You might wonder why he would have bothered.
For a decade or more, Tesla boss Elon Musk has captivated a generation of technology enthusiasts with his outstanding vision for a new world order, at least when it came to electric vehicles, kicking fossil fuels out of the grid and the world’s transport systems.
These days, Musk appears to have a different day job. The hero of the movement seeking to dethrone the trillion dollar fossil fuel industries has morphed into a right wing political agitator and conspiracy theorist. His X account last week had a picture of him wearing a Donald Trump MAGA (Make America Great Again) cap. It’s now the Starlink rocket.
There are a bunch of theories about why Musk has nailed his colours to the mast of a techno-phobe like Trump, and social media speculation has run wild, some even citing mooted links with Russian oligarchs.
No one knows, of course, but eyes were raised when Musk told the right wing commentator Tucker Carlson in an interview last week: “I’m fucked. If he (Trump) loses, I’m fucked.”
Musk is reportedly handing out tens of millions of dollars into the Trump campaign via a super-pac, setting up a special advisory team and even contemplating door-knocking in one of the key battleground states.
Musk on Friday (Australia time) was asking the world to trust him again. Or at least the world of the hyper-aggressive tech-bro culture. OK, let’s go to Mars. First stop, a robo-taxi, or robo-cab. Second stop, the Optimus robot. How about a robot-van. Trust me, they’re autonomous.
Tesla’s “We, Robot” presentation at a Hollywood studio got off to a fashionably late start, apparently due to a health issue in the crowd. It didn’t slow down Musk’s relentless tweeting in support of Trump while he was waiting.
When it did get going, it pretty quickly fell flat. Musk’s special presentation days are usually long on hype and visuals, but they are generally accompanied by enough useful information to get some people inspired, and others to re-crunch their valuation models on Tesla stock, mostly in favour of an upgrade. This time, the visuals were there, but no detail.
“Is that it?” wrote Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas, in a report that shared equal amounts of incredulity and disappointment.
Jonas, and other analysts, had been anticipating a lot of information, signs of step-change improvements in autonomous vehicle tech, forward cost curve expectations and signs of a steeping product rollout. After, he even wondered – as many others did – if the Tesla’s Robo-taxi, the 20-person “robot-van” and the Optimus robots were really fully autonomous.
“Not clear if this vehicle (or the Cybercab) were operating fully autonomously on the closed course,” Jonas wrote in a note to clients.
“There was no demonstration of or updates to the latest advancements of FSD (full self driving) technology, no mention of any go-to-market strategy in a ride-sharing service, or supporting economic inputs for investors to dig into.
“Other than the mention of inductive charging, there was no detailed discussion about the capabilities of Cybercab including technology (Inference hardware? Sensor suite? Lidar? L4/L5?), range, safety, utility, flexibility/configurations, etc.
“Many have remarked that it looks like the ‘Model 2’ prototype repackaged as an autonomous vehicle.”
To understand just how disappointing that might be, you need to look at the Jonas valuation model for Tesla. Jonas has long challenged investors to think of Tesla as more of a tech company than a car company.
Morgan Stanley has a price target of $US310 a share, but only $US60 of this comes from the actual car business as most people know it. The rest comes from mobility (FSD), Tesla energy, 3rd party sales, insurance and the like.
But both he and others, like Ark Invest, believe that most of Tesla’s future earnings could come from FSD and the rollout of Robo-cabs. Jonas hasn’t dialled in his robo-taxi predictions, but in June, Ark Invest – another big Tesla supporter – put out a valuation of Tesla that put its core case at $US2,600 a share – 90 per cent of that coming from the robo-taxi business.
Will it happen? Some are starting to wonder. The stock plunged eight per cent in the following trading session, and Jonas wrote how disappointed he was in the lack of detail.
The remarkable takeoff and “catching” of the giant reusable Starship rocket booster gave cause to some to reaffirm their trust in Musk’s technology wizardry, but others filled the information void about the robot-cab with their own valid concerns about what a fleet of robot-taxis will do to road congestion.
But perhaps the most disappointing part of the whole show was the lack of a low-cost EV. Musk put the expected price of the robo-taxi at “below $US30,000.”
That’s a long way short of what some would be hoping as a low cost model of just $US20,000 or even $US15,000. Maybe Musk is spending too much time on social media and politicking to bother with the details of such matters now. The election result may really be that important to him.
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of The Driven, and also edits and founded the Renew Economy and One Step Off The Grid web sites. He has been a journalist for nearly 40 years, is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review, and owns a Tesla Model 3.