Elon Musk spent Sunday on the Chappelle backlash, a hunt for fairness in the Russell Brand case and a wave of Starlink and Robotaxi news, then closed the day by telling Cybertruck buyers many of them will get deposits back. This edition covers 7:01 a.m. PST Sunday, Nov. 8, to 7:01 a.m. PST Monday, Nov. 9. It quotes his posts with a link to each, pairs claims with other sources where the desk found them, and follows Jacob and Isaac’s topic order, checked Monday against their Oct. 31 episode timestamps (episode index) and their Nov. 6 episode (YouTube); Tesla leads today because his Cybertruck post drew the widest news coverage of the day. The desk found no new interview or public appearance in the window; the latest remains his Nov. 6 Baron conference chat. Video follows at the end.

Highlights. Tesla will shut the Cybertruck line in about eight months and must return deposits to “a lot of people,” he wrote (). He promised Grok Bot users a “dramatic improvement” by Monday after a round table with the engineering team (). And he welcomed Qualcomm’s role in Starlink Mobile’s 5G build ().

Topic by topic

1. Tesla. Cybertruck gets its own deep dive below. Elsewhere, he reposted @robotaxi’s announcement “Robotaxi available in San Antonio starting tomorrow, 5am” () and, Monday morning, “Bigger Austin service area now live” (). Electrek counts San Antonio as the eighth Robotaxi city, with a launch map near 274 square miles, and notes that an independent tracker had logged no Robotaxi there by Monday morning (Electrek). TeslaNorth, citing Robotaxi Tracker’s estimate, puts Austin at about 442 square miles, up from roughly 272 (TeslaNorth). Asked by @OwenSparks why Tesla does not just build more factory space, he replied, “Prototypes are trivial by comparison” to a high-volume factory (; ). He also reposted @JohnStossel’s claim that the U.S. government built 400 electric vehicles in five years while Tesla built 35,000 (), which the desk did not verify.

2. SpaceX and Starlink. Besides the Qualcomm quote, he wrote “Starlink saves lives” over @cb_doge’s clip of Starlink helping five people stranded after their SUV broke down about 15 km from a village in Kazakhstan’s snowy mountains (; ), about 2.4 million views. He reposted @cb_doge on a Fiji village’s first reliable internet () and on Brussels Airlines’ first Starlink flight to Copenhagen (); the airline’s own release confirms flight SN2257 on Nov. 9 with free Wi-Fi and a fleet rollout (Brussels Airlines). Answering a question about why Starship needs 33 engines, he wrote, “33 engines means we can lose a few and still complete the mission” (; ). He reposted a clip of himself on asteroid defense in which he says Earth has no current ability to stop asteroids and that Starship would give “some ability” (; ). On Qualcomm, CNBC reports financial terms stayed undisclosed (CNBC).

3. X. The 14.7-million-view post wrote “Chinese 𝕏 is 牛逼” (slang that roughly means awesome or great) (). When @PlanetOfMemes replied “I prefer Japanese 𝕏,” he answered “Also great” (; ), and he answered a joke about meeting his Chinese double with “💯😂” (). Over @IterIntellectus’s post that it “will never not be funny how much time elon spends working as a customer service agent for his companies,” he wrote “I care” (; ), about 3.2 million views.

4. Grok Bot and xAI. After the round table post, TeslaNorth reports that Marco d’Amore quoted it and said the team had heard feedback on usage limits and model routing, with harness and routine changes to follow over coming weeks; no new allowance, reset or price change appeared (TeslaNorth). FourWeekMBA lists xAI’s plans as Premium at $30, Super at $100 with “3.5x Premium usage” and Ultra at $200 with “12x Premium usage” (FourWeekMBA). He reposted @cb_doge’s chart of Similarweb estimates that the Grok app drew 93,386,567 monthly active users and 12,731,752 downloads in October, up 3.32% and 3.57% on September (; FourWeekMBA). Under a @VladTheInflator post that held only a link, Musk wrote “@grok is this true?” (), then reposted Grok’s reply, which rated the claim “Mostly accurate per historical records” (). The desk could not read the claim, which sat behind that link, and did not check the answer.

5. AI and compute. He quoted a post that relays a secondhand report that Larry Page puts the share of computing that will move to orbit at “five nines,” or 99.999%, with “Larry Page has made many accurate predictions and this is one of them” (; ); the post says its source heard it secondhand. Replying to a clip of Chamath Palihapitiya saying SpaceX could end its Anthropic compute deal on 90 days’ notice and reprice it at two to three times, Musk wrote, “It works both ways, of course. If compute becomes plentiful and cheap, SpaceX revenue will drop,” adding “No crying in the casino for either party” (; ); Teslarati covers the exchange (Teslarati). On Nvidia, he wrote “I agree” over Maguire’s five points, which call Huang “one of the greatest entrepreneurs of this generation” who “did something incredibly dumb” with effects “bad for America,” yet “irreplaceable for America’s AI leadership” (; ). Nvidia’s board opened an independent investigation after reports of a close relationship between Huang and Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive whom the New York Times reported US authorities have investigated; Huang told staff, “I was unfaithful to my wife,” and Beijing called the spy claim “pure fabrication and slander” (AAP/Reuters). He also wrote “True” under a post by @yishan about making a AAA game with Opus 5.5 ().

6. U.S. politics. Reacting to a clip in which, per the poster, Texas Democrat Gene Wu says his party’s new majority wants Musk investigated and prosecuted (“The word is PROSECUTE”), he wrote “Gene Wu is the Beria of Texas” (; ), about 243,000 views. The poster, a partisan account, writes that Wu named no specific illegality; the desk found no independent report of Wu’s remarks, though the Hindustan Times, republishing the Wall Street Journal, covered Texas Democrats’ plans to rein in his companies (Hindustan Times). He answered a reply that “Donating to R’s and working with Trump ARE the crimes” with “Exactly” (). He wrote “Interesting” over a post on a Times Square march under “No Schumer, No Jeffries” signs after Democrats won both chambers (; ), and reposted David Sacks’s view that Republicans lost the midterms because of the war and its economic effects (). He answered “Yeah” to @BillyM2k’s post telling the left to stop celebrating murder ().

7. Europe and the world. At 11:25 p.m. PT Sunday he replied “Unjust” to @ABridgen’s question whether Britain would see “two tier justice” in Russell Brand’s sentencing (; ). Page Six reports that Brand received 10 years and six months on Monday morning for sexual offences, from Justice Bennathan at Southwark Crown Court (Page Six); so Musk’s post came before the sentence, and Page Six, a tabloid, frames it as a defense of Brand (Page Six). He also reposted several posts that tie the Brand case to the Epstein files or to grooming-gang prosecutions (; ; ), including one saying police sent a survivor back to the men she had fled (); the desk did not verify those claims. After the Kraków square shooting, he reposted posts that call the gunman a leftist and criticize outlets for calling him far right (; ; ). Per AP and AFP summaries the desk could reach only through search excerpts, Poland’s interior minister first cited fascination with far-right ideology and later called those leads unproven, and prosecutors said by Monday that no evidence firmly establishes an ideological motive (AP; AFP).

8. Culture and jokes. Musk wrote “Shame, shame, shame on Chappelle” over @bennyjohnson’s post (), about 6.1 million views, then “Dave Chappelle is cruel” over a @ClownWorld clip () and “Chappelle is just not funny anymore” over a post by an attendee (), and he reposted five more posts on the same subject. Variety quotes Chappelle at Madison Square Garden: “Ever since that guy Charlie Kirk got murdered, and I shouldn’t say this publicly, but I feel better” (Variety). Erika Kirk called laughter at political assassination “beyond disgusting” without naming him (Variety). The show drew advertising as phone-free, so the clip’s origin stays unclear, and it omits the surrounding routine; IBTimes UK reports that Chappelle had not responded publicly (IBTimes UK). Some reposts claim fuller context; the desk could not verify them.

Deep dive: Tesla closes the Cybertruck line and returns deposits

The sequence ran over four days. Reuters dates Musk’s announcement that Tesla would wind down Cybertruck production in Texas by mid-2027 to make room for Cybercab to the previous Friday (Reuters via Investing.com); CBS quotes the aim as to “make room for increased Cybercab production” (CBS News). On Saturday he wrote that the order backlog stood “far more than we can make before dismantling the line for Cybercab expansion around June/July next year” and that Tesla would add an extra shift (). On Sunday night he went further: some buyers will get deposits back ().

He also rejected the explanation he said legacy media gave: “This is not a case of Cybertruck being unprofitable, as has been misreported by legacy media, but rather that the opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck is vastly outweighed by the value of incremental Cybercab production” (). Tesla does not break out Cybertruck sales or profit, so the desk cannot test either claim; TechCrunch notes that industry estimates put total sales near 71,000 since late 2023, against Musk’s earlier forecast of 250,000 a year and 1 million reservations (TechCrunch). Reuters cites Kelley Blue Book data showing U.S. Cybertruck sales fell 48% to 20,237 last year (Reuters via Investing.com).

The tension: demand that “far exceeds” production sits beside sales far below the old forecasts. TechCrunch suggests a final scarcity bump could follow the shutdown news but would not restore the old projections (TechCrunch). Analyst Dan Ives told CBS the “writing was on the wall” given the truck’s price and low demand, and that ending it frees Musk to focus on robots and robotaxis (CBS News). The Next Web and StockAnalysis both note Musk gave no count of refunds, no money total and no rule for which buyers keep a truck (The Next Web; StockAnalysis). The post quoted @jamesdouma’s photo post, which says “cars are going to become robots, their forms and functions will change” and urges buyers to “Get it while you can” ().