If you solved self driving technology (which they havent) - a huge massive win on its own - and you are the only person who makes the product, why wouldnt you simply run a cybercab fleet yourself?
Companies love recurring revenue.
Here's how I see it: (market-talk, not personal judgement)
1. Musk is an excellent
marketing hype man, as demonstrated by his wealth (~$850 billion) & his company (Tesla has a ~$1.3 trillion market cap). His
actual cash is very little (which is why he had to get loans & equity from investors) and, like Bitcoin, the market value is built on
hype. But, hype sells!
2. He's a
visionary exaggerator who "silently" invests in long-term exponential systems, specifically:
Supercharger billing (I believe
every single US EV is now slated to come with his NACS system),
Starlink (worldwide cell & Internet), and
AI (primarily government contracts). He
open-sourced Tesla patents. Nobody else wanted to make electric cars & nobody else wanted to build & maintain a charging network, which meant that literally all of the other auto manufacturers shrugged & handed him an endless conveyor belt of charging dollars lol. There are now over
36,000 Tesla charging stalls worldwide &
less than a thousand Rivian Adventure Network chargers. They are also quietly rolling out utility-scale battery grids (MegaPacks & whatnot), which have the potential to be HUGE revenue sources in the future!
3. He sees the writing on the wall from China's EV explosion, which is why he pivoted Tesla to a robotics & AI company. I think it's odd they scrapped the S & X, but not the Cybertruck, which only sells ~1,500 units a month. But now they do spaceships, satellites, etc. The United States War Machine is an endless fountain of funding, which Musk is providing AI, Starlink, and shuttle rides for.
4. Self-driving IS coming, just not
soon. My friend takes Waymo self-driving cars all the time out west! It will be in development for a long, loooong time. The thing is, Tesla has what no one else has: millions of car's worth of data!
5. Robotics is building at insane speeds due to AI. I've gotten more into professional robotics over the last year. They are really,
really useful in specific use-case scenarios. Will we ever see a home unit that cooks & stuff? Maaaaybe lol. In theory, yes, but I think we'll see FSD before we see a useful humanoid home robot tbh.
6. Like everyone else, he's on a budget. He wanted to make the Model Y a new platform, but financial & investor constraints forced him to base it off the Model 3. Still a great car, but not quite his vision of what he
really wanted it to be. So looping back to #2, rather than denying users access to Autopilot due to the huge capital cost ($8,000), he now charges $99 a month, which makes it more accessible to people, which creates yet another endless revenue stream. Despite what you may read online, Tesla FSD is HUGELY helpful. Many people where I live commute into NYC for hours in self-driving mode & wouldn't trade it for the world! "Imperfect" & "WIP" does
not mean useless!
Right now:
1. Cybercabs & FSD are speculative
2. Robotics are speculative
3. Everything depends on Musk
He really crashed things financially for awhile there with his political antics, and yet he has managed to
double his money since then & bring his stock price back up, so I have NO IDEA how the future will go lol. Still waiting on my 500-mile Cybertruck & $20k Model 2 hahaha
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