Musk’s robot fantasy won’t save Tesla investors
Tesla’s quarterly results were a disaster by every metric. Net income plunged 71%, car sales dropped 13%, and automotive revenue fell 20%. Wall Street expected $21.3 billion in revenue and $0.41 earnings per share; Tesla delivered just $19.3 billion and $0.27. And that was only thanks to $595 million in carbon credits—government lifelines for a CEO who claims to loathe government intervention.
And that profit? It only exists thanks to $595 million in carbon credits—a government program that Elon Musk pretends to hate, but happily cashes in. Yet again, a Musk company would be deep underwater without public intervention.
And yet … Tesla’s stock jumped nearly 10% after the earnings report. Why? Because investors, like Donald Trump voters, keep believing Musk’s lies, ignoring collapsing fundamentals in favor of fantastical promises.
Related | Musk pushes dumb lies about paid protesters as Tesla sales collapse
On the earnings call, Musk opened with a conspiracy theory. “The protests that you’ll see out there, they’re very organized, they’re paid for,” he claimed, offering zero evidence. “They are the recipients of wasteful largesse … they wish to continue receiving it.”
He also blamed a 50,000-car drop in deliveries on “retooling” the Model Y. But last year, Tesla retooled the Model 3 line without tanking sales, though they did experience a drop. In Q1, the company actually built 26,000 more cars than it sold. That’s a demand problem, not supply.
None of that mattered. The stock didn’t rally because of Q1’s collapse, it surged because Musk dangled the next shiny object—his promise to focus more on Tesla and less on wrecking the government. “I think starting in May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly,” he said, pledging to scale back his anti-government antics—unless the president “still needs” him.
Investors cheered. But they shouldn’t have.
Tesla’s Cybertruck is shaping up to be the biggest auto industry flop since the Edsel. Just 46,000 have been sold since its November 2024 launch—despite Musk claiming 1 million reservations and building a factory in Austin to pump out 250,000 a year.
Anyone could’ve predicted this. The Cybertruck is a hideous, overdesigned monstrosity. Musk, who once bragged, “I do zero research whatsoever,” designed it for an edgelord fever dream—not for real people.
And if that were Musk’s only blunder, Tesla might be fine.
Musk now claims that fully autonomous Cybercabs will be generating revenue for Tesla next year, and that “there will be millions of Teslas operating fully autonomously in the second half of next year.”
This is the same Musk who said in 2019, “Next year, for sure, we’ll have over one million robotaxis on the road.”
Now we’re supposed to believe Tesla, which built 1.77 million cars in 2024, will manufacture more than one million robotaxis by mid-2026, even though large-scale production of the new vehicle isn’t even scheduled to begin until next year? Tesla did confirm on the call that they’ll be making the robotaxis in their Austin plant, which has all that excess capacity from the Cybertrucks they aren’t selling. Enough capacity to build 1 million Cybercabs in half a year? I’m calling bullshit on that.
Tesla doesn’t have the factories. It doesn’t have the infrastructure. And more importantly, it doesn’t even have the tech. “Unsupervised autonomy will first be solved for the Model Y in Austin,” said Musk in the earnings call, admitting that this biggest of technological challenges is not yet solved, something that he’s consistently claimed was months away from being solved for the past decade.
Even if they crack the tech, they’ll need regulatory approval in every city they operate. And who runs big cities? Liberal Democrats. The same people Musk has spent years mocking and antagonizing, and who will have every reason to slow walk any approvals until Tesla proves its robotaxis aren’t murdering people or destroying property.
Musk knows this, so he hedged on the call, saying, “We’ll have 10 million autonomous cars in a few years … unless blocked by regulatory situations.” Investors apparently skipped that footnote.
Let’s assume the impossible happens. Austin’s pilot succeeds. The robotaxis don’t kill anyone. Regulators wave it through.
Now who rides them?
Urban liberals? They’ve abandoned Musk. They won’t step into a Tesla cab, preferring Waymo, Uber, or public transit.
Conservatives? They don’t need robotaxis. They’ve got pickups, SUVs, garages, and wide-open roads in their exurban and rural outposts. They’re not hailing Cybercabs to the Cracker Barrel.
Even if Tesla threads every needle, I’d be shocked to see more than 5,000 Cybercabs nationwide by mid-2026. More likely? Zero—aside from a lingering pilot or two in Austin, probably vandalized, of course.
If robotaxis weren’t enough, Musk also hyped his humanoid robot Optimus. “We expect to have thousands of Optimus robots working in Tesla factories by the end of this year,” he said on the earnings call. “I feel confident we’ll hit a million units per year by 2030, maybe 2029.”
Who’s buying millions of humanoid robots? And for what?
At a cost of $20,000–$30,000, they’d need to solve real labor problems at scale in an economy that’s already shifting toward automation. And not particularly in this economic dystopia where Musk is hoarding all the wealth—and building robots to replace human workers.
At the Optimus unveiling, Musk said the robot could be “your own personal R2-D2 [or] C-3PO,” so either a beeping trash can that fixes your spaceship, or a neurotic butler who never stops whining. Great. But come to think of it, that R2-D2 bot could surely come in handy to fix those panels falling off Cybertrucks!
Yet Tesla’s not even a leader in robotics in a field with fierce competition. (Here’s some competitors that are doing the work if you want to get creeped out.)
But Musk has big numbers in mind, saying last year, “Tesla will be the most valuable company in the world … $25 trillion.” As CNBC noted, that’s more than half the value of the entire S&P 500.
At this point, Tesla isn’t a car company, it’s a meme stock. It’s science fiction with a stock ticker and P.T. Barnum at the helm.
Tesla’s earnings call didn’t inspire confidence in EVs or energy storage, neither of which would sustain the company’s ridiculous valuation. Instead, it pivoted to robot taxis and humanoid workers—neither of which Tesla is remotely prepared to deliver at scale.
And if that weren’t enough, you still have to deal with Musk’s noxious personality—which might be Tesla’s biggest liability of all.
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