The 2026 Sustainable Global Leaders Conference returns to the banks of Shanghai's Huangpu River from October 20 to 22. Nobel and Turing Award winners will take the stage to discuss the future and trends of technology, and the internet-famous professors who "rescue" people from anxiety and the rat race era, Macfarlane and Xiang Biao, will hold a live dialogue. Spots are limited, so act fast. Let us gather for a date with sustainability.

A dazzling launch event saw Musk re-release a car from nine years ago and show off a stunning flipping stunt, but what he truly wants is not to sell a large number of supercars, but to restore Tesla Motors (TSLA) cool black-tech halo, thereby laying the groundwork for a possible SpaceX merger. After watching the Tesla Roadster flip at the launch event, top American tech video blogger MKBHD (Marques Brownlee) wrote on X: They actually went on stage and announced that this brand-new designed, four-thousand-plus-pound car can flip. Is this a prank? He later put it more bluntly in a conversation with Tesla fans: "Neither you nor I will be able to buy this (flipping) car, so don't treat it as a product that will actually happen; the base version, the fan car, I think is possible." As a reservation holder, MKBHD is qualified to say this. He put down a fifty-thousand-dollar deposit for the Roadster back in 2018, and only canceled the order last year. At the time he publicly complained that Tesla had taken his fifty thousand dollars and delivered nothing for eight years. Of course, MKBHD is not short of money at all; the main reason he canceled was that he had fallen out with Musk, and the two unfollowed each other.

A car that can flip. It must be said that the on-site effect of this launch event was truly stunning. The car drove up a vertical and even inverted ramp, spun once in the air, and landed back on the ground. It must be pointed out that there was no human driver inside; it was operated by autonomous driving. This cool effect shocked the audience on site and immediately became a hot topic of discussion in global media and social media. In this respect, it fully achieved the cool tech halo effect Musk wanted.

Driving up a wall vertically and flipping are two completely different technologies. The reason it can drive up a wall is that a fan is installed under the car, around the rear diffuser area, which actively draws air out from under the car to create a low-pressure zone below, so the external atmospheric pressure presses the entire car onto the contact surface. Engineering lead Lars Moravy explained that this system can generate up to two Gs of suction, and that number happens to be the dividing line for whether inverted driving is possible: the car's own weight counts as one G, and once inverted, gravity wants to pull the car off the wall; with two Gs of suction, one G remains to hold it down. So driving upside down is not about speed, it is about pressure difference; in theory, the car would not fall even if it stopped there. This is not any kind of innovation. In the 1970 Can-Am unlimited challenge race, the Chaparral 2J used a fan to extract air and create downforce. In the 1978 F1 season, the Brabham team's BT46B won the Swedish Grand Prix with the same design and was then directly banned by F1. Tesla's difference is that electric vehicles have enough power budget to drive a high-power fan, while those race cars back then had to divert some output from the engine.

Flipping is another matter, relying on cold gas propulsion. Tesla engineering vice president Lars Moravy gave a technical explanation: the car has two carbon-fiber-wound pressure vessels containing about 250 kilograms, equivalent to 600 liters, of high-pressure air; ten nozzles are distributed under the body, on the sides, and at the rear, and according to Musk, the main thrust is at the rear while attitude-control nozzles are on both sides. The entire motion is controlled by Tesla-developed software. The maneuver called flipping works like this: the car travels at normal speed, underbody nozzles lift the car off the ground, side attitude-control nozzles push the body to complete a 360-degree rotation in the air, and before landing, downward-facing nozzles fire to cushion the impact; the whole process takes about three seconds. In another arch-bridge demonstration, the car jumped about 68 feet, with a maximum landing load of 3.2 Gs. The fundamental difference between cold gas propulsion and rockets lies here: rockets rely on fuel combustion to produce high-temperature, high-speed exhaust gas, with specific impulse usually above three hundred seconds; cold gas propulsion simply releases compressed air and generates thrust through momentum exchange, with a specific impulse of about seventy seconds, so the velocity increment obtained from the same kilogram of propellant is much smaller. This explains why 600 liters of air is only enough to last three seconds; it is not conservative design, but a physical limit. The difficulty in turning this thing into a car that can be sold is not whether it can spray, but those two pressure vessels. Every available cavity in the car is stuffed with high-pressure gas cylinders, and the safety standards for COPVs under collision, fatigue, and long-term storage conditions belong to a different system from the crash test regulations of a sports car. SpaceX has had two rocket explosion accidents in its history related to this. In a private sports car driving on public roads and unknown road conditions, stuffing it full of COPVs sounds nerve-wracking.

Waiting a full 11 years. Setting aside the cool stunts, the new Roadster comes in three tiers, all with 300 miles (about 483 kilometers) of range and a top speed above 230 miles per hour (about 370 kilometers per hour). The Performance version is a two-seater with active aerodynamics and an adsorption system, and Tesla positions it as road-legal; the Thrust version is a two-seater with cold gas nozzles at the rear and a zero-to-sixty acceleration within one second, positioned as track-legal. The flipping Rocket version has only one seat and ten nozzles, and Tesla says this tier is invitation-only. MKBHD's claim that this technology cannot be mass-produced may not be accurate. The accurate statement is that the version capable of flipping is not a car meant to be driven, but an exhibit meant to show off stunts.

The new Roadster was originally unveiled in November 2017, and I attended the Los Angeles launch event at the time, experiencing Musk's innovative idol charisma on site. Back then, the deposit for the regular version was 50,000 dollars, and there was also a 250,000-dollar Founders Series requiring full prepayment, with production promised for 2020. But Musk never delivered this car. A full nine years have passed, during which it was delayed at least eight times, and each time he said technical problems were being solved, and after a while he would give fans some new hope. The version re-released last night has a promised delivery time of 2028. In other words, counting from the originally promised 2020 production start, buyers still have to wait another two years, for a total of 11 years. The process for reopening reservations this time is to first charge 5,000 dollars to a credit card; Tesla says this amount is fully refundable, and then the customer has ten days to pay the remaining 45,000 dollars, and the reservation is only established once the funds arrive. And the new car still has not announced a price to this day.

Missing deadlines is also the norm for Tesla. The Roadster was announced back then alongside the Semi truck prototype launch, and the Semi itself was delayed for years before small-volume deliveries; the Cybertruck waited until the end of 2023 to be delivered after the 2019 launch event where the glass was smashed, and its scale has long been far below expectations; the mass-production timing of the Cybercab has likewise been repeatedly revised. This pattern is quite stable: first use a visually striking demonstration to lock in attention and deposits, then spend several years digesting the gap between promise and reality. Last night's flip was the most exaggerated one in this series of missed deadlines. The technical completeness did exceed outside expectations, but from a demonstration to a car that can be sold to ordinary people, there still lie crash tests, vehicle certification, pressure vessel safety standards, and a price that has still not been announced.

A cool show car that builds halo. Tesla's third-quarter earnings are scheduled for October 21, and before this launch event, Tesla's stock had already fallen for three consecutive days, with a year-to-date decline of 19.4%. Last Friday, Tesla's premarket stock once rose more than 5%, touching 381.15 dollars. Then it gave all of that back. At the close that day, Tesla reported 354.72 dollars, down 2.13%, with about 62 million shares traded, while average volume was only 37.7 million shares. In other words, after a spike at the open, it was sold off all the way and closed near the lowest point of the day, falling on heavy volume. A launch event cannot buy a day of sentiment repair, and this is not the first time for Tesla. Of course, the broader market was also bad that day, with the S&P 500 down about 1.1%, the Nasdaq down 2.15%, and the entire electric vehicle sector weakening. So it is normal that the Roadster cannot change Tesla's trajectory. That day SpaceX closed at 146.03 dollars, down 1.74%. It seems institutional investors are much calmer than retail investors. Gene Munster believes this launch was a display of engineering strength, does not constitute a breakthrough for the stock price, and has no economic value for Tesla.

However, this type of model has a special term in the industry: halo car, meaning its job is not to make money, but to prove technical capability for the entire brand and create a cool halo. The new Roadster is expected to sell only in the thousands, and for a company with annual revenue in the hundreds of billions of dollars, that scale has almost zero impact on the financial statements. But Tesla needs this cool Roadster launch event: electric vehicle sales growth is slowing, the FSD narrative has been told for years and has only just begun to land and advance, and the progress of humanoid robots is also being repeatedly questioned; at this time Musk needs to bring out a car that can flip in the air, sending the message that we still have a lot of black tech. Interestingly, the original Roadster in 2008 was Tesla's first product, with the task of proving that electric cars did not have to be ugly or hard to drive; that car was the reason this company survived. And Musk's positioning for the 2026 generation is also very blunt: it is the best of the last batch of human-driven cars. The implication of this statement is that Tesla's future is not in this car.

The real story is the merger. Perhaps the greatest significance of this launch event is not Tesla at all, but a future merger with SpaceX. The Roadster launch event was held outside Waco, Texas, right next to SpaceX's rocket testing base, and the car itself was co-developed with SpaceX; both the venue and the partner carry additional meaning at this current point in time. Barclays analyst Dan Levy just issued a report on October 14 judging that a formal merger between Tesla and SpaceX could be announced before Tesla's annual shareholders meeting. According to regulations, this annual meeting must be held before December 6. It should be noted that Levy's basis was public statements by management, and the report did not mention that investment banks had been hired, a special board committee had been formed, or substantive negotiations were underway. The scale of this deal is as follows: SpaceX has a market value of about 2.07 trillion dollars, Tesla about 1.45 trillion dollars, and the combined entity would be close to 3.5 trillion. Levy estimates the exchange ratio at about 0.7 SpaceX shares per Tesla share; that is, under this plan SpaceX would effectively acquire Tesla. SpaceX only listed on the Nasdaq this year under the ticker SPCX, and its market value is already more than forty percent higher than Tesla's. A rocket company that has never delivered a single consumer product has a market value exceeding that of the world's most valuable automaker, which has sold millions of cars. This inversion itself explains why last night's launch event had to be held next to the rocket test site. Right now it is Tesla that needs SpaceX's halo.

Levy believes the synergy of SpaceX acquiring Tesla is not financial, but vertical integration of the industrial chain: holding the supply chain of chips, launch, and factories in one hand, and he calls the Terafab chip plant jointly built by the two companies a key driver. He also acknowledges that Musk getting approval from both boards is a complicated situation, especially at Tesla, where he does not have an absolute voting advantage. Before the launch event, prediction markets gave only about a 24% probability of a formal merger announcement before December 31; after the launch event, overnight, that probability jumped to 56%, nearly doubling. In other words, what the market read from this car is not how many sports cars Tesla will sell, but how deeply the two companies' technology and personnel have already cooperated. Well-known longtime Tesla bull analyst Dan Ives confirms this: this launch made the relationship between Tesla and SpaceX more concrete and tangible. And investor Ross Gerber put it even more bluntly, saying the merger has become obvious.

Making a big news splash is the goal. The Roadster was delayed for nine years, and now the team finally has something to show. Musk had previously said this would be the most exciting demonstration of any product ever, whether it succeeded or not. After the launch event, his assessment was that he had never seen anything like it. For Musk, making a big news splash is itself the goal. Explaining this launch event simply as an attempt to boost the stock price actually underestimates him. What he wants is for everyone to reconfirm one thing: no second company dares to throw a car into the air and flip it at a launch event; only Tesla and Musk can do it. By that standard, last night was a complete success. Trump posted that he was very happy for Musk and Tesla, calling the car quite stunning; Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent congratulations; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wrote only one word: Wow. And the most interesting one came from OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, Musk's nemesis. He also put down a fifty-thousand-dollar deposit for the Roadster in 2018, and when he wanted a refund in 2025, he found the email bounced, so he complained about Tesla on X. Musk first cursed, "You stole a nonprofit organization," and then refunded him the fifty thousand dollars. But after watching the new Roadster flip, Altman praised on X: "The new Roadster looks quite stunning, good job Musk." A person who hates Musk the most publicly applauded a car that can flip. That is probably the entire effect this launch event wanted.