• The EV Universe
  • Posts
  • Teslaverse #8: Musk loses $55B comp lawsuit - — Next-gen Tesla "Redwood" — 2023 Tesla overview

Teslaverse #8: Musk loses $55B comp lawsuit - — Next-gen Tesla "Redwood" — 2023 Tesla overview

Caution! High Voltage ⚡️

Hey, Jaan here.

With your monthly dose of nothing but Tesla. To avoid confusion: this is an extra newsletter we send on top of our weekly EV industry coverage.

This edition is born out of a collaboration between EV Universe (that’s me and you) and the fully contactless Tesla rental startup Beast Rent.

They've just added another country to their growing list (8 countries now), after recently expanding to Vienna, Austria. It’s been really fun to watch them execute on this grand vision.

In today’s Teslaverse:

  • Deep dive: learnings from Tesla 2023 Earnings call, deck, and filings.

  • Court loss: Delaware court decided to retroactively pull the plug on the Musk $55B compensation package set in 2018

  • History: Akio Toyoda (of Toyota) in a Tesla Model S

  • Vehicles: Tesla’s mass-market EV “Redwood” incoming mid-2025; Refreshed Model 3 in US; Cybertruck in China

  • Production: Model Y in Giga Berlin stopped because of the Red Sea armed conflicts

  • Other ventures: first human Neuralink implant ✓

  • Fun stuff: 687 Teslas in one Finnish Tesla Lightshow

As usual, click the good old read online button on top right to see the newsletter in a lot more colorful details, playable videos and extra insights.

Words: 5,170 | Reading time: 9 to 20 minutes | Feeling: like an e-archeologist

Tesla held its Q4 and Full Year 2023 Earnings call last week.
First off, some of the resources I’ve based this overview on:

2023 Q4 FINANCIALS:

for more details make sure to check the shareholder deck, this is a quick view:

  • GAAP net income $15.0B in 2023, $7.9B in Q4;
    Non-GAAP net income $10.9B in 2023, $2.5B in Q4

  • Revenue: $96.77B in 2023, up 19% year-over-year.
    $25.17M in Q4. $78.5B of this was auto revenue.

  • GAAP gross margin: 18.2%; 17.6% in Q4.

  • Operating margin 9.2%; 8.2% in Q4. So Tesla most likely remains one of the most profitable large automakers.

  • Regulatory credit sales: $443M in Q4; ($1.79B in 2023)

  • Liquidity: $29.1 billion in cash, cash equivalents and investments at the end of Q4. This means Tesla has more liquidity than most automakers.

  • R&D spend has reached ~$4B per year. Tesla says that they focused on future growth projects with our highest capital expenditures and R&D expenses in company history.

  • Tesla expects its capital expenditures to exceed $10B in 2024 and be between $8 to $10B in each of the following two fiscal years.

Here’s a good visual on how the revenues have grown over the years (link):

This Sankey diagram by Motley Fool shows the Q4 well (link):

The one-time non-cash tax benefit of $5.9B there recorded in Q4 which makes up most of the net income for the quarter, refers to the release of valuation allowance on certain deferred tax assets. Here’s what it means.

I also just had to poke a little joke on the regulatory credits line of this diagram (the little gray line there) with a post on X here, because, well, it has been a very popular anti-Tesla thing to say just recently that it would be bankrupt without the subsidies.

Tesla stock ($TSLA) was down -10.2% after the earnings call. For some great context Sawyer Merritt shared that it also dropped between -9% and -10% following all 2023 earnings calls. (link)

TESLA EXPANSION IN NUMBERS:

As of Dec 31, 2023, Tesla has a total of 140,473 employees worldwide. This means the count grew 9.9% up from 127,800 at the end of 2022.

In 2023, Tesla produced:

  • 1,775,159 Model 3/Y, which is 476,725 more than in 2022 (+37%)

  • 70,826 Model S/X/Cybertruck, which is 351 less than in 2022 (-0.5%)

  • Total: 1,845,985 vehicles (+35% YoY).

And delivered:

  • 1,739,707 Model 3/Y, which is 492,561 more than in 2022 (+39%)

  • 68,874 Model S/X/Cybertruck, which is 2,169 more than in 2022 (+3.2%)

  • Total: 1,808,581 vehicles (+38% YoY)

About two out of three Teslas sold were a Model Y (over 1.2M, so about 66%) — which is now confirmed to be the best-selling car in the world for 2023.

Based on @TroyTeslike data, this is how all the 2023 deliveries were distributed globally:

  • USA: 664,775 (+39,350 Canada)

  • China: 610,468

  • Europe: 365,171

While no guidance for 2024 was given on Tesla vehicle production, Musk said:

“In 2024, our vehicle volume growth rate may be notably lower than the growth rate achieved in 2023, as our teams work on the launch of the next-generation vehicle at Gigafactory Texas”

Elon Musk

Reminder for context, that Musk said last year that Tesla is working on two new products, with a combined annual sales potential of 5 million vehicles.

Tesla’s market share (of cars of all fuel types) per region:

Now, we also got a bit of an “fun fact” here from Tesla:

“Our data suggests that around 90% of our vehicle buyers in 2023 never owned a Tesla before.” This in turn means that about 180,858 deliveries came from repeat buyers? Considering that Tesla’s worldwide fleet isn’t that large yet, this seems significant. 

Tesla hasn’t updated the installed annual vehicle capacity of its factories, which is at over 2,350,000 units, from its Q3 earnings call.

Tesla, in 2023, also:

  • Opened 245 new service/store locations, now at 1,208 (+25% Year-over-Year)

  • Opened 1,274 Superchargers locations, now 5,952 (+27% YoY)

  • Added 12,473 Supercharger connectors, now at 54,892 (+29% YoY)
    continues to add 10 connectors per site it seems,

  • Added 325 vehicles to the Mobile service fleet, now at 1,909 (+21% YoY)

  • Global vehicle inventory (days of supply): 16 (same as last year); and 15 days in Q4.

  • Deployed 223MW of Solar (-36% YoY)

  • Deployed 14.72GWh of energy storage (+125% YoY)

I found a great visual (link to @piloly) to show what exactly is happening on the Tesla Energy side which, I want to underscore again, is one of its most underestimated business arms yet:

Budhiraj added on the Tesla Energy that “Lathrop continues to ramp through 2024 with the operation of a second final assembly line to double capacity from 20 GWh to 40 GWh by the end of the year.”

Tesla’s “Services and Other Business” recorded an almost $500M revenue in 2023. Something that we expected to see growing well too (and continue to expect for 2024, especially with first automakers getting access to Tesla Supercharging network in North America too.

I would love to extract how much Tesla is bringing in with the pay-per-use Supercharging network — and additionally, I hope we’ll get a breakdown of both the non-Tesla charging revenue and the revenue coming in from the Supercharging equipment (and whatever extra services) sales.

Tesla FSD Beta reached ~775 million cumulative miles driven by the end of 2023.

Tesla has “more than doubled” the size of their AI training compute, for their growing dataset and Optimus Robot project. Musk mentioned recently that in addition to buying NVIDIA chips, it’ll also purchase chips from AMD.

By the way, in late Dec, Musk said that he’ll have an all-hands meeting with the team after filing the 10-K (which it did yesterday), and it’ll be published publicly. We’ll wait.

More comments from the Q&A session

Let’s start with the key takeaway that Elon Musk said:

“I mean, I would certainly say things with they should be taken with a grain of salt, since I am often optimistic. I don't want to blow your minds, but I'm often optimistic regarding time.”

—Elon Musk

On the next-gen vehicle:

“The reason I wanted to put this new revolutionary manufacturing line at Giga Texas was because we really need the engineers to be living on the line. This is not sort of “off the shelf, just works” type of thing. And it's just a lot easier for Tesla engineering to live online if it's in Austin versus elsewhere.

But we are currently expecting to start production second half next year. That will be a challenging production ramp. Like, as I can emphasize we'll be sleeping on the line practically. In fact, not practically. We will be.

But I am confident that once it is going, it will be head and shoulders above any other manufacturing technology that exists anywhere in the world. It's next level. So it's always difficult to predict what that S-curve of manufacturing looks like.”

— Elon Musk

On Elon wanting 25% of Tesla to not be uncomfortable expanding AI and robotics at Tesla:

“I see a path to creating an artificial intelligence and robotics juggernaut of truly immense capability and power. I don't want to control it. But if I have so little influence over the company at that stage that I could sort of be voted out by some sort of random shareholder advisory firm.

We've had a lot of challenges with institutional shareholder services, ISS, I call them ISIS, and Glass Lewis, which -- and there's a lot of activists that basically infiltrate those organizations and have strange ideas about what should be done.

So I want to have enough to be influential. If we could do a dual-class stock, that would be ideal. I'm not looking for additional economics. I just want to be an effective steward of very powerful technology. […] That's what I'm aiming for, is a strong influence, but not control.

— Elon Musk

On the Cybertruck reservations:

"The reservation to order conversion rates so far has been very, very encouraging. If the trend continues as it is very likely to be, we will soon sell out all the builds in 2024. And also, we have new orders come in after the launch."

— Karn Budhiraj, VP of Supply Chain at Tesla

Elon added, that “It's important to emphasize that this is very much a production-constrained situation, not a demand-constrained situation,“ and that it doesn’t feel right to raise the price for early customers, which they could.

On the 4680 cells production ramp:

“To date, 4680 production is ahead of the ramp with actually weeks of finished cell inventory. And the goal is to keep it that way, not only for Cyber, but for our future vehicle programs.”

[…] And in terms of what we're doing, we're currently running one production line, one assembly line, using two assembly lines in addition for yield and rate improvement trials, and we have a fourth in commissioning, and four more will be installed starting in Q3 this year. So definitely this is a big year for ramping 4680.”

“But we also do want to emphasize that we also expect to ramp orders from our suppliers. So this is not about replacing our suppliers, it's about supplementing our suppliers. So we are very appreciative of our suppliers. Panasonic, obviously, is our longest supplier. They're an amazing company. We've got CATL, we've got LG and BYD.”

— Karn Budhiraj, VP of Supply Chain at Tesla

“We do a lot of other things, and we got a lot of breakthrough technologies that take time to figure out with 46. It's not just that it's a 46 millimeter diameter by 80 millimeter Cyl Cell. That's just the dimensions. There's tremendous amount of new technology in the cell itself.”

— Elon Musk

On Giga Nevada expansion and Giga Mexico:

This one is interesting as it shows Tesla is not yet ramping Giga Mexico construction up, except the long lead work, because they want to demonstrate success in Austin first (better to build it this way):

“We have recently broken ground for the next phase of Giga Nevada expansion to incorporate Semi and other projects. As regarding Mexico, we want to first demonstrate success with the next-generation platform in Austin before we start construction. Therefore, we have started the long lead work to get the basics ready and plan to follow our recipe from the 3/Y ramp with Shanghai, where we started with learnings from Fremont and ramp really quickly.”

Karn Budhiraj, VP Supply Chain at Tesla

On Optimus production:

[…] I think we've got a good chance of shipping some number of Optimus units next year. But like I said, this is a brand new product. A lot of uncertainty. […] I do think it has the potential to be the most valuable product of any kind ever, by far.

— Elon Musk

On what will the automotive margins be for 2024

“We don't know. We don't have a crystal ball, so it's difficult for us to predict this with precision. If the interest rates come down quickly, I think margins will be good. And if they don't come down quickly, they won't be that good.“

— Elon Musk

On results of advertising campaigns so far:

[…] And one particular awareness campaign we run in Texas will reach the audience, about 10 million unique viewers, and generated close to 0.5 million visits to our website. A large number of these viewers are first-time visitors to our website.

— Karn Budhiraj, VP of Supply Chain

There are some geographies where our market share is remarkably low. Like Japan, for example. Now, we also need to make sure that we have superchargers in the right locations and the service centers are there, and the product works well in Japan. But Japan is the third largest car market in the world of any country, and we should at least have a market share proportionate to, say, other non-Japanese car makers like Mercedes or BMW, which we do not currently have.

— Elon Musk

On volume growth in 2024:

We are between two major growth waves. The first one began with the global expansion of Model 3 and Y, and we believe the next one will be initiated with the next generation platform. In 2024, our volume growth will be lower, as we have said, because we are trying to focus the team on the launch of the next generation vehicle.

— Vaibhav Taneja, CFO of Tesla

On FSD licensing to other companies:

I really think lots of car companies should be asking for FSD licenses. And we've had some tentative conversations, but I think they don't believe it's real quite yet. I think that will become obvious probably this year. And I do want to emphasize that if I were CEO of another car company, I would definitely be calling Tesla and asking to license Tesla full self-driving technology. It's definitely the smart move.

— Elon Musk

What we didn’t hear, but what I was hoping for, from the call was more details about how the price cuts have affected business and margins, and how has the demand been fluctuating.

News just in: The $55B compensation plan of Elon Musk — the unbelievable terms of which he has already delivered on — has been retroactively voided by a Delaware judge, after a shareholder (with 9 shares) sued the company. A brief timeline of events (helped by this post by Sawyer):

→ January 2018, Tesla announces a long-term performance award package, given shareholder permission, to Musk if he succeeds in growing the value of the company, as much as 10x’ing the company valuation. Deemed impossible by nearly everyone. Note, that Musk would get no bonuses or equity that would be vested “over time” — just purely on performance.
Here is the SEC filing with the award announcement: (link) and the accompanying image:

(detailed image of this here)

→ March 2018, 73% of all shareholders approve the package.

→ June 2018, a shareholder (with 9 shares no less) files a lawsuit claiming “the Tesla board of directors breached its fiduciary duties for waste, and Musk has breached his own fiduciary duties for unjust enrichment.”

→ Dec 2020, Musk delivers, Tesla has now 10x’ed at $650B market cap, triggering the first tranches of his award package

→ Yesterday, Judge McCormick concluded:

The process for coming up with Elon's comp plan wasn't independent because Elon controlled the Board and the directors who approved the plan weren't truly independent. Further, the shareholders who approved the comp plan weren't made aware of this controlled relationship. Hence, the $55.8B comp plan is voided.

Delaware court, Judge McCormick

Here’s the post-trial opinion from Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware in case you want to dig really deeper: 201-page pdf. I find it interesting that a legal opinion, from the court, starts with the words more suitable to a regular clickbait media headline: “Was the richest person in the world overpaid?”" (link)

Fun fact — McCormick is the same judge who ruled that Musk must pay $44B for buying Twitter (instead of you know, less).

Some of the Tesla shareholders across social media are raging against this decision, by the way. You know, the part of the 73% of the company that ruled in favor of the performance package itself in the first place.

I… won’t tell you what I think of all this.

What’s next? Now, there’s a few ways this could play out further — from Musk saying “frunk it” and moving on drawing up a new compensation plan, to them appealing the decision.

Whatever the case, you can bet that Tesla has calculated for this outcome ahead of time, and this might be the real reason for Musk’s recent comments on the voting control (here). Now, Musk has (finally) publicly expressed what he thinks of the decision on X with posts like:

“Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware,” (link)
“I recommend incorporating in Nevada or Texas if you prefer shareholders to decide matters.” (link), then launched a poll on
“Should Tesla change its state of incorporation to Texas, home of its physical headquarters?” with currently 88.2% of yes in 685k votes; followed by posting an article from WSJ about Delaware trying to drive away corporations.

Now the poll itself is meaningless and just gives attention, but a more interesting quote on the poll comes from Greg Abbott, the Texas Governor, saying: “Elon, it’s over. The election desk is declaring a landslide victory for Texas.”

Sounds pretty clear what the path is. I also wouldn’t worry about Musk planning to leave Tesla at this point — seems he is here to fight it out.

TESLA HISTORY CORNER

In case you missed it: I was able to surface a long-deleted blog post of none other than the founder of Xiaomi, Lei Jun, from when he met Elon Musk in 2013. Here’s the full blog post he made about Musk back then: (link).

I’m starting to feel like some kind of an EV archeologist lately, as I’ve surfaced something fun for you today too.

Steve Jurvetson has been, among a lot of other accomplishments. a member of the Tesla Board from 2006-2020, owned the Model S VIN 0001 (video of delivery, Straubel handing him keys), and is a current member of SpaceX board.

I’ve found he shares a bit of the “interesting” dinner discussions he had with Akio Toyoda, Elon Musk, and JB Straubel in 2014, on his Flickr account. Find the story in the descriptions of the images here.

There’s a one-of-a-kind image along with the story too: Akio Toyoda (of Toyota) sitting in a Tesla Deskla Model S:

This desk is, at least per last year, still located in the Draper University Hero City. Toyoda is the one sitting, Jurvetson is the guy right behind him.

I’ve surfaced some more great stuff from the earlier days of Tesla. I’ll start bringing the History section here, starting from the next Teslaverse issue.

Mass-market next-gen vehicle “Redwood”

Tesla has reportedly informed its suppliers of plans to start producing a new mass-market EV, a compact crossover codenamed "Redwood," by mid-2025, per a Reuters report. (link) The suppliers were approached with a 10,000-unit/week production volume and we’ve confirmed that it’ll be first produced in Giga Austin, and then when success is demonstrated, Giga Mexico will follow. A bit more on this on the earnings call deep dive above.

NV9X — this is what the next-gen Tesla architecture is reportedly called internally, which is said to include at least two different models. Interestingly, Reuters’ sources also said Tesla had recently completed a teardown of a Honda Civic, priced at $23,950 in the US, to “study methods of producing more affordable cars.”

Refreshed Model 3 now available in US

Tesla has now launched the upgraded Model 3 in the US. (link) Here’s an extensive overview of everything new in the refreshed North American Model 3 (link) — it’s a lot. You can also refresh your memory with the deep dive we made when it launched in Europe (link).

A couple of things that are new in the US vs Europe: knee airbags; slightly different steering wheel (features a non-functional ‘light’); the rear console will now lock in place during certain driving situations like hard accelerations or while driving on a steep slope.

S3XY and Cybertruck

Cybertruck’s curb-to-curb turning circle is revealed as 43.5ft (12.5m). For example, a F-150⚡️  does it in 47.8 ft (12.5m). Musk says further improvements incoming to tighten the turning circle “significantly”.

Cybertruck easter egg: infotainment lets you shatter the vehicle windows on the screen, with Musk saying OMFG on audio, along with “at least it didn’t go through”. Referencing the good old metal ball trick. (video)

Cybertruck vs F-150 Lightning vs Rivian R1T in an Out of Spec (video).

The Cybertruck full owners’ manual is out there so we could learn every spec and detail… but still hasn’t leaked in pdf yet (NDAs with owners?). Here’s a 39-minute video of someone going through the whole manual in the car’s system.

Tesla shipped some Cybertrucks to China and is touring the biggest cities and showrooms. (link) From the various reports, it is making quite a lot of fuzz over there with people in lines to see it (video), and is creating some halo effect, as expected, for Tesla’s other products too.

Here’s the design chief Franz von Holzhausen giving an interview about the truck to Shanghai Daily (2-min video).

And here’s a pic of the Cybertruck at its max height compared to others (link)

Tesla released a one-minute video of Cybertruck’s power-to-X capabilities… including powering a stranded F-150 Lightning. Note that just recently, Ford decided to compare their Mach-E with Model Y, so this is probably a little tongue-in-cheek move.

James May (of Top Gear) gets the new Model 3. Martin Viecha, head of IR at Tesla, says “You should get the Performance one, once that comes out”. (link) Which a lot us ar waiting for, really.

Mat Watson (of carwow) showing a demo Model Y that visually shows all 13 different layers of the optional Midnight Cherry Red paint. (video)

Tesla lowers the EPA range shown on its website for S, X and Y models in North America, due to the EPA testing cycle changes and “due to what Tesla refers to as “comfort and functionality improvements” that draw more energy from the battery pack.” (link) For example, the Model Y LR saw 330 → 310 miles; MY Performance 303 → 285 miles and RWD remained at 260 miles. Model S Plaid with 19’’ wheels went from 396 → 359 miles.

Tesla has also decided to remove two of the stopping modes - Creep and Roll— from its new Model 3 & Y vehicles and to leave just the Hold mode, to improve the efficiency.

With this update, Tesla seems to also have quitely downgraded the audio system for Model Y’s lowest, RWD trim. Now with 7 speakers (link).

Tesla lowered Model Y prices in a number of European countries on January 17th, some by up to 5,000€ (link). In some cases, Tesla is also offering 0.00% financing (link).

Here’s a review Tesla shared of Model Y RWD in deep Norwegian winter (link in 🇳🇴 )

Demo-drive locations: Tesla introduced a new program that allows property owners with Tesla Destination Chargers to host self-serve demo drives, where Tesla will provide up to four demo vehicles, managed and maintained by the company, to these locations at no additional cost. (link) This is how to apply (link).

687-Tesla Lightshow: Here’s the 4-minute video of the world record Tesla Light Show from Finland, with 687 Finnish Teslas simultaneously doing their show after Darude — Sandstorm. If you didn’t know, Simon Pollock is the guy behind teslalightshows.io organizing these events.

SOFTWARE

Certain 2023 S,X,Y vehicles had a bug that occasionally prevented the rearview camera image from displaying, which could have decreased the driver's rear visibility. The interesting part here is that a recall notice from the NHTSA went to Tesla on January 23, 2024… which is full 20 days after the issue had already been fixed via an Over-The-Air update. (link)

Tesla recently added traffic lights to its navigation system in various regions, but they have now gone one step further and added a countdown to a green light in China. (link) Tesla also introduced an advanced voice assistant there, providing weather updates, translation, etc. I assume that at one point, Grōk or other AI-service will be integrated here.

There, this info is available due to government-supplied data, while in other countries it’s transmitted over special frequencies instead of over the web. This seems to be similar to Audi’s approach showing the countdown.

If you remember from our last Teslaverse report, Tesla added the “custom lock sounds” feature in the holiday update. This means you can take whatever sound and create a vehicle lock sound out of it. For example, here are some short clips of classical cartoons and video games (think: Super Mario or Road Runner’s meep meep). I liked the windows shutting down sound in this tutorial video.

Tesla FSD Beta V12 with end-to-end neural network rolling out to employees and now also to some Tesla owners. @WholeMarsBlog is one of the great channels actively testing and posting videos (here). Tesla described the system in the shareholder deck as: “Trained on data from a fleet of over a million vehicles, this system uses AI to influence vehicle controls (steering wheel, pedals, indicators, etc.) instead of hard-coding every driving behavior. V12 marks a new era in the path to full autonomy.”

Tesla announced the 19 global Fall 2023 Supercharger location winners (link). It’s a competition where logged-in users can vote for a new Supercharger location of their choice, and then Tesla executes on winners of each region.

The Tesla owners in Romania must have really focused their efforts, as the overall winner was Brașov, Romania with a massive 20,012 Votes. Winter 2024 voting has started (here), with Keszthely, Hungary currently leading and Romanian sites already in #2, #3.

By the way — if you want a nice real-life update feed of Tesla’s new Supercharger installs, their X account @Teslacharging puts up pictures of a lot of the sites as soon as they open. Like this.

Meanwhile, Minor things matter. Cable dock & stiffness improvements coming soon!” is what the official TeslaCharging account answered to a driver feedback that said how V4 Supercharger cables are heavier, less flexible, the holster grip makes the plug fall onto the ground and the taller, opaque dispensers block visibility at the site. (link)

Xcharge is testing to get the Cybertruck charge on their DC charger equipped with NACS (not a Tesla Supercharger). They didn't get it going (car sends a stop command) on the first runs but they'll keep at it. (video)'

Tesla has launched “Help Me Chargewebsite to guide people to the right solutions about their charging needs.

Norway today reached the 50,000th Tesla on its roads (link). The Model Y also absolutely dominated the Norwegian market in 2023, which had an 82.4% fully electric sales mix. The top three sold models were the Model Y with 23,088 sales, 2nd a VW ID.4 with just 6,614 sales and 3rd Škoda Enyaq with 5,737.

Oh, did we mention that the count of Elon Musk liking our posts on X has gone up by two since our last newsletter? This one about the Norwegian market got a like, and he also boosted this one about Model Y becoming top seller in Europe.

Europe: Tesla gained more than twice as much market share (+1.03%) as the 2nd best-performing brand (+0.49%, Škoda) in all of 2023 in the European Union's vehicle market. Here’s a great chart by @alojoh (link).

Giga Berlin Model Y production will be shut down for 2 weeks, until February 11th, due to the armed conflicts in the Red Sea region causing supply chain problems due to the longer transportation times. (link) I assume the delay is mostly about batteries, as Tesla has localized a significant part of its supply chain here. Tesla will also use the ‘downtime’ for maintenance and retooling work and continues to pay all employees and temps.

Giga Berlin: Tesla released a 2-minute video with employees praising how good it is to actually work for Tesla in Giga Berlin (video)

Tesla Chile: Tesla is officially opening its first location in Chile on January 31st, in Parque Arauco (link). Tesla Mexico: Teresa Gutiérrez Smith becomes the Country Manager for Mexico. (link)

Musk: “The first human received an implant from Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well. Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.” (link)

Musk says that the first Neuralink product is called Telepathy (not sure this is what was implanted though), which “enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking. Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs.”

That’s it for the Teslaverse issue! This went out to our 5,825 readers.

FEEDBACK: This Teslaverse issue turned out...

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Not a fan of this? If you’d rather not get these Teslaverse newsletter editions, but you’d like to keep getting our weekly EV industry overviews, I’m now able to do exclude you from just the Tesla list. Just reply to this email with your wish.

If you feel like you can never get enough EV insights, then consider joining us in the EV Universe Pro.

We’ll be back with our regulars later this week. See you soon,

— Jaan

Join the conversation

or to participate.