Tesorb Signal: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Musk Companies

Wall Street is buzzing about merging Tesla with SpaceX. But this would not be the first time Musk folded one company into another. In 2016, Tesla bought SolarCity for $2.6 billion. The seven-year court fight and the business aftermath that followed should be required reading before anyone votes on the next one. Lena Ruiz revisits the deal, the trial, and the lesson.

Wall Street is buzzing about Elon Musk merging Tesla with SpaceX. Analysts call it the holy grail. But this wouldn't be the first time Musk folded one of his companies into another. He did it in twenty sixteen. And the story of how that went should be required reading before anyone votes on the next one.

This is Tesorb Signal and this is Lena Ruiz. Today, the SolarCity playbook. We'll revisit the deal where Tesla bought a company run by Musk's cousins. The seven year court fight that followed. And what the aftermath teaches us about the merger talk swirling right now.

Rewind to twenty sixteen. SolarCity was the biggest residential solar installer in America, founded by Musk's cousins, Lyndon and Peter Rive. Musk was its chairman and its largest shareholder. He was also, of course, the CEO of Tesla. That summer, Tesla offered to buy SolarCity for two point six billion dollars. Paid in Tesla stock.

On paper, the logic sang. Solar panels on your roof. A battery in your garage. A car in the driveway. One integrated sustainable energy company. Musk unveiled a gorgeous new Solar Roof to seal the vision, and shareholders of both companies voted yes.

One more wrinkle made it feel like family business. Musk had personally poured money into SolarCity to keep it afloat, and even SpaceX had bought the solar company's bonds. By twenty sixteen, the fates of the chairman, his cousins, and three of his companies were braided into a single knot. Untangling who was rescuing whom took a courtroom.

What the pitch played down was SolarCity's condition. The company was carrying more than three billion dollars of debt, burning cash, and cutting a fifth of its workforce that very year. Critics had a blunter name for the acquisition. A bailout. Of the chairman's own investment, paid for with Tesla shareholders' stock.

Tesla shareholders sued, seeking up to thirteen billion dollars from Musk personally. Their claim was simple. Musk sat on both sides of the deal and steered his own board into rescuing his cousins' company. The case took years to reach trial. In twenty twenty-two, a Delaware judge ruled. Musk won.

The legal standard matters for what comes next, so a quick translation. If a friend who ran two lemonade stands used one to buy the other, at a price he helped shape, you'd raise an eyebrow. Delaware law raises the same eyebrow. It demands the deal prove itself entirely fair, the toughest test on the books. Musk's deal passed it.

But read the ruling closely, because it isn't a clean bill of health. The judge wrote that Musk was more involved in the process than a conflicted fiduciary should be. The court still found the price fair and the board's review meaningful, and Delaware's highest court later agreed. Legally, the deal was declared entirely fair.

The trial produced one detail worth remembering. Testimony revealed that the beautiful Solar Roof tiles at that twenty sixteen unveiling, the ones that sold the whole vision, weren't actually functional. The product that justified the merger, on the night it mattered most, was a prop.

Now for the other verdict. The one the market delivered. Within roughly a year of the deal, Tesla's solar installations had fallen by more than forty percent. The market leader Tesla bought slid to a sliver of the residential solar business. The cousins left within a year. And after Musk won the lawsuit, Tesla quietly stopped reporting solar numbers at all.

Tesla had projected the combined company would install solar at a blistering pace. Instead, deployments kept sliding for years, until they were a fraction of what SolarCity had managed on its own before the deal. The integrated sustainable energy company still sells cars and batteries. The solar piece became a footnote.

To be fair, the acquisition wasn't a total loss. The energy division that grew out of it eventually produced the Megapack, the grid battery business we covered in episode thirty-five, which is now one of Tesla's healthiest product lines. Something valuable did emerge. It just wasn't the thing shareholders were sold.

Which brings us back to twenty twenty-six. SpaceX's own president has hinted that combining with Tesla might make Musk's life easier. Analysts call a merger inevitable. The companies already share board members, engineers, and billions in transactions, the tangle we mapped in episode twenty-one. The integrated vision pitch is warming up again, at a scale hundreds of times larger.

And this time the pattern has already started rhyming. A merger of Musk companies, blessed by a friendly vote. A dazzling product reveal to carry the story. We covered the one company thesis back in episode sixteen. SolarCity is what that thesis looks like after ten years of weather.

There's one difference of scale worth naming. SolarCity was a two point six billion dollar bite. A Tesla and SpaceX combination would be the largest merger in the history of markets, joining two of the most valuable companies alive. The eyebrow Delaware raised last time would become a national spectacle this time.

Hold those two verdicts side by side. The legal question, was the deal fair, was eventually answered yes. The business question, did the deal deliver what shareholders were promised, was answered just as clearly. No. Both answers are true at once. That's the entire lesson.

When the next merger pitch arrives, wrapped in an integrated vision and a beautiful reveal, remember that courtroom fairness and shareholder value are two different tests. SolarCity passed the first and failed the second. The pitch never tells you which one you're voting on. Only the following decade does.

That's the signal. I'm Lena Ruiz with the Tesorb Signal podcast. For more news about Tesla, SpaceX, and Elon Musk's companies, visit our website at tesorb.com.

Got a tip or feedback? Send it to [email protected], we'd love to hear from you. This podcast was developed with the help of using AI assistants, including the voice, and undergoes a detailed review during production. See you on the next one.

Four days after the biggest IPO in history, SpaceX agreed to buy Cursor for $60 billion in stock. In this episode, Lena Ruiz walks through how the deal actually works, why Grok 4.5 was already trained on Cursor data before the acquisition closes, and what the sequencing reveals about how the Musk ecosystem operates.

Four days after the biggest IPO in history, SpaceX went shopping. It agreed to buy Cursor, an AI coding company, for sixty billion dollars. It didn't spend a dime of cash. And by the time the ink dried, Cursor's most valuable asset had already been poured into Grok.

This is Tesorb Signal and this is Lena Ruiz. Today, the sixty billion dollar deal where the goods moved before the money. We'll walk through how the Cursor acquisition actually works. Then the new Grok model that was quietly trained on Cursor's data. And what the sequencing tells us about how the Musk ecosystem really operates.

If you don't live in the software world, a quick primer. Cursor is the tool that made AI coding mainstream. It's an editor where developers write software side by side with an AI assistant. In about four years it went from a student project to one of the fastest growing products in tech history, used inside a huge share of America's biggest companies.

Let's rewind to April. Back in episode fifteen, we covered a strange arrangement. SpaceX didn't buy Cursor outright. It bought an option. Either acquire the company later for sixty billion dollars, or walk away and pay roughly ten billion for the partnership. And part of that walk-away fee wasn't even money. It was computing time.

Then came June. SpaceX went public on June twelfth in the largest IPO ever. The stock surged. Just four trading days later, SpaceX exercised its option and signed a binding agreement to buy Cursor. The price is paid entirely in newly minted SpaceX stock. Not a dollar of cash changes hands. The deal is expected to close later this year.

Pause on that mechanism, because it's genuinely new. The stock jumped so much in its first days of trading that the gains alone could have covered the purchase several times over. SpaceX turned four days of market enthusiasm into ownership of one of the fastest growing software companies on Earth. Paper became product.

It also sets a template. SpaceX now has a publicly traded share price, and that paper can buy real things. When your stock carries a premium, every acquisition comes at a discount. The Musk premium we covered in episode twenty-nine isn't just a valuation quirk anymore. It's a checkbook.

Now for the part that got far less attention. In late June, Musk announced a new model called Grok four point five. Buried in his post was a detail worth reading twice. The model, he said, was trained with Cursor data added in. It's in private beta inside SpaceX and Tesla, and Musk claims it rivals the best models from Anthropic.

Follow the timeline. The acquisition hasn't closed. Cursor is, legally, still an independent company. But its data, the record of millions of developers writing real code with AI assistance, is already inside Grok's training runs. The value SpaceX is paying sixty billion dollars for started flowing months before the purchase completes.

Why does that data matter so much? Because usage produces something nobody can buy off a shelf. Millions of real programming sessions. What developers asked for. What the AI suggested. What got accepted, and what got thrown back. For training a coding model, that feedback trail is gold, and Cursor holds the richest supply of it on Earth.

To be fair, none of this appears improper. The April agreement was explicitly a partnership, and sharing was the point. Cursor got what it publicly said it needed, which is massive computing power for its own models. Its founders and investors get stock in one of the most valuable companies on Earth. Both sides signed up for exactly this.

But the sequencing still tells you something important about how this ecosystem works. Remember episode twenty-one, Tesla's best customer, where we traced how money and resources flow between Musk companies long before the paperwork catches up? This is the same pattern at a grander scale. Integration first. Ownership later.

There's a governance wrinkle too. At least one major venture firm holds large stakes on both sides of this deal, in SpaceX and in Cursor. When the same investors sit on both sides of the table, the price isn't really negotiated between strangers. It's agreed within a family. That's worth remembering when you hear the headline number.

And the price itself deserves a squint. Cursor is a four year old company that crossed a billion dollars in yearly revenue only last fall. Sixty billion values it at many, many times that. The bet isn't on today's business. It's that owning the tool developers actually use, and the data trail they leave behind, is the scarcest asset in AI.

There's a competitive logic to the timing as well. The most trusted coding models today come from Anthropic and OpenAI, and Grok has chased them from behind. Buying the place where developers actually work gives Musk something rivals can't easily copy. Distribution. Millions of programmers, already inside his product, feeding it every single day.

So watch what got used, not what got signed. The contracts, the option, the stock mechanics, that's all choreography. The substance is that Cursor's data was training Grok while the market was still debating the price tag. In the Musk ecosystem, the assets merge long before the companies do.

When you see the next Musk acquisition headline, skip the price and find the plumbing. Ask what's already flowing between the companies. That flow, not the announcement, is where the real deal lives. Sixty billion dollars bought SpaceX a company it was, in every way that matters, already using.

That's the signal. I'm Lena Ruiz with the Tesorb Signal podcast. For more news about Tesla, SpaceX, and Elon Musk's companies, visit our website at tesorb.com.

Got a tip or feedback? Send it to [email protected], we'd love to hear from you. This podcast was developed with the help of using AI assistants, including the voice, and undergoes a detailed review during production. See you on the next one.

Tesla’s car business had a rough year, but its Supercharger network just posted record numbers. Tesla now operates 52% of all DC fast charging ports in America. In this episode, Lena Ruiz looks at how big the network actually became, how Tesla got every rival to surrender to its plug, and whether charging is a real business or just a very expensive perk.

Tesla's car business had a rough year. Deliveries fell. Revenue declined for the first time in company history. But one Tesla product just posted record numbers. It isn't a car. It isn't a robot. It's the plug on the wall, and it now powers more than half of all fast charging in America.

This is Tesorb Signal and this is Lena Ruiz. Today, the quiet empire Tesla built while everyone was watching the robots. We'll look at how big the Supercharger network actually became. How Tesla got every rival to surrender to its plug. And whether this is a real business or just a very expensive perk.

Start with the scale. According to federal energy data, Tesla operates roughly fifty-two percent of all the DC fast charging ports in the United States. Every other network in the country, combined, makes up the other half. If you pull into a fast charger anywhere in America, it's basically a coin flip whether Tesla built it.

And the network isn't just big. It's woven into the map. On major American interstates, a charger now sits roughly every fifty to seventy miles. That density is the whole product. Nobody plans a road trip around the second biggest network. Charging is a business where the map is the moat.

It's worth remembering how unfashionable this bet once looked. Tesla started building Superchargers back in twenty twelve, when electric cars were a rounding error and every new charger was a money loser in an empty parking lot. Tesla built anyway, years ahead of demand. That head start is now more than a decade long, and it compounds.

So how did one company end up owning half the country's fast charging? The short answer is that everyone else gave up. In twenty twenty-three, Ford broke ranks and adopted Tesla's charging plug. Then General Motors followed. Then Rivian, Hyundai, and eventually the parent company of Jeep and Dodge. One by one, the industry adopted Tesla's connector as the standard.

Consider what that means in practice. A Ford or a GM electric vehicle now pulls into a Tesla station, plugs into Tesla hardware, and pays Tesla for the electricity. Tesla's competitors send their customers, and their customers' money, directly into Tesla's network. It's as if every gas station in America had quietly become an Exxon.

A useful way to picture the arrangement is airports. Airlines compete ferociously with each other, but every one of them pays landing fees to whoever owns the runway. Tesla spent a decade pouring runways. Now Ford, GM, and Hyundai are the airlines, lining up to land.

There's a reason they surrendered. Independent studies have ranked Superchargers as the most reliable fast chargers in the country. For years, broken chargers were the number one complaint of electric vehicle owners outside the Tesla world. The rivals didn't adopt Tesla's plug because they wanted to. They adopted it because their customers demanded it.

And the hardware keeps moving. Tesla is rolling out its newest generation of chargers, roughly twice as fast as the ones they replace, plus even bigger units for the coming Semi trucks. It's also assembling charger stations inside the factory, so a new site drops into a parking lot in days instead of months. Speed of deployment has become a weapon of its own.

So is this a real business? This is where the picture gets more complicated. Tesla folds charging revenue into its services segment, so we never see a clean number. What we do know is usage. Tesla reported about sixty million charging sessions last quarter, with the average stall used roughly nine times a day. That's utility company scale. Steady. Boring. Growing.

But the honest picture cuts the other way too. Tesla's slice of the pie is shrinking. A few years ago it controlled the fast charging market with room to spare. New networks from rival automakers, and even Walmart, are now growing faster. Tesla's share will likely dip below the halfway mark sometime this year. Tesla traded exclusivity for volume, and the competition it invited is real.

If this story feels familiar, it's the same pattern we found in episode thirty-five, on Tesla's energy storage business. The boring products are quietly becoming the dependable ones. And after episode fifty-two, where BYD took the global electric vehicle sales crown, Tesla needs dependable more than ever.

Charging also plugs straight into Tesla's other quiet business. Every session sells electricity, and Tesla increasingly stores that electricity in its own giant batteries, buying power when it's cheap and selling it to drivers when they need it. The plug, the battery, and the grid are slowly becoming one machine.

But charging matters for one more reason. Every robotaxi Tesla dreams of running, every delivery van and electric truck on its roadmap, needs somewhere to charge. The network isn't just a side business serving other people's cars. It's the foundation under everything Tesla says it wants to become. Autonomy is the headline. Electricity is the prerequisite.

So zoom out from the plug for a second. Tesla spent more than a decade building charging infrastructure ahead of demand, at a scale nobody else would fund. That bet has now matured into the default fuel network for American electric cars. One that even Tesla's fiercest competitors pay to use, every single day.

The Supercharger network is Tesla's quietest strategic asset. Not because it makes headlines, but because it makes everything else stickier. Cars change. Market share shifts. Infrastructure endures. While the robotaxi race and the robot demos dominate the news cycle, the most durable thing Tesla owns might be the humble plug.

That's the signal. I'm Lena Ruiz with the Tesorb Signal podcast. For more news about Tesla, SpaceX, and Elon Musk's companies, visit our website at tesorb.com.

Got a tip or feedback? Send it to [email protected], we'd love to hear from you. This podcast was developed with the help of using AI assistants, including the voice, and undergoes a detailed review during production. See you on the next one.

Google will pay SpaceX $920 million a month starting in October to rent AI computing capacity from the Colossus data centers in Memphis. The contract runs through June 2029. In this episode, Lena Ruiz breaks down the deal itself, why Google is renting from a rocket company, and what the “compute landlord” thesis means for the SpaceX growth story now that the company is public.

Google runs some of the largest data centers on the planet. It designs its own AI chips. It has spent twenty years building more computing power than almost any company alive. And starting this October, Google will pay Elon Musk nine hundred and twenty million dollars a month. To rent computers.

This is Tesorb Signal and this is Lena Ruiz. Today, the rent check that says everything about the AI boom. We'll break down the Google deal itself. Then why the world's biggest infrastructure builder is renting from a rocket company. And finally, what this means for the SpaceX growth story now that the company is public.

First, the deal. In early June, days before SpaceX went public, a regulatory filing revealed that Google agreed to pay SpaceX nine hundred and twenty million dollars a month for AI computing capacity. The contract runs from this October through June of twenty twenty-nine. Add it all up, and it's one of the largest computing agreements ever disclosed.

Take a second with that monthly figure. It's nearly a billion dollars. Every month. For access to someone else's computers. Entire companies have been acquired for less than one month of this rent. And Google, of all companies, decided that writing this check was cheaper than waiting.

What does Google get? Access to about one hundred and ten thousand Nvidia GPUs, plus the processors and memory around them, sitting in the data centers SpaceX built for its xAI division. The same Colossus machines in Memphis that we covered back in episode thirty-six. The ones running on Tesla batteries.

It helps to remember what capacity physically means here. Buildings. Power lines. Cooling. Racks of chips that took years to source. Google isn't buying a service so much as reserving floor space in a machine that already exists. In a market where every chip is spoken for, existing beats planned.

And the contract has teeth on both ends. If SpaceX can't deliver the promised chips by the end of September, Google can walk away immediately. After this year, either side can exit with ninety days notice. This isn't a marriage. It's a lease. A very, very large lease.

So why is Google renting at all? In its own words, it needs bridge capacity. Demand for its Gemini business products has run ahead of even Google's expectations, and building new data centers takes years. SpaceX has capacity standing ready today. In the AI boom, speed beats ownership.

There's a poetic loop in this arrangement too. Alphabet, Google's parent company, invested in SpaceX back in twenty fifteen, when the rocket maker was a scrappy private startup. More than a decade later, the company it once helped fund has grown into its landlord. The tenant used to hold the deed.

And Google isn't the only tenant. A month earlier, Anthropic, one of xAI's most direct competitors, signed up for the entire capacity of the first Colossus data center. Sit with that arrangement for a second. Companies that compete head on with Grok are now paying to run their own models inside Elon Musk's buildings.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Back in episode seventeen we called SpaceX the compute landlord, when the first hints emerged that it would rent its supercomputers to rivals. That thesis just graduated from theory to signed contracts. And the tenants are two of the biggest names in AI.

Now, the honest picture. These contracts are real revenue against a very real problem. SpaceX's AI segment lost two and a half billion dollars in the first quarter, while its data center spending more than doubled. Deals like this one are exactly how that gap is supposed to close. In that sense, the landlord strategy is working precisely as designed.

But read the fine print again. Google calls this bridge capacity. A bridge is temporary by definition. Google is building its own data centers as fast as it can pour concrete, and so is Anthropic. These tenants are renting because of a shortage, and both of them are working hard to end that shortage. The ninety day exit clause exists for a reason.

There's also a circularity worth naming. Chip makers invest in AI labs. The labs sign giant computing deals with each other. One company's revenue is another company's spending, inside the same small circle. None of that makes the Google deal fake. It does mean the whole structure leans on AI demand continuing to outrun supply.

One quiet question hangs over all of this. Every chip rented to Google is a chip that Grok isn't training on. SpaceX insists it has room for both. But when computing power is the scarcest resource in AI, leasing this much of your kitchen to the neighbors says something. Either about your own appetite, or about your need for the cash.

So what does it actually mean when your rival pays your rent? It means you own something scarce. Right now, ready to use computing power is one of the scarcest assets on Earth, and SpaceX built a warehouse full of it. That's the strongest, most concrete revenue story in the entire SpaceX AI portfolio. Not chatbots. Not robots. Floor space and electricity.

Landlords do incredibly well during a housing shortage. The question that should sit in the back of your mind is a simple one. What happens to the rent when the tenants finish building their own houses? SpaceX has until twenty twenty-nine to turn bridge customers into permanent ones. That's the deadline that matters more than the monthly check.

Two markers will tell us how it's going. Whether SpaceX keeps landing new tenants at rates like this one. And whether the AI segment's losses actually start narrowing once the Google payments begin flowing in October. Watch the vacancy rate, not the press releases.

That's the signal. I'm Lena Ruiz with the Tesorb Signal podcast. For more news about Tesla, SpaceX, and Elon Musk's companies, visit our website at tesorb.com.

Got a tip or feedback? Send it to [email protected], we'd love to hear from you. This podcast was developed with the help of using AI assistants, including the voice, and undergoes a detailed review during production. See you on the next one.

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX showed investors a secret AI phone. Elon Musk’s entire response was two words: “Utterly false.” The market’s response was louder. It erased more than fifty billion dollars of his net worth in a single afternoon.

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX showed investors a secret AI phone. Elon Musk’s entire response was two words. Utterly false. The market’s response was louder. It erased more than fifty billion dollars of his net worth in a single afternoon.

This is Tesorb Signal and this is Lena Ruiz. Today, the phone that may or may not exist. We’ll cover what the Journal actually reported. Why a flat denial sent the stock down instead of up. And what this strange week reveals about how the market prices Elon Musk’s promises.

Let’s start with the report. On July first, the Wall Street Journal said SpaceX privately showed investors a prototype AI device before its June IPO. The description was unusually specific. A handset slimmer than an iPhone. A proprietary operating system. Chips from Qualcomm. And Grok, the AI from xAI, woven all the way through.

According to the Journal, the device connects to an idea Musk has chased for years. The everything app. One device, one platform, where you message, pay, watch, and talk to an AI assistant. Starlink provides the connection. Grok provides the intelligence. The handset would be the doorway to all of it.

The timing matters too. The whole industry is racing to build the gadget that replaces the smartphone in the age of AI. OpenAI has hired away some of Apple’s most famous hardware minds to build a device of its own. If a Musk handset is real, it isn’t a side project. It’s an entry into the biggest hardware fight of the decade.

Musk has a complicated history with phones. In January, he said a Starlink phone was not out of the question at some point. In February, after a Reuters report, he stated flatly, we are not developing a phone. And this week, he dismissed the Journal’s story with just those two words. Utterly false.

There’s an older breadcrumb as well. The Journal reported last year that Musk once considered building a smartphone out of pure frustration with Apple, because Apple controls how apps like X reach their users. Musk joked that the idea of making a phone made him want to die. And yet it keeps resurfacing, in report after report.

Notice what those two words don’t do. They don’t say which part of the report was wrong. They don’t say no prototype exists. They don’t say no investor ever saw a device. It was a denial with no edges. And markets hate a denial they can’t measure.

That brings us to the reaction. SpaceX stock fell about seven percent on Wednesday. That extended a slide that’s been running since the stock peaked in June. And it briefly dropped Musk’s personal fortune back under a trillion dollars. Ending, at least for the moment, his run as the world’s first trillionaire.

For a company barely three weeks into public life, this was a lesson in what it signed up for. Private investors read pitch decks and wait years. Public markets read headlines and reprice you by dinner time. SpaceX spent its entire life as a private company. Most recently, the most valuable one on Earth. It’s learning what the other side feels like.

To be fair, the idea itself isn’t far fetched. If any company could build this, it’s probably this one. SpaceX and Tesla have real manufacturing muscle. They have access to chips. Starlink already beams phone signals from space through a deal with T-Mobile. And SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell recently told investors the company is exploring a full mobile phone service here on the ground.

If you’ve been with us a while, this rhymes with episode twenty-three, where we covered SpaceX’s ambition to become a wireless carrier in its own right. The pieces for a Musk phone genuinely exist. Connectivity. Chips. An AI assistant. A payments push through X. The hardware would just be the final piece snapping into place.

But look at the deeper pattern, because this is the real story. A product that officially doesn’t exist, described in a report the CEO denies, moved one of the most valuable companies on Earth by tens of billions of dollars. In one afternoon. No earnings. No launch. No recall. Just a story, and a denial.

One analyst note put it bluntly. Musk companies get a massive benefit of the doubt on product promises. Their valuations rest partly on products that are more ideas than reality. That’s the Musk premium we covered back in episode twenty-nine. Investors pay today for the products Musk might ship years from now.

Compare that with how mature companies trade. When a rumor about an unannounced Apple product gets denied, Apple stock barely blinks, because Apple is valued on the billions of devices it already sells. SpaceX moved this hard because so much of its price lives in the future tense.

That premium is usually described as a gift. This week showed the other side of it. When a big chunk of your market value rests on belief in future products, belief can move the price all by itself. Up when the story is exciting. Down when the story gets confusing. The phone didn’t have to be real to cost fifty billion dollars. The story did that on its own.

So set the phone aside and look at what the market just did. It priced a rumor, then priced a denial, and neither price had anything to do with rockets, satellites, or cars. The signal this week isn’t whether the device exists. It’s that SpaceX now trades on narrative momentum. And narrative can be denied, but it can’t be recalled.

Watch two things from this point. Whether more details of the device leak out, because reports this specific rarely arrive alone. And whether SpaceX’s push into phone service keeps growing, because a carrier without a handset never stays that way for long.

That’s the signal. I’m Lena Ruiz with the Tesorb Signal podcast. For more news about Tesla, SpaceX, and Elon Musk’s companies, visit our website at tesorb.com.

Got a tip or feedback? Send it to [email protected], we’d love to hear from you. This podcast was developed with the help of using AI assistants, including the voice, and undergoes a detailed review during production. See you on the next one.

Neuralink promised high-volume production and automated surgery in 2026. Halfway through the year, 26 people have an implant. The chip works. The bottleneck is everything around it.

At the end of last year, Elon Musk made a promise about his brain-implant company. In 2026, he said, Neuralink would begin high-volume production of its devices, and move to a surgery so streamlined that a robot could do almost all of it. High volume. Now we’re halfway through that year. Count the people who actually have one of these chips in their head. The number is twenty-six.

This podcast was developed with the help of using AI assistants, including the voice, and undergoes a detailed review during production. Corrections are posted to the episode page.

In 2011, Musk laughed at BYD on camera. In 2025, BYD sold 600,000 more electric cars than Tesla. How the crown changed hands, how BYD pulled it off, and why Tesla does not seem all that bothered.

In 2011, a television interviewer asked Elon Musk about a Chinese car company called BYD. Musk laughed. On camera. He said he didn’t think they made a great product. Fast forward to today. That same company just sold more electric cars in a year than Tesla. By about six hundred thousand of them. Nobody at BYD is laughing now.

This podcast was developed with the help of using AI assistants, including the voice, and undergoes a detailed review during production. Corrections are posted to the episode page.

Elon Musk added $116 billion to his net worth in a single move this month. But the money is the distraction. The stock options came with voting shares, and 25 percent control of Tesla is the number that has driven his decisions for years.

This month, Elon Musk added about a hundred and sixteen billion dollars to his net worth in a single move. He didn’t sell a thing. He didn’t launch a rocket or ship a single car. He just exercised a stack of stock options he’d been fighting over in court for years. But the money is the part everyone’s talking about. The part that matters more is the votes that came with it.

This podcast was developed with the help of using AI assistants, including the voice, and undergoes a detailed review during production. Corrections are posted to the episode page.

Tesla claims Full Self-Driving is ten times safer than human drivers. A fatal Houston crash just put that claim under a microscope. The real dispute is not whether the tech works. It is how the math is built.

Tesla likes to say its cars drive themselves ten times more safely than you do. It’s a stunning claim. If it’s true, it rewrites everything about how we move. Last week, that claim ran into a house. A Tesla in a Houston suburb veered off a residential street and into a home. The seventy-six-year-old woman inside was killed. The driver told police the car was driving itself.

This podcast was developed with the help of using AI assistants, including the voice, and undergoes a detailed review during production. Corrections are posted to the episode page.

Two weeks after the biggest IPO in history, SpaceX borrowed $25 billion more. The money is easy. The question is where it all goes, and who’s funding the bet now that the doors are open.

Two weeks ago, SpaceX pulled off the biggest stock sale in history. Seventy-five billion dollars, in a single afternoon. Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire before lunch. And then, just this week, the company did something that should make you look twice. It went out and borrowed twenty-five billion dollars more.

This podcast was developed with the help of using AI assistants, including the voice, and undergoes a detailed review during production. Corrections are posted to the episode page.