Welcome to the Tesla Space newsletter, our 100^th issue.

The 100^th.

That’s how many newsletters we’ve sent out now. Wow.
I took over writing these from the 30^th issue, so this means you’ve heard from me, Jaan, directly for seventy consecutive weeks now.

Thank you for being on the receiving end.
I love doing this every week because of you.

Today’s newsletter will be all about the Tesla Shareholder Meeting and what we learned. You’ll find things like the Cybercab production line, new Optimus factory, Elon’s package confirmed, and more.

— Jaan

Before we kick it off, here’s our latest video:
Elon Musk Reveals New Plan to Build a Supercomputer in Space

Done? Good. Let’s carry on with overview 👇

Tesla held its Annual Shareholder Meeting late last week and it really was a fork in the road deciding the future of the company.

And by that, we mean… an actual fork, of course:

If you want to see the whole event yourself, here’s the livestream, timestamped to the 55th minute for when Elon walked on stage.

Okay, let’s start with the big news first:

Elon’s historic 2025 CEO Performance Award was… approved by shareholders, with 76.6% support (confirmed so by the SEC filing later).

This means that Musk would be required to grow Tesla’s market capitalization from about $1.1 trillion today to $8.5 trillion over the next decade, along with milestones for both vehicles (20M cumulatively), FSD adoption (10M active), Robotaxi deployments (1 million) and Optimus deployments (1 million) and $400B annual EBIDTA.

The SEC filing for the Performance Award with the 12 tranches of shares (423.7 million total shares) have been issued now (here).

Anyway, Elon opens the meeting with:

“Have you watched any other shareholder meeting. They are snoozefests. Ours are bangers!"

Cringe? A little. But now to the new & fun stuff:

On the xAI investment the shareholder vote results were (shares):

For: 1,058,999,435
Against: 916,321,296
Abstained: 473,073,20
Broker Non-Votes: 302,456,274

While the For votes were larger, the Tesla board says it basically isn't enough due to large amount of Abstained votes “since our bylaws generally consider abstention as votes against, this was not approved under the bylaw standard. As a result, given that this is an advisory vote, the Board will examine next steps in light of these voting results (including the high number of abstentions).”

Meanwhile, on an analyst note calling for this to happen, Elon says:

Well, we have been hoping for an “X Holdings” company or something for a while now which would allow investing into all of Musk’s company at once — might that ever be a thing? Don’t miss the SpaceX news around this in the bottom of this recap.

Tesla says their current Austin & the SF Bay Area robotaxi service will be accompanied next with service in Nevada, Florida & Arizona. Their goal is to remove safety riders by the end of the year in Austin. New video by Tesla on this:

(read this article online to play videos right in the article)

In the Q&A, Elon said they “see a path to sub $.20/mile cost to operate”

And Tesla also showed us the first look into the Cybercab production line, confirming the production starts in April:

I don’t think many of us really get what a “sub 10 second cycle time” means. This production line will be unlike anything the auto industry has ever seen. They’ll eventually want to get it down to 5 seconds. Here are some stills from the video:

The Cybercab has also been redesigned in both interior and exterior.

In the interior, there’s a new door card design, different handle area and ambient lighting, also what seems to be air vents (the new slit across the dashboard). The headliner area is different, and the seats have upgraded cushions.

Carpet on the floor and door sills seems like a bit of an odd new decision, given the heavy usage. Tesla going for that premium feel and cleaned often, perhaps?

Also, the Cybercab doors are now frameless like on other Teslas.

On the exterior, we just recently saw the Cybercab with a slightly different design compared to the old look, here are the details that have changed by Sawyer, based on the images from the IN-N-Out pic of Cybercab that Tesla shared.

The changes include alightly redesigned front end and light bar area, a longer front lower lip, a redesigned B-pillar area, which looks to have moved slightly forward, no gold paint on tires, the door/window looks to be frameless (unconfirmed), front amber reflectors near the wheel arch, production-ready looking headlights and exterior mirrors (likely required by law right now).

Surprisingly, Elon even thanked Waymo in the Q&A: "I'd like to thank Waymo for paving the (regulatory) path; I think Tesla will be able to deploy all the Cybercabs that we produce."

Elon expects regulatory approval for Robotaxi to approximately match Cybercab production rates, doesn't see approval as a bottleneck. Including Cybercab, Elon predicts Tesla could do 2.6M vehicle run rate end of 2026 (vs 1.8M total this year), 4M run rate end of 2027, 5M run rate end of 2028.

Some in the industry have reportedly confirmed (so take it with a grain of salt), that Cybercab runs on 48 volt architecture. I saw this reported by several people who went on the factory tour, also witnessing the new motors using zero rare earth.

What about the Robovan? It is said to be a late 2027 product… at the earliest.

So Elon really did mostly make good on his promise from May when he said “I will have an Optimus dance troupe on stage with me at the Tesla shareholders meeting”.

We got a rare look at the Optimus pilot production line at Tesla Fremont, while the real scalable line will start in 2026 and will be bigger & different — this is per Julian Ibarz, the AI Lead of Optimus. Tesla says they are “also testing in our factories & office spaces for real-time use case.” Tesla says their goal is $20k COGS per robot at scale.

I heard the Optimus bots already walk around the Palo Alto engineering studio autonomously and plug themselves in.

Elon thinks there could be tens of billions of Optimus robots. For every personally robot, there will be 3-5 corporate robots.

Elon said Tesla will build a 1 million unit Optimus production line at Fremont, and a 10 million unit line at Giga Texas. Tesla seems to have started construction on its new Optimus production facility at Giga Texas which Elon mentioned on the meeting

Elon mentioned that these Optimus’ are version 2.5

COGS here means Cost of Goods Sold, which you can consider as the all-inclusive price of making these. Tesla will certainly command a higher price for these when launching.

As we know, there’s a large overlap in Tesla’s components across its product line, and Tesla demonstrated some of the vehicle → Optimus overlap.

And here’s the latest gen of Optimus hand on display:

Tesla has also created some “idle gestures” for Optimus while it isn’t actively dancing or anything, “it’s casually looking around”:

Tesla says the FSD Supervised is available in 6 countries, with EU + more to follow.

Tesla owners using FSD experience just one crash per 4.92 million miles vs one crash per 700k miles for the US average.

Elon says the cars on FSD are currently “a little strict on keeping your eyes on the road”, but in the next month or two Tesla will allow you to text while using FSD and reduce the attention monitoring strictness.

Here’s a sneak peek at the Tesla AI5 chip:

Tesla says “Designing chips in-house unlocks absolute efficiency that no off-the-shelf part can match. AI5 has potential to be 50x more performant than AI4 (our current hardware) – working toward mass production in 2027. It will be used in vehicles, robotics, training & data centers.”

Tesla might have to build its own gigantic chip fabrication facility to keep up with its own demand, as Elon put it: “We have to do a Tesla Terafab. It’s like Giga but way bigger. I can’t see any other way to get to the volume of chips that we are looking for. We are going to have to build a gigantic chip fab.”

“The only option is to build some very big chip fab. It’s at least 100K wafer starts per month. And that’s one of ten in a complex. So ultimately, it would be 1 million wafer starts per month. We have to solve memory and packaging too.”

That would be, if typical 50-100 chips per wafer, about 1 billion chips per year 🤯

Elon revealed that the Cybercab and the Tesla Semi will use 4680 cells next year. But when it comes to Dry Cathode, Elon said it was a mistake and that it has been incredibly difficult. He explained Tesla will be successful in scaling dry cathode, but the path to get there may not have been worth it.

Dry Cathode is estimated to use 50% less equipment, 50% less energy to create, 5% more energy dense, 1/10th the factory floor space, and at least 20% cheaper than standard 4680s.

Tesla’s VP of Finance, replied with: “Indeed. Has been harder than we expected. All of which, however, is the whole point of the company: to solve tough problems on the path to sustainable abundance.”

He also liked my comment about it which I think holds true: "I love the “it was harder than expected but we'll do it" instead of "it's pretty hard so we abandoned the project“ approach.”

Tesla also shared their lifetime emissions avoided from the Tesla fleet:

The most notable “new” information about the Tesla vehicles we got was about the Tesla Semi and the Cybercab.

The Semi has been updated to be more efficient, now showing the 1.7 kWh/mile efficiency (so ~15% less than originally said). The thing is that the pilots with DHL and others have already consistently shown the 1.7 kWh / mile numbers, so might it be we’ll start seeing ~1.5 kWh / mi soon?

It was also said it can now handle increased payload while still at 500 mile range, and is designed for Autonomy. I think the Tesla does not mention Tesla Semi being able to run on FSD nearly as much as they should. Even though it’s “normal” for us who follow what they do, this will be a massive surprise factor for the world around us.

It has 800 kW drive power and can charge at 1.2 MW peak. The most visible change is that the truck got a Model Y style light bar instead of the previous headlights.

Roadster will be unveiled on April 1, 2026 (tentatively aiming for that date, per Elon) with production “probably starting 12-18 months after that”. Elon says the Foundation Roadster reservation holders will be invited to that event.

Elon Musk says Tesla will hold its next shareholder meeting at much bigger venue (such as an arena) so thousands of people can go.

Elon says Tesla's new lithium refinery in Texas will have a 50GWh capacity initially and expand from there.

Elon also said SpaceX might go public!

“I want to try to figure out some way for Tesla shareholder to participate (invest) in SpaceX. I've been giving a lot of thought to how to give people access to SpaceX stock; Maybe at some point SpaceX should become a public company despite all the downsides of being public.”

We’re done for today! We strive to be the most value-packed and concise Tesla-related newsletter out there. How did we do?

94.23% “👍” last week. More honest takes, appreciate it!
Here are some of you who left replies:

Curt wrote, on our Insider Alert email:

“So Happy For Elon Musk and Tesla, Keep the Insider Alerts Coming, Thank You Tesla Space Team!”

— Thanks for being an insider, Curtis! Also, make sure you send us pics of your new Model Y Performance once you receive it 😉

J wrote:

“With each issue my excitement level increases. I'm not sure I've got enough zantac to make it to the propellant transfer in 2026! lol”

— lol

Rog wrote:

“It is just great to hear some good news about Tesla. Most of what you read or hear on the news is lies and mis-information. I have had my Tesla for 4 years and am getting ready to upgrade. The only cars in consideration are Teslas.”

— Nice to hear Tesla has made you a loyal customer, so much of that around (for a good reason!)

K wrote:

“too much info crammed into a good read.”

— Yeah, I do have trouble finding the fine line between giving all the info and not making it overwhelming sometimes. Thank you for the feedback!

EA wrote:

“A jam-packed issue with so much to see & just awesome. Thank you for the links to videos re Starship V-3. Kudos to those that put that together. Amazing & beautifully done & much to look forward to in humans space ventures. […]”

— 🤜 ⚡ 🤛

Also, GW, thanks for finding that typo!

See you next week for more,

— Jaan, Ted, and Sean.

PS, we’d like to thank all of our supporters on Patreon.

As a monthly supporter of the channel, you will receive our eternal gratitude and respect, plus a little shoutout at the end of every video and maybe even a few perks if you happen to be particularly generous.