In April 2026, the Company entered into an agreement to acquire an AI hardware company for up to $2.00 billion in Tesla common stock and equity awards, of which approximately $1.8 billion is subject to certain service conditions and/or performance milestones dependent on the successful deployment of the company's technology.
I wonder if it is the people who worked on dojo that just got bought by tesla especially when they restarted their efforts on dojo earlier this year. [1]
That's a better title, as "Tesla discloses $2B AI hardware company acquisition buried" could also mean "Tesla disclosed that it buried an acquisition" or "Tesla disclosed that a hardware company buried an acquisition".
It's pretty obvious much of this article was written with AI, there's about 15 emdashes.
This electrek site frequently comes up in my Firefox news feed and they seem to have made a business of breathless reporting news about Tesla with a negative spin.
I really used to enjoy Fred's writing on Electrek. But after the Roadster referral debacle, Fred's tune changed and has gotten more negative... so negative now that you cannot find any positive articles about Musk or Tesla (some articles you might classify as 'neutral'). If you look at comment counts, it's clear Fred is playing to the "I hate Musk" crowd now for clicks (comments and clicks have similar outcomes for Google Adsense). Electrek's other articles' comment counts pale in comparison. So the incentive is pretty obvious now. Too bad.
I find it funny how stealing 500,000 $ from a fan is a "debacle". In most places that would be considered a felony instead of a justification to smear the victim and call them a whiner.
You are totally right. In accordance with the Tesla Referral Program contract a estimated ~250,000,000 $ in sales were referred to Tesla by major referrers earning those major referrers ~80 free Tesla Roadsters [1], announced as a 250,000 $ value and used a explicit contractual incentive to the program, in accordance with that legal contract. Having engaged in work on behalf of Tesla on the contractual guarantee of compensation and having earned that compensation in accordance with the contract, Tesla legally owes those fans ~20,000,000 $ in aggregate which it has so far rejected compensating for nearly 7 years.
I am not sure what term you use for having people work on your behalf according to the terms of a contract and then not paying the agreed upon compensation, but "theft" or "steal" would be the colloquial term. Only the intentionally biased would claim a trillion dollar company not paying fans for their work in accordance with their own contract is not "stealing" in common parlance.
I am sorry I was downplaying Tesla's bad behavior by just highlighting that individual fans were jilted out of hundreds of thousands of dollars of their work instead of pointing out how they screwed hundreds of their most loyal fans out of tens of millions of dollars of earned compensation. Anything other than praise for such a upstanding company is unwarranted and smearing their victims is the only unbiased move.
Why do you want the articles to be "positive" or "negative"? Why do you not want them to simply be the fact of the matter?
If you want more good news about Tesla then perhaps Tesla should be better run. Perhaps Tesla should abandon their policy of constantly lying. Tesla's been lying continuously about full self-driving for a decade. Tesla lies about dumb things there's no need to lie about like how fast the Cybertruck is:
Tesla never ran that quarter mile, a lie which the lead Cybertruck engineer pathetically tried to defend. When even your engineers can't achieve basic honesty then you've got a sick company culture:
His utter failure at DOGE is irrelevant too, slashing aid programs that will result in the deaths of millions while not making any discernible impact on the budget. No one cares about that.
I’ve grown to love em dashes — I try to use them in places where I’d usually use commas. But I quickly get wary that someone might think it’s AI-written. So I give them the benefit of the doubt. (Admittedly, I didn’t read the article fully.)
Anyone with sense sees the negativity around Tesla.
It trades at a 360 p/e with annually shrinking finances. None of it's blockbuster promises have come to fruition, and it keeps on faux chasing hype products to keep shares buoyant. Nevermind all the shady accounting and and notorious opaque data sharing that has cropped up in the last few years.
It has had three success stories which are all pretty banal (model S, model 3, model Y), and has a litany of perpetually "just around the corner" products that will fill those massive 360 p/e shoes and then way more. FSD, roadster, semi, model 2, robotaxi, optimus robot, and now terafab. All vaporware that is indefinitely pending, and seem perfectly crafted to tickle the mind of "the internet IQ test said I'm a genius" type investors.
It then has it's meh business of battery production and storage, which does alright for what it is, but even still is now borderline noncompetitive with Chinese offerings.
So if electrek is going hard against Tesla...it kind of makes sense?
What if you were just reporting on electric cars then dropped most reporting on electric cars from the foremost electric car company unless there was a way to include ceo-bashing for half the article? I get being fair or even a decent amount of hatred for whatever reason, but Fred really changed his tune and became quite spiteful. It was sad to watch, and many people tried to help in online comments, but seems like the negativity mostly won out.
There are plenty of CEOs who have had this result on trade publications and/or market analysts. The only difference I see is that Musk can be neither thrown out like the majority nor pressured to listen to PR experts who normally spend as many hours as it takes to convince a schmuck like him with a majority stake that being a silent partner shows strength and confidence.
BYD has two SUVs in the ranking, which added together brings them to parity with the Y.
That aside though, in total sales, BYD is selling 2.5x the amount of EVs.
Tesla ranked 9th, behind Toyota and Volkswagen for total sales in Feb and March.
Globally, Tesla has a tight lineup, so there is only one SUV choice. Other brands outsell Tesla model Y, but it's splintered across their many offerings in the SUV space. Tesla really wants you to know that the model Y is the top selling car globally. They don't want you to know that other SUV brands outsell them, but in the form of many different models.
This is exactly the kind of nonsesne flexing I am referring to that comes out of Tesla for the last few years. Things that on the surface seem "wow", but underneath are just shady or misdirection.
Tesla sales numbers are perpetually skewed by their limited model numbers. Other car manufacturers (rightly or wrongly) have many more SKUs, so any one particular version is unlikely to hit the #1 spot.
I loved Electrek early on. It was a fresh air reporting on everything renewable and EV. Now I consider it the whore of the news. Tesla could do no wrong five years ago. Now everything they touch is a disaster. That especially sucks because their cause is noble. HN’s sentiment toward Tesla has turned sour so Elektrek’s articles get upvoted more. Objectivity is overrated.
Tesla (and Elon) are responsible for bringing on the EV age, and forcing the trend on legacy manufacturers. Anyone who says otherwise is uninformed or dishonest.
That being said, their (one trick) pony has done it's trick, and now it's just promises that the pony will do progressively more crazy tricks if you just give it a little more time.
Just look at any headline they put out about Tesla. They phrase every article in the most negative light possible and mostly seem to report only negative events about the company.
>Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ expansion looks like another stock pump before earnings
>Tesla’s California sales crash 24% as state’s EV market plunges to lowest since 2021
>Tesla’s head of customer experience leaves for Coinbase as talent exodus grows
Even benign announcements are phrased in a negative light:
>Tesla launches ‘Robotaxi’ in Houston and Dallas with tiny geofences
Going out of their way to say the initial area for Dallas is “tiny”. You can imagine that a few years ago when they still liked Tesla they would have reported this story much differently.
>Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ expansion looks like another stock pump before earnings - I believe thats fair, they love doing this but Im willing to concede its negative.
>Tesla’s California sales crash 24% as state’s EV market plunges to lowest since 2021 -> Thats just a fact, it also mentions in the headline that the entire EV industry is down a lot in Cali so of course Tesla is heavily affected. If they wanted to just bash tesla it would have been trival to cut that out instead they provide context.
>Tesla’s head of customer experience leaves for Coinbase as talent exodus grows -> Both statements( head of customer experince leaves && talent exodus ). I guess you could make a argument that "talent exodus" is negative but is it not warranted? Its not a good look when a bunch of people leave your company at the same time.
>Tesla launches ‘Robotaxi’ in Houston and Dallas with tiny geofences - The initial area IS tiny it would not be a fair article if that was not highlighted, its just a few neighbors in some of the most sprawling cities in the US. The total area they are operating is in not even 10% of the city, its 30-35sq miles out of 340. The entire metro is ~9,000. That IS tiny especially if we compare it to its competitors that operate throughout entire cities.
What has Tesla done positively lately? Optimus is hardware that exist in many other companies paired with remote people controlling it, the cybertruck is a disaster, the semi has had no news of note, the robotaxi currently does not exist and requires software that has been promised for years and years without actually being delivered so its only fair to be skeptical of it.
I feel like you are intentionally ignoring my point, this ofc doesn't feel like a good faith discussion but I will engage anyway.
Bias comes in many forms. We can choose to not report things at all, we can choose to take neutral things and present them negatively, we can even take positive things and represent them as negatives, or we can choose to highlight negatives.
Elektrek is doing all of these.
Compare their coverage of Waymo's launch in Dallas to Tesla's. Their testing areas have very similar footprints, Waymo's is slightly larger but not by much.
Waymo's headline:
>Waymo adds 4 more cities to its robotaxi service, now 10 total (Tesla: still 0)
Tesla's headline:
>Tesla launches ‘Robotaxi’ in Houston and Dallas with tiny geofences
I mean if you cannot see the bias here then I would say you're just deliberately being bad faith.
One highlights Waymo's expansion as a positive while taking a deliberate swipe at Tesla, the other for some reason always puts "Robotaxi" in quotes and makes sure to emphasize how small it is directly in the headline.
6 months ago when Tesla launched robotaxi in Austin the service area was like twice as big as Waymo's, but do you think Elektrek reported it that way?
Reading this site really does remind me of Fox News.
If you want to see some positive things that Tesla is doing you can read other sites that actually publish that information.
>What has Tesla done positively lately?
Off the top of my head positives: the fact that they started production on the cybercab, the fact that they're rolling it out in all their testing locations and people have sighted it on the street, the fact that they started construction on the Optimus robot manufacturing plant which will have the capacity to make 10M robots per year.
>the semi has had no news of note
There is definitely news on the semi, it's just not being reported by people like Elektrek.
>California-based freight brokerage and asset-based carrier AiLO Logistics has launched a three-week operational pilot using the Tesla Semi truck.
>Tesla has said it has a few hundred Semis on the road with 13.5 million miles logged.
The fact that you believe they have only done negative/evil things indicates that likely the news you are reading about them has some significant slant to it.
The earnings call is basically an event to announce that they've published their 10-Q report. The report says:
> "In April 2026, the Company entered into an agreement to acquire an AI hardware company for up to $2.00 billion in Tesla common stock and equity awards, of which approximately $1.8 billion is subject to certain service conditions and/or performance milestones dependent on the successful deployment of the company’s technology."
That's not quiet or sneaky in any way.
The article says:
> The fact that Tesla discussed the $2 billion SpaceX investment extensively in the shareholders' letter but didn't mention an equally-sized acquisition is a deliberate choice.
The existence and content of the report is all that matters, you can emphasize or ignore anything you want in the press release.
Has any company ever buried such a large acquisition in its filings without disclosing the acquired company prior? I cannot recall any off the top of my head.
> Is it legal? The whole point of earnings call...
You might be shocked to find out, as I was, that earnings call are not even legally required. Companies are legally required to make SEC filings and that's it.
> "for up to $2.00 billion [...] of which approximately $1.8 billion is subject to certain service conditions and/or performance milestones dependent on the successful deployment of the company’s technology."
> The deal structure offers a few clues. Only $200 million of the up to $2 billion total is guaranteed — the remaining $1.8 billion is tied to service conditions and performance milestones.
Link to actual filing with Note 14 highlight:
In April 2026, the Company entered into an agreement to acquire an AI hardware company for up to $2.00 billion in Tesla common stock and equity awards, of which approximately $1.8 billion is subject to certain service conditions and/or performance milestones dependent on the successful deployment of the company's technology.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000162828026...
I wonder if it is the people who worked on dojo that just got bought by tesla especially when they restarted their efforts on dojo earlier this year. [1]
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/20/elon-musk-says-teslas-rest...
Original Title: Tesla (TSLA) quietly discloses $2 billion AI hardware company acquisition buried in filing
That's a better title, as "Tesla discloses $2B AI hardware company acquisition buried" could also mean "Tesla disclosed that it buried an acquisition" or "Tesla disclosed that a hardware company buried an acquisition".
"quietly discloses"
Can we vote to ban an adverb?
The idea that anything can still be buried in a filling is equally ridiculous
"hidden in a news press"
Quietly has not so quietly become an AI slop calling card.
I think it’s bad enough that more people are using it too. Maddening.
It's pretty obvious much of this article was written with AI, there's about 15 emdashes.
This electrek site frequently comes up in my Firefox news feed and they seem to have made a business of breathless reporting news about Tesla with a negative spin.
I really used to enjoy Fred's writing on Electrek. But after the Roadster referral debacle, Fred's tune changed and has gotten more negative... so negative now that you cannot find any positive articles about Musk or Tesla (some articles you might classify as 'neutral'). If you look at comment counts, it's clear Fred is playing to the "I hate Musk" crowd now for clicks (comments and clicks have similar outcomes for Google Adsense). Electrek's other articles' comment counts pale in comparison. So the incentive is pretty obvious now. Too bad.
I find it funny how stealing 500,000 $ from a fan is a "debacle". In most places that would be considered a felony instead of a justification to smear the victim and call them a whiner.
You think $500K was stolen? Hmm, doesn't sound hyperbolic at all...
You are totally right. In accordance with the Tesla Referral Program contract a estimated ~250,000,000 $ in sales were referred to Tesla by major referrers earning those major referrers ~80 free Tesla Roadsters [1], announced as a 250,000 $ value and used a explicit contractual incentive to the program, in accordance with that legal contract. Having engaged in work on behalf of Tesla on the contractual guarantee of compensation and having earned that compensation in accordance with the contract, Tesla legally owes those fans ~20,000,000 $ in aggregate which it has so far rejected compensating for nearly 7 years.
I am not sure what term you use for having people work on your behalf according to the terms of a contract and then not paying the agreed upon compensation, but "theft" or "steal" would be the colloquial term. Only the intentionally biased would claim a trillion dollar company not paying fans for their work in accordance with their own contract is not "stealing" in common parlance.
I am sorry I was downplaying Tesla's bad behavior by just highlighting that individual fans were jilted out of hundreds of thousands of dollars of their work instead of pointing out how they screwed hundreds of their most loyal fans out of tens of millions of dollars of earned compensation. Anything other than praise for such a upstanding company is unwarranted and smearing their victims is the only unbiased move.
[1] https://electrek.co/2019/01/17/tesla-roadster-free-killed-re...
Can you explain the $500k being stolen? All I could find was something about the roadster and some rebate program, but not actual cash being stolen.
Why do you want the articles to be "positive" or "negative"? Why do you not want them to simply be the fact of the matter?
If you want more good news about Tesla then perhaps Tesla should be better run. Perhaps Tesla should abandon their policy of constantly lying. Tesla's been lying continuously about full self-driving for a decade. Tesla lies about dumb things there's no need to lie about like how fast the Cybertruck is:
https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/tesla-cybertruck-beast-vs...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0AJmLvKjxw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J3H8--CQRE
Tesla never ran that quarter mile, a lie which the lead Cybertruck engineer pathetically tried to defend. When even your engineers can't achieve basic honesty then you've got a sick company culture:
https://x.com/wmorrill3/status/1746266437088645551
What "positive" spin do you want to see on these lies?
It was an early booster of Tesla, but I think it rightly went negative when the unkept promises and CEO antics started piling up.
Yeah. They seem to specialize in low-effort Musk bashing. (Not that there doesn't appear to be a evergreen market for that among the jealousinati.)
Musk-bashing doesn't require effort. Any reasonable person knows he's at best an opportunist dragon with no moral compass.
Sure, which is why this publication has commoditized it.
That's it, they're jealous of Musk. It's not the Nazi salute, they're just jealous they don't get to exploit people like he does.
His utter failure at DOGE is irrelevant too, slashing aid programs that will result in the deaths of millions while not making any discernible impact on the budget. No one cares about that.
I’ve grown to love em dashes — I try to use them in places where I’d usually use commas. But I quickly get wary that someone might think it’s AI-written. So I give them the benefit of the doubt. (Admittedly, I didn’t read the article fully.)
Anyone with sense sees the negativity around Tesla.
It trades at a 360 p/e with annually shrinking finances. None of it's blockbuster promises have come to fruition, and it keeps on faux chasing hype products to keep shares buoyant. Nevermind all the shady accounting and and notorious opaque data sharing that has cropped up in the last few years.
It has had three success stories which are all pretty banal (model S, model 3, model Y), and has a litany of perpetually "just around the corner" products that will fill those massive 360 p/e shoes and then way more. FSD, roadster, semi, model 2, robotaxi, optimus robot, and now terafab. All vaporware that is indefinitely pending, and seem perfectly crafted to tickle the mind of "the internet IQ test said I'm a genius" type investors.
It then has it's meh business of battery production and storage, which does alright for what it is, but even still is now borderline noncompetitive with Chinese offerings.
So if electrek is going hard against Tesla...it kind of makes sense?
Yeah, to me it's not bashing or negative to call a spade a spade.
What if you were just reporting on electric cars then dropped most reporting on electric cars from the foremost electric car company unless there was a way to include ceo-bashing for half the article? I get being fair or even a decent amount of hatred for whatever reason, but Fred really changed his tune and became quite spiteful. It was sad to watch, and many people tried to help in online comments, but seems like the negativity mostly won out.
In my view, the negativity was commensurate with the company CEO's increasingly erratic behavior and choices.
There are plenty of CEOs who have had this result on trade publications and/or market analysts. The only difference I see is that Musk can be neither thrown out like the majority nor pressured to listen to PR experts who normally spend as many hours as it takes to convince a schmuck like him with a majority stake that being a silent partner shows strength and confidence.
Some fair points, but Model Y was the #1 selling SUV in China in Feb and Mar, and 2nd place vehicle was almost half the price.
BYD has two SUVs in the ranking, which added together brings them to parity with the Y.
That aside though, in total sales, BYD is selling 2.5x the amount of EVs.
Tesla ranked 9th, behind Toyota and Volkswagen for total sales in Feb and March.
Globally, Tesla has a tight lineup, so there is only one SUV choice. Other brands outsell Tesla model Y, but it's splintered across their many offerings in the SUV space. Tesla really wants you to know that the model Y is the top selling car globally. They don't want you to know that other SUV brands outsell them, but in the form of many different models.
This is exactly the kind of nonsesne flexing I am referring to that comes out of Tesla for the last few years. Things that on the surface seem "wow", but underneath are just shady or misdirection.
Tesla sales numbers are perpetually skewed by their limited model numbers. Other car manufacturers (rightly or wrongly) have many more SKUs, so any one particular version is unlikely to hit the #1 spot.
I loved Electrek early on. It was a fresh air reporting on everything renewable and EV. Now I consider it the whore of the news. Tesla could do no wrong five years ago. Now everything they touch is a disaster. That especially sucks because their cause is noble. HN’s sentiment toward Tesla has turned sour so Elektrek’s articles get upvoted more. Objectivity is overrated.
>Now everything they touch is a disaster.
Care to give counter examples?
Tesla (and Elon) are responsible for bringing on the EV age, and forcing the trend on legacy manufacturers. Anyone who says otherwise is uninformed or dishonest.
That being said, their (one trick) pony has done it's trick, and now it's just promises that the pony will do progressively more crazy tricks if you just give it a little more time.
Just look at any headline they put out about Tesla. They phrase every article in the most negative light possible and mostly seem to report only negative events about the company.
>Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ expansion looks like another stock pump before earnings
>Tesla’s California sales crash 24% as state’s EV market plunges to lowest since 2021
>Tesla’s head of customer experience leaves for Coinbase as talent exodus grows
Even benign announcements are phrased in a negative light:
>Tesla launches ‘Robotaxi’ in Houston and Dallas with tiny geofences
Going out of their way to say the initial area for Dallas is “tiny”. You can imagine that a few years ago when they still liked Tesla they would have reported this story much differently.
These are headlines with Fox News level of bias.
Most of those are pretty fair thou.
>Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ expansion looks like another stock pump before earnings - I believe thats fair, they love doing this but Im willing to concede its negative.
>Tesla’s California sales crash 24% as state’s EV market plunges to lowest since 2021 -> Thats just a fact, it also mentions in the headline that the entire EV industry is down a lot in Cali so of course Tesla is heavily affected. If they wanted to just bash tesla it would have been trival to cut that out instead they provide context.
>Tesla’s head of customer experience leaves for Coinbase as talent exodus grows -> Both statements( head of customer experince leaves && talent exodus ). I guess you could make a argument that "talent exodus" is negative but is it not warranted? Its not a good look when a bunch of people leave your company at the same time.
>Tesla launches ‘Robotaxi’ in Houston and Dallas with tiny geofences - The initial area IS tiny it would not be a fair article if that was not highlighted, its just a few neighbors in some of the most sprawling cities in the US. The total area they are operating is in not even 10% of the city, its 30-35sq miles out of 340. The entire metro is ~9,000. That IS tiny especially if we compare it to its competitors that operate throughout entire cities.
What has Tesla done positively lately? Optimus is hardware that exist in many other companies paired with remote people controlling it, the cybertruck is a disaster, the semi has had no news of note, the robotaxi currently does not exist and requires software that has been promised for years and years without actually being delivered so its only fair to be skeptical of it.
I feel like you are intentionally ignoring my point, this ofc doesn't feel like a good faith discussion but I will engage anyway.
Bias comes in many forms. We can choose to not report things at all, we can choose to take neutral things and present them negatively, we can even take positive things and represent them as negatives, or we can choose to highlight negatives.
Elektrek is doing all of these.
Compare their coverage of Waymo's launch in Dallas to Tesla's. Their testing areas have very similar footprints, Waymo's is slightly larger but not by much.
Waymo's headline:
>Waymo adds 4 more cities to its robotaxi service, now 10 total (Tesla: still 0)
Tesla's headline:
>Tesla launches ‘Robotaxi’ in Houston and Dallas with tiny geofences
I mean if you cannot see the bias here then I would say you're just deliberately being bad faith.
One highlights Waymo's expansion as a positive while taking a deliberate swipe at Tesla, the other for some reason always puts "Robotaxi" in quotes and makes sure to emphasize how small it is directly in the headline.
6 months ago when Tesla launched robotaxi in Austin the service area was like twice as big as Waymo's, but do you think Elektrek reported it that way?
Reading this site really does remind me of Fox News.
If you want to see some positive things that Tesla is doing you can read other sites that actually publish that information.
>What has Tesla done positively lately?
Off the top of my head positives: the fact that they started production on the cybercab, the fact that they're rolling it out in all their testing locations and people have sighted it on the street, the fact that they started construction on the Optimus robot manufacturing plant which will have the capacity to make 10M robots per year.
>the semi has had no news of note
There is definitely news on the semi, it's just not being reported by people like Elektrek.
>California-based freight brokerage and asset-based carrier AiLO Logistics has launched a three-week operational pilot using the Tesla Semi truck.
>Tesla has said it has a few hundred Semis on the road with 13.5 million miles logged.
https://eletric-vehicles.com/tesla/tesla-semi-gains-traction...
The fact that you believe they have only done negative/evil things indicates that likely the news you are reading about them has some significant slant to it.
> The company never mentioned the deal in its shareholders’ letter or during last night’s earnings call.
Is it legal? The whole point of earnings call is to disclose such events to [potential] shareholders.
The earnings call is basically an event to announce that they've published their 10-Q report. The report says:
> "In April 2026, the Company entered into an agreement to acquire an AI hardware company for up to $2.00 billion in Tesla common stock and equity awards, of which approximately $1.8 billion is subject to certain service conditions and/or performance milestones dependent on the successful deployment of the company’s technology."
That's not quiet or sneaky in any way.
The article says:
> The fact that Tesla discussed the $2 billion SpaceX investment extensively in the shareholders' letter but didn't mention an equally-sized acquisition is a deliberate choice.
The existence and content of the report is all that matters, you can emphasize or ignore anything you want in the press release.
> That's not quiet or sneaky in any way.
Has any company ever buried such a large acquisition in its filings without disclosing the acquired company prior? I cannot recall any off the top of my head.
> Is it legal? The whole point of earnings call...
You might be shocked to find out, as I was, that earnings call are not even legally required. Companies are legally required to make SEC filings and that's it.
This is such a bad article. And no suprise it's Fred Lambert.
Could it have been acquired to clear some possible patent issues on a future product?
We can’t know, they didn’t disclose ;-)
> "for up to $2.00 billion [...] of which approximately $1.8 billion is subject to certain service conditions and/or performance milestones dependent on the successful deployment of the company’s technology."
so it could be as well just 200 million.
Which is exactly what the article says:
> The deal structure offers a few clues. Only $200 million of the up to $2 billion total is guaranteed — the remaining $1.8 billion is tied to service conditions and performance milestones.
Atomic Semi?