• Tesla is facing some profitability headwinds.
• Its operating income fell 56% year over year as AI and research and development costs climbed.
• The company is still in the green, and it surprised earlier this month by delivering 486,532 vehicles in the third quarter.

Tesla is still selling plenty of cars. Making the same amount of money on them is getting harder.

On Wednesday, the Elon Musk-led automaker reported that its operating income fell 56% year over year to $718 million in the third quarter — below Wall Street's estimates of $746.3 million — while overall revenue of $28.05 billion came in a smidge below analysts' estimates.

Tesla pointed to higher operating expenses tied to its AI efforts, or "SI"/"Super Intelligence" as Trump prefers, and other R&D projects. Lower regulatory credit revenue and weaker energy storage gross profit also weighed on profitability, while lower vehicle prices hurt revenue.

"While we continue to execute on innovations to reduce the cost of manufacturing and operations, over time, we expect our hardware-related profits to be accompanied by an acceleration of SI, software and fleet-based profits," the company reported.

It's not all bad news for Tesla's profits. The company is still solidly in the green, and it beat on the bottom line. Tesla reported 48 cents in adjusted earnings per share, above the 44-cent analyst consensus estimate. Free cash flow of $1.5 billion was also a surprise after Wall Street had expected negative free cash flow of $4.92 billion.

The automaker also sees areas of profit growth in its future: autonomy subscriptions are trending up, and Tesla said it's offering the right, region-specific product mixes.

During the earnings call, Tesla's chief financial officer, Vaibhav Taneja, said the company is experiencing its "highest backlog" of vehicles in four years. The company, he said, is trying to increase vehicle production.

He also added that Tesla has secured $30 billion of borrowing to support expected capital expenditures, but the company doesn't expect to "make any draws under any of the new facilities in this calendar year."

"The main takeaway is that Tesla's surprisingly positive cash flow quarter did not come from stronger profits," Thomas Monteiro, senior analyst at Investing.com, said after the report.

"Added to the equation is the fact that Tesla's AI spending remains broadly inefficient, with research costs up nearly 70% and operating margins down to just 2.6%, while at SpaceX AI is already one of the biggest sources of revenue," the analyst added.

The new quarter has already made waves

The Tesla story continues to play out in real time, and it's had a busy month since the fourth quarter kicked off in October.

On Tuesday, during SpaceX's earnings call, Musk said that Tesla and SpaceX had each formed committees to explore a potential merger. Both companies are helmed by Musk — and he owns billions of dollars in stock of each.

Anticipation of the potential mega-merger has been building around the companies for much of 2026, and has only increased since SpaceX went public. Musk said he was not included in those committees and that calling the merger a foregone conclusion "would be overstating it."

It also came less than a week after Tesla held its high-flying demo for the Roadster. The sports car performed a gymnastics routine, including briefly jumping into the air and twirling over a lineup of other Tesla vehicles.

It came nine years after Tesla first promised to relaunch the Roadster. Musk first showed off a prototype of the vehicle in 2017 and predicted a 2020 product launch.

• GM says it's keeping humans in its OnStar call centers to help with emergencies.
• It comes as OnStar is getting a fresh makeover, complete with AI.
• "The stakes are too high," an exec told BI about the human-in-the-loop.

GM is giving OnStar an AI overhaul. The automaker says it is not coming for the person who answers when your airbags deploy.

On Wednesday, during the company's tech conference, GM Forward, Ed Nightingale, GM's vice president of digital products, told Business Insider that the automaker would continue to use human OnStar staffers on emergency calls to contact first responders.

"That's something that isn't changing," Nightingale said. "We feel that, when it comes to a crash or a problem being solved, they want to make sure that there's a human in the loop. The stakes are too high."

After publication, a GM spokesperson told Business Insider that OnStar Advisors "aren't going away" and will remain a core part of the OnStar experience.

Humans-in-the-loop are a notable constraint on GM's AI ambitions compared to other software companies. Other AI-enabled companies, such as SpaceX, have recently highlighted how few customer calls are routed to humans.

GM said that keeping people involved in complex or sensitive situations is an intentional part of its AI strategy. Technology handles more routine interactions, while humans take the call during an emergency.

It also comes as the company gives OnStar — its 30-year-old in-car emergency service — a much bigger job.

GM showed off OnStar AI on Wednesday. It's a new voice assistant designed to understand a vehicle and the driver using it. The automaker said it can answer questions about vehicle alerts, control some functions, plan routes around bad weather, and offer more context-aware suggestions, including from information through a driver's digital calendar.

The assistant will arrive first on the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq via an over-the-air update in the coming months, GM said. Other vehicles will follow.

GM also plans to unify its brand-specific mobile apps under the OnStar AI name next summer.

Onstage, Sterling Anderson, GM's chief product officer, said the company was turning the 30-year-old service into "an intelligent platform."

The shift is part of a large bet from GM.

GM is focusing heavily on its tech capabilities. On recent earnings calls, CEO Mary Barra has highlighted GM's subscription products. Anderson previously told Business Insider about how AI has allowed the company to cut product development time in half, starting with the GMC Hummer EV, which only took 20 months of development. Industry-average product development is typically around 5 years.

On Wednesday, the company also highlighted the development of its hands-off, eyes-off self-driving features, set to make their debut in the Cadillac Escalade IQ in 2028.

GM still has to persuade drivers that the new tools are valuable enough to use — and, in some cases, pay for.

Nightingale said subscriptions only retain customers when drivers can see the benefit.

Work at GM? We want to hear from you. Contact Ben Shimkus at bshimkus@insider.com or Signal at bshimkus.41. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device.

• SpaceX and Tesla have each established exploratory committees to discuss a possible merger, Elon Musk said.
• Musk, who said he can't participate in the talks, gave the update during Tesla's Q3 earnings call.
• Musk said he thinks a merger is a good idea, but cautioned investors that shareholder approval is "quite a high hurdle."

Houston, we have an update on all that SpaceX-Tesla merger chatter.

During SpaceX's Tuesday earnings call, Elon Musk said both of the companies had created "special committees of independent directors" to discuss a potential merger.

Musk, who helms both companies and owns billions of dollars in stock of each, said he can't be part of those exploratory groups.

"Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," he said on the call. "But at the end of the day, the shareholders have to be supportive of this, and particularly on the Tesla side, we will need a 50% vote of all shares, not just those who vote, but of all shareholders."

He said clearing that bar would be "quite a high hurdle."

It's the most detailed update investors have received yet on the idea of a tie-up, which has been the subject of much chatter since SpaceX went public earlier this year. If the companies ultimately decide to merge, it would further consolidate Musk's business empire, often referred to as Musk Inc.

His businesses have been on a consolidation kick. In 2025, xAI acquired Musk's social media company, X (formerly Twitter), and in February, SpaceX acquired xAI.

Musk also runs the brain-chip startup, Neuralink, and the tunnel-building firm The Boring Company. Both operate independently, but have had business collaborations within Musk Inc.

Tesla and SpaceX's stocks were up in after-hours trading following the news. SpaceX was up around 6.6% and Tesla 1.6%.

Musk sees clear benefits in tying the knot

"I do think there's a lot of merit to combining the companies as we are pretty much in the superintelligence singularity," Musk said during the call.

SpaceX and Tesla have worked together on a host of projects, including artificial intelligence software, chip design, TeraFab manufacturing efforts, robotics, Starlink satellite connectivity, and SpaceX's ability to launch payloads into orbit, Musk and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said.

The most recent result of that partnership: On Thursday, Tesla demoed its long-awaited Roadster, which includes a version with SpaceX technology. The high-powered sports car's top trim will include cold-gas thrusters. The car launched, hovered, and flipped in the air during the demo.

While Musk is for the two companies tying the knot, he said investors shouldn't think it's a sure thing.

"I don't think we should necessarily assume that a SpaceX and Tesla merger is a certainty," he added. "That would be overstating it."

• Starlink missed on customer growth expectations. It's still making a ton of money for SpaceX.
• The company is leaning heavily on large customers, like governments.
• The company acquired a spectrum provider in October. Execs said they're targeting mobile providers.

Starlink is SpaceX's big cash cow. And it just reported some mixed results.

On Tuesday, during the company's earnings call, SpaceX said its satellite-internet service had 13.6 million consumer subscribers at the end of September, up 1.6 million from three months earlier. That fell short of the 14.2 million expected by Bloomberg analysts — though the company said the figure excludes hundreds of thousands of enterprise subscribers and aviation customers.

Still, Starlink is making a lot of money. Monthly consumer revenue per user rose 5% from the previous quarter, while enterprise and government revenue jumped 91% from a year earlier to $2.1 billion.

A big, important customer? Airlines. The company said that, as of the end of September, 3,800 total aircraft had been outfitted with Starlink equipment.

"Aviation remains a major growth opportunity, as we're still early in the installation phase with many of the largest carriers worldwide," CFO Bret Johnsen said on Tuesday's earnings call.

SpaceX's next venture: your phone

The company has recently focused on becoming a mobile provider.

On October 8, SpaceX announced it had agreed to buy a portfolio of low-band wireless spectrum from Grain Management. The deal gives SpaceX a key ingredient that could turn its Starlink satellite-internet provider into a direct challenger to Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile.

SpaceX said the spectrum would power Starlink Mobile, which it has described as a hybrid satellite-and-terrestrial network designed to work indoors, outdoors, and in cellular dead zones.

It also comes after SpaceX hinted that it saw itself as a challenger to mobile carriers during its first-ever earnings call in August. The company's president, Gwynne Shotwell, hinted that the company was considering building a "cellular base station on basically the gear that holds the Starlink broadband dish," rather than a ground-based system.

They said the market was worth $600 billion annually.

"I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers," Shotwell said.

During the earnings call, Shotwell said, "The vast majority of mobile connectivity is actually WiFi," an area where Starlink is already well-versed.

"Keep in mind, Starlink broadband does a lot of WiFi work as well," she said. "As far as the mix goes, I think we expect that the S-band spectrum will provide the majority. And then obviously, you need the low-band spectrum, the 800 megahertz spectrum, to basically penetrate buildings. So if you're not on WiFi, you can still receive the signal."

Musk said that there was probably a need for a longer presentation about their Starlink plans.

"I can say we do see a clear path to several hundred billion dollars a year in connectivity revenue," he said. "But I think we should lay — probably describe that in a — in more detail in a forum that's not limited to a few minutes at an earnings call."

• Cognition's cofounder said software engineering AI models are "intelligence saturated."
• AI model baselines improved — so smarter, more capable models aren't pulling as many users, he said.
• Instead, the focus could turn to speed and price.

For years, the AI race has favored the smarter model.

Russell Kaplan, the president and cofounder of AI coding startup Cognition, the company behind software-engineering platform Devin, said that could be changing for a growing number of software-engineering tasks.

"Many tasks within software engineering are now 'intelligence saturated,'" Kaplan wrote in a post on Monday. "Once any model can do the task well, cost and speed are all that matter."

Kaplan was responding to an article from The Information. Their reporting found that a 10-point advantage in model intelligence now delivers just 20% more developer traffic, down from nearly 69% in late 2025.

He said that story is "directionally consistent" with what is happening inside Cognition.

That could be a sizable strategic shift for the AI companies fighting to win software developers and enterprise contracts. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and a growing crop of AI labs have all highlighted their increasingly capable coding tools as a reason to choose their models.

Now, as those AI agents get better at routine tasks, one model's slightly smarter approach could matter less to users if another model is cheaper and faster.

Kaplan didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Want to buy a RAV4? Good luck finding one!
• I drove the longtime favorite vehicle for a week. It's boringly good — and that's a huge compliment.
• Toyota is ramping up its electric powertrains. The new RAV4 is the next great example.

Think of that awkward highway moment: You've accidentally cut someone off or made an obvious driving mistake. You wish you could sink into automotive oblivion before the other driver gets a good look at you.

The Toyota RAV4 is perfect for that situation.

The crossover SUV is good at nearly everything — efficient, comfortable, reasonably priced, and backed by Toyota's reputation for reliability — while wrapped in a package that looks like pretty much every other grocery getter on the road.

I spent a week and about 200 miles in a 2026 RAV4 Limited AWD, driving through New York City and the Catskills region. The fully-loaded tester stickered at $46,883.

I found the RAV4 to be aggressively competent. Its performance won't get your adrenaline pumping, and its looks won't turn many heads. Instead, it'll get occupants comfortably from point A to point B while barely sipping fuel.

And consumers can't get enough of that.

RAV4 gets a facelift — and some fresh electric motivation

The RAV4, America's third-best-selling vehicle last year, is fresh out of the design studio.

It's the sixth generation of the SUV: Unlike its curvier predecessors, it's squared off and upright. The front and rear are nearly perpendicular to the ground and are finished off with LED head and taillights.

The more consequential change is under the hood.

For 2026, Toyota killed the gas-only RAV4. Every version now comes with a battery in the powertrain; the only remaining choice for RAV4 hopefuls is between a conventional hybrid and a pricier plug-in hybrid.

That puts one of America's most popular vehicles squarely behind the hybrid strategy Toyota has spent years defending.

While rivals poured billions into all-electric lineups, Toyota kept betting that hybrids — which combine a gas engine with electric motors and a small battery that recharges as you drive — would be easier for mainstream buyers to adopt.

The RAV4 isn't Toyota's first bestseller going hybrid-only. The Camry sedan made the switch for 2025, and the Sienna minivan has been hybrid-only since 2021.

RAV4 is the most consequential expression of that hybrid bet. And the execution hits the nail on the head.

The base model is roughly $32,000 — similar to gas-powered competitors like the Honda CR-V or the Nissan Rogue.

Gas mileage is exceptional. During my test, I averaged 47 mpg, and saw 50-plus mpg on some shorter trips.

There are trade-offs. The RAV4 feels sprightly off the line, but ask for more power at highway speeds, and the gas engine starts working noticeably harder. The steering is vague, the engine can drone, and the transition between electric and gas power is still more obvious than I'd like.

Still, Toyota gets the boring stuff right. The RAV4 gets a smartly layered front-seat organization system, a clean gauge cluster, and easy-to-understand digital climate controls.

Buyers who want something faster, flashier, or fully electric have plenty of other options — including elsewhere in Toyota's own showroom. My Limited tester also proved you don't need to spend nearly $47,000 to get what makes the RAV4 appealing (the heads-up display, for example, really wasn't necessary).

The RAV4's trick is simpler: It doesn't require any major life changes from its owner. Shoppers don't have to install a charger, rethink a road trip, or learn a radically different car. They can just drive it — and, in my case, get 47 mpg.

Wow, it's popular

That success does create a problem: Buyers can't get enough of the RAV4, especially as high gas prices add to already-strong hybrid demand.

Right now, a new RAV4 spends an average of just 17 days on a dealership lot, per CarGurus data shared with Business Insider. The industry average is above 70 days.

Kevin Roberts, director of economic and market intelligence at CarGurus, said the situation reminds him of the chip shortage era, when limited inventory sent shoppers hunting through dealership lots and helped push car prices higher.

"We're way out of the chip shortage now, so it's a really kind of unique environment," he said.

That scarcity is creating another oddity. CarGurus found that average used prices for 2026 RAV4s were actually running above the starting prices of equivalent new trims. Even 2025 RAV4s were retaining about 99% of that value.

His advice for shoppers: "Dust off some of the chip shortage playbook" by expanding their search radius, being flexible about options, or ordering a vehicle if they aren't in a rush.

• John Carreyrou told Business Insider that he loves the new Elizabeth Holmes doc as "a great piece of art."
• But audiences who want an accurate retelling of Theranos' downfall should read his book, he said.
• It comes as people allege that he's "missing the point of the film."

John Carreyrou has seen "You Can See Everything" twice.

The reporter, whose award-winning investigation for The Wall Street Journal helped bring down blood-testing startup Theranos, told Business Insider that he liked the documentary. It follows Elizabeth Holmes, the startup's CEO, in the 34 days before she reported to federal prison in 2023.

The film — co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim — has inspired a mix of reactions from viewers, ranging from shock to boredom to sympathy for Holmes.

Carreyrou doesn't see that ambiguity.

"The film is a great piece of art, but let's not confuse that art with the underlying facts," he told Business Insider.

It mirrors what he's been writing on X. Carreyrou has been pushing back on people who, he said, had accused him of "missing the point" of the film — namely, that Holmes is unknowable.

"She went after Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung with everything she had," he wrote, referring to the two company whistleblowers at the center of his 2015 story. "I was threatened with litigation on a daily basis for months on end. It was a ruthless cover-up of a breathtaking fraud, and she was at the controls."

He has also reposted a Monday morning interview with Schultz, who said that Holmes "knows that she did something wrong," and alleged that, during the film, she brought out a different device when she was asked to show Theranos' hardware.

The documentary does not retrace every detail of the Theranos scandal or the reporting that exposed it. Instead, it puts viewers inside Holmes' home as she insists that she was wrongly convicted.

For audiences, it's raised bigger questions about performance, self-deception, and whether the film's subject can ever be fully believed.

Carreyrou has told Business Insider that if audiences "have questions afterward or want more context about the Theranos saga, I would encourage them to read my book."

He ended his X post by saying he "loved the film." He also gave a nod to its early Oscar buzz.

"#BestPicture, IMO," he wrote.

• The tech world is buzzing with thoughts about the fresh Elizabeth Holmes doc.
• From "sympathetic" to "uncanny" to "innovative" to "boring — the film is inspiring huge reactions.
• If you haven't seen it, don't worry. We're holding the movie spoilers.

Elizabeth Holmes is back on the silver screen, and the tech world has has thoughts.

Holmes, the disgraced Theranos founder, is the subject of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's new documentary, "You Can See Everything."

Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors after her blood-testing startup falsely claimed it could run hundreds of diagnostic tests from a small amount of blood. She has consistently denied wrongdoing.

Since the film's theatrical release on Friday (it grossed an impressive $15 million in its opening weekend), people who work in and around tech have been sharing their reactions.

And don't worry if you haven't seen the film yet: We're keeping it spoiler-free.

Holmes' legacy

Audiences can't pin down how they feel about the film's central characters.

John Loeber, a San Francisco-based investor and the former CEO of Limit, said the film brought him back to a 2019 party when he ran into Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans.

"Double take. She's not in jail?" he wrote Saturday on X about the encounter. Seeing them on screen was equally "uncanny."

"I have never before seen a movie where I have personally met the leading cast. And I was not prepared for the level of surprise and weirdness in seeing their faces — especially Billy, whom I had not thought about in seven years — on the big screen," he wrote.

Nick White, a former software engineer turned YouTube and Kick streamer, said the film reminded him of "why I left the tech industry."

"There are so many narcissistic, delusional morons in that industry who genuinely believe they're geniuses," he wrote on X.

Last week, ahead of the doc's release, a tech crowd got a sneak peek of the doc at a Manhattan movie theatre rented out by AI startup Extend — Business Insider reporter Henry Chandonnet was there.

That audience couldn't settle on what to make of Holmes, either. Some said she had become a meme. Others called her an utter psychopath, while one attendee said the film had unexpectedly made Holmes seem sympathetic.

Mostly 'great,' a few 'boring'

There's a range of feelings about the film itself.

Songwriter Grimes — whose own artistic career has circled Silicon Valley — called the film "innovative" and called the movie's second half "artistic futurism."

The pseudonymous X user roon, who runs a well-followed techno-optimist Substack from Silicon Valley, called Fielder's filmmaking talent "almost incomprehensible" — but said he was wasting it on "some quite boring subject matter."

John Carreyrou, the former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter whose investigation helped expose Theranos, disagrees. He called it "a great film."

Carreyrou also wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, published on Sunday, about his jealousy around the Fielder and Oppenheim's access to Holmes — and his own worries about personal safety.

But the film, he wrote, is the "#BestPicture," he wrote on X, referencing its early Oscar buzz.

• Tesla has unveiled the next-gen Roadster twice: in 2017 and again on Thursday.
• We list the differences between the two versions.
• Range: down. Price: unknown. Flying: way up!

Tesla just unveiled the revived Roadster.

Sound familiar? It certainly should.

On Thursday, CEO Elon Musk took the covers off the latest version of Tesla's halo sports car and said the EV maker is eyeing production in 2028.

It's the second time the company has unveiled a prototype vehicle that it says will carry on the Roadster nameplate. In 2017, Musk unveiled a smoother-looking and very different type of Roadster.

The 2017 version simply drove onto a stage next to Elon, then spun its tires and raced away. The 2028 version — on a track placed a safe distance away from spectators — drove up a vertical wall, hung upside down, hovered in the air, and did a "kick flip" over a line of other Teslas.

Turns out, a lot can change in nine extra years of product development.

A lot of the nuts and bolts powering the Roadster changed — and so did the car's metrics. So, we put together a chart comparing Tesla's old Roadster promises with the new ones.

Here's what we found:

• Want to physically drive a Tesla in the future? The Roadster will be your only option, Musk said.
• The car is not cheap.
• Musk has compared today's driving to elevator operators.

Want to physically drive a Tesla in the future? Get ready to pay up.

On Thursday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the new Roadster with a gravity-defying demo. The car suctioned to the side of a vertical ramp, drove upside down, briefly flew, stuck the landing, and later bunny-hopped and twirled over a standing lineup of other Tesla vehicles.

The stunts were choreographed with autonomy, Musk said — but Roadster owners will eventually be able to manually take the wheel. That will make it unique in Tesla's lineup.

"This will actually be, long-term, the only manually driven car that Tesla makes," Musk said on stage, before Tesla's lead engineer, Lars Moravy, added, "You gotta have some fun sometimes."

Tesla hasn't revealed the car's final price, but we know it'll firmly be in the luxury supercar tier. The company's reservation queue asks customers who want the base Performance trim to fork over a $50,000, due within 10 days. That reservation, alone, is nearly the price of an average car in America, and it doesn't capture the car's final price. Our best pricing ballpark dates back to 2017, when Tesla first said it was bringing back the Roadster. At the time, the automaker collected $250,000 payments from people who wanted a Founder Series model.

Meanwhile, Tesla has been ramping up its autonomy push for its more price-conscious vehicles.

In September, it started rolling out the Cybercab — a vehicle that leans so heavily into self-driving that it has no steering wheel, brake pedals, or side mirrors. Tesla says it wants to eventually sell those cars to consumers at less than $30,000 apiece.

On recent earnings calls, Musk has also praised the recurring revenue from subscriptions of Full Self-Driving (Supervised) from Cybertruck, Model Y, and Model 3 owners.

Musk has talked a lot about a world where driving becomes obsolete. He has compared driving a car to operating an elevator, a profession that was largely phased out in the mid-20th century as elevators became automated.

"Now, you just get in, press a button and a modern elevator, if inspected regularly, is extremely safe," he wrote on X in March.

Treating driving like elevator operation requires a pretty big leap. Driving is still a hobby, a sport, and — for many people — a point of pride. By Moravy's own admission, driving is fun.

There's still a chance in Musk's vision of his carmaker's future that drivers can control their own Tesla and lean into that fun. They'll just need to open their checkbooks.

• SpaceX says Grok is taking 20,000 Starlink customer calls a day — and closing 70% without humans.
• The company revealed the stat while touting its voice-capable agent.
• It's part of a race to build AI agents that love to chat — possible (likely, even) with each other.

Elon Musk's AI is a talker.

This week, Musk's combined AI-and-space-exploration company, SpaceX, announced a new Grok Voice model — and revealed that Starlink call centers are already using the AI-as-a-conversationalist technology to answer 20,000 customer calls a day.

The company said roughly 70% of those calls are resolved without humans.

Grok Voice agents are verifying customers, troubleshooting Starlink hardware, issuing credits, and shipping replacement equipment, the company said. Its AI agents can take on those tasks in multiple languages, too.

That makes Starlink a useful, real-world test case for AI voice technology — and particularly useful for its global expansion. The company says Starlink serves more than 6 million active customers around the world.

Instead of building a massive human customer-service operation to power call centers, SpaceX is betting it can serve its multilingual customers with AI.

SpaceX did not respond to Business Insider's questions about which languages Grok supports or what types of calls still require a person.

AI companies have been quickly rolling out more powerful voice models that do their best Chatty Cathy impression. In July, OpenAI released GPT-Live-1 with call-capable support, while Google has launched similar enterprise systems.

The same is true for AI companies that are focusing on consumers. Meta's Muse, for example, can also handle phone calls for those let into the beta feature.

So, soon, your bot may dial one for English — while a company's bot answers the call.

• Elon Musk stood onstage while the new Tesla Roadster (literally, and figuratively) flew by.
• Is it fully legal? Musk doesn't know.
• But is it a secret weapon in the ongoing talent wars? Very, very likely yes.

Tesla's Roadster is back. Now, it kinda flies, and I'm not just being hyperbolic about its speed.

(Although, I guess, that would be a fair read, too.)

On Thursday, CEO Elon Musk unveiled the second-generation Roadster. It's capable of doing "crazy gymnastics," Musk said, like hopping off the ground and spinning in the air. The prototype also sprints from standing to 60 mph in 0.8 seconds, Tesla claims — and the automaker said the production model will be even quicker.

Will the two-door electric sports car be street legal? Who knows.

Instead, the car is accomplishing something more tangible — and more obviously Musk-like: make Tesla look like the kind of company that can build things other companies cannot. That's a useful message for Wall Street and for the engineers Tesla wants to hire.

Tesla is already valued far more like a tech company than a traditional automaker.

For years, investors have bet heavily on its ambitions in autonomy, artificial intelligence, robotics, and robotaxis. A flying (or, at least, hopping) Roadster does not prove those businesses will work, but it makes Tesla's technological ambitions more legible.

Musk also has long treated product spectacles as recruiting events, too.

At a 2019 Neuralink presentation, where he announced that the company had successfully implanted sensors in rats' brains, he said the "main reason for doing this presentation is recruiting." Ahead of Tesla's 2021 AI Day, Musk posted on X that "convincing the best AI talent to join Tesla is the sole goal."

The Roadster reveal follows a very similar playbook. What better way to excite more techies than a flying car?

Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, also agrees that Thursday's Roadster reveal was an exciting technical feat for up-and-coming tech talent:

Who knows if Tesla will even be able to bring this car to American roads. Musk said he doesn't even know.

"I'm not sure it's necessarily legal in all jurisdictions," he said during the Thursday launch. When asked if the car was street legal, Musk responded: "Yeah, depends on your street."

Either way, this car may not need to be a volume sales winner to be a hit for Tesla. It might just need to be the tech belle of the ball.

• Tesla has finally (re)revealed the second-generation Roadster.
• It's the automaker's new halo product.
• Musk has been hyping tonight's event, saying it's a contender for the "greatest product demo."

The Roadster has, at long last, taken off — quite literally.

Tesla unveiled its next-generation Roadster at a livestreamed event Thursday night, giving customers who have waited years their first fresh look at the EV maker's new halo car.

In a dramatic demonstration, the Roadster traveled up a huge curved ramp until it was upside down. The car then flew off the ramp, flipped, and landed safely on the ground, thanks to thrusters attached to the bottom of the vehicle.

"Well, it worked," Tesla CEO Elon Musk said after it successfully landed.

"Flying cars are real," Lars Moravy, Tesla's VP of vehicle engineering, added.

Musk called the latest Roadster a result of a collaboration with Tesla and SpaceX engineers.

The Tesla CEO said the car uses an "advanced ultra-high pressure air tank" to lift itself.

"The car has obviously altitude control thrusters and main thrusters in the rear, so it can basically fly like a rocket, and it could do rolls," he said.

In a separate recorded demonstration shown on screen, Tesla also showed the Roadster hitting 60 mph in under one second, marking .81 seconds.

Tesla shared more stats about the Roadster on X: a two-seater with about 300 miles of range and a top speed over 230 mph. Some of the configurations also appear to depend on whether the Roadster is equipped with "rocket" thrusters. For example, if the car is "air ready" and has the rocket, the Roadster seats only one.

There are also small details about the Roadster that notably diverge from Tesla's signature design choices.

The Roadster's door latches, for example, appear to be mechanical. Typical Tesla cars are known for their electronic door latches, which China is clamping down on due to safety risks.

The halo vehicle also appears to lack side-view mirrors, which raises the question of how the Roadster will be street-legal under federal standards.

Tesla's website lists three configurations of the car for purchase: performance, thrust, and rocket. The performance trim requires an immediate $5,000 deposit, with an additional $45,000 due in 10 days. The thrust version requires a $250,000 deposit. The rocket trim appears to be available only through "invite only."

Musk said the Roadster will be the only Tesla vehicle meant to be driven manually and that it's not "necessarily a safety-optimized car."

An observant audience member at the event also asked a glaring question: Is it street legal?

"Depends on your street," Musk said. "It'll be a viable car."

The long road behind

The revived nameplate has been a long time coming.

The original Roadster was Tesla's first production vehicle, launching in California in 2008. It used a chassis derived from British sports-car maker Lotus' Elise, but replaced its gasoline engine with an all-electric powertrain. That model ended production in 2012.

Musk surprised audiences in November 2017 at an event for Tesla's Semi truck by unveiling a second-generation Roadster. At the time, Tesla said the two-door sports car would have a 1.9-second zero-to-60-mph time, a top speed above 250 mph, more than 600 miles of range, and a gargantuan 200-kilowatt-hour battery pack.

That month, customers could put down a $50,000 deposit to reserve a Roadster, or pay $250,000 upfront for a Founders Series model.

Musk also floated a SpaceX package for the supercar with cold-gas thrusters that he said might "allow a Tesla to fly."

With the wait time creeping toward a decade, Musk apologized to "long-suffering" deposit holders in an earnings call, adding that Tesla was focusing heavily on its robotics and autonomy programs.

"Roadster is not just icing on the cake; it's the cherry on the icing on the cake," he said at the time. "We are working on it, but it has to come behind the things that have a more serious impact on the world."

Tesla began ramping up the Roadster's design cycle in the summer of 2025, Business Insider previously reported.

Musk had been hyping Thursday's livestreamed event on X. He claimed that event would be "a candidate for greatest product demo of all time" and that "the whole world will watch this."