Hey everybody Rob now we're here and today we are continuing to talk about Elon Musk's visit to China. We also have some new rumors on Tesla's project Highland for the Model 3, an update on energy storage, hardware 4, and depending on when it's published we may have some items to discuss from a new Elon Musk interview with Babylon V that is supposed to come out today. We'll see if that makes it in time for this episode.
Alright, looking at the stock pretty volatile day for Tesla today but finishing up 1.4% after jumping significantly in the last 10 minutes of trading, not exactly sure what is going on there. It's a very different movement than we saw from the broader NASDAQ but some other EV stocks jumped similarly so I guess we'll have to wait and see maybe there's some news out there that some people know about some others don't but we'll obviously keep an eye out to see if there is anything that does eventually trace back to the jump that we saw at the end of the day. Anyway Tesla finishing up 1.4% while the NASDAQ was down at 6% and closed at $203.93 on the day.
Getting into the news the predominant topic today continues to be Elon Musk's visit to China no surprise on that. Elon has continued to meet with government officials in addition to the minister of foreign affairs that we had talked about yesterday. Sounds like Elon is also met with the minister of commerce and industry. You can see photos here with the minister of commerce and also with the president of the China Council for the promotion of international trade. As expected Elon has then moved on to Giga Shanghai, Tomzu and Grace Tao also attending Grace Tao, posting a couple of photos with the teams at Giga Shanghai on Weibo. So really fun to see that and the timing as we had talked about yesterday does line up with previous rumors that we had heard about the possible start of production or prototyping production for Project Highland for the Model 3 in Shanghai.
Those rumors grew even louder today with a report from Bloomberg this afternoon saying that quote, Tesla ink plans to give an early glimpse of its revamped Model 3 sedan as part of chief executive officer Elon Musk's first visit to the carmaker Shanghai factory in years according to people familiar with the matter. The first cars coming off the line Thursday are prototypes the people said asking not to be identified because the company's plans are private. End quote. Alright so pretty interesting report from Bloomberg there my reaction after first reading that was that they probably meant that Elon Musk was going to be shown the Project Highland line and some prototype vehicles that are first off the line as a part of his visit that would seem to make a lot of sense but it seems like what they are actually reporting is that Tesla itself as a company is pointing to give people outsiders a first glimpse at the Highland Model 3.
This really doesn't make as much sense to me if the first prototype versions from Shanghai are actually being produced this week or tomorrow Thursday though obviously we have seen Highland prototypes running around at Fremont this will be referring to more of a production prototype but regardless it's still going to take time for Tesla to get this ramped back up and if they're just now shutting down the Model 3 production line that could still be many weeks or months from happening. Depending on what exactly the updates for the Highland Model 3 are that could inhibit Tesla's ability to sell Model 3's in that interim period of time so it would seem more beneficial to wait on any sort of official announcement or official teaser on this vehicle until it is as close as possible to actually shipping and that seems to be Tesla standard operating procedure in general anyway.
Probably the best example of a similar situation we have from Tesla in their history would be the S and the X refresh production basically stopped on those vehicles in December of 2020 and the actual refresh vehicle wasn't announced until late January 2021 so over a month after production was actually stopped which allowed Tesla time to to an extent clear out some of the older version inventory. Now obviously by that point in time the refresh was pretty widely expected not too dissimilar from where we're at right now in the Highland timeline but by the time that it was actually announced there was still supposed to be at least another month or so until the very first deliveries.
Now obviously that ended up getting delayed deliveries were a little bit later than Tesla expected but when using it as an analogy for what Tesla might do around Highland it's more helpful to look at what their actual intent at the time was. So if you overlaid a similar timeline onto Highland you might be looking at stopping production in June, an announcement in July maybe mid July and then maybe first deliveries in August or September so I'm sure Tesla would try to compress that timeline as much as possible Shanghai if anywhere would be most capable of that but that's not Tesla's only production hub obviously for the Model 3.
So they also have to weigh how to balance this internationally and in general this is a much higher volume product than the S&X so although we expect the update to add simplicity the volume does add to the challenges of a refresh. So anyway obviously we'll know soon if this report does end up being accurate or not but I do think it's helpful just to kind of consider that timeline and what Tesla has kind of managed around a refresh before.
Alright moving on from Highland and from China we've got an update on Tesla Energy today electric doing some digging and receiving confirmation that a newly signed Energy Storage project in Arizona will be supplied by Tesla. The agreement has been made between Stratoclean Energy and the Arizona Public Service Utility for a 1 Gwatt Hour Energy Storage project with up to 255 MW of power capacity. So it's a huge project one of the biggest energy storage projects in the world that being said as Tesla continues to grow their Energy Storage deployments actually starts to become relatively small to Tesla's total. That's okay though because that just means we continue to see more and more of these large scale projects apparently this project has an investment value of $500 million according to a spokesperson for the agreement. Apparently this project was initially scheduled to come online in 2024. There was no updated timeline for that with this announcement but a filing for the project apparently shows that a related substation is set to come online at the end of 2023. So 2024 probably still about right.
Alright next up just a little bit more insight into Tesla's FSD hardware 4. SWEV on Twitter has answered some questions on whether or not hardware 4 does actually include a radar at this point in time and from what he is found on his hardware 4 vehicle it looks like it in fact does. This was expected as a part of hardware 4 but it's been a little bit unclear on how progressed the actual installation of hardware 4 parts are on hardware 4 vehicles. Sometimes like Tesla may have some intent to do some other retro fitting later on but at least right now it does look like that radar is at least there from a hardware capacity although perhaps not doing anything yet from a software perspective maybe some shadowing or something like that.
Alright next up the Babylon B interview did end up being published as I'm recording here so just listen to that really quickly to XB on Twitter that's nice now but most of the interview was on Twitter or rather about Twitter but there were some Tesla related items first off he did say that when he was going through the acquisition process of Twitter the early days after the acquisition he talked about how it was really just chaos and mentioned something that now seems very intuitive but I don't remember him mentioning specifically before about the acquisition was that basically everybody at Twitter was working remotely. So that contributed to the chaos probably helps explain some of his recent comments on remote work but anyway as it related to Tesla they talked about the financial position at that point in time Elon mentioned that basically they had 4 months of runway so the Babylon B guys asked what the options were at the end of that runway if Elon would just continue to fund it and he said quote yeah I mean there's a limit to how much Tesla stock I can sell and I can't sell it all the time I mean the reason I sold stock in December last year which I regret at this point was because I wasn't sure how much money Twitter would need.
So he's not saying there that he regrets acquiring Twitter he said that he still thinks it was the right move but regretting the last tranche at least of Tesla stock sales which seems like that was probably a cushion which Elon no longer feels would be needed since he again said that Twitter is on a good track right now close to financial stability not quite break even but close to it so interesting to hear Elon mentioned that regret although he didn't elaborate much on it hopefully that builds well for the next time around when Elon may be considering selling some more Tesla stock.
The rest of the interview mostly stuff we've heard before or outside of the scope but Elon did mention that for Twitter he does think that they need to broaden the branding now to X rather than Twitter since the scope of things that Twitter is doing is growing quickly. If you do want to watch the full interview that is available on the Babylon B's Twitter account.
Last item for today then Bloomberg is reporting that lucid is according to people familiar with the matter raising about three billion dollars with the majority of that coming from the Saudi PIF. Obviously they're the predominant investor in lucid right now so that stake would be growing and while this would provide cash for lucid as they continue to burn a lot of cash it would dilute shares pretty significantly as their market cap right now sits around 14 billion which I guess somehow still sitting around that level is kind of how I would phrase that and I think a lot of that is really just coming from the backing from the PIF.
So lucid stock down more than 5% after hours on this report. Alright that is a way we'll leave it for today so as always thank you for listening make sure you subscribe and sign up for notifications also find me on Twitter at Tessile Podcast and we'll see you tomorrow for the Thursday June 1st episode of Tessile Daily. Hi there.