Musk Loses Autonomy in Race for Tesla Robotaxis
Driverless vehicles will advance only as quickly as society — and cautious bureaucrats — can tolerate.
What’s out there?
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg
No one values autonomy more than Elon Musk. Except, perhaps, other Tesla Inc. bulls. For example, RBC Capital Markets’ base case valuation for Tesla is just over $1 trillion — roughly double the current valuation — of which less than 6% relates to the manufacture and sale of electric vehicles. Some $627 billion of it relates to “robotaxis” — a figure bigger than the entire current market cap. There’s a reason that Musk, the chief executive, routinely prods investors to view Tesla not as a carmaker but as an artificial intelligence pioneer. Its next big event is a “robotaxi unveil” scheduled for August 8.
Yet in pivoting wholeheartedly to autonomy, Musk may actually be constraining his own — and, by extension, the boundless theorizing that buoys Tesla’s stock.