Elon Musk Plays a Familiar Song: Robot Cars Are Coming
Tesla’s Robotaxi event excites faithful betting on the company’s future in robotics, while underwhelming those watching from afar
4 min
Elon Musk , dressed in a leather jacket in front of adoring fans, looked like an ageing rock star on stage playing one of his greatest hits.
Robot cars are coming.
Those fans at Thursday’s event swooned as they always have as he pushed out timelines for delivering robot cars and showed what those vehicles could look like. But outside the Hollywood-area venue, it wasn’t exactly clear that everyone believed his vision for the future is as near as he says.
Tesla stock fell almost 9% Friday amid investors frustrated with the continued lack of details for how the company is going to make the very complicated transition from maker of cars to maker of robots.
In essence, Thursday night’s much-hyped product reveal became something of a Rorschach test: Supporters, who point to everything Musk has accomplished with electric cars and other industries, heard a glorious future with driverless cars and humanoid robots. Critics—mindful of previous missed goals and maybe peeved by his contentious politics —saw more smoke and mirrors.
“Let’s not get nuanced here,” the chief executive told the crowd as they peppered Musk with questions, a reminder that even among the faithful, time is ticking for him to play some new notes. And to deliver a big hit.
What he did show was cool. A two-seat car with doors that swung upward to open, inspired, in part, by the sci-fi movie “Demolition Man.”
Though as Musk talked about the vehicle, it wasn’t clear he had settled on a formal name. On stage, he called it the “Cybercab,” while the company released details on its website calling it the “Robotaxi.”
Whatever the name, the straight lines of the small car resembled what might be the offspring of the Cybertruck , the pickup the company brought out last year after some delays, and the new Roadster that was first revealed in 2017 and has yet to come to market. Those delays are examples of “ Elon Standard Time ,” or his practice of setting a target only to miss it.
Robot cars are coming.
The Cybercab/Robotaxi reveal also included what Musk says will be Tesla’s autonomous van, an art deco-inspired vehicle that resembled a giant toaster with an interior meant to feel like a spaceship and enough room for 20 passengers.
Like the small car, the van lacked a steering wheel—the sort of doodads currently required under regulations, though exceptions can be granted. The car could begin production “probably” in 2026, Musk said. He didn’t even suggest when the van might come.
The nearest timeline was deploying fully self-driving cars, through the company’s current offerings, next year in Texas and California.
Musk has been predicting driverless cars being just around the corner for several years, including in 2016 when he said Tesla would demonstrate a car driving itself from Los Angeles to New York City in 2017. That didn’t happen.
In 2019, he said he expected his robot taxis would arrive in 2020 . That didn’t happen.
But Tesla has pushed the envelope with its driver-assist system that is essentially a glorified cruise control—adjusting speed, keeping within a lane and other manoeuvres—but can’t technically drive the car itself. Tesla says the person behind the wheel is responsible for everything, though some drivers grow overconfident in its true abilities and act like the car is autonomous.
Musk likes to talk about how Tesla vehicles are collecting valuable real-world data that is used to train its AI systems.
After building Tesla into the world’s leading electric-car company, Musk in recent years has tried to position its future on robotics, saying it is focused on solving self-driving technology. “That’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero,” Musk said in 2022.
Despite that rhetoric, Tesla is behind in deploying cars on roadways without drivers. Alphabet ’s Waymo has deployed fully autonomous vehicles in places such as San Francisco, where paying customers can take its vehicles around the city without anyone sitting behind the wheel.
On Thursday night, Tesla demonstrated 50 vehicles, including the new two-seater, driving autonomously on private property of the Warner Bros. studios where Musk held his party for investors and supporters.
Detractors were quick to pounce.
“After over 10 years of Full Self-Driving development, Tesla is limited to a 20-30 acre geofenced 5mph 1950s Disneyland ride on a preprogrammed, premapped and heavily rehearsed route with no traffic and no pedestrians,” Dan O’Dowd , a critic of Tesla and founder of a rival software company, said in a statement. “Tesla robotaxi is nothing more than the latest work of fiction to come out of the Warner Bros. Studio.”
But Thursday night wasn’t about impressing the O’Dowds of the world. And maybe not even those watching on the livestreams through Musk’s social-media platform X—which counted more than 9 million views by Friday evening.
The real target were the hundreds of attendees at the event who spent the evening riding around in the cars and posting fawning videos of their experiences on social media, in turn, helping the event go even more viral and generating even more attention for the idea that Tesla is paving the way for a robot future.
Robot cars are coming.
Not only did party attendees enjoy rides, but they were entertained by the latest versions of Tesla’s humanoid robots Optimus, which Musk has said could one day add $25 trillion to the company’s market value.
Former Tesla board member Steve Jurvetson posted a video of himself playing rock, paper, scissors with one of the robots. “Optimus just beat me in rock paper scissors!” he tweeted .
Others shared videos of robots pouring drinks and dancing.
“The markets won’t get what happened last night at @tesla ,” Robert Scoble, a blogger and former Microsoft tech evangelist, posted on X. “I couldn’t be more impressed. @elonmusk laid out a bunch for next decade. I have been to a lot of product launches and never have been to one like this.”
Some even compared the evening to when the late Steve Jobs unveiled Apple ’s first iPhone, marking the beginning of a new technology era. It was an idea that Musk was quick to endorse.
“Yes, this marks a fork in the road,” he tweeted afterward.
Robot cars are coming.
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Nvidia’s earnings will test Wall Street’s confidence in the AI boom.
3 min
Chip makers are fighting to assure investors that the artificial-intelligence boom is racing forward. Wall Street might not believe it until Nvidia’s NVDA -0.98%decrease; down pointing triangle Jensen Huang says so.
When Huang steps up to the mic for his company’s earnings call Wednesday, he will have the world’s attention. What he says about Nvidia’s present will preview the future of AI, dictate the path forward for a tech-crazed stock market and influence an American economy increasingly tethered to hopes that the boom won’t go bust.
The $5 trillion chip maker has provided the key building blocks for AI since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 set off a race for dominance among OpenAI, Anthropic and established Silicon Valley giants. Now, as Nvidia backstops sprawling data-center projects and an exotic money pipeline to boost chip demand, the company’s influence is arguably bigger than ever.
But there are signs of trouble ahead. Political pushback to AI is growing. A bond selloff propelled borrowing costs to their highest levels in years. The hyperscalers that include some of Nvidia’s key customers—once cash-printing machines—are relying more on debt. OpenAI recently told investors its revenue rose by a tepid 18% in the second quarter while its losses deepened.
Nvidia is increasingly stepping in to shore up potential weak points across the market. Earlier this month, the company teamed up with six of Wall Street’s biggest firms on a $500 billion AI-financing plan, pledging to backstop lending to customers that can’t afford its chips otherwise. The chip maker last week also took a stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which arranges power for data centers, and struck a $6 billion deal with startup Poolside aimed at developing a powerful open-weight AI model.
After watching shares in other chip makers and the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies swing wildly in recent months, Wall Street is hoping Nvidia can beat expectations—again. The countdown is on.
“It’s kind of becoming more and more like the World Cup final than the Super Bowl at this point,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management. “It’s just gotten to be that big.”
The company has smashed analysts’ earnings estimates for each of the 14 quarters since the AI boom kicked into high gear. Nvidia posted 210% annual growth in net income in its last three-month period, according to FactSet, making Wall Street’s 126% projection look pedestrian.
Expectations for a blowout second quarter have risen rapidly over the course of this year. All Nvidia will have to do to beat this target: outrun 95% annual earnings growth to more than $51.5 billion. Analysts project the chip maker will report record sales of $92 billion for the period, up from a forecast of $78 billion at the start of this year.
In July, big-tech earnings sparked volatility. Concerns about runaway capital spending spread across the sector after Alphabet’s and Tesla’s results, driving a $890 billion wipeout that contributed to the unwind of hedge fund Situational Awareness. Microsoft posted the largest one-day gain in market capitalization by any company, ever, after a quarter proving that it could still show investors the money. SpaceX rocketed higher after a record-breaking initial public offering, only to see $1 trillion in value evaporate.
Surging memory prices and borrowing costs have fueled fears that those and other companies will be unable to keep plowing more money into supplies including Nvidia chips. Shaia Hosseinzadeh, founder of OnyxPoint Global Management, has recently bought dips in AI-infrastructure stocks when Wall Street has strained to absorb massive debt issued by Silicon Valley.
“The macro data is really quite robust,” he said. “Of course, there’s a level at which everything breaks.”
Investors have kept pumping money into the AI trade despite concerns around chip consumers—and to the benefit of chip producers. That is why Nvidia’s outlook for semiconductor demand could send ripples through counterparts such as Micron Technology and Sandisk, developers of the data centers in which their chips reside, and a supply chain of power producers, contractors and other specialists that underpin the globe-spanning AI build-out.
“We joke internally that we’re all Nvidia analysts now,” said David Lefkowitz, head of U.S. equities at UBS Global Wealth Management.
The irony is that investors have tended to sell Nvidia stock immediately after blockbuster earnings, with shares falling each trading session after its four past quarterly reports. Some are betting that will be the case this time around, too.
The options market is pricing in a 5.3% swing, higher or lower, in Nvidia shares during the session following earnings, according to Option Research & Technology Services. That is higher than the 4.8% average move in Nvidia’s stock over the last 12 months after the company reports quarterly results.
In recent days, some of the most actively traded Nvidia options have been put contracts tied to the stock falling from its Friday value of $214.75 to $205 and $210 apiece, according to Cboe Global Markets data. Put options give the right to sell a stock by a set price and typically represent a bearish wager.
Many analysts remain optimistic. Frank Lee, global head of tech hardware and semiconductor research at HSBC Global Investment Research, recently raised his price target for Nvidia shares to $360 from $325, citing, among other things, Nvidia’s strategic partnerships with suppliers and its role as a top contributor to open-source AI.
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