#ElonMusk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk vigorously defended his Autopilot system when accident reports rolled in earlier this year. Even when a fatal Florida crash was blamed on a temporarily blinded Autopilot, Musk assured citizens, Tesla owners, regulators and everyone else that the semi-autonomous driving system made his vehicles the safest things on the road.

Just do the math, Musk told the skeptics. Well, someone finally has.

To help make its promise of producing 500,000 vehicles per year a reality, Tesla Motors wants the city of Fremont’s approval to nearly double the size of its assembly plant.

The expansion plan comes as the electric automaker’s CEO promises something unexpected next week.

The brief uptick in share price Tesla enjoyed after beating production estimates this week was swiftly erased by a newly critical Goldman Sachs Group.

The investment bank downgraded the company on Thursday, sending its stock back down the hillside, Bloomberg reports. It’s bad news for CEO Elon Musk’s fundraising plans.

The dialogue from Tesla wasn’t all rainbows and puppies this week.

In oddly coordinated diatribes, CEO Elon Musk and his vice-president of business development took off the soft driving gloves and laid into their competition and the country’s regulators. The message? Put up, pay up, or shut up.

If Elon Musk’s tweets are accurate (and who can prove that they aren’t?), the Tesla CEO plans to build Millennials and hippies their dream ride at some point in the foreseeable future.

As per tradition, Musk took to Twitter to release snippets of detail about his sprawling (but vague) 10-year “master plan,” including what to expect from the automaker’s next two models. One proposed model is a no-brainer, but the other would be worshipped at a counterculture love-in.

To bastardize an old Dodge slogan, if you’re willing to devote your life to sustainable driving and ditch your electricity provider, you could be Tesla material.

The electric automaker announced a deal with solar company SolarCity today — an all-stock agreement worth $2.6 billion. Acquiring the nation’s largest rooftop solar provider gives Tesla CEO Elon Musk the top-to-bottom green company he always wanted, but it opens the company up to new risks.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s drive to develop and market new driving technology is well known, but former employees say he brushed aside their concerns about the safety of the company’s Autopilot system.

Several employees, including a former Autopilot engineer, told CNN Money that their concerns fell on deaf ears, as Musk always reverted back to a “bigger picture” position on safety.

His company’s product is under investigation by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk likes the favorable press the NHTSA gave to its Autopilot system.

Musk tweeted a link to a Wall Street Journal report that quotes NHTSA administrator Mark Rosekind praising the semi-autonomous driving system at a Detroit conference last week. The NHTSA is investigating what role Autopilot played in a fatal Florida crash on May 7.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s vision for his company’s future covers all the automotive bases, from personal vehicles to commercial trucks and transit fleets.

In a blog post on Tesla’s website, Musk spelled out the steps of his “Master Plan, Part Deux” — a long-term update of his previous decade-long business plan. With the Model 3 on the way in late 2017, the old plan has come to an end, so the company’s founder is looking for other things to power with electricity.

Lately, it seems the only headlines written about Tesla Motors are brimming with controversy, so wonderCEO Elon Musk decided to change the channel the best way he knew how — by generating 100 megawatts of hype.

As he’s known to do, Musk took to Twitter last night to tease something big. Well, a looming announcement of something big. But something that could change the world. But no details just yet. In typical Bond villain-esque fashion, Musk tweeted, “Working on Top Secret Tesla Masterplan, Part 2. Hoping to publish later this week.”

It was a little terrifying watching the question-and-answer session near the end of Tesla’s livestreamed annual shareholder’s meeting, and it wasn’t just the lady asking about goji berries.

All of the speakers — well, the majority of them — seemed to possess a stratospheric level of admiration for Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Like religious (or political) disciples, the trust they placed in the man’s brilliance and decision-making abilities seemed limitless.

Well, after this week’s announcement that Tesla is offering to buy SolarCity — a solar energy provider co-founded and chaired by Musk — cracks are forming in his circle of supporters, especially in the financial realm.

Founded with the intent of finding energy solutions (and profit) in the power of the sun, SolarCity’s photovoltaic energy business has grown in leaps and bounds since 2006. Now, as the company poises itself for bigger profits, a very familiar man wants to acquire the operation.

Tesla Motors published a note on its website yesterday stating its intention to acquire SolarCity. The offer, made by Tesla, would see the electric automaker trade shares with the San Mateo, California-based company, bringing the business into its fold.

Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk is no stranger to SolarCity’s operation — he co-founded it with cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive (CEO and CTO of Solar City), and serves as the company’s chairman.

The stuck cork that was the Model X has finally cleared its supply hurdles, causing Tesla production to hit a new high at the automaker’s Fremont, California factory.

With assembly of that model speeded up, Tesla recently hit a production rate of 2,000 vehicle per week, a knowledgeable source told Electrek — a figure that’s still way off the company’s goal of building half a million units per year within the next 18 months or so.

Elon Musk is declaring the controversy that erupted over reports of Tesla Model S suspension failures to be over, done, finished, finito.

The Tesla founder and CEO fired off a string of tweets late Friday, saying that the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration was done looking into the matter, and added that the majority of complaints were found to be fraudulent.

Yesterday, TTAC examined the details of the case that sparked accusations of a serious Model S safety issue and a cover-up on the part of the automaker. The firestorm of controversy, ignited by a Daily Kanban blog post by ex-TTAC editor Edward Neidermeyer, centered on a Pennsylvania man whose 2013 Model S experienced an unusual upper ball joint failure.

by Mark Stevenson and Bozi Tatarevic

A day after former TTAC editor-in-chief and current Daily Kanban blogger Edward Neidermeyer hit out at Tesla regarding suspension failures and Tesla’s supposed customer bullying through a goodwill agreement on Wednesday, the electric vehicle manufacturer hit back.

According to Neidermeyer’s post, a 2013 Tesla Model S owner on the Tesla Motors Owners forum experienced a ball joint failure at around the 70,000-mile mark, and the owner referred to Tesla for a fix. The automaker offered what’s commonly known in the industry as “goodwill assistance,” which covered half the $3,100 total cost of the repair, as the Model S was out of warranty.

However, the vehicle owner and Neidermeyer took exception to part of the written goodwill agreement as it seems to include a non-disclosure clause, which Neidermeyer contends could dissuade other Tesla issues from reporting issues to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and subvert the federal vehicle issue reporting process.

Is Tesla silencing its customers via threat of litigation? And is this ball joint issue even a problem in the first place?