How Elon Musk reportedly staked Tesla’s future on robotaxis against the advice of his own senior management team
- The Information reported Tesla CEO Elon Musk didn't feel launching a compact EV was worthy of the technological disruptor and opted for the CyberCab, despite an internal report warning the latter's sales could be so low it might not ever make money. “Ultimately I think Elon is just uninterested in making a [Volkswagen] Golf-type car," a source told the publication.
Elon Musk is known for being among the most demanding CEOs in the world, someone who aspires to nothing less than altering the course of history whether in business or politics.
So when executives in his Tesla leadership team lobbied to fill a much needed gap in its product range, he was anything but impressed, according to a new report in The Information. Greenlighting a compact EV that could sell for $25,000 was the obvious and predictable move any CEO of a car company would choose, unworthy of a technological disruptor like Tesla.
Musk reportedly ignored their collective counsel in favor of his preference to develop, for the same price, a fully automated robotaxi. While that has been widely speculated, the publication learned Musk had been explicitly warned the car might never be profitable, according to an analysis in an internal company report.
That could mean the last holdouts still believing Tesla will launch an all-new model later this year will be disappointed. Tesla is scheduled to hold a "Company Update" on Tuesday after it publishes first-quarter results, which are expected to show an even lower automotive margin that three months ago.
Sources told The Information Musk feels as if he's achieved his underlying goal of creating a thriving EV industry, and now finds the everyday routine mundane, in their words. Launching a small car doesn't live up to the promise of Tesla, maker of the iconoclastic Cybertruck.
“Ultimately I think Elon is just uninterested in making a [Volkswagen] Golf-type car,” one person familiar with the situation told The Information. “It just doesn’t wake him up in the morning. He was, ‘Let somebody else do it’.”
Musk counting on consumers to no longer desire owning a car
Musk's senior management team suggested both models could be built, using the same platform and same assembly method to save costs. But Musk reportedly wasn’t having it, and killed off the low-cost car popularly known as the “Model 2”.
The Tesla CEO had grown convinced his AI-powered CyberCab—which lacks any manual controls and only offers seating for two—would sell in the millions every year, mainly to fleets. Everyday people would eschew buying a car in favor of autonomous ride hailing.
His analysts, however, reportedly warned the total robotaxi market in the U.S. might top out at fewer than 1 million units annually: “There is ultimately a saturation of people who want to be ferried around in somebody else’s car.” Overseas markets couldn’t be counted on either since regulators might not permit cars without steering wheel or pedals. This left potential CyberCab sales in the hundreds of thousands.
The article reveals a CEO that seemingly doesn’t base decisions on bottom-up market analyses, but rather his own innate judgement. But that gut feeling, while serving him well in the past, also led to the Cybertruck, a love-it-or-hate-it pickup whose hefty price tag and limited appeal, now threatens to render it Tesla’s first bonafide bomb.
Musk still waiting for Tesla's 'ChatGPT moment'
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment from Fortune on the story. But the behavior is textbook Musk, who based his now-buried goal of selling 20 million EVs a year on nothing more than back-of-the-envelope math.
His gradual shift away from cars towards robots has been closely documented on Fortune, starting in January 2022. That was the first indication that his priorities began to shift little more than a year since first announcing plans for the Model 2.
“We have too much on our plate right now, frankly,” he told investors at the time, adding his team hadn’t even begun to work on its development. Instead, he started talking up the prospects of his Optimus robot before a prototype had even been shown to investors.
Musk was already convinced autonomous driving would be Tesla’s unique selling point, easily worth $50 billion in annual profits.
Yet once his rival Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, won plaudits Musk felt he as if deserved, he began promising a “ChatGPT moment” for Tesla. All of his cars would simultaneously download from the cloud instructions how to drive themselves, able to be five times as productive. It would be the single biggest one-day appreciation in asset value that history has ever recorded, he argued.
Musk's grand visions: from 20 million EVs sold a year to 100 million robots
Early last year, Musk danced around the issue, claiming a $25,000 vehicle is still on track for the latter half of 2025. Only later did it emerge he meant the CyberCab.
Musk then proclaimed any company not pivoting to AI wouldn’t survive, and weeks later Tesla had officially scrapped its 20 million EV annual sales target by 2030. Musk had cooked up this impossibly large number in his head, but thanks to his image as a miracle worker it nonetheless enjoyed credibility among his fanatic investors.
Instead, he fell in love with the idea that Tesla would instead one day sell 100 million Optimus droids annually—roughly the number of all new cars sold worldwide—for twice the $10,000 cost it would take to build each one. That would leave Tesla shareholders with $1 trillion in annual profits, or more than ten times what Apple earns in a year.
More importantly, humanity as a whole would benefit, Musk claimed, since his legions of robots would usher in an age where would mankind would want for nothing. “The future we’re headed for is one where you can literally just have anything you want,” he said last month.
What if people don’t want bold visions and grand promises of the future to be? What if they just wanted a small, affordable Tesla all along?
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com