Tesla CEO Elon Musk ratcheted the hyperbole to new levels on the company’s latest earnings call, talking up the earnings potential of new projects like the Optimus robot and Cybercab autonomous car, even as earnings on the core automotive business delivered a “significant” miss on analysts' expectations.
Tesla’s quarterly discussions with business analysts have rarely followed the patten of other listed automotive companies', with Musk preferring to make often-unfounded predictions about future launches and milestones rather than give colour to the current balance-sheet numbers.
The policy has served him well, with investors taking his word for it and pushing Tesla to a $1.28 trillion (£1.0tn) valuation.
But the call on 29 January pushed Musk’s fanciful depictions of vast future profit pools generated by Tesla-engineered creations to new heights.
He predicted the humanoid Optimus “will be overwhelmingly the value of the company” and stated revenue from sales could “north of $10 trillion”.
To put that into context, Tesla's revenue from selling electric cars in 2024 was $77 billion (£62bn), down 6% on the year before.
Musk also announced the launch of "unsupervised FSD". Tesla’s current Full Self Driving system has always required the driver to pay attention, but Musk promised this system would be able take control in California and “many regions of the US” by the end of this year.
A robotaxi running the system would put onto a ride-hailing fleet in the Texas city of Austin in June, he said.
The claims then escalated from there: “I expect us to be operating unsupervised activity with our internal fleet in several cities by the end of the year. Then it's probably next year when people are able to add or subtract their car from the fleet."
This is a huge step, given that it shifts the burden of responsibility for any crashes from the driver onto Tesla, which still relies on cameras and its own AI-informed software stack to locate and direct the car.
The company refuses to introduce redundancy in the form of other sensors such as lidar (essentially 3D cameras) or even radar – technology that everyone else working in the space says is essential for full autonomy, even for brief periods on the highway.
Musk may feel he has protection from official National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) guidelines on self-driving vehicles, thanks to his relationship with new US president Donald Trump (not mentioned on the call), but he won’t from the insurance industry.
Oddly, perhaps, Musk didn’t push autonomous vehicles as Tesla’s big earnings-generator, as he has done in the past. In 2023, for example, he declared “the value of the company is primarily on the basis of autonomy” – something he now says about Optimus.
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