Liam Denning, Columnist

At $100 Billion, Waymo Is the Perfect Tesla Hedge

December 17, 2025 at 3:01 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

The robotaxi race.
Photographer: Eli Hartman/Bloomberg

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At a nuts-and-bolts level, Tesla Inc. and Waymo LLC don’t mix. But the latest news concerning both suggests that if you like Tesla, you should love Waymo.

Waymo, the only fully autonomous commercial robotaxi service operating in multiple cities in the US today, and owned by Alphabet Inc., is seeking to raise $15 billion at a $100 billion valuation, according to a Bloomberg News report. Tesla, meanwhile, just saw its stock close at an all-time record, valuing the company at $1.6 trillion. This latest burst of enthusiasm is owed to gathering hopes the company will make good on a pledge to pull the safety drivers from its robotaxi-ish service in Austin.