Elon Musk is keeping investors’ dreams of a Tesla robotaxi alive
By just about every measure, Tesla’s first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday was dreary. The company missed estimates on the top and bottom lines. Revenue fell by 9% year over year, the worst decline since 2012. Auto sales dropped 13% from the same period in 2023. Free cash flow turned negative.
But CEO Elon Musk downplayed most of that and suggested investors focus their attention elsewhere.
Rather than dwell on quarterly financials or the massive restructuring announced last week, Musk reiterated his vision of Tesla as a company that’s building artificial intelligence software to turn existing cars into self-driving vehicles, dedicated robotaxis that will make money for their owners and a driverless transportation network.
This is the Tesla Musk is selling to Wall Street, and he’s telling anyone with doubts to stay away.
“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla’s going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company,” Musk said on the earnings call. He added, “We will, and we are.”
Tesla shares soared 13% in extended trading Tuesday after the earnings report, despite the disappointing results. Some of the optimism was tied to Tesla’s announced plans to start production of new affordable electric vehicle models in “early 2025, if not late this year.”
The stock’s rally picked up steam during the earnings call as Musk veered to the future. He casually mentioned that the company’s robotaxi, which he has long said is coming, will be called the CyberCab. In a shareholder deck that Tesla published before the call, the company featured a “preview of ride-hailing in the Tesla app.”
Musk also talked up a driverless network that’s like Uber with Tesla autonomous vehicles.
“When the car is not moving,” Musk said, “there’s potential to actually run distributed inference,” through the hardware that’s in the cars.
Musk has been making these kinds of pronouncements for years.
In 2015, Musk told shareholders that Tesla cars would achieve “full autonomy” within three years. They didn’t. In 2016, Musk said a Tesla car would be able to make a cross-country drive without requiring any human intervention before the end of 2017. That hasn’t happened either.
And in 2019, on a call with institutional investors that would help him raise more than $2 billion, Musk said Tesla would have 1 million robotaxi-ready vehicles on the road in 2020, able to complete 100 hours of driving work per week each, making money for their owners.
The robotaxis would make Tesla a company worth $500 billion, he said at that time. Tesla’s market cap is around that mark now and even topped $1 trillion in 2021, but the company has never managed to deliver on its driverless promises.
NBC News reported recently that the company hasn’t even sought permits that would allow it to test and operate robotaxis in three states, including California and Nevada, where it employs thousands of people.
Separately, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has filed a legal complaint against Tesla, saying it engaged in false advertising and marketing concerning its driver assistance systems — Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems. Autopilot is the standard, and FSD costs $99 per month or $8,000 upfront. Both require human drivers at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time. Tesla is defending itself in court against the accusations.
‘More valuable than everything else’
On the earnings call, Musk said he believes FSD will soon be ready to expand geographically to China pending regulatory approval. He didn’t mention the California regulator’s lawsuit.
Musk said people who haven’t tried Tesla’s latest FSD updates “really don’t understand what’s going on.”
His bluster isn’t limited to cars.
At an AI Day in August 2021, Musk said Tesla would build a humanoid robot, now known as Optimus. The company didn’t have a hardware prototype to show at the time, so an actor dressed in a spandex bodysuit danced onstage in its place. In 2022, Tesla unveiled its hardware prototype of Optimus.
On Tuesday, Musk said Optimus is already capable of doing some unspecified factory tasks.
A mockup of Tesla Inc.’s planned humanoid robot Optimus on display during the Seoul Mobility Show in Goyang, South Korea, on Thursday, March 30, 2023. The motor show will continue through April 9. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“We may be able to sell it externally by the end of next year,” he said. “Optimus will be more valuable than everything else combined because if you’ve got a sentient humanoid robot that is able to navigate reality and do tasks at request, there is no meaningful limit to the size of the economy.”
Whether all of these capital-intensive and far-out projects belong at Tesla is a question that many investors and analysts are asking.
Musk owns a 20.5% stake in Tesla, more than 715 million shares, as of March 31, according to the company’s recent proxy filing. He’s used around 238.4 million of those shares as collateral to secure personal debt. In January, he began angling for even more control of Tesla.
“I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control,” he wrote in a post on X. “Enough to be influential, but not so much that I can’t be overturned.”
Musk created a new startup, xAI, to develop AI products to rival those from Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Before starting xAI, he was already serving as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and was technology chief at X, which he owns. He’s also the founder of brain computer interface company Neuralink and tunneling venture The Boring Co.
Alex Potter, an analyst at Piper Sandler, asked Musk on the earnings call if he’d “come up with any mechanism” to ensure he would have the requisite level of voting control at Tesla because, if not, “the core part of the thesis could be at risk.”
“No matter what, even if I got kidnapped by aliens tomorrow, Tesla will solve autonomy, maybe a little slower but it would solve autonomy for vehicles at least,” Musk said. “I don’t know if it would win with respect to Optimus, or with respect to future products, but there’s enough momentum for Tesla to solve autonomy, even if I disappeared, for vehicles.”
But he was quick to tell investors that the company needs him to achieve his loftiest goals.
“If we have a super sentient humanoid robot that can follow you indoors, and that you can’t escape, we’re talking Terminator-level risk yeah I’d be uncomfortable if there’s not some meaningful level of influence over how that is deployed,” he said.
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports
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