Roundup: Everything you need to know about Tesla Shareholder Meeting

EVwire brief: Tesla held its Annual Shareholder Meeting yesterday and, in addition to the largest news of Elon’s up-to-a-trillion pay package being approved, we got a lot of details on what Tesla builds, where it went off the path a little, and some great insider footage from the current developments. We’ll also include some footage straight from the Tesla community that visited the meeting.

And by the fork in the road, we mean… the actual fork, of course:

Before we start, here’s the livestream of the event itself. Jump to 55th minute for when Elon walked on stage.

Okay, let’s start with the big news first: Elon’s historic 2025 CEO Compensation Award was… approved by shareholders, with ~75% support. This means that Musk would be required to grow Tesla’s market capitalization from about $1.1 trillion today to $8.5 trillion over the next decade, along with milestones for both vehicles (20M cumulatively), FSD adoption (10M active), Robotaxi deployments (1 million) and Optimus deployments (1 million) and $400B annual EBIDTA.

Elon opens the meeting with “Have you watched any other shareholder meeting. They are snoozefests. Ours are bangers!"

Now, the new & fun stuff:

Tesla says their current Austin & the SF Bay Area robotaxi service will be accompanied next with service in Nevada, Florida & Arizona. Their goal is to remove safety riders by the end of the year in Austin. New video by Tesla on this:

In the Q&A, Elon said they “see a path to sub $.20/mile cost to operate”

And Tesla also showed us the first look into the Cybercab production line, confirming the production starts in April:

I don’t think many of us really get what a “sub 10 second cycle time” means. This production line will be unlike anything the auto industry has ever seen. They’ll eventually want to get it down to 5 seconds. Here are some stills from the video:

The Cybercab has also been redesigned in both interior and exterior.

In the interior, there’s a new door card design, differend handle area and ambient lighting, also what seems to be air vents (the new slit across the dashboard). The headliner area is different, and the seats have upgraded cushions.

Carpet on the floor and door sills seems like a bit of an odd new decision, given the heavy usage. Tesla going for that premium feel and cleaned often, perhaps?

On the exterior, we just recently saw the Cybercab with a slightly different design compared to the old look, here are the details that have changed by Sawyer, based on the images from the IN-N-Out pic of Cybercab that Tesla shared:

The changes include alightly redesigned front end and light bar area, a longer front lower lip, a redesigned B-pillar area, which looks to have moved slightly forward, no gold paint on tires, the door/window looks to be frameless (unconfirmed), front amber reflectors near the wheel arch, production-ready looking headlights and exterior mirrors (likely required by law right now).

Surprisingly, Elon even thanked Waymo in the Q&A: "I'd like to thank Waymo for paving the (regulatory) path; I think Tesla will be able to deploy all the Cybercabs that we produce."

Elon expects regulatory approval for Robotaxi to approximately match Cybercab production rates, doesn't see approval as a bottleneck. Including Cybercab, Elon predicts Tesla could do 2.6M vehicle run rate end of 2026 (vs 1.8M total this year), 4M run rate end of 2027, 5M run rate end of 2028.

Some in the industry have reportedly confirmed (so take it with a grain of salt), that Cybercab runs on 48 volt architecture. I saw this reported by several people who went on the factory tour, also witnessing the new motors using zero rare earth.

What about the Robovan? It is said to be a late 2027 product… at the earliest.

So Elon really did mostly make good on his promise from May when he said “I will have an Optimus dance troupe on stage with me at the Tesla shareholders meeting”.

We got a rare look at the Optimus pilot production line at Tesla Fremont, while the real scalable line will start in 2026 and will be bigger & different — this is per Julian Ibarz, the AI Lead of Optimus. Tesla says they are “also testing in our factories & office spaces for real-time use case.” Tesla says their goal is $20k COGS per robot at scale.

I heard the Optimus bots already walk around the Palo Alto engineering studio autonomously and plug themselves in.

Elon thinks there could be tens of billions of Optimus robots. For every personally robot, there will be 3-5 corporate robots.

Elon said Tesla will build a 1 million unit Optimus production line at Fremont, and a 10 million unit line at Giga Texas.

Elon mentioned that these Optimus’ are version 2.5

COGS here means Cost of Goods Sold, which you can consider as the all-inclusive price of making these. Tesla will certainly command a higher price for these when launching.

As we know, there’s a large overlap in Tesla’s components across its product line, and Tesla demonstrated some of the vehicle → Optimus overlap.

And here’s the latest gen of Optimus hand on display:

Tesla has also created some “idle gestures” for Optimus while it isn’t actively dancing or anything, “it’s casually looking around”:

Tesla says the FSD Supervised is available in 6 countries, with EU + more to follow. (We in the European Union have been waiting for a long while now, just regulations stopping us currently). FSD approval in Europe is expected in Q1 2026, but we’ve heard that before. Based on the other robotaxi regulation, I still expect that this means UK first.

Tesla owners using FSD experience just one crash per 4.92 million miles vs one crash per 700k miles for the US average.

Elon says the cars on FSD are currently “a little strict on keeping your eyes on the road”, but in the next month or two Tesla will allow you to text while using FSD and reduce the attention monitoring strictness.

Here’s a sneak peek at the Tesla AI5 chip:

Tesla says “Designing chips in-house unlocks absolute efficiency that no off-the-shelf part can match. AI5 has potential to be 50x more performant than AI4 (our current hardware) – working toward mass production in 2027. It will be used in vehicles, robotics, training & data centers.”

Tesla might have to build its own gigantic chip fabrication facility to keep up with its own demand, as Elon put it: “We have to do a Tesla Terafab. It’s like Giga but way bigger. I can’t see any other way to get to the volume of chips that we are looking for. We are going to have to build a gigantic chip fab.”

“The only option is to build some very big chip fab. It’s at least 100K wafer starts per month. And that’s one of ten in a complex. So ultimately, it would be 1 million wafer starts per month. We have to solve memory and packaging too.”

That would be, if typical 50-100 chips per wafer, about 1 billion chips per year 🤯

Elon revealed that the Cybercab and the Tesla Semi will use 4680 cells next year. But when it comes to Dry Cathode, Elon said it was a mistake and that it has been incredibly difficult. He explained Tesla will be successful in scaling dry cathode, but the path to get there may not have been worth it.

Dry Cathode is estimated to use 50% less equipment, 50% less energy to create, 5% more energy dense, 1/10th the factory floor space, and at least 20% cheaper than standard 4680s.

Tesla’s VP of Finance, replied with: “Indeed. Has been harder than we expected. All of which, however, is the whole point of the company: to solve tough problems on the path to sustainable abundance.”

He also liked my comment about it which I think holds true: "I love the it was harder than expected but we'll do it" instead of "it's pretty hard so we abandoned the project".

Tesla also shared their lifetime emissions avoided from the Tesla fleet:

The most notable “new” information about the Tesla vehicles we got was about the Tesla Semi and the Cybercab.

The Semi has been updated to be more efficient, now showing the 1.7 kWh/mile efficiency (so ~15% less than originally said). The thing is that the pilots with DHL and others have already consistently shown the 1.7 kWh / mile numbers, so might it be we’ll start seeing ~1.5 kWh / mi soon?

It was also said it can now handle increased payload while still at 500 mile range, and is designed for Autonomy. I think the Tesla does not mention Tesla Semi being able to run on FSD nearly as much as they should. Even though it’s “normal” for us who follow what they do, this will be a massive surprise factor for the world around us.

It has 800 kW drive power and can charge at 1.2 MW peak. The most visible change is that the truck got a Model Y style light bar instead of the previous headlights.

Roadster will be unveiled on April 1, 2026 (tentatively aiming for that date, per Elon) with production “probably starting 12-18 months after that”. Elon says the founder Roadster reservation holders will be invited to that event.

Elon Musk says Tesla will hold its next shareholder meeting at much bigger venue (such as an arena) so thousands of people can go.

Elon says Tesla's new lithium refinery in Texas will have a 50GWh capacity initially and expand from there.

Elon also said SpaceX might go public!

“I want to try to figure out some way for Tesla shareholder to participate (invest) in SpaceX. I've been giving a lot of thought to how to give people access to SpaceX stock; Maybe at some point SpaceX should become a public company despite all the downsides of being public.”

That’s it for the Shareholder Meeting coverage today. If you found this read useful, let us know in the comments, share, and certainly sign up for our EV industry newsletter.

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