The car industry’s next battleground is the humanoid robot

Tesla’s product play Tesla targets a 20,000 to 30,000 dollar Optimus, roughly the price of a Model Y, by reusing its motor, battery-management and sensor supply chain and driving cost down through scale. The deeper move is the data flywheel: with more than a thousand Optimus units inside its own factories by 2026, each robot … Read more

Google and Tesla just posted negative free cash flow. The AI bill is coming due

The numbers Both companies turned free cash flow negative for the first time. Google’s was minus 5.9 billion dollars, its first negative since the 2004 IPO. Tesla’s was minus 1.1 billion, its first in about two years. The driver is capital expenditure: Google’s second-quarter capex doubled to 44.9 billion dollars, nearly 5 billion a day, … Read more

Tesla denies report it is weighing a China spin-off; Musk calls it ‘fake news’

The reported logic: SpaceX, a major US defence contractor, creates conflicts that a firewall between Tesla’s China unit and its US operations could resolve. Tesla has already been asked to rigorously separate US and China operations, including a standalone sales entity for Shanghai exports. Selling Shanghai is hard to imagine. The plant runs as a … Read more