The Electric: Musk Confirms His Mission Has Changed: Make Tesla a Lot More Valuable
In 19 minutes of remarks to analysts Wednesday evening, Tesla CEO Elon Musk enthused about his favorite topics—artificial intelligence-powered driverless cars and humanoid robots, which he predicted would make Tesla the most valuable company on Earth.
What Musk didn’t talk about: a quarter that in key ways was Tesla’s worst in at least four years; his plans for new or refreshed electric vehicles, its main current product and the source of almost all Tesla revenue; or the 800-pound gorilla in the room—how he is managing to run Tesla at all, given the massive amount of time he has spent helping President Donald Trump win reelection, prepare to return to the White House and now direct his administration.
Not that it mattered to the analysts—none asked about those topics. In a note to clients, Alexander Potter, an auto industry analyst with Piper Sandler, summed up the hourlong call: “Q4 Results weren’t great, but who cares? Elon has never sounded so bullish.”
As though in sync with Potter, investors pushed up the company’s shares more than 4% in after-hours trading.
Around this time last year, Musk essentially abandoned his mission—first publicly expressed in 2006—to put humanity into EVs and save the planet from climate change. As we reported last year, he canceled development of a $25,000 car for mainstream drivers and told lieutenants to instead develop a driverless taxi—a vehicle requiring no steering wheel or pedals—which he interchangeably dubbed the Robotaxi and the Cybercab. In revenue calls and public events, Musk said that the same AI that powered the Robotaxi would also power a humanoid robot called Optimus.
These two products—driverless cars and humanoid robots—would make Tesla worth $10 trillion, Musk said. Without them—just making EVs—Tesla would be “worth basically zero,” he said last June.
And it’s those two products that Musk spent most of Wednesday’s call speaking about. After deploying Robotaxis first in Austin, then in California, and then across the U.S., Musk said he would launch them in Europe and China. That would set up Tesla “for what I think will be an epic 2026 and a ridiculous 2027 and 2028—ridiculously good,” he said.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s robot team would develop Optimus, with plans to manufacture several thousand next year for use on mundane tasks in Tesla factories. In 2027, he predicted, the robot would be ready for sale outside Tesla. It would have the ability to play piano and thread a needle. “This is a level of precision no one has been able to achieve,” Musk said. “It’s really something special. My prediction long term is that Optimus will be overwhelmingly the value of the company.” Meaning the majority of that $10 trillion.
Tesla’s fourth-quarter report did not entirely ignore its EV traditions. In a slide deck posted on the company website before the call, Tesla reported that it would release an unspecified new, affordable EV in the first half of the year, and it forecast growth in annual car sales. Last year, Tesla’s EV sales fell for the first time since 2010. Tesla did not specify the company’s growth target for 2025.
But the deck seemed to underscore a primary reason for Musk’s change of heart about EVs—he doesn’t think Tesla can still make big profits from cars alone, or at least big enough to justify its $1.2 trillion valuation. In the fourth quarter, the company’s gross profit from vehicle sales excluding regulatory credits—payments from other companies to meet government clean vehicle thresholds—was 13.6%. That continued a slide that began in 2022, near the beginning of Tesla’s run of profitable quarters. In the first quarter of 2022, for instance, its automotive gross margin was 30%.
It's not clear that Musk is correct about EVs. Though Tesla’s profit margin is shrinking, it makes more money on EVs than anyone; its main rival, China’s Byd, earns a lot of its profit from the sale of plug-in hybrids. Nor is it self-evident that Robotaxis or humanoids will pan out the way Musk is predicting.
One possibility is that Musk has moved on from idealism—driverless cars and humanoid robots will not save the human race, but they could make a lot of profit.
With Wednesday’s call, Musk completed his transition from a man on a climate mission to one on a quest for profit and valuation.