Elon Musk

Today, Elon Musk apologized for the delay in releasing his blog post about the updated Autopilot under v8.0 citing “unusually difficult couple of weeks”, presumably due to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 anomaly on September 1, but now he sets the date for tomorrow afternoon:

Will do some press Q&A on Autopilot post at 11am PDT tmrw and then publish at noon. Sorry about delay. Unusually difficult couple of weeks.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 10, 2016

The fact that he is holding a press conference before the release of the blog post is a good sign of the importance of the information that will be released.
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Last week, we reported on comments made by Elon Musk in a company-wide email obtained by Bloomberg. The publication had only published excerpts from the memo at the time, but now that we have the full email, we learn that Elon Musk actually thinks that Tesla could be GAAP profitable in the current quarter – something the company hasn’t achieved in over 3 years.

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Since he has been seen traveling the world while wearing his Tesla gear (pictured above), you might know that famed actor Morgan Freeman is a longtime Tesla owner, but now we learn that he is also a Tesla (TSLA) investor and a big supporter of CEO Elon Musk.
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After publishing its second quarter 2016 financial results last month, Tesla said that it plans to deliver about 50,000 vehicles during the second half the year to bring the total to 80,000 vehicles. The volume will generate a lot of cash flow for the company and now CEO Elon Musk says that it could be enough to be profitable during the third quarter, which will end by the end of the month.
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Another interesting tidbit of information coming out of Tesla’s SEC filing for its proposed acquisition of SolarCity yesterday – following our reports about Tesla’s board first turning down the merger and Tesla planning another round of financing – now we learn that the Rive Brothers are going to forfeit over $100 million worth of stock options through the merger.
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There are few interesting tidbits of information coming out of Tesla’s SEC filing in regard to the proposed merger with SolarCity, like the fact Tesla is currently planning another round of financing, but now we also have a detailed timeline of the behind the scene work for the merger and it includes an interesting information.

CEO Elon Musk first brought up the idea of buying SolarCity to Tesla’s board 6 months ago (Feb 2016), but the board turned him down at the time. The automaker only started considering the merger 3 months later.
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When SolarCity first launched its Solar Bond Program, it was presented as an interesting way for people to invest in solar with minimum cost requirements and without having to install panels on their roof. It ended up looking more like SpaceX’s private investment platform after Elon Musk’s rocket company bought most of the bonds over the last year – about $255 million worth.

Now Elon Musk is also personally investing in the Solar Bonds, along with SolarCity co-founders Lyndon and Peter Rive, ahead of SolarCity’s merger with Tesla.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk just confirmed that Tesla is about to make a product announcement at noon California time – 3pm ET – 7pm UTC:

Tesla product announcement at noon California time today

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 23, 2016

We don’t know what it is yet and there are a lot of possibilities. Let the speculation begin!
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk was on SolarCity’s conference call for its second quarter financial results today, which is unusual for the Chairman, but understandable considering the impending deal for Tesla to acquire the solar installer. During the call, Musk announced that SolarCity will unveil a “solar roof” as opposed to “solar modules on a roof”.

While Musk didn’t elaborate on the product itself, he made it clear that Tesla/SolarCity will go after the roof industry with its new products, rather than only installing solar modules on existing roofs.
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There’s no doubt that Tesla has suffered several delays on its product launches (heck, even its events rarely start on time). From the Roadster to the Model X, and now even Tesla Energy products are being slightly pushed back a few months. But what about its most important product to date and arguably the most time sensitive: the Tesla Model 3?

Tesla says it will arrive in late 2017, but in its latest issue, the popular automotive magazine Car and Driver claims the Model 3 will not arrive until late 2019, 2 years late, and it backs its prediction with a set of formulas.
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In a conference call with analysts today, Elon Musk gave more details on the expected timeline for two major programs he announced last month: ‘Tesla Minibus‘ and ‘Tesla Semi‘.  The CEO originally said that we should expect an unveiling of these products next year, but now he clarified and said that we should expect the events to happen in the next 6 to 9 months.
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During a conference call today, Elon Musk talked about Tesla’s progress in level 4 fully autonomous driving and while he didn’t want to make an announcement on the call, he said that it is coming sooner than people think:

“What we’ve got will blow people’s minds, it blows my mind …it’ll come sooner than people think.”

Musk’s most recent prediction placed the technology being ready in Q4 2017, around the time Model 3 will enter production.
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During a Monday morning Tesla Motors conference call Elon Musk, in response to several questions regarding designing a new system wide (solar, storage & car) inverter, said –

We don’t want to jump the gun on future (hardware) announcements, but we are internally betting on the merger. If it doesn’t go through, It would a bit awkward…we are betting on the merger for integrated power electronics.

This and other comments essentially answered the question we posed Saturday, ‘Will TeslaSolar continue to outsource the brain of its solar systems – the inverter – or develop in house?’ That design of this inverter occurred as part of the behind the scenes work of a merger, is testament to the importance of this piece of hardware in Musk’s vision of Tesla Energy’s future.

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Since unveiling his ‘Master Plan Part Deux’ and Tesla’s future vehicle lineup earlier this month, Elon Musk has been quietly revealing more details about how Tesla plans to leverage its vehicle platforms to release more models. For example, he confirmed that the upcoming ‘Tesla Minibus’ will be built on the Model X chassis.

Now he reveals that Tesla will also likely build a cargo van on its upcoming pickup truck chassis.
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Tesla had made it a goal to vertically integrate long prior to the current offer to purchase SolarCity. SolarCity took action purchasing a solar panel and solar racking company. A looming question becomes – how exactly will TeslaSolar protect itself in the solar inverter market? TeslaSolar could purchase a close technology partner like SolarEdge or design in house like it does with Tesla automobiles. With powerful options like these, arguments of value of cash, availability of in-house focus, risk of inaction/value of action and control over data are probably the driving considerations.

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Elon Musk has been on a quest to bring ‘S3XY’ back with Tesla’s vehicle naming convention. First with the Model S, ‘S’ for sedan, and Model X, ‘X’ for the look of the Falcon Wing doors, and now with the upcoming Model 3 and Y.

But now it looks like Telsa might drop the ‘Model’ plus ‘letter’ naming scheme after the Model Y completes the ‘S3XY’ vehicle lineup, according to Elon Musk.
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