Chapter 13: Tesla Cybercab and the robotaxi economy

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.

And also, when these things get started, when they're new, the central force wants you to succeed so badly, to get the momentum going, that they subsidize the hell out of your success. Like, if you were the fifth Starbucks owner, you would have been guaranteed success by the mother ship. You don't want to be the hundred thousandth. But if you get an early jump on this and whatever's next and whatever is next, the mother ship will subsidize the heck out of your success. So you just have to basically not screw it up.

I find this incredibly compelling, you know, to go fill out the form and say, I'm going to grab 10 of these and have them work for me, or a hundred of them. Uh, end of the day it's earning revenue while you sleep and improving your local community.

There's a simple economic thesis here, which is dropping marginal cost, right? Uh, you think about Airbnb's marginal cost of adding a room is near zero. If you're Hyatt, you have to build a hotel. Same thing here. The marginal cost of owning one of these and having people use it and leveraging that asset, rather than centralized ownership of taxi cab fleets, is such an obvious no-brainer. So, I think this is a huge opportunity. Dave makes a great point: get in early on these things because then you have scale built in.

And the question of which of the cyber taxi companies or robot taxi companies — we're going to call it — going to win. It's the one with the lowest operating cost, uh, the lowest production cost, and I haven't seen anything yet compete with uh with Tesla here.

Or the one, unfortunately, that may be coziest with the municipalities that are approving them.

True. It will be city by city.

Usually it's pretty obvious who the winners are. Boston — it's so sad, Peter. So sad. It's so painful.

Um, the winners are usually pretty obvious. People are just so slow to react. They're not nimble enough. But it's not going to be a mystery who's going to win. It's going to be people underreacting to the urgency of the opportunity. Sorry. Go ahead.

No, I just think it's becoming increasingly clear robots are the biggest investment class that we'll ever see. Um, and so again, like, we'll see SPVs, we'll see funds, we'll see all this emerge, and then as you reach that level of capability, whereas Alex said they can take over an HVAC engineer — or in this case, do you need more than a two-seater robotaxi for just about anything? No, only when you want to have your air robotaxi. That's the only time you need anything better than that. Like, these will have very long lives and they will earn money in just about any scenario.

Yeah, you can find out more at tesla.com/robotaxi if you want to jump into this future economy. And again, um, not promoting it and not giving investment advice. Doesn't get a commission on this one.