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SpaceX went public, the biggest IPO in stock market history, and the money that just watched it happen will start looking straight at Tesla. Many investors believe it's Tesla's turn next to skyrocket. So, wherever the SpaceX stock eventually settles, the market just put a live public price on Elon's execution. And the obvious next question for every Tesla holder is, when does a stock get its own repricing? My answer, let's take a look at the calendar.
Tesla's sitting on the greatest run of upcoming milestones it's ever had in a single half-year. So, the Tesla milestones table CERN, Basher, and I manage has over 20 line items between now and December 31st. And a bunch of them are the kind that move how investors think about the company. So today, after a quick look at the scoreboard, I want to start with the one that towers over everything else: the possibility that SpaceX announces a merger with Tesla, maybe as soon as late July, right after its earnings report as a public company. Then we'll walk the rest of the table group by group. Roboaxi and Cybercap here in the US, FSD going global in Europe and China. Optimus and the AI factory buildout, and the money deliveries, earnings, the shareholder meeting. No price targets today. You know, I don't do those. Just the milestones, why each one matters, and why the setup into year-end tilts the way it does. So let's start with where we actually are, because the checkmarks already on the board tell you how fast this year is moving. This is the table. So, certain I keep it updated all year, and look what's already checked off in 2026. Okay, the Terraab project launched in Q1, FSD version 14.3 rolled out, construction started on the Optimus factory in Austin, robo taxi went unsupervised in Dallas and Houston in April, Cybercab started production at Giga Texas on April 24th. Tesla Semi started production, and on May 3rd, the fleet crossed 10 billion cumulative FSD miles. Then a few days ago, it crossed 11 billion. The first billion took years. The last one took 37 days, and over 4 billion of the total is city streets, the hard miles. Projection, it'll be past 17 billion by year-end. That's the data engine compounding, and it's a thing under every other row on this table. Here's why the scoreboard matters for the stock. So, every checkmark retires a doubt. A year ago, the bare case was that robo taxi was a demo, Cybercab was a render, and Semi was a science project. All three of those are now production realities. And that track record is what makes the rest of 2026 credible instead of hopeful. I know that the timing for robo taxi took a lot longer. It launched on June 22nd, and many people thought that we'd be much further ahead. But don't look backwards. Look forward and see what might happen now. The timing of all this against a SpaceX IPO is the setup, though.
So, the two companies went into this week nearly the same size, run by the same guy, and one of them just got repriced live by public markets. You can pull up this SpaceX tape yourself while you watch this. Whatever it says, the attention now swinging toward the other half of the Elon machine is what the rest of the show is about. So, if you take a look at this table, the row that's bigger than the rest of the table combined is the SpaceX and Tesla merging possibility. This stopped being podcast talk on May when CNBC reported, citing a Tesla employee and others familiar with the talks, that the two companies are indeed weighing a merger. Wolf Research says the idea has moved into the Wall Street mainstream, with some investors treating a future combination as their main reason for owning Tesla. Dan Ives puts the odds at 80%, and the betting market Calry has it around 52% within the next year. So, the serious money is split, but nobody serious is calling it crazy anymore. And there's language in SpaceX's own IPO filing that reads interesting in this light. The S1 says SpaceX, quote, "may issue a significant amount of equity in connection with future transactions." Plenty of filings carry boilerplate like that, sure, but Fortune's Sean Tully read it as the merger clue: a company telling you in advance it plans to pay for something big with stock. The only acquisition target that fits the word "significant" at SpaceX's scale is Tesla. So, on timing, my read is the cleanest window is right after SpaceX's first earnings report as a public company. You don't announce a transformational deal between your IPO and your first print. If SpaceX reports the June quarter in late July, the way most companies would, that's a slot. I want to be straight about the uncertainty, though. SpaceX hasn't announced a date, and some coverage argues the first call could land as late as September. We just don't know yet. Worth noting, the IPO lockup releases its first 20% the day after that June quarter report. So, that date is already the most important undated event on the calendar, merger or no merger.
So now let's take a look at the math. If this happens as a merger of equals, stock for stock, at a roughly one-to-one exchange, then a Tesla share and a Tesla's price gets pulled toward wherever SpaceX trades at announcement. Actually, the actual conversion does not occur until the following year, but the just the announcement alone, alone, will see these two stocks tickers, uh, kind of move closer together. The two companies went into the IPO close to the same size, and the analysts running merger math are already publishing a combined company around maybe $3.4 trillion. So, if the post-IPO run carries SpaceX towards $2.5 trillion by late July, NASA's just a scenario, my guess, not a forecast, then the exchange ratio does the lifting for Tesla holders. The ratio is the entire game. Merger of equals, near par. Tesla converges up, a stingier ratio, and the upside shrinks. That single negotiated number is why this road dwarfs everything else on the table in both directions. And the strategic logic is real, regardless. Starlink connectivity in every Tesla. Uh, one AI and compute budget instead of two rival ones. Optimus built by the company that builds rockets, funded by the company that prints vehicle cash flow. Elon has spent two years saying his companies work better as one machine. A public SpaceX finally gives him a currency to do it. That last point is why the IPO itself raised the odds. A private SpaceX couldn't buy Tesla with stock. There was no market price for the stock, no liquidity, no way for a Tesla board to tell shareholders what they were getting. As of this week, there's a ticker, a tape, and a price the lawyers can put in a fairness opinion. The tool to do that deal exists now. It didn't 7 days ago. So, that's the wild card, and I'll come back to it at the end. Everything from here on feeds it, because every milestone Tesla checks off between now and that announcement window strengthens Tesla's side of the ratio negotiation.
Let's walk the groups. The first group is autonomy in the US, and it's the fattest section of the table. Unsupervised robo taxis live in three cities right now: Austin, Dallas, and Houston. So, there's no safety driver, you've got paying customers. The table has five more cities pending, all penciled for this stretch: Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas. Tesla's own language on those five softened from "first half" to "preparations underway" back in April. So, I think some of them slide into Q3. The cars are already being spotted testing in Phoenix, which is a fun one. That's Waymo's home turf. Why each city launch matters? Well, every new city's proof the system generalizes. Waymo needed years of mapping and a depot network per city. If Tesla keeps lighting up cities in weeks instead of years, the cost structure argument settles itself. And the argument is most of the long-term valuation debate. And each of the five cities carries its own signal. Phoenix is a direct shot at Waymo on Waymo's best map streets. Vegas brings friendly regulators, year-round driving weather, and the Boring tunnels already moving people under the Strip. Miami, Orlando, and Tampa are tourist markets, riders who don't own a Tesla taking their first robo taxi on vacation and going home as word of mouth. Different city, different proof point, same direction. Then there's the row that matters more than any single city: the unsupervised ramp in Q3, going from dozens of cars per city to hundreds, then thousands. Scale is where Robo taxi stops being a headline and starts being a revenue line you can model. Stacked on that, Q4 has the two biggest autonomy rows on the whole table. FSD unsupervised in the USA, meaning customer-owned cars, your car driving with nobody watching. Elon said in a Q1 call that that should reach customer vehicles in Q4. I wouldn't hold my breath on it. Another one is a federal framework for autonomous driving. So, one national standard instead of 50 state-by-state fights. If the federal piece lands, the city-by-city rollout map basically becomes a national rollout map. Now, the Cybercab rows: production started April 24th, targeting hundreds of units a week and ramping. As of today, no Cybercab has carried a paying passenger in robo taxi, but the robot taxi fleet doing real rides is still model-wise. So, the table has two Cybercab rows left this year: the first paid Cybercab ride, probably with an event around it, and the Cybercab available for customer order in Q4. Wouldn't hold my breath on that one either. The first paid ride is symbolic, sure, but it's the right kind of symbolic: a vehicle with no steering wheel, built for $30,000 economics, earning revenue. That's the picture institutional investors have been told about for two years. Finally, you can take a photo of it. And opening Cybercab orders in Q4 turns it into a product with a backlog you can count. Is that whole group going to land on schedule? Probably some of it slips. That's the honest answer. But notice the shape of it: three cities live, five cued, the hardware in production, the regulatory rows converging at year-end. The direction of every row is the same.
The second group is FSD outside the US, and this one moves faster in the last 60 days than I expected. Your first, the Netherlands granted the first European approval for FSD supervised on April 10th through the Dutch authority RDW, and Tesla started rolling it out to Dutch owners the next day. Then it spread. Denmark went live. Belgium approved it June 10th. Tesla shared roughly two months of Dutch safety and usage stats alongside that one. The count now sits at 13 countries globally with FSD supervised, five of them in Europe, and Tesla's targeting a broader European rollout through the summer, country by country. Or maybe we'll get an EU approval all at once. So, let's keep our eye on that one. So, why would this matter? Europe was the market where the bears said regulators would never budge. The Dutch approval became the legal template the neighbors are copying, and that's why approvals are now arriving in pairs. Every country is a new pool of existing Tesla owners who can suddenly buy Tesla's highest-margin product. The cars are already sold. The software money is pure gravy. Okay. Then China, the bigger one. Tesla made FSD supervised officially available in China on May 21st, after years of delays. The one-time purchase there runs $6,401, around $9,400. Tesla built a dedicated data center in Shanghai, partnered with BYU for mapping, and is hiring test drivers across nine major cities. What's still pending is the full fleetwide regulatory approval, the version where every eligible car in the country can get it pushed over the air. Tesla's pointing at Q3 for that window. So, if you run rough math on why this road is huge, there are well over 2 million Teslas on Chinese roads. At $9,400 a copy, every 10% of that fleet that buys FSD is roughly $2 billion of high-margin software revenue. I'm hedging on attach rates. Those are guesses. The fleet size and the price are facts. There's also an Israel approval row on the table for this stretch. Smaller market, but the same story. Another regulator, another template, another pool of sold cars waiting for software. One more thing on the Europe data, because it's the detail regulators actually trade on. Tesla published roughly two months of Dutch safety and usage stats alongside the Belgium approval. Every country that goes live generates local evidence for the next country in the queue. So, the approvals feed themselves. That's why five European countries in two months looks slow compared to what the next 6 months could look like. Step back from the group and you see the pattern. FSD revenue used to be a US story with a hardware ceiling. By year-end, the table says it's a US, Europe, China story, and the marginal cost of serving each country is close to zero.
Okay. The third group is the robot and the factories behind it. And this is the group with the longest views. What's already real? Construction started this quarter on the dedicated Optimus factory in Austin. Tesla's stated plan for the first generation line is capacity for 1 million robots a year. And the table tracks the Model S and X line sunsetting, partly to free up room for Optimus tooling. Optimus units are being tested inside Tesla factories today. I want to be careful here, because precision matters to this audience. Testing with no officially confirmed count, and Tesla is not given a 2026 production target. Elon explicitly to give one. Wall Street models float numbers like 50,000 units this year to size the earnings impact, but that's analyst math. Tesla's guidance does not say that. The table has three Optimus rows left this year: the Optimus Gen 3 reveal, penciled for Q3, very possibly at the annual shareholder meeting; Gen 3 pilot production, also Q3; and then a Q4 wildcard, the digital Optimus reveal, the macro hard project, Elon's software-only version of the robot brain doing knowledge work. The Gen 3 reveal is the one-eyed circle. The leaked Gen 3 handwork points to around 50 actuators of dexterity. And the whole question for Optimus economics is hands. If the reveal shows hands that can do real factory tasks, the million-robot factory under construction stops being a bet on a prototype, becomes a bet on manufacturing. And manufacturing is the thing Tesla has actually proven it can do. Around the robot, the compute buildout has its own roles. Cortex 2.0, the training cluster in Austin, hits 50% capacity this quarter and full capacity in Q3. Construction begins on the advanced technology flat fab, the follow-through on the Terafab chip project that launched in Q1. Tesla making its own AI chips at scale is a 5-to-10-year statement, maybe longer. But why this group moves the stock even with a long fuse? The market reprices a story once the story turns physical and funded, long before the revenue shows up. Factories under construction, clusters at capacity, a fab breaking ground, steel and concrete read as conviction on a balance sheet.
So, the fourth group is the plain financial calendar, and it's worth a quick pass because these are the dates where everything above gets scored. Q2 production deliveries lands the first week of July. Then Q2 earnings in late July. That earnings call is where we get robo taxi unit economics, city-by-city color, Cybercab ramp numbers, and FSD take rates after the Europe and China launches. The quarters where the story shows up in the segments table are the quarters that stick. Somewhere in Q3, the odometer rolls over on a brand milestone: 10 million cumulative vehicles delivered. Real numbers do real work in headlines. This one lands while the robo taxi narrative is peaking. So, the annual shareholder meeting is on the table for Q3 as well, though I'd flag that last year it slipped to November. So, hold that date loosely. Whenever it lands, between a Gen 3 reveal window and whatever Elon wants to say about the corporate structure, it's appointment viewing this year. On the energy side, Mega 3 and Mega Block start production at the new Houston Megapack factory late this year. 5 megawatt-hours per unit, 28% more than Megapack 2 in the same footprint, out of a factory built for 50 gigawatt-hours a year. Energy is already Tesla's best-margin hardware business, and this is its next gear. And yes, the next-gen Roadster demo. It was supposed to be April 1st, then late spring, and now it's pointed at August. The car itself is reportedly ready. The SpaceX thruster package is the long pole. Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla's design chief, said in an interview just days ago that it's coming very soon and that it's, in his words, "going to blow people away." I'll believe the date when I'm watching the live stream. We've all been burned by Roadster dates already. But the design chief putting his own name on it is more than we've all had ever, honestly.
All right, let's talk the bear case and give it its full weight, because parts of it are right. The first objection is timelines, and the evidence is on this very table. The five robo taxi cities were first-half guidance in January, and now they've become "preparations underway" by April. The Roadster demo has missed three dates this year alone. Some Q4 rows, federal framework especially, depend on Washington, where Tesla controls nothing. If you scored the table strictly on hitting quarters, it will miss rows. The honest reframe pattern with Elon timelines is late but real. Robo taxi itself was years late and is now carrying paying passengers in three cities with nobody in the seat. Slipping a quarter changes the calendar, but it doesn't change the destination. The second objection is the merger itself. So, a 52% odds number means the market thinks this is a coin flip. Coin flips land on tails. The deal faces board committees on both sides. Shareholder votes, almost certainly leg over fairness, and a national security wrinkle. SpaceX is a major defense contractor, while Tesla runs major operations in China. Any review there takes months at best. And if the ratio favors SpaceX holders, Tesla investors could see this as dilution dressed up as destiny. Fortune ran the combined numbers and pointed out that the merged company would be worth $3.4 trillion, while SpaceX is still posting losses. Revenue up, profits negative. Merger, no cash flow on day one. Okay, well, all of this is very fair. My response is sizing, and I'll get to that in a second. The merger is the option on top of this table, and the table itself is the reason to own the stock. The 20-plus rows above it don't need the merger to matter. So, the third objection is that robo taxi is still small. The unsupervised fleet is in the dozens of vehicles per city, and one viral incident anywhere resets the regulatory mood. That is absolutely true, and it's the real risk I watch most. The counterweight is the miles: 11 billion cumulative FSD miles, headed past 17 billion by December, is a safety data set no competitor or regulator can wave away.
All right. So, how do I put this together as an investor? Think of the back half as two separate things you happen to get in one stock. Thing one is the table: 20-plus dated milestones. Each one either confirming or denting the execution story. That's the part you can actually track week by week. And it's the part where the news flow between now and December is unusually dense and tilted toward good news. Thing two is the merger option: a binary event with a window. I'm saying late July the earliest, that you can't handicap better than the insiders. Treat it like an option. Real value. No guarantee. The practical posture that follows: own the position for thing one. Size it so thing two going nowhere doesn't hurt you. And don't chase the rumor spikes. If the merger headline hits, the move happens in minutes. And the exchange ratio, that one number, tells you whether it's a good deal. And if it never comes, you're still holding the fullest milestone calendar this company has ever printed.
So, five things to actually watch between now and year-end. First, the Tesla app. Robo taxi going live in Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, or Vegas. It will show up there before any press release. Same launches are the cleanest execution signal we have. Second, European approval announcements and a China full approval window in Q3. Each country switches on another stream of recurring software revenue, and China is the biggest one on Earth. Third, the date SpaceX sets for its first earnings report. The moment that date publishes, you know the earliest possible merger announcement window, and the first lockup release lands the day after it. Fourth, the shareholder meeting materials when the proxy files. Gen 3 Optimus and anything about corporate structure will be telegraphed there first. Fifth, the Q2 earnings call in late July. Listen for robo taxi unit economics, FSD take rates in Europe and China. Those numbers turn this whole story from narrative into arithmetic.
So, the market just proved with the biggest IPO in history what it's willing to pay for an Elon execution at scale. Tesla is the other half of that machine, with a second-half calendar that reads like a greatest hits list, and possibly a merger that bolts the two halves together. The table's public. CERN and I will keep checking the boxes all year, and I'll cover every single one of these as they land. So, please subscribe if you want them the day they happen. I'm Herbert. See you in the next one.