Employees ranging from senior leaders to engineers are quitting Elon Musk's companies — and often joining his rivals.

Tesla is still only operating an autonomous driving system under the supervision of in-car employees with a few dozen cars, while Waymo has been doing rider-only rides for years and operates over 1,500 autonomous vehicles in the US

According to a credible new report, Elon Musk has reportedly shut down an internal analysis from Tesla executives that showed...

You want to slow EV adoption to gain a competitive advantage, then that’s what you get. Musk couldn’t complain about that without being a hypocrite – though that doesn’t seem to be a big concern for him these days.

After the April 5 Reuters report that Tesla had killed the Model 2, Musk posted that day on X saying Tesla planned a “robotaxi unveil” in August. The event, delayed until October and held on a movie set near Los Angeles, underwhelmed Wall Street and drove a 9% drop in Tesla shares the following day.

The fundamental issue is they don’t have technology that works. And by works, I want to differentiate between a driver assistance system that drives most of the time — except when it doesn’t, and then you have to take over — versus a system that’s so reliable and robust that you don’t need a person in it.

This is something that irritates me personally because I’ve used those quotes from Elon about service to counter the hesitation of many potential Tesla buyers regarding the maintenance and service of electric vehicles.

Elon’s statement reassured them, but if that was ever really the plan, it certainly isn’t anymore based on the latest results.

Tesla’s gross margins for service and selling replacement parts are surging, and Tesla is proudly saying it in its financial results.

"There is some chance that HW3 does not achieve the safety level that allows for unsupervised FSD," he added.

Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true.

Its neural network will be far less transparent than the modular systems used by Waymo and others. And regulators may not trust that relying solely on cameras will be sufficient to deal with rare and unusual “edge cases”. Officials are already wary of safety after Cruise’s accident last year, in which one of its vehicles dragged along a pedestrian thrown into its path by a human hit-and-run driver.

Gene Munster, managing partner of growth-investment firm Deepwater Asset Management, acknowledged the idea that Optimus was remotely controlled and said he had been “fooled” at the event. Still, he said in a post on Musk’s X platform, it gave a “window into the potential around these products.”

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."

The Optimus robot "can be a teacher or babysit your kids," Musk promised, which strikes me as a terrible idea even if it's true.

Wild. I don’t even know how he could legally do that, but as CEO, he could do a lot of damage if he wanted to.

The guy would already have about 25% of the company with his 2018 compensation package and if he didn’t sell stocks to buy Twitter. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Hertz gambled and lost when it placed its big EV bet on Tesla a few years ago. It was a chance for the rental car company to shake up the industry, instead the company bought 30,000 Teslas, got scared away by depreciation and expensive repairs and now wants to get rid of them. While all those used Teslas looked to be great used car deals, it turns out high mileage EVs that were formerly rentals are horrible to own as New York Magazine reported.

Last week the CEO said Tesla will spend $500 million expanding the charger network.

to do that, Tesla will need to rehire a whole bunch of people.

That started with Max de Zegher, who was an executive under the previous head of Supercharging, Rebecca Tinucci. (At the time of the layoffs, Electrek reported that Musk got rid of the entire team because its Tinucci did not lay off enough workers on her own.)

Elon Musk touted plans to expand Tesla Inc.’s Supercharger network just over a week after firing almost all of the roughly 500 people who ran the business.

Tesla shares slid to their lowest level in more than a year Tuesday after Deutsche Bank analysts downgraded the stock, citing uncertainty around its plans to refocus its growth efforts on autonomous vehicles.