

In May, Elon said that Tesla would have 1,000 autonomous Robotaxis in Austin “within a few months.” Then, lately, he has been talking of 500 by the end of the year. Looks like he underestimated the speed of rollout a bit.

Per the community-built robotaxi tracker, which logs the license plates that people have seen in their app on their robotaxi rides, has currently logged 29 vehicles in Austin and 112 on the San Francisco side. Doubling that in Austin only puts us at ~60…

Now, we see a delay, but here’s why it isn’t exactly the worst thing in the world.

The lower-than-Elon-anticipated robotaxi rollout in Austin for a moment makes sense if you consider that the service with safety operators does not make sense to scale. Like…at all. Safety Drivers out must come first (expected within December?), then the numbers can go up explosively if the fleet ops are handled. The demand is clearly there.

And that scaling-up part is where Tesla can excel, given the robotaxi can literally just roll off the line in Giga Texas and enter service immediately with no added modifications.

TESLA NEWS

The Model Y is winning the best-selling EV title in Europe again in 2025.

Much like it won in
2024
2023
2022

Why didn't it win in 2021, you might ask?

Well, because it started sales in Europe in August 2021.

Elon did a 2-hour interview with Nikhil Kamath. I found this part interesting:

“I think there's increasingly a convergence between SpaceX, Tesla and xAI, in that if the future is solar powered AI satellites, which is pretty much needs to be in order to harness a non-trivial amount of the sun, you have to move to AI-powered satellites in space.”

This has been on Elon’s mind a lot lately, expecting to hear more soon.

Also in the shortlist:

• 🖖 Optimus hands are getting ridiculously human-like: video.
  

• 🏃‍♂️ And Optimus shows how it is running in this video titled: “Just set a new PR in the lab”
  
  And Elon says: “Optimus will be the Von Neumann probe,” and also:
  “Since we are naming the singular, we will also name the plural, so Optimi it is.”
  
  If you’re unaware of what a Von Neumann probe is, the post suggests that Tesla's humanoid robot could self-replicate, say on Mars, using local resources.
  

• 🇨🇳 Tesla's China-made EV sales rose 9.9% in November from a year earlier to 86,700 vehicles, the second-best month of 2025.
  

• 💪 I happened to be the first to report that the Tesla Semi team pulled in an industry heavyweight Jason Gies, formerly Head of Operations for North America at Windrose. Jason is now joining Tesla on the Business Development team for the Semi program. “Tesla is delivering, and I’m ready to contribute,” Jason says.

• 🇳🇴 Record: Tesla has sold more cars in Norway in 2025 than any other automaker ever did in a full year (previously held by VW).

• 🇰🇷 The first international Cybertruck deliveries have officially begun in South Korea.
  

• 👂️ Here's what the new 2026 Model Y Performance motor sounds like from inside the cabin when you accelerate quickly.
  

• 🔵 Tesla has begun Model Y deliveries in Europe and Australia with the all-new Marine Blue color.

• 👀 Tesla released a new video showcasing videos from owners on the two-year anniversary of the first Cybertruck deliveries.
  

• New Tesla Shop items: Cybercab Wind-up Racer for $35 and Holiday Edition water bottle for $45. The Holiday Edition Tesla Bot action figure is now also available in North America.

• 🏍️ Elon confirms — Tesla will never do a motorcycle: “Never happening, as we can’t make motorcycles safe. My near-death experience was on a road bike.

  Dirt bikes are safe if you ride carefully, as you can’t be smashed by a truck.”
  

• 🚆 Tesla will expand its factory shuttle service in Germany on January 4, adding direct rail trips from Berlin Ostbahnhof to Giga Berlin — basically expanding the service that the local governments haven’t been able to. The service is free for all employees… and it’s called Giga Train.

• A neat software request for Tesla — red/white Santa Mode ambient light for the holiday update?

…and no, the emojis didn’t come here because I started to use some AI or anything, just felt like it. Don’t know if you knew this, but I use absolutely zero AI to put these newsletters together. All my rants you’re seeing here.

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FSD & ROBOTAXI & SOFTWARE

So, this happened — Elon reposted my post (well, he did it through Sawyer quote posting mine below, but still). I was wondering why the impression count suddenly shot up so much:

The finding itself was notable — Waymo’s Q3 data in California showed 90% of the Waymo robotaxi had 2 or fewer people riding. It’s as if Elon and Tesla knew what they were doing with the 2-seater robotaxi…

Tesla launches FSD ride-alongs in Europe (!)

Tesla is now offering FSD (Supervised) ride alongs in Europe for the first time ever, with Italy, Germany, France and Netherlands available to book for now.

A lot of the ride-alongs that people have already shared from Europe are under this thread.

Tesla writes: “Ride along in the passenger seat to experience how it handles real-world traffic & the most stressful parts of daily driving, making the roads safer for all.”

In case you’re Europe like me (most of you aren’t), you can find links to sign up in the respective countries through this page.

In Netherlands, Tesla invites to festivities “Featuring Caraoke, FSD Supervised ride-along experiences, holiday light shows with our S3XY lineup & more”. I like the image they cooked up for this:

French media after trying FSD V14 in France: "It's mind-blowing! Both for the safety and for the "humanity" of the choices; We were allowed to film everything and I have a huge video coming (including a long uncut)."

Also, the approach seem to be working for legislators as well (key benefit Tesla is surely going for!):

Here’s the Mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, and the Commissioner for Transportation and Mobility, Eugenio Patanè, just after riding along in Tesla FSD on their own streets.

Elon replied to this with: “Cool”

Free FSD trial for all HW4 owners in North America now live:

Tesla has launched a free 30-day trial (actually a bit more even, it ends early January) of FSD (Supervised) V14.2 in North America for the estimated 1.5 million Tesla owners with HW4 who have not purchased FSD. Owners will receive an email and in-app notification about the trial.

We’re seeing some wildly large mileage counts of no-intervention drives lately.

For example, this 1,200 mile journey from Chicago to Cape Canaveral, Florida, or the 1,136.3 miles on FSD (Supervised) V14.2 without a single intervention. Also saw someone’s 1,102-mile at 99%…

SUPERCHARGING

And here’s the other one of my posts from the same week, where Elon commented on Max’s comment on my post. A more vague one this one, but glad Elon agrees Supercharging needs to keep scaling!

Tesla Supercharging team is preparing for peak travel days through a site opening push, proactive service visits, attendants at some of their busiest sites, and deployment of mobile assets.

MegapackChargers & Mobile Supercharger Units are deployed at 5 new locations (4x CA, 1x OH)

Oh, and… the largest Supercharger in the world, the Lost Hills, CA with 168 stalls, is now live and powered by the sun!

🇮🇹 And the 1,000th Supercharger was deployed in Italy. As one of my favorite things in the Tesla world, they wrapped it:

MUSKONOMY

SpaceX:

SpaceX received approval to develop Space Launch Complex-37 for Starship operations at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Construction has started.

“With three launch pads in Florida, Starship will be ready to support America’s national security and Artemis goals as the world’s premiere spaceport continues to evolve to enable airport-like operations.”

Starlink products are now sold directly on Amazon, with Starlink's support pages now listing Amazon as an authorized retailer.

AND Starlink has now also opened one of its first physical stores: located in Gretna, Nebraska.

Starlink service is now free in Indonesia for the flooding disaster areas. Elon writes: “SpaceX standard policy is to make Starlink free whenever there is a natural disaster somewhere in the world. It would not be right to profit from misfortune.”

Falcon 9’s first stage has yet again landed, completing this booster’s 30th flight!

The Boring Company

The Boring Company has released an update on the tunnel it's building in Nashville. The initial airport-to-downtown tunnel will carry 20,000-30,000 people per hour and have 20 stations.

• Prufrock-MB1 is assembled, in the shaft, and will be ready to start tunneling by Dec 15th.

• Out of 45 necessary permits, 27 have been approved and 10 are under review, while the remainder relate to proposed route expansions.

• A comprehensive environmental impact study found no significant risks, and TBC reports zero safety incidents to date

Future add-on stations will not slow the system’s travel times. A rider traveling from Centennial Park to the airport, for example, would still make the trip in about ten minutes regardless of how many intermediate stations are added later.

See more with images on their blog.