Tesla Space #79: while the world debates, we build.

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X OF THE WEEK

You probably have heard about the Elon v Trump breakup saga that took place, so we won’t be digging deeper into that. However, we’ll start at a rather clear self-reflection from Elon here:

Can’t argue with this one… 😂 

$TSLA

… is down 8.58% since our last week’s newsletter (Monday’s close), now at $313.60 per share. Tesla is now at a $990.40B market cap. Welcome back to the three comma club, $TSLA.

TESLA NEWS

I don’t want to dig into Elon v Trump v Elon thing too much, but all this was entertaining to watch unfold for sure.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about at all, I’ll give you a very quick rundown — the two went publicly at each other’s throats after Elon started criticizing the “Big Beautiful Bill”.

Can’t blame the guy either — all that they worked for with DOGE to cut spending? Not enough cut, and a lot more spending added in the bill. Additionally, it will affect Tesla specifically, through removal of the $7,500 Fed EV credit, battery production incentives and Megapack (energy storage) tax credits.

So, this was one of the starting points of the saga:

You can dig through Elon’s X timeline for a lot of the posts he made in response to Trump’s posts on Truth Social and public interview stuff, but Elon has also deleted some of the posts, including where he made a remark around Trump’s association with Epstein.

Some clarification of Trump talking about SpaceX being reliant on subsidies: Elon says “SpaceX commercial revenue from space will exceed the entire budget of NASA next year. SpaceX revenue this year will be ~$15.5B, of which NASA is ~$1.1B.” — NASA contratcs make up just 7.1% of all SpaceX revenue.

Something funny happened along the way, too — it looks like a guy with 184 followers achieved de-escalation between two of the most powerful people in the world:

Elon has since deleted the first post, but I love that the small account (now jumped to 14.5k followers though) writes in his X bio now: “unlikely peace broker”.

As you might’ve expected, Elon went and asked on X:

“Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?” After the poll, Elon said it could be called “The America Party” and wrote: “The people have spoken. A new political party is needed in America to represent the 80% in the middle! And exactly 80% of people agree 😂 this is fate.”

President Trump of course, said Elon Musk will pay "very serious consequences" if he funds Democratic candidates who challenge lawmakers who backed Republicans' tax-and-spending bill.

Then, after a little while, both Elon and Trump seemed to have let go of the thing and wished each other well through different mediums.

Here’s a good ending note from Jose del Corral who works Software @ Tesla:

In other news:

• China’s rare earth restrictions halt first auto industry production lines — is this the actual reason why Tesla is working on ferrite motors, so there are no rare earths needed for the permanent magnet motor?
  As I recently wrote to you, Tesla's next-gen motor teased in Industry Day. Confirmed ferrite magnets in Q1 call. This is Tesla again taking geopolitics out of its supply chain. Elon said it himself recently: “It is important, albeit extremely hard work, to localize supply chains to mitigate geopolitical risk.”

• Tesla put up a deep-dive article on X about Dojo: “Detecting defective compute nodes in Tesla Dojo”. Elon also comments: “Tesla Dojo AI training computer making progress. We start bringing Dojo 2 online later this year. It takes three major iterations for a new technology to be great. Dojo 2 is good, but Dojo 3 will be great.”

• Tesla has successfully recovered 52 domain names that leveraged its brand and Elon Musk’s likeness to promote cryptocurrency and phishing scams.

• Waymos were summoned and burned by the protestors in LA, as seen on this video. My question is — will the Tesla Network have a built in system so they could avoid being deployed in already known problem areas, be it a protest or other dangers?

• Meanwhile, Tesla became officially listed as a "Known Autonomous Vehicle Operator" in Austin, Texas on the local DMV website from June 9th, suggesting an imminent launch of Model Y robotaxi rides.

VEHICLES

Tesla has now reached 8 million cars built!

The milestone Model Y rolled off the line in Giga Berlin:

• Tesla teases an upcoming 7-seat Model Y in a new email titled “Model Y: Midsize SUV” to customers: "Ready for anything with long range, seating for up to seven and enough room for everyone’s gear."

• Tesla Semi account with a recent video: “Tesla Semi fleet has saved more than 1 million gallons of diesel.”

• In the US, for 60-month loan terms, Tesla has introduced 0% APR for new Cybertruck orders if you buy FSD. This means it is now cheaper in all versions of the truck to add FSD and do 0% APR than to get it a 5.54% and not get FSD.

• Tesla Model Y becomes best-selling in China in May with 24,770 units.

• Tesla has become the top brand for private vehicle registrations in Hong Kong, which is one of the countries with highest EV-penetration at all.

• Tesla UK: “Shiny new photo spot if you take delivery at Longbridge”

FSD & SOFTWARE

Bloomberg launched info and details of a fatal crash from November 2023 that involved a driver using the FSD Supervised V11 (the earlier, non end-to-end version, so there’s been ~1000x improvement per intervention since), where a Tesla owner, drove, while visibility was reduced due to sun glare, into a crash site head-on and hit a woman who died.

There’s a full video on that article right up to the crash in case you can access the article (paywalled I’m afraid but you can get around it via the waybackmachine), and you can see the strong glare from the sun right against the cameras which seem to have confused the Tesla’s system. The driver did not seem to notice all the people stopping on the side of the road or people waving to stop vehicles, either:

I’ve also managed to pull the official crash report, a 36-page pdf here.

While the incident itself is no doubt tragic, the timing of this article right before the robotaxi launch doesn’t look like a coincidence.

On the Q1 call in April, Elon said they made a breakthrough with the sun glare issue “some time ago”, going directly with photon counting when processing the image, bypassing the image signal processor which is adding the noise in high sunlight situations.

Tesla has launched a separate page on its website now dedicated just for FSD (tesla.com/fsd). It describes the different features like ASS, FSD (Supervised), Autopark, shares some info on how it’s trained and more.

FSD (Supervised) is trained on what amounts to over 100 years of anonymous real-world driving scenarios from Tesla's fleet of over six million vehicles. Tesla's fleet collectively experiences a lifetime of driving scenarios in 10 minutes.

Tesla is reportedly trying to prevent the city of Austin, Texas, from releasing public records to Reuters involving the EV maker’s planned launch of self-driving robotaxis in the city this month.

Austin public-information officer Dan Davis told Reuters on April 1 that “third parties” had asked the city to withhold the records to protect their “privacy or property interests.” The Tesla attorney wrote that providing the documents to Reuters would reveal “Tesla’s deployment procedure, process, status, and strategy” and “irreparably harm Tesla.”

In the 2025.20 update, charging can now be stopped and the charge cable released by pulling and holding the rear left door handle for 3 seconds.

MUSKONOMY

Optimus program

Milan Kovac, the leader of Tesla Optimus program, leaves the company after 9+ years in what seems to be in good terms. “ I’ve been far away from home for too long, and will need to spend more time with family abroad. I want to make it clear that this is the only reason, and has absolutely nothing to do with anything else. My support for Elon and the team is ironclad - Tesla team forever.” he says.

He wrote a lengthy leaving note which also gives me some of the behind-the-scene history of their teams. For example, he writes:

“The transition to build & lead the Optimus group early 2022, when we had nothing but a couple Kuka arms arranged upside-down, was of another level for me. We had to build an entire platform: hardware & software all at once. And this amazing team did it. They did it, I didn’t. […] My departure now will not change a thing.”

After some more words, he ends the note with:

SpaceX & Starlink

Starlink now has over 6 million customers, up from 5 million in February 2025 and 4.6 million in December 2024. Starlink added a record 9,900 new customers on average per day in the last ~100 days. The system is no live across 140 countries, territories and, of course, the oceans.

SpaceX's revenue this year will hit ~$15.5B, with NASA contracts only making up 7.1% of that total, per Elon.

SpaceX has released some videos of its brand new Starlink Performance dish, its most rugged kit ever.

It can withstand the vibrations of a rocket landing, heavy-duty trucks, etc. Makes sense, as we’ve seen Starlink provide videos literally from out of space on the SpaceX rockets! There’s more specs and pics on the Starlink For Land Mobility page now.

Virgin Atlantic is in talks with SpaceX for Starlink in-flight Wi-Fi.

Starlink has received a license to launch commercial operations in India

Australia: Telstra has launched Telstra Satellite Messaging, a new service that allows customers to send and receive text messages directly via Starlink satellites in areas without mobile coverage, the first provider in Australia to launch the service.

Reports said SpaceX is valued now at $480B up from the previous $350B, Elon says: “I have no idea how they’re arriving at this valuation. Sounds too high for where SpaceX is today.”

xAI

XMoney will have Daily, Weekly, and Monthly limits, but you will have the ability to request higher limits. X Money will be FDIC-insured up to $250,000.

X filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court against eight individuals for attempting to abuse X’s Creator Revenue Sharing Program by posting inauthentic content and faking engagement metrics to unfairly increase their earnings.

Per Elon, X is building both macOS and Windows apps. He says: “Can’t live in the browser forever!”