Tesla announced a new version of its full self-driving supervised technology Tuesday morning, but investors are looking for something bigger.
Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s company shared a teaser clip featuring a logo-emblazoned, spinning component that could be anything from a wheel cover to a fan or turbine. The clip ended with the numbers “10/7,” indicating Tuesday’s date for the reveal.
Tesla posted a second clip to X on Sunday showing the outline of a vehicle’s headlights in the dark.
Shares climbed 5% Monday as the buzz grew online over what the announcement would be.
The big reveal could be the long-awaited lower-cost model, or the next-generation Roadster that Musk has promised for years.
Or something else.
The company hasn’t released a new model vehicle for sale since it began shipping the Cybertruck, its angular unpainted steel pickup, in late 2023.
Musk originally promoted the Cybertruck at an “unveiling” event in 2019, where his demo went awry and he shattered a window. The Cybertuck never achieved the level of popularity of Tesla’s Model 3 sedan or Model Y SUVs and has been the subject of at least eight voluntary recalls in the U.S.
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With its auto sales in a multi-quarter slump, Tesla has been trying to shift investor attention to its future as a robotics and self-driving car business.
The slump has resulted, in part, from a consumer backlash against Musk, his endorsements of far-right political parties and figures, and his incendiary political rhetoric. But it’s also due to an aging lineup and increased competition from companies including Volkswagen and BYD.
In mid-October of last year, Tesla held its invitation-only, “We, Robot” event in Hollywood, where it showed off a low, two-seater Cybercab concept with no steering wheels or pedals. Musk said the driverless car would cost about $30,000.
As of the company’s second-quarter earnings call, it was not yet in production.
At an event in late 2017, Musk promised Tesla would make a next-generation Roadster, but the vehicle has never moved into production. In 2021, Musk promised the Roadster would be able to “fly,” and last year he said the elusive sports car was being redesigned in collaboration with SpaceX, his aerospace and defense contractor.
Musk has been promising to turn existing Tesla EVs into robotaxis with a software update for about a decade.
The company currently has human safety drivers in its Robotaxi-branded test and fleet vehicles, unlike robotaxi rivals like Alphabet’s Waymo and Baidu’s Apollo Go.
In the realm of humanoid robots, Musk has said Tesla’s Optimus robots will be capable of factory work or babysitting your kids, but they’ve yet to hit the market. Meanwhile, competitors like Agility Robotics and Unitree are already selling bipedal, humanoid robots.
Following a brutal first quarter that saw Tesla lose 36% of its value, the stock has been on a tear, jumping 40% in the third quarter. It’s now up 12% for the year. That stock price increase was aided by Musk, who purchased about $1 billion of Tesla stock himself in mid-September.
Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said Tuesday that while demand for computing power is “tremendous,” the production of artificial intelligence data centers will eventually top out.
“I’m sure at some point there’ll be too many of these things built, but we don’t see any signs of that,” Dell said on “Closing Bell: Overtime.”
The hardware maker’s server networking business grew 58% last year and was up 69% last quarter, Dell said. As large language models have evolved to more multimodal and multi-agent systems, the demand for AI processing power and capacity has continued to be strong.
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Dell’s AI servers are powered by Nvidia‘s Blackwell Ultra chips. The company then sells its devices to customers like cloud service provider CoreWeave and xAI, Elon Musk’s startup.
Dell shares rose over 3% Tuesday after increasing its expected long-term revenue and profit growth in an analyst meeting.
The computer maker raised its expected annual revenue growth to 7% to 9%, up from its previous target of 3% to 4%, with diluted earnings per share now expected to be 15% higher, up from its previous 8% target.
The company reported strong second-quarter earnings in August, and said it planned to ship $20 billion worth of AI servers in fiscal 2026. That is double what it sold last year.
The Motion Picture Association on Monday urged OpenAI to “take immediate and decisive action” against its new video creation model Sora 2, which is being used to produce content that it says is infringing on copyrighted media.
Following the Sora app’s rollout last week, users have been swarming the platform with AI-generated clips featuring characters from popular shows and brands.
“Since Sora 2’s release, videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media,” MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clarified in a blog post that the company will give rightsholders “more granular control” over how their characters are used.
But Rivkin said that OpenAI “must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service,” and that “well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Concerns erupted immediately after Sora videos were created last week featuring everything from James Bond playing poker with Altman to body cam footage of cartoon character Mario evading the police.
Although OpenAI previously held an opt-out system, which placed the burden on studios to request that characters not appear on Sora, Altman’s follow-up blog post said the platform was changing to an opt-in model, suggesting that Sora would not allow the usage of copyrighted characters without permission.
However, Altman noted that the company may not be able to prevent all IP from being misused.
“There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration,” Altman wrote.
Copyright concerns have emerged as a major issue during the generative AI boom.
Disney and Universal sued AI image creator Midjourney in June, alleging that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from their films and disregarded requests to stop. Disney also sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Character.AI in September, warning the company to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.
Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo said that valuations for artificial intelligence companies are “at a bubble,” comparing it to the dotcom era.
But one key difference in the market now, he said, is that large companies with “healthy balance sheets” are financing AI businesses.
Bravo’s private equity firm boasts more than $181 billion in assets under management as of June, and focuses on buying and selling enterprise tech companies, with a significant chunk of its portfolio invested in cybersecurity.
Bravo told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday that investors can’t value a $50 million annual recurring revenue company at $10 billion.
“That company is going to have to produce a billion dollars in free cash flow to double an investor’s money, ultimately,” he said. “Even if the product is right, even if the market’s right, that’s a tall order, managerially.”
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OpenAI recently finalized a secondary share sale that would value the ChatGPT-maker at $500 billion. The company is projected to make $13 billion in revenue for 2025.
Nvidia recently said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, in part, to help the ChatGPT maker lease its chips and build out supercomputing facilities in the coming years.
Other public companies have soared on AI promises, with Palantir’s market cap climbing to $437 billion, putting it among the 20 most valuable publicly traded companies in the U.S., and AppLovin now worth $213 billion.
Even early-stage valuations are massive in AI, with Thinking Machines Lab notching a $12 billion valuation on a $2 billion seed round.
Despite the inflated numbers, Bravo emphasized that there’s a “big difference” between the dotcom collapse and the current landscape of AI.
“Now you have some really big companies and some big balance sheets and healthy balance sheets financing this activity, which is different than what happened roughly 25 years ago,” he said.