Tesla Space #68: Tesla's new mission statement

X OF THE WEEK

First of all – you know of Elon’s Master Plans – the 1, 2, and 3 - which Elon says we’re in right now, right? Well it seems that Elon skipped all the rest and jumped to “The ultimate master plan of Tesla - is to create Sustainable Abundance for all.”

More on what it means below.

$TSLA

… is up 16.97% from our last week’s newsletter, now at $278.39/share before the market’s open and at a $872.3B market cap.

We dig deeper in this new section — every week from now on — for the Tesla Space Insider members. Join us?

Before we continue, just an FYI — I already sent all my notes on this Tesla all-hands meeting to all of our Tesla Space Insider members early on Friday. If you want to get our rare Insider Alert emails with the most notable happenings around Tesla as they take place, join the membership.

DEEP DIVE: TESLA ALL-HANDS MEETING

As an unannounced but a rather pleasant surprise, Tesla held a Q1 2025 all-hands meeting with Elon talking about the present and future — and we got to watch!

Here’s the 1-hour full video.

Here are my notes, starting with Optimus:

Tesla has now produced its first Optimus robot at their new production line at Fremont, and there’s an even bigger production line in Austin.

It has a new hand with 22 degrees of freedom (previously 11) and a new forearm is now in production. Elon says it’s the "most sophisticated humanoid robot on earth” and "our robot has a real brain".

“Tesla is the only company that can make intelligent humanoid robots at scale. Optimus will be the biggest product of all time by far - nothing will be even close - I think it will be 10x bigger than any other product ever made."

Plans are to make about 5,000 Optimus (and parts for 10k-12k) this year, then reach 50,000 Optimus in 2026. Tesla employees will be first to be offered the Optimus.

• Dojo: Dojo 1 is active in NY and Palo Alto, and handling ~10% of the FSD training load currently. Dojo 2 on the way and it will be 10x better than Dojo 1. Elon says he is optimistic and there’s a "Real shot at a breakthrough."

• Cybercab will ultimately roll off the production line in less than every 5 seconds (to compare, it’s 35 seconds for Model Y currently). The production line looks like a high-speed consumer electronics line - moving so fast that people can't get close to it!

• Tesla's cells: Elon says they think they are making now the lowest-cost cell per kWh in the world 🤯, also: record battery production currently happening at Giga Nevada:

• Model Y is on track to be a bestselling car in the world in 2025 for the third year in a row. Interesting considering it plays in a disadvantage of missing January & Feb until it started deliveries?

• Work-related injuries are decreasing:

• Tesla Semi: on track to complete the Semi factory, Tesla will make millions of the Tesla Semis -and these will also have the ability to go autonomous down the road. Autonomy around Tesla Semi is actually something Tesla/Elon hasn’t talked about much, which is kind of weird since it’s a huge use case given the shortage of truckers in the US. FSD will have huge implications there.

• Gigacasting: Elon wants to experiment with much larger gigacasting machines, potentially up to 50,000 tons to do 5 castings simultaneously — "How big can a casting machine be - what are the limits of physics? - let's find out, I’m down!" Tesla’s largest is 9,000 tons currently.

• Tesla's Cortex One – yes Elon used the word One there so we see it as a hint to Cortex Two - anyway, Cortex One which is supercomputer at Giga Texas is, as we know, currently at 50,000 active GPUs, and soon to reach 100,000 GPUs. Elon says that at that point, it will be a top 5 training cluster in the world.

• Elon also touched the topic of HardWare 4 – or AI 4 – which is now in all new Tesla vehicles, saying it is a very powerful AI inference computer but also operates at a very low power. Elon says that even though they designed this several years ago, there isn’t anything on the market that you can buy that would be better than AI 4. Also, Elon says that Tesla will obviously have an AI5 and AI6 and AI7 but there is no point in waiting for the next version because they’ll always keep improving.

• Autonomy: “Almost the entire fleet - which will surpass 10 million vehicles next year - is capable of autonomy. An autonomous car could have the usefulness that's 5x to 10x a regular car. So with a software update, we could turn 10 million cars into the usefulness of 50 to 100 million overnight.”

• Energy: after saying Megapack and Powerwall teams rock, he says “Long-term more than 90% of all power on earth will be solar + batteries.”

• Elon, after talking of the potential of Optimus and FSD in value creation: "What I'm saying is hang on to your stock." 🤷‍♂️ NFA

• As an answer to an employee question – Elon said he’d actually love to make electric airplanes – specifically a supersonic electric VTOL jet - but he’s stretched pretty thin… “I have like, 17 jobs”. He says “Maybe at some point we’ll do that. Would be fun. We do have ingredients for it.”

• Master Plan 3 plus Abundance for all = Master Plan 4, says a new future mission statement will be “it's all about sustainable abundance.”

I’ll leave you with some words from Elon:

“I’ve got so much going on in my mind, it’s kind of hard to got to sleep. It’s like having a computer browser with 100 tabs open. That’s my brain.”

PS! Join us as a Tesla Space Insider so you’d get our rare ‘Alert’ emails when something notable happens — like this all-hands meeting with notes which our ~40 members already got on Friday. Among other perks, of course.

Here’s one of the feedback from that alert:

TESLA, GLOBALLY

Another one of Elon’s appreciation posts on X with a bunch of hearts… we’re doomed aren’t we?

Here’s what’s the latest on the anti-Tesla and anti- anti-Tesla trends.

First off, Tesla, and the US gov, are cracking down hard on vandalism — the FBI is now involved as well.

The FBI has announced that they are launching a new Tesla Task Force to investigate attacks targeting Tesla — a 10-person strong team that will include personnel from their Counterterrorism Division. The FBI is treating the attacks as “domestic terrorism.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi has announced charges against three individuals responsible for the violent destruction of Tesla properties. “The days of committing crimes without consequence have ended; Let this be a warning: if you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars.”

In Las Vegas, several Teslas were set on fire. Elon posts: “This level of violence is insane and deeply wrong. Tesla just makes electric cars and has done nothing to deserve these evil attacks.”

Over 80 Teslas were purposely damaged at Tesla’s company's largest service center in Canada. Damage included deep scratches and punctured tires. Likely that all of these damaged cars were customer-owned.

Elon says that “Tesla has ramped up security and activated Sentry Mode on all vehicles at stores.”

The worst part about all this is that it is the Tesla owners that suffer from these acts. For example, someone thought it’d be cool to start a trend of giving Uber drivers that drive a Tesla one-star reviews. Even Elon commented “That’s just plain cruel. The driver did nothing to deserve this.”

“The backlash against him will backfire” says Musk after an LA restaurant becomes a target of haters because the owners talked positively of Tesla’s diner-charger concept.

Organizers of the Vancouver International Auto Show in Canada have removed Tesla from the event participants. “The Vancouver Auto Show’s primary concern is the safety of attendees, exhibitors, and staff.” — The real reason? Perhaps the fact that the auto show is organized by the New Car Dealers Association?

Tesla protesters are planning their “biggest day of action” yet, aiming for 500 demonstrations at Tesla showrooms across the world on March 29th, organizers said during a mobilizing call Wednesday.

Ed Niedermeyer was one of the organizers of a Tesla Takedown protest in Portland. If the name sounds familiar, you must be one of the OG Tesla geeks — Ed was the guy who originally created the so-called “Tesla Death Watch”. Looks like he’s still on it. Elon says “Many of those doing these “takedowns” have also sold Tesla stock short, so they benefit financially from a drop in the stock.”

Oh, and we also found a nice combo of some Tesla protestors and Drake's Cybertruck who is a Tesla supporter… the Cybertruck reads “Thank you Elon” while the signs are saying “This Musk stop” and “Don’t trust Musk”:

Watch tip: I never thought I’d see someone coal-rolling… to show support of Tesla?

Quick takes:

• 92% of the Tesla Giga Berlin supply chain is now located on the European continent! Basically means Tesla's European operations will be mostly unharmed of any transatlantic trade conflicts. I found this nugget from Andre Thierig’s - plant manager of Giga Berlin - interview on the weekend
  (and I’m pretty sure the Teslaratis etc found it thanks to my post too haha).

• Tesla has issued a recall — this time an actual physical one — for 46,096 Cybertrucks because the cantrail — a stainless-steel exterior (decorative) trim panel above the side doors — can delaminate and detach from the vehicle. Tesla service will replace the assembly, free of charge. This has been a known issue among the Tesla community and it’s great to see Tesla tackle this on the higher level.

FSD & SOFTWARE

Last week, we didn’t even get to covering Mark Rober’s faulty test about Autopilot (not FSD!) driving through a fake Wile E. Coyote-Style wall, while a LiDAR-using vehicle detects it and stops before the wall… he tried to show how vision-based system compares to LiDAR-based systems. The problem is he used just Autopilot, which does rely on vision-only but does not resemble the current state of the Tesla system at all.

Now, we’ve luckily got people from Tesla community already replicating the test and found how Tesla’s actual FSD performs — like Kyle Paul here.

Tesla Cybertruck with Hardware 4 (HW4) using FSD v13.2.8 did not hit the wall in a new recreation of Mark Rober's "Wile E. Coyote-Style" self-driving test. Success.

However, a Model Y with HW3 using FSD v12.5.4.2 was going to hit the wall before the driver stopped it. Now, we’re hoping to see the latest FSD version used also on a HW3 vehicle like this to understand if HW3 can tackle the (not really real world anyway) issue. Based on technology alone, it actually should stop before the wall, if HW4 did.

There’s also this great analysis on this by an OG self-drive expert, Brad Templeton.

SUPERCHARGING

I happened to be the one to break some good news about Tesla Supercharging yesterday:

Tesla has partnered with The EV Group, which will roll out Superchargers under its own brand in US. It will own and operate these chargers, leveraging Tesla's hardware, software and service - much like EVpoint does in UK. EVG has an EV dealership Utah.

Meanwhile, EG on the Move is also rolling out more Tesla (V4) Superchargers in the UK — now reportedly deployed over a 100 chargers. These are a part of a larger deal announced in November ‘23 with EVpoint set to acquire some amount of Tesla Superchargers to roll out their own network — the first 3rd party sale of the SCs.

I'm surprised to see that instead of its own app, EVpoint direct drivers to download the Tesla app instead. Nice little extra perk to Tesla when selling their Supercharging stations & system — using a Tesla App and frictionless system is great for discovering your next Tesla for other EV owners ;)

MUSKONOMY

SpaceX & Starlink

Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are now back on Earth after spending nine unplanned months in space — here’s the splashdown with Dragon capsule (they were stranded in the ISS after Boeing's Starliner capsule malfunctioned on their eight-day mission).

Elon on the latest SpaceX breakthrough:

“We are honing in on the V3 Starship design. SpaceX is tracking to a Starship launch rate of once a week in ~12 months. That will yield ~100 tons to Starlink orbit with full reusability. Profound breakthrough.”

SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen says he is “not working on any near-term IPO efforts.”
“We’re laser-focused on operations right now.”

Here’s a great comparison infographic from Statista of Starlink and OneWeb (from EutelSat) — the latter being hailed as the big competitor for Starlink in Europe…

We won’t go deeper into this today, but once you start comparing capacity per satellite, as Starlink looks even better…

𝕏

… and just like that, 𝕏 is valued at $44B again.

D.O.G.E

Elon shares: “My DOGE office with the late great Kekius Maximus on the wall.”

And this seems to be Elon’s office at the White House. Elon answers: “Absolutely. I could have something much bigger, but I like my tiny office. Sends the right message. Larger DOGE meetings are held in the Secretary of War suites. Seems fitting.”

PS! If you’re hungry for more from us, consider becoming a Tesla Space Insider.