Over its roughly 100-year history, the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California, has set the stage for some of America's most iconic stories. It may do so once again as Elon Musk prepares to use the studio lot to tell another story: Tesla is more than just a car company.
On Thursday, the billionaire Tesla boss is set to take center stage at the historic site in California to host Robotaxi Day. The long-awaited event — originally scheduled for August — is meant to give weight to the electric-vehicle maker's pitch that it is a tech company first and a car company second.
More and more, Musk has been positioning Tesla not just as a company focused on accelerating the clean-energy transition, much like traditional automakers, but also as one with plans to lead in artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.
Musk has played his part in generating the hype, sharing a poster about the event on social media titled "We, Robot," alongside claims that the day will be "one for the history books." But as Musk prepares to unveil a major part of his vision for Tesla's future, he faces a high-stakes situation.
In 2019, at Tesla's then-headquarters in Palo Alto, the EV chief told shareholders that by 2020, he was confident that a fleet of 1 million driverless robotaxis would swarm the streets and carry passengers. Though he missed this deadline, he has driven Tesla into other areas.
In July, Musk wrote on X that "Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production" for internal use next year and hoped to ramp up production to sell them to other companies in 2026. A prototype first shown in 2022 has been dubbed "Optimus."
More broadly, Musk could look to humanoid robots and driverless cars as a way for Tesla to generate value from AI, the hyped technology put firmly on Silicon Valley's agenda after Sam Altman, Musk's fellow cofounder at OpenAI and nemesis, released ChatGPT in late 2022.
That Tesla can capture a broader opportunity through robots and AI is not just Musk's conviction. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's former director of AI, said in a recent episode of the "No Priors" podcast that he didn't think Tesla was a car company; in his view, "cars are basically robots," he said. Meanwhile, in July, the Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said the "Tesla AI story could be worth $1 trillion-plus and is the most undervalued AI name."
However, what's critical to note is the timing for Tesla's robotaxi push. It comes at a tough moment for Elon Inc. For one, Tesla has been unable to escape the sales pressure that has hit the wider EV market.
In the first half of the year, Tesla generated $46.8 billion in revenue, down from $48.3 billion in the same period last year. While Tesla posted a 6.4% year-on-year jump in deliveries for its third quarter, its value remains over $600 billion short of the $1.2 trillion peak it hit in November 2021.
Caspar Rawles, the chief data officer at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, an industry firm focused on market prices and supply-chain data for EVs, said he expected EV growth to continue long term but acknowledged that recent macroeconomic headwinds had led to a slowdown.
