I’ve got plenty to tell you this week, but there’s one thing I have to mention first.

The Tesla Space Insiders just got an email. A very full email, actually, with 3,875 words for a proper coffee reading. It is called the Robotaxi Report, part III, and it completes our series. This issue talks about something that most people don’t realize is a part of the robotaxi industry. But I’ve been neck-deep in research of the industry for a few years now.

I call it the enabling layer, and we’re talking about everything from fleet operations to charging, from humans involved to permits and pudo. And how Tesla has vertically stacked across it all, along with how do all the other players play it.

Become an Insider to access this, all the previous parts for a full robotaxi industry picture, and our next reports that are incoming soon (next up is Humanoids).

We loved their framing (not financial advice) so this ad just fit our newsletter like a 🧤

Apple just secretly added Starlink satellite support to iPhones through iOS 18.3.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

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Worth knowing what that meant the first time.

I’d normally hate citing the ridiculously anti-Elon site called Electrek here, but they did go and check out what Tesla actually released for the Roadster, and seem to have found five CAN database files, a diagnostic ISO, two PDF guides, and a liability disclaimer. No CAD, no firmware source, and no license granting anyone the right to copy or modify any of it….

Tesla is suing a supplier to get its own Cybertruck tooling back.

The complaint, filed Thursday in the Western District of Texas, says Angstrom Automotive shut its Troy, Texas plant with Tesla's die-cast machinery, trim dies, fixtures and X-ray inspection gear locked inside, then asked for $250,000 a week on top of existing purchase orders before releasing any of it. Seven hundred finished parts were due to ship on July 17 and never left the building.

Tesla told the court its supply of the affected components is "dwindling and will be exhausted in mere days," that rebuilding the tooling would take five to six months, and that several thousand Cybertrucks already promised to customers depend on it. It is asking for its property back, nothing else.

The Q2 earnings call, which we covered last week, landed badly. Tesla shares fell about 14.5% on Thursday to close at $320.21, one of its sharpest single-day drops, taking more than $140 billion of market value with it.

Record revenue of $28.2 billion wouldn’t cover Wall Street’s (or retail’s?) worries about the margin drop. It is certainly interesting to see $TSLA valued at less than a trillion again:

Elon got asked on the call whether Tesla and SpaceX merge.

His answer: there is "more and more overlap. Especially with Terafab, that's really going to be a gigantic project." Then he stopped himself, saying you cannot talk about combining companies on an earnings call and it has to go through the appropriate process. General counsel Brandon Ehrhart pointed at the framework agreement and investment already in place.

The 2026 Summer Update started landing on customer cars on Sunday, and it brought something that was not in the release notes we ran last week:
Model 3 and Model Y get drive modes for the first time.
A new Traction Control Mode setting with Slippery Surface and Stuck Assist for snow, mud and sand. It resets to Auto at the start of every drive.

The browser camera and microphone access we mentioned turned out to mean video calls. Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord and X Spaces all work in the car while parked, with the feed auto-cropping to center you.
AMD Ryzen infotainment only for now.

Discord had something to say about this 😂 :

🇨🇦 The Model Y is effectively sold out in Canada for the year.

Every trim now quotes December, and RWD and Performance slip into January 2027. Canadian Model Y sales ran about 98% higher year over year in Q2, after Tesla moved Canadian supply from the US to Giga Berlin to get around the tariffs. That cut the price and added a transatlantic shipping leg to every order.

Interestingly, I’ve seen similar situations for specific trims in parts of Europe… remember how Tesla said they came out of Q2 with the strongest order backlog since 2023? Things are looking good.

Tesla has released updated safety data for FSD Supervised in Europe, stating that the system has recorded more than 5.2 times fewer collisions than manual driving after accumulating 65 million kilometers (40.4 million miles) across five European countries.

The figures cover driving in the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark and Belgium, where FSD Supervised has received regulatory approval. According to Tesla, the data spans the period from April 10 through July 26, 2026.

On highways, the tally is zero collisions across 41.9 million kilometers (26.0 million miles).

🇫🇷 France is not on board for FSD. Transport minister Philippe Tabarot came out against bloc-wide approval, saying the safety trade-offs are not yet sufficient to authorize the system as it stands, and pointing at the speed offset feature and at driver monitoring in roundabouts and lane changes. The European Commission is due to vote in October, and if it’s a “no”, then all the already approved countries need to claw back their approvals, too.

Elon replied that “delaying FSD approval in France will cost lives”, citing one major collision per 5.1 million miles on FSD (Supervised) against a US average of one per 698,000 miles.

🇯🇵 Tesla opened up the Superchargers for free in three disaster zones this week. Ten sites across Kyushu went free after the earthquake in southwestern 🗾 Japan.

Nine more opened up around the wildfires in southwestern 🇫🇷 France and 🇪🇸 Spain.
Those are free for any EV, not just Teslas. All of it runs from midnight on July 29 to midnight on August 5.

I love how the Muskonomy can pull two levers to help people, with the free Supercharging and free Starlink.

A new Tesla Supercharger opened in Midlothian, Texas on July 23, and it wears its host's branding instead of Tesla's. The stalls are branded to Victron Energy, the travel-center operator behind the Texas Best Smokehouse chain, which owns the site under Tesla's Supercharger for Business program.

Importantly, V4 Superchargers can now be bought by US federal agencies through a GSA contract held by Verdek, so the Defense Department and the services can order them without running a fresh procurement. This is actually quite a win for the Supercharging for Business program, potentially.

Starship flew Friday evening and, for the first time, came back whole.

Flight 13 lifted off from Starbase on July 24 evening. The ship deployed all 20 third-generation Starlink satellites, relit one of its six Raptors in space, rode out peak heating on the way down, and set itself into the Indian Ocean before tipping over and floating there, intact and still sending telemetry. Six of those satellites carried cameras aimed at the heat shield, which was the data the team wanted most.

SpaceX's Dan Huot, on the stream: "That is the softest splashdown we have ever had with Starship in the Indian Ocean."

The booster had the worse day. Super Heavy's landing burn never came up to full power and it hit the Gulf hard instead of settling in the way SpaceX had planned.

Elon followed up on Saturday. Unless the data review turns something up, SpaceX will try to catch the ship with the tower on Flight 14. Nobody has ever caught an orbital-class upper stage. And the fact that it was still floating and recoverable even though all previous tipovers have resulted in a boom… wild. Here’s the floating video.

The Boring Company is reportedly raising about $4 billion at a $20 billion valuation, per the Wall Street Journal. The deal has not closed, and the terms could still move. Its last mark was $5.7 billion back in 2022.

Elon put dates on the next two Groks. Grok 4.6 releases around August 7 as the 1.5 trillion parameter model, with what he describes as significantly improved SFT and RL. Grok 4.7 follows a few weeks later at 2.1 trillion parameters, better in every way except slightly slower to serve.

X Money went live in the US on Tuesday, invite-only, for X Premium and Premium+ subscribers. I mean… it has been live for select people for weeks, but now broader.

It ships with an X-branded Visa debit card that drops straight into Apple Pay, fee-free peer-to-peer transfers inside the app, no foreign transaction fees, free ATM withdrawals worldwide, up to 3% cash back, and 6% APY.

Neuralink just shared that participants living with paralysis are now controlling a powered wheelchair using nothing but their thoughts. No joystick. Just intention.
Here’s how they did it