Tesla opens a fleet interest form, and the Airbnb-style ownership model

All right. Uh, I want to turn us next to Tesla Cybercab. Last Thursday we covered the Austin launch, what I was calling Cybercab-palooza. Uh, this week Tesla opened an official interest form for businesses who want to buy their own Cybercab fleets and build mobility hubs and charging infrastructure for the robotaxi network. Uh, no pricing or delivery terms yet.

Uh, this — you know, Salim, for me this is another Musk business model innovation. Tesla doesn't want to own every robotaxi. You buy it, it works for you, you share the revenue with Tesla. It's a brilliant move for customer financing of a global fleet. And honestly, uh, this can only work in my opinion because of the price tag on Cybercabs, projected at $30,000, affordable to anyone who was previously an Uber driver. Um, here's the form. Uh, I've gone and filled mine out. Wonder if you guys did.

Let's hear a quick video from uh from Elon. Uh, this is an old video, but it, you know, it predicts what he's saying and doing now.

Uh, but uh, we'll have a model which is kind of like uh some combination of Uber and Airbnb. So if you're a Tesla owner, uh, you'll be able to add or subtract your car to the fleet. So just like an Airbnb, you could, like, rent out your spare bedroom or rent out your house um when you're not using it. And uh the same thing will be available for Tesla owners.

So did you guys see that announcement? Any thoughts?

Well, it's exactly what Alex was saying a minute ago. If you're the electrician or HVAC person working on Colossus and you banked 600 grand, where do you go next? You would have heard about this with your peers while working on that. This is where you go next, and then the next and the next. But this —

Well, you buy the Optimus robots that now do the work for you.

Exactly. Exactly. That'll probably also be syndicated out as some kind of a franchise model for maintenance, repair, and whatever. And that becomes your trajectory of the future.

Yeah, totally agree. I mean, I think in the style — going back to, I'll self-cite earlier comments about the private ownership of the capital means of production — I think this is the way. Again, not investment advice, but decades ago would have been accumulating a laundromat or a restaurant franchise. Now it'll be, yeah, you own a fleet of robotaxis or a fleet of humanoid robots. That's — without this being misconstrued as investment advice — that's sort of the, call it, the franchising path to medium and high income and wealth creation. And I think the SMBs of the present and the near future are going to look far more like that than opening, say, a chain of restaurants.