But in true Musk style, he skipped over expectations of how a two-seater robotaxi would serve the needs of families headed to a restaurant or to the airport, or if he expected these to appeal only to a niche clientele.
Investors jeered the design and the lack of financial detail, with Tesla stocks tumbling 9% on Wall Street on Friday.
"When you think of a cab, you think of something that's going to carry more than two people," said Jonathan Elfalan, vehicle testing director for the automotive website Edmunds.com. "Making this a two-seat-only car is very perplexing."

A judge agreed with Musk's lawyers that some of Musk's statements regarding self-driving Teslas amount to “corporate puffery"

In a mind-numbing statement, Musk’s lawyers argue that his claims about Tesla Autopilot safety were “vague statements of corporate optimism are not objectively verifiable.”

The lawyers even argued, successfully, that “no reasonable investor would rely” on many of the alleged misleading statements because they are “mere puffing.”

The Department of Motor Vehicles indefinitely suspended Cruise from operating in California on Oct. 24, alleging that the company didn’t immediately disclose that the robotaxi tried to pull over after striking the pedestrian. Cruise fired nine executives, and its CEO resigned. The company paused its driverless operations across the U.S. Cruise lost $3.48 billion in operating costs in 2023 and laid off 24% of its staff. Multiple federal and state agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, are investigating the company.

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It isn’t actual artificial intelligence akin to C-3PO, it’s a sophisticated pattern-matching tool.

Rather than seeing exponential improvements in the quality of AI performance (a la Moore’s Law), we’re instead seeing exponential increases in the cost to improve AI systems — supervised ML seems to follow an S-Curve.

our heavy investment into safety didn’t translate for investors.

It took me way too long to realize that VCs would rather a $1b business with a 90% margin than a $5b business with a 50% margin, even if capital requirements and growth were the same.

Investors were impressed. It didn’t matter that that jump from “sometimes working” to statistically reliable was 10–1000x more work.
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People will be tempted to tip a self-driving car, here's why.

"The real world here is pretty hard,” he said. “The real world out there is even harder, and the real world in Times Square is supremely difficult.”

“Our view is, we can’t do all of them,” he said. “Let’s start with places we can get autonomous vehicles to work reasonably in the near term.”