Tech Won't Save Us - Is Tesla Still a Car Company? w/ Ed Niedermeyer

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Ed Niedermeyer to discuss the mission to turn Elon Musk into the world’s first trillionaire, Tesla’s growing interest in making robots instead of cars, and how other automakers are coming for the EV market it once dominated. Ed Niedermeyer is the author of Ludicrous and co-host of the Autonocast. Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon. The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Also mentioned in this episode: Tesla is paying out a series of lawsuits, and the California DMV has called for a one-month ban on Teslas being driven in the state. Curious to see what Tesla’s current Optimus robot is like? Is Tesla the world’s biggest meme stock? Tesla lied about data relating to a fatal accident until a hacker found it. ICE raided a Hyundai plant earlier this month.

the whole issue of distracted driving gets to the heart of this. Is the equipment in your car there to make your use of the car better, or is it a way to make you feel better about being stuck in your car? Unfortunately, the car business has gotten to a kind of unhealthy place around and then sort of U.S. culture more broadly around sort of what are you doing when you're behind the wheel? Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Ed Niedermeyer. Ed is the author of Ludacris, the unvarnished story of Tesla Motors, and a co-host of the Atonacast.

Now, if you are a regular listener to the show, you will be quite familiar with Ed because he's been on a number of times to talk about Tesla, electric vehicles, autonomous driving, and so many of these other topics. over the past number of years. But there's a lot that's been going on with Tesla lately, especially after Elon Musk left the White House, but also in the wider electric vehicle industry. And I figured this was worth having Ed back on the show to dig into in a bit more depth because I think there are some really interesting things happening

that we need to be paying attention to. So we talk about some of the recent litigation that Tesla has been facing and what that might mean for the autopilot and self-driving systems that is trying to sell. We talk about Tesla as a company more broadly that seems less and less interested in actually making and selling electric cars and more interested in these big ideas like robots and things like that, that we're both very

skeptical of whether they're actually going to work out. But then beyond that, of course, Tesla is not just the only electric vehicle maker in the world anymore. There are many other companies that are competing on this front. And I wanted to talk to Ed about what we're seeing in other parts of the world and from other automakers when it comes to electric vehicles. And often that is a discussion about China and BYD in particular, and certainly that comes up in what we're talking about here, but also in the United States, in Europe, including, of course, in Korea and automakers like that, where we are seeing real innovations on the electric vehicle front. And I wanted to understand where Ed thinks this might be going, because he's been reporting not just on Tesla, but the wider car industry for many years. So I think that there are a lot of really interesting things happening now for us to be paying attention to. and only one part of that is whether Tesla is going to keep being a meme stock and will turn Elon Musk

into a trillionaire or something like that if he's able to pull this off, which he shouldn't be able to, but who knows, investors have let him get this far. So it's hard to know where things are going to go from here. So with that said, it was great to have Ed back on the show. Again, I think this is a really important subject matter. And I think a really interesting one as well, right, as we're seeing Tesla's position be further challenged by these other automakers. And of course, as Elon Musk tries to remake Tesla into something else, and it's really not clear that makes any sense. So if you like the show,

make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can also share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week, so we can keep having these critical in-depth conversations. And so you can get ad-free versions of the show. You can get stickers if you support at a certain level.

And to do that, you can join supporters like Juan Pablo from Santiago, Chile, Lorna in Yip Salanti, Michigan, and Martin in Copenhagen, by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Ed, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.

There's always Tesla things happening, and that means I need to have you back on to dig into all of it. There has been just a wave of news over the past few months, not all great things. But I want to start with this kind of wild story about this news. new pay package that the board has approved, is put forward for Elon Musk that could see him being paid up to a trillion dollars depending on if the valuation hits the targets that they've set and all this kind of stuff. Run us through this and what you're making of this decision because it seems absolutely wild to me. One of the things that makes it the most interesting

company around in a lot of ways is that it exists in this purely symbolic realm. We're through the looking glass on Tesla, you know, as someone who for many, many years, you know, sort of staked out my position as being like, I'm the guy who's interested in the fundamentals of this company and its business and things. None of that matters. We've crossed over into this realm where, again, it's all semiotics, right? It's all symbolism. And that is what this pay package is about. I mean, the headlines, right, I think with anything that Elon Musk does, you can usually sort of judge what he's up to based on the headlines that comes out of it. And here, the was Elon Musk to be the first trillionaire, essentially, question mark, right?

Like, I was on the, set the gym on the elliptical machine, and I watched my heart rate spike as I saw Elon Musk, first trillionaire question mark on CNN. What does that say about our society if Elon, first of all, even if we have a trillionaire, but second of all, if the trillionaire is Elon Musk. Well, I mean, look, like, that's what he's selling, right? as Elon Musk's profile and persona has, I don't know if grown, but like evolved, right? It sort of sloughed off the things that used to be fundamental, right? He used to be sort of engineer and in the weeds and in the lab.

Like that was the image that he tried to sell for a long time. And that's all fallen away now. And now he's this spirit of pure capitalism where, and not even capitalism, really, it's this new oligarchism where him being a trillionaire is the goal unto itself. It's like a social media following. You know, I think that's sort of, as I look at his history and his evolution over the long term, I think that's kind of what sets him apart. That's who he is, is that he's someone who kind of had like a 20-year head start

on the world that we sort of are just, have been entering into where everything that matters is building your following and having people support you and building this cult around you, whether it's in politics and he shows in business that that's also sort of the way to go. And so this is him, this is sort of the apotheosis of that. Just as, you know, on the business side, selling, you know, the idea of cars that drive themselves everywhere and now taking that to the next level of robots, like this race of mechanical slaves that's going to overturn the laws of economics, you know, all of everything around him is reaching this new point. And I think, as always with him, the real problems and the real challenge with this part of what he's doing is how does he keep it going? How do you go from here? Because once you've said, I'm going to be a trillionaire. And, you know, my, my, my mechanical men are going to, you know, like I said, bring in an era of apocalyptic abundance, you know, where everyone can have everything for free? Where does the hype go from there?

Yeah, absolutely. It's hard to go much higher than that, right, to justify getting to that trillion dollars. There are a few things I want to pick up on there. But like, just on the pay package, like Robin Denholm, who is the chair of the Tesla board, came out and defended it and said it made sense and all this kind of stuff. And like, I know that we had some stories, when was that? probably last year, I think, or maybe it was earlier this year, about maybe the board finally being like, Elon, you need to spend more time at Tesla, you know, questions about his leadership

and all that stuff. Like, what is up with this board at this company? Like, I guess they have just bought in that, like, they need Elon Musk in the story or else the company just isn't there. So they need to give into whatever he wants. Like, is that how you would see it? Yeah. I mean, it's a meme coin and not a company, right?

Like, it's the valuation of the stock is the thing. And that's why to get people excited. And by the way, as we record this, Tesla's recording it is trading at like all-time highs, the stock. And so it's working, right? This idea that, again, like, what matters is that the stock is going up. What matters is that Elon will become the oligarch, right? And therefore, it's almost like a new form of feudalism or something, where you pledge yourself to your liege and they're going to be the one that comes out on the top of the Game of Thrones.

And, like, a lot of people, weirdly enough, buy into that, whether or not they can buy, into it forever is another question because at the end of the day, you know, there is still a car company at the bottom of all of this that, as you sort of alluded to, is not really doing so great. But in the short term, you know, this pay packet, right? Like, this is what the 2018 pay package did. It was, that was really the turning point for Tesla and for Elon most personally in terms of like breaking free from sort of some of the constraints of being a guy who's running a business, you know, which to the extent he was always good at sort of, you know, skating above that and creating these narratives and these perceptions that made all that

easier. But 2018, what changed there was that the incentives, it wasn't just the size of the package. That was part of what made 2018 a huge turning point for him and for Tesla. It was also that the incentives were now increasingly tied to the stock price rather than to any kind of particular performance metrics. And like, that's a little bit different this time because now it's like he has to bring out a million self-driving cars, which of course, there's a lot of ways he can play games with that. He has to bring out this robot. You know, so there are some. like physical realities that he has to deliver on to get these awards, but now it's like the size of it is even bigger.

And so all of it just continues to serve to push him further down this track that he's already been on. And yeah, like the board, it's all or nothing. I think that's the board's calculation is that there's no halfway strategy here anymore. It's like you're either in or you're out. And of course, at this point they're in. They've all made life-changing money. You know, you say Tesla's trading at like an all-time high right now.

You could almost, I guess, if you're like an investor, just wait until the moments where it drops, buy in, wait until it goes back up again and sell. Like, it's pretty predictable, I feel like the way that the stock kind of like waves, you know, kind of goes up and down. And just based on that, like based on what you're saying, we're in this moment with Tesla where the company is struggling to sell cars, it feels like. The Robotaxi rollout, correct me if I'm wrong, did not go so hot. So it's like, as you're saying, the fundamentals don't seem to be there, but it doesn't seem to matter. Well, and this has been the story for a really long time. Of course, they had their moment where the car business was doing well.

I think we've talked about sort of that COVID-era thing that has absolutely fallen off. Yeah, there's supposed to be more affordable vehicles. There was the super low-cost car, which they canceled, but then they're supposed to have like a sort of a decontented version of the Model Y that was supposed to be in production already. We're not hearing anything about that. They have sort of a six-seat version that looks very awkward-looking thing in China, but that's China only. So they don't have products.

You know, the cyber truck is, seems to be like, again, like, it's, we've been in this stasis. It's actually fascinating working on a book of the history that it feels like in so many ways sort of since sort of the rollout of full self-driving, sort of when the Model Y came out and then full self-driving came out, you know, the cyber truck has been such a non-entity that basically nothing has changed really since almost 2020, you know, we've been in this real holding pattern. And yet, of course, the stock has come way up and down and a lot has happened. A lot has changed. But fundamentally, Tesla has not delivered full self-driving. And that's the thing that Elon said that the company's value depends on. It's certainly there's no reason to

believe that they're going to deliver on the, on the full self-driving. With full self-driving, I mean, I think if you go and, you know, I spent some time in Austin looking at what they're doing there, and it's interesting, but it's a performance, just like everything else with full self-driving over the years. It's a more plausible performance than they put on in the past for sure. And the way they're doing it is totally at odds with what they've always said their strategy is. It's a geoffence constrained. They've got that. And I said you spend some time in that geo fence. And they just plaster it with test and validation vehicles. So again, the idea that they're just drawing data off their customer cars and that's what's allowing them to create this general solution. Like none of that is remotely true anymore. And in order to create even the performance of driverless, which they weren't able to. They still have someone in the car. Right. But to get close to that, they had to completely throw out everything they've ever said about how they're approaching this technology and essentially sort of cobble together a very labor-intensive version of what Waymo does, essentially. I mean, I'm working on a book about this because I hope people see sort of this whole story and understand sort of what the strategy was and how completely it's had to be abandoned just in order to. And again, like it's not like this robot taxi thing. It's what they're building there is not some, it's not a serious effort to. get into that business. They don't want to be in that business. It's just another performance in this long string of performances. So I hope at some point people, this is just a technology literacy problem and when people sort of see it all in one place, they'll be able to see what's going on

here. But the clock is ticking now too, though, because about a year from now, Elon has said that that's when you'll start to see the revenue streams from full self-driving and what he said in riot hailing will start to replace the losses on the car business side. He's never said that before, right? He's always said, he's always framed full self-driving in terms of, like, feature complete or safer than a human or all this very, like, kind of abstract thing. The only thing that matters is, right, like you take legal responsibility for it. When you do that, then it's then self-driving until that point it's not. But he's created a new, sort of similarly real benchmark for himself now in terms of saying autonomy is going to

actually deliver meaningful revenue, which it hasn't yet. So we'll see it. And again, he's saying that because he has to say it because the car business itself has fallen apart. I wouldn't be surprised, as I'm sure you wouldn't be, if it's just another one of those statements that is made and that nothing really amounts to it, right? Like, I remember when he said there'd be a million robotaxies by like 2020 or something, wasn't it? That's now one of his performance. That's now something he has to be incentivized to do.

Him saying that they were going to do it was not sufficient incentive. Now, the board has to give him more shares to deliver on something that he promised was that AI Day, you know, 2019, 2021, it was one of the two. Yeah, it's a wild man. But like we've discussed, that fundamental of the business doesn't seem to be impacting the actual share value because it's about a story. But you are mentioning there, and we have been seeing these stories for quite some time, that sales of Teslas are stagnating. In many markets, they're going down. You know, they've recorded a sales decline, and things are not looking great on that front.

You are mentioning that the model lineup is very stale, suggestions of lower cost vehicles that were supposed to maybe, come don't seem to be materializing. Do you see any real hope on that front of Tesla actually being able to turn it around and start selling vehicles again? Or has the company, like, given up on that? Yeah, I mean, look, like car sales in general, there's a lot of inertia. Once you've built a brand in the car space, it takes a while for that to, it doesn't just go, it almost never just goes away overnight, right? If it does, it's because the company went bankrupt, not because people just stop buying the cars. For a lot of people, they just, they like how a Tesla looks and that is what matters and they're going to buy it because of that, right? And they don't care about

anything else. So there's a lot of that. So I don't think that like sales are going to go to zero and they can't because where else is the revenue going to come from? Like that's the real issue. So, so no, we don't see new products on the horizon. I mean, there's always possibility that something's getting cooked up. I know they just partnered with Uber on the semi-truck, which has been sort of quiet, but they've been building. a factory. I don't see that being a real serious product, but now it seems like they're trying to make some kind of push to sell that in some volume. So that is technically a product. The cyber truck is there's nothing to do there. There's no fixing that mess. And then, you know,

you have issues around like the door handle thing, which, you know, you want to discuss, which is a really big problem for Tesla because they've always said that, you know, sort of safety is this is important to them. And to be totally fair to Tesla, the passive safety of the vehicle body itself, you know, it's very tough. They've done some good things on safety. You do just in a pure crash scenario, Tesla versus a lot of other cars, the passive safety is quite good. This issue around if your car catches on fire and there's no way, because of the way these door handles are designed to get out and people have died this way, this is one of those kinds of things that gets to the heart of Tesla's biggest weakness, which is style over substance.

You know, Tesla, I've always said this, everything is a tradeoff in engineering and design. And everything, all the tradeoffs are all weighted towards short-term impressions. And this is what Tesla does. And the problems are all over the long tail. This is one of those things finally that we've known has been out there for a long time that look, like, yeah, the door handles are cool. This is part of what people like about Tesla's. But at the end of the day, you know, they ice over when it's winter.

There's the inconvenience factor. And then there's the safety issue. And I think that it's telling that Tesla is now buckling on this, right? So the Chinese have said they're looking at it. And now NHTSA has said they're looking at a recall or something. If there's a recall, like you can't just replace all the door handles and all the guys. Like that's not something you can fix an over-the-air software update, you know? This is a huge deal both in terms of like, is there liability now for the vehicles that are out there,

either on the regulatory side or then maybe through civil liability, right? Because once the regulators start talking, then the trial lawyers move in. And then going forward, are Tesla's going to just have normal door handles now? Or they're just going to go to like the same supplier that Toyota, like, where does it go? This is a touch to the heart of who this company is. I found that story really fascinating because to me it fit into this broader conversation about, say, design trends that Tesla had kind of legitimized and a lot of other automakers felt that they needed to follow along with in order to appear stylish, forward-looking, things like that.

Of course, you know, the big example then is the big touch screen that we see in many vehicles now. And in particular, how many brands have moved a lot of the physical buttons onto the screen itself. And of course, the growing conversations around safety with relation to that, right? You know, if you can't actually feel what you're doing, then you need to look away at the screen because you don't have that tactile feedback. And I know, I believe it's in the European Union that they've actually changed the rules so that automakers will have to provide buttons for certain functions, I think, to start to move away from that. that. Yeah, to me, it spoke to like, it's another one of these examples of things that look really good, that look futuristic and whatnot, but that have real consequences that were not properly considered, I guess. Yeah. And, you know, the pendulum swings always, right? In politics,

and taste and products and all kinds of things. And I think, you know, we saw the pendulum swing really hard towards Tesla. And the whole time I was like, hey, there are reasons that car company, right? It's not like these are technologically impossible problems to solve, having a big screen, and having these flush door handles, having connected car. These are all things that, you know, it's not impossible to do, but Tesla rushed into them, and they got all of this credit and all of this cachet for being the leader in those things.

And what we're seeing almost across the board with a lot of these trends is the pendulum swinging back, because at the end of the day, you know, Toyota became Toyota. I've always used Toyota as the foil for Tesla because they've never had the sexiest cars. They don't like it when I say this, by the way. I don't think. This is historically true.

And they made efforts on Rocchio Toyota to make their cars more stylish and, you know, and things like that. But like, historically, the brand has been built not by the sexiest cars. It's because people rely on these things. It needs to be affordable, right? And it needs to be repairable and it needs to be rugged and durable and reliable. And everything else is sort of gravy. And so we've seen not just regulators, but the market swing away. We've seen perceived quality scores go down on vehicles related to their overreliance on infotainment.

We've seen companies like Honda already, even before any regulatory. pressure, start to bring buttons and physical controls back on the connected car front. We've seen it looks like a sort of peak and maybe local. It may not be the end of the long term trend, but certainly in the near term, there's been a peak and sort of interest in and sort of subscriptions and stuff, which is the whole point of doing a connected car. Yeah, it's great to be able to do software updates to the car, but you know, you could also just get the software right the first time.

That'd be good, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And like, you know, I think for Tesla, having that connected car thing has been really important because it's fueled the whole narrative around full self-driving, right? We pull the data off the fleet. We then push the updates and someday your car will drive itself and you won't have to bring it into the shop for that to happen. Right.

So it's played into that narrative, but is the value there? Because really they've had to, and if you look at the history too, they've had to do a lot to control access to that data. They've used that data in ways that were not sustainable in terms of, you know, kind of violating their own user agreements to like use the data against the people who had actually sort of belonged to. They've now in this Benavitas case, this autopilot case, they've been caught not just concealing it from the lawyers, but concealing it from police. And again, this is something that there's been lots of, you know, hints of throughout the history of autopilot.

And so the point is that having a connected vehicle is a liability as well, right? And if you're not making enough money on it, it becomes this regulatory challenge and this PR and liability sort of question that's a huge headache. And so I think we're just seeing that on almost all of the things that Tesla has sort of pushed forward, the pendulum has sort of started to swing back. And we'll see how far back it goes, but it's definitely the vibe is shifted for sure. I have so many questions based on all the things that you just said. First I'll say, the new Priuses, they're not anything like the old Priuses. They look pretty stylish. So they've definitely made some advances there.

For sure. My comparison is a historical one, absolutely. The new Priuses are fly as hell, yeah. Yeah, I looked at what. I was like, maybe I should get that. Yeah. Anyway, you're talking about the connected car thing specifically, right? And all of these features and kind of the pendulum swinging back and all that kind of stuff. What immediately came to mind to me, as you were saying that, is obviously we've had a lot of car makers kind of rush to follow in many of those trends. But I feel like nowhere has that been stronger than in China with these Chinese automakers that are really focused on the connected car, on making sure that these like infotainment features are there in adding a lot more of that kind of stuff than what we would have traditionally in the United States and the European Union, right? Do you think that, you know, and obviously you mentioned that China has been looking into the door handles and other aspects of this, do you think that that kind of hits the

model of like the electric vehicle that Chinese automakers have been pursuing potentially? I mean, I think that the Chinese auto industry has been very influenced by Tesla. And it makes sense, right? I mean, China tried to build an auto industry for a really long time through a number of different policy means and essentially realized a while ago that catching up on internal combustion technology was not going to be the way to do it. And I think Tesla was helpful in catalyzing for them the vision for the opportunity. I mean, I think they had already sort of seen it, but the opportunity to build a new auto industry around these new technologies. Now, part of it is right, so they've gone out and they've dominated the entire stack for EVs, right? whether it's pulling minerals out of the ground in Africa,

whether it's processing them, whether it's putting into all of that. They've gone and they've dominated that. But they've also separately established a really dominant position in like sort of the Internet of Things supply chain ecosystem as well. And so China has its own strategic interest in having things be connected. And I think, you know, some of that is even security related and intelligence gathering.

I don't want to be conspiratorial about it, but like I think they see a lot of benefits to sort of dominating that, that sort of supply chain and stack as well. So I think in the Chinese market, you know, what you see is a market that is, it's a market of Tesla's. I think what's interesting there, though, is he wears, the differences here in the U.S., we'll kind of only have Tesla as a company that we sort of can point to as like this innovative new company. And I think that's one of the big reasons they've gotten away with so much terrible, terrible stuff over the years, is that politicians don't want to be seen as standing in the way of innovation and this,

that, the next thing. And with China, it's refreshingly the opposite. They have so many Tesla's that if you lose the original Tesla, but I don't think it's even a U.S. thing. I think they just want, and this has been an issue for a while for them, is they want fewer car companies. And if some of them go under, then all the better. And that, you know, allows them to have higher standards. I think this is really, it's a fascinating comparison because it really pulls the rug out from under one of the most dominant tropes around all of this in the U.S. culture, which is that

regulation stifles innovation. this is not conclusively the case. And I think that, you know, if you have a lot of innovation, you can afford to regulate it. And I think the problem is, is that we have to make this argument because we're actually not doing so great in the innovation department. Yeah, like how all that competition in the Chinese case has actually, you know, not just allowed them to really advance their car industry in a relatively short time frame, but leaves it open so that the government can come in and say, listen, these things need

to change. And there's all these companies so you guys can, like, figure it out. On the connected car front as well, there was that Chinese piece of it that immediately came to mind. But part of the story that I've heard as well about, say, the other U.S. automakers and European automakers and some of the difficulties that they've been having in recent years also relates to software and the difficulty that they've had in developing a quality software suite in order to run their vehicles, especially what a modern vehicle and especially an electric vehicle requires, if there is a move away from, say, the connected car thing and the expectation that that's going to be such an important component of the future vehicles. Does that potentially make it easier for them then to, you know, move into this space and become properly competitive again? I don't know if it's the connected car piece of it alone. I think what it is is it's a general shift back to cars being cars again. You know, I think we went through this phase where cars were devices.

In real terms, cars were becoming more like devices. And we just thought that there was buying around the idea that that was not just a trend, but a good and inevitable kind of trend. And that's sort of broadly across all of these. I think there's different things happening in sort of each one of these areas. It was connected or the interior design and perceived quality, things like that. But I think broadly speaking, the hope behind all of this was that cars are this platform, right? That's why you wanted to be a device, right, from an investment sort of capital perspective, is that you look at cars and it's like, you know, in the same way that search engines were

and now LLMs are becoming sort of our vehicle for exploring the virtual world, right? cars are interface for a lot of people with the physical world. And that sort of choke point, that it's a platform, right? And cars are built at massive scale. And so I think there was just, you know, a lot of hope that that would become a platform for software. Fundamental, and I understand why, right? Like creating a platform for software is you create the whole gold rush. Look at what smartphones did. But cars are just different. Cars are not, again, there's about exploring two different things. You want your device for the physical world and you want that developed for the physical world. Yes, there are ways to use connected services and

things like that that can be helpful to that. But I think, you know, the whole issue of distracted driving gets to the heart of this. Is the equipment in your car there to make your use of the car better? Or is it a way to make you feel better about being stuck in your car? And I think those are two really separate things. And I think, unfortunately, the car business has gotten to a kind of unhealthy place around and sort of U.S. culture more broadly around sort of what are you doing when you're behind the wheel and how serious is it what you're doing behind the wheel and how serious is what they're doing when they're building cars. And I think that the pendulum kind of has to, if nothing else because of, I think, more and more and more lawsuits. I think you're going

to see that pendulum swing back towards a kind of older paradigm in the car business of, yeah, more traditional approach to both the design of the vehicle and sort of orienting it around that driving experience more and more because systems like autopilot have not relieved people from their responsibility to drive. I mean, they has, and then they've died. You're rolling the dice with your life, and that's not a sustainable business model either with your, right? If your customers are gambling with their lives using your products.

And so I think that it's going to be a difficult transition back. And again, we'll see how far the pendulum swings back the other way. But I think that at a high level, that sort of broadly is that cars are getting back to being cars again. Which is a good thing, obviously, because you don't want them to be a device like this. I feel like on the one hand, a lot of these automakers tried to sell these additional services, these monthly services, all this kind of stuff, and people were just not having it. And in some cases, like, really got annoyed.

But then I feel like one of the kind of nails in that coffin, too, was when BYD, I believe it was, announced that it wasn't going to be charging for its assisted driving features. And then the other automakers were like, well, we can't charge then if they're not going to. You know, maybe you could in the American market because BYD isn't here. but other than that, like, yeah. When a car, if a car requires a subscription, isn't really even a car anymore. So that's the problem that they have

is they created this product class that's rooted in a century of tradition and subscriptions fundamentally change that. The whole point of a car is that it's free of anything tying it down. This is part of the problem with the move to EVs is that you are sort of stuck to a charger in ways that you weren't before.

And it's a little bit of the old world struggling to die and new world struggling to be born and now is the time of monsters, as in so many other things. You mentioned the legal cases. So I want to go to that quickly before we get back to the bigger picture. And you already kind of mentioned this earlier, but we've obviously seen Tesla in some legal troubles, I guess, in California and Florida recently, I know that you were at the thing that was going on in California. And in Florida, obviously, Tesla was ordered to pay, I think it was $240 million, but you can correct me if I'm wrong as a result of this kind of fatal autopilot case that it was involved in, where it seems like the company for the first time has has had to accept some degree of responsibility for, you know, what happens when someone dies in an autopilot crash? Can you talk a bit about what happened there and the ramifications of the decision? So it's the first time that an autopilot case was tried in federal court, which as far as I can

tell was Tesla's idea. It really thought it would win? Or? So a number of families have sued Tesla and Tesla has settled. Every time, if you go through the history, as I have been of autopilot, every time something comes out, we learn something new. it's because something was done a little bit differently, right? So, like, going back to, you know, the first case in 2016 in China, the court sort of maintained, and this has often been the case, also with the Josh Brown case, where there's the maintenance of the chain of custody of the onboard vehicle data. So Tesla can't just sort of say like, oh, well, we have the remote data and it says this,

and then we get possession of that data, and then we can sort of say whatever we want about it. And so there's always, there's been a lot of questions over the years. And again, when we've learned more about what's really, going on, it's been, or when there have been some form of consequences for Tesla, even just in the realm of PR, it's been when people have not trusted them and have made certain critical choices. One of the key things in this case, the Benavita's case, was that actually, well, so there's one survivor and then the family of the woman who died, they sued the guy behind the wheel first, and it looked like he was fighting them. And then sort of what happened was, you know,

there was sort of this new wave of investigations at NHTSA and stuff. that was when they settled. He settled with them. When he sort of laid out his affirmative defense, he was sort of saying, this isn't all just on me. This is part of it is your irresponsibility because you parked in this place, whatever, but part of it is Tesla. But he settled with them. And so the families had, we don't know how much money, but probably they got a couple million dollars out of this driver. And so it was one of the first times that there was a settlement where a family went into the legal battle with Tesla with some kind of financial cushion, where they didn't feel like they had to take the very first offer. And even both of these plaintiffs, they made

offers to settle for 60 million apiece. And Tesla said no. And yeah, the punitive damages ended up being 200 million. So one of the key things was that they had the money. They were able to sort of force Tesla, you know, into a realm of compensation that they'd been, you know, able to stay away from. The other thing that was really pivotal in this case was, and it's sort of a whole long story. It's probably too long to go into all the details here. But essentially, the Florida Highway Patrol, when they investigated it, this case, they brought the onboard vehicle, the computers where the onboard data was logged to Tesla. A technician at Tesla tried to read them, said that they couldn't, said that this was corrupted.

This was to the police. And also sort of in an affidavit afterwards said a lot of stuff that wasn't true. They said that the police officer let them out of their site when they plugged this in. And the officer's like, no, I had chain of custody. I signed that evidence out and I was with them the whole time. I don't know why they would have said that. But they also said that one of it, the autopilot control unit, which is where the really meaningful data was, they said, well, we weren't even able to power it on.

Well, it turns out not only did they power it on, but when they did, it deleted the data, which often happens. And so it wasn't until years later, this all happened in 2019, right after, you know, the months after the crash. It wasn't until 2024 that the plaintiffs hired this hacker. Guy by the name of Green the Only, he's been responsible. I've seen this guy online for many years, and he's been responsible for exposing a lot of really interesting details about autopilot. He did this amazing thing.

He basically sort of pulled the chip off the board and then was able to extract sort of like metadata and figure all this out. They realized, oh, it had been plugged in when the employee said in their affidavit, it hadn't been. When it did, it deleted that data or some of it. But it also had, in the moments after the crash, they found out it had, in fact, sent remote data a snapshot, crash snapshot, to Tesla to their thing. Tesla was like, oh, goodness me, we just couldn't find. So they lied to the police. Well, again, from the perspective of the court, they sort of give them the benefit of the doubt

on all of this. But the pattern is pretty ugly where it's like the shenanigans with the police when they're trying to obtain the data, the shenanigans with the lawyers, you know, in discovery where Tesla's saying, we don't have this stuff on our server. Forget about the shenanigans with the onboard data. The server is not there. And then, oh, well, once you get the hacker to say, like, oh, no, we know that it uploaded right after the crash.

It's on your server. And they're like, oh, well, we just didn't have the unique ECU number. Like, totally just completely unbelievable stuff. This was really crucial to this whole thing happening. And so, and I think what it illustrates is not only, right, that Tesla is not a good actor here, but that we don't really know the extent of all of this. There may well be a lot of crashes that have happened that were either actively covered up or, you know, the person died and they weren't there to say, hey, I was on autopilot and therefore

Tesla never had to answer the public sort of hue and cry about it, let alone subpoenas and things like that in an actual court case. And so I think this is really crucial story to kind of get out there because it shows like what we know about how Tesla's managed autopilot is really bad, but then some of the stuff like this that we know implies that it's way worse than we may ever know. It's wild to hear you even describe that. Is there any real process to try to actually get to the bottom of that in any meaningful way or have the regulators just like I know that NHTSA was doing a bit more as you were saying the national highway transportation safety agency in the United States was obviously looking into this

or looking into aspects of it as I understand things have changed now that the Trump administration is in power is there any prospect of finding out more about that and does a result like this in this case in Florida, does that have any meaningful implications now for the company moving forward? Yeah, it has in the sense that it's raised the price of settlements. The lawyers that tried that case had another case, the Maldonado case, that actually just yesterday, I think, was settled. Again, the number was not made public. I was led to believe that that settlement would have to be close to $100 million, I think, for that to be something that, you know, things may well have changed. I don't know what the number was, but clearly, that cost is going up. And again,

you know, Tesla's business is not doing better, right? And this is something I've tried to say for a long time, is that Tesla, the way Tesla does business, it leaves these time bombs sort of strewn around the place. Not only do they hurt, you know, as real people being hurt and their lives being turned upside down and horrible things happening, but there's this long tale of consequences that is bound to catch up with Tesla at some point. And, you know, if you look at the history of this company, what jumps out is everything that Elon has done to avoid those consequences and to avoid more of a perception of crisis at any given point along the way of this. So from the regulatory perspective, you know, look, like I caught Tesla using nondisclosure agreements to cover up defects in

2016 and the regulator said, that's naughty and then nothing happened. You know, I didn't try and allege a defect in that case, but the examples, one of the examples that I used in that case was a guy who suspension broke. And it wasn't until 2020 that China forced a recall for suspension breakage that then Nitzel looked at it and then spent a couple years and then didn't do anything. And now with the door handles, you see China's leaving the way and Nitz is following behind them. So we're in a fascinating situation here in the U.S. where on terms of auto safety regulation, we have to wait for the Chinese regulators to do something before our regulators feel sufficient shame to go after them. But look, I think like all of this, right, I think with Tesla's history shows the need for more serious legal frameworks around automated driving and around this very shady boundary between level two driver assistance systems, which are clearly anything but and something that's actually full self-driving.

We need to, we need to do a lot of work there, and it's not an easy thing to regulate, and I grant that, but clearly something needs to happen. But the other piece that really needs to happen is vehicle data. we by law sort of like event data recorders which there's a statutory definition of these things they record right you know the the moment of a crash right before and during a crash a certain kinds of data but that doesn't include you know was driver assistance being used it doesn't include really important stuff and so we have a law that says that edr data is yours by law and Tesla after preventing people from accessing it eventually 2018 released this readers but basically you know if cars are going to be, if they're going to have these autopilot like devices and they're going to be

generating all this data, we need laws that really unambiguously make it clear that that data belongs to the public or to the people who own it, the car, and then they can access it any time in ways that are independently verifiable that don't depend on the goodwill and trust in the company because you cannot trust this company. Yeah, I think a really great point and something that really needs to be taken up. And it's baffling to hear you say that often we need to wait for the Chinese now to look into Tesla for U.S. regulators to do anything. It's also wild to me that the Europeans aren't more aggressive on this. They have no particular stake in needing Tesla to be successful. But that's a whole other point, I guess. I think there have been fewer autopilot

crashes in Europe. I think that's been one of the factors. Fair enough. I think there's also limitations on what's available there as well. Like full self-driving is not even allowed, right? It's not. No. And even with autopilot, you know, they don't let you have as much control authority. So you can't take it around as sharp of corners and stuff like that, which is, I think, fundamental to the whole ploy of autopilot and full self-driving, which is seeming full self-driving, right? So, yes, there's a number of factors. I want to move back to looking at the bigger picture. For a while, Tesla has been positioned, at least, as kind of this dominant player in the electric

vehicle space. You know, we know that there's more competitors out there now. We talk a lot about the Chinese competitors, of course, and how they're moving into more and more markets globally and capturing more market share. But obviously, there are Western automakers that are trying to really catch up, even as there have been questions about the, you know, sustainability of the EV market, especially as the United States kind of pulls back on ambition. So I want to talk about a few different pieces of that. And for me, I feel like the company I've been watching most closely the past number of years

with this has been forward because I find their CEO really interesting and some of the things that he has been saying. And they have obviously had this team in California that's been trying to like devise a new production process and just recently started to shed more details on that. Obviously, they haven't shown off an actual vehicle yet that's coming soonish. But I wonder, you know, after seeing that and after hearing the things that they're saying, what do you make of what Ford is doing? And does this actually sound like something that could work to make it a real competitor in the EV space? You know, thinking not just against Tesla, but increasingly these Chinese companies that are capturing so much market share.

You know, I've always found Ford to be a fascinating company because they are now kind of one of the smaller global automakers, right? They're very dependent on the U.S., and they have to make very pragmatic choices. You know, they're very dependent on their big truck business, but they know it won't last forever. And managing that transition is this constant, never-ending challenge and preparing for the next downturn, which they tend to be really good at. So I do think that this Ford Skunkwick thing, it sort of illustrates two things. One, it illustrates their desperation, I think.

They know that they're in a tough spot. They put a lot of money into EVs, and they put out some products. that were well reviewed, you know, in terms of the Ford Lightning and the Machi, but those products were not profitable. They were not the foundation of a real business. They were symptoms of this EB kind of bubble period. And I think that this new, what are they called,

the Ford Universal platform, I think that this is the first sign of them really doing, being really serious about EVs. I think it has a shot. I think it's actually, it's interesting and it has a shot. So we were just talking about connected cars and about sort of the challenges there on the consumer side and how, you know, the data seems to suggest that people just don't want

subscriptions on their cars. There was a sort of willing to try it, but hasn't really lasted, or at least they haven't found a way to create that sustainable recurring revenue. Where that's not true, in fact, both this and sort of smaller battery EVs is the other challenge in consumer adoption, right, is he can't sell an EV that doesn't have 250 miles of range essentially, or at least that's the conventional wisdom. Yeah, and I think we've talked about this before, how like Tesla kind of set this model, this idea that a vehicle needs to have this massive battery, but that is inherently very expensive

and made this kind of difficult. Of course, all these automakers then chase that model and then have these really unprofitable EV businesses as a result, right? And the market is stalled out because there's a lack of affordability. So Ford's taking an interesting approach to this because the way their brand does positions, they do, they're sort of this hybrid between consumer products and work vehicles. And I think, you know, a lot of consumers who buy a Ford, they like it in part because it has that sort of blue-collar kind of hardworking kind of image, right? And so they have an opportunity to make something work here. And what that something is, I think, is one platform that has consumer-facing products on it,

but also build scale in the fleet space. And not just scale, actually. In the past, that was sort of what would happen, right? You build a consumer car and you build, like, a bunch of really, like, low-end versions of a car or truck, right? A bunch of really low-end version and then dump it in the fleet. And there was, like, almost no margin in it, but it built your scale, which then, propped up your margin on the consumer side, right? And what's interesting is that that's like inverting a little bit because in the commercial

space, you can do two things that you can't do in the consumer space. One is you can sell a vehicle and EV with a smaller battery because businesses, and we may have discussed this little before in the past, but businesses, they don't get hung up on like, oh, what if I need to go to the mountains once a year? Or what if I, you know, what if this or what if that? Like, they know what their mobility needs are. Generally speaking, like almost nobody drives more than 100 miles a day, day and day out, certainly businesses, right? So it's deliveries and it's logistics and it's stuff. And it's

like, we know we have the chargers, we can make 150 miles work, which is an impossible sell to consumers. The other thing that's really interesting is that when your fleet management does require connected vehicles, that data is useful in part because it helps you know what size battery you need for your EVs, among many other things, right? Does you need maintenance, you know, keeping tabs on where things are so you can reroute stuff. So in the commercial space, the connected vehicle thing and then the recurring revenue opportunities are real because you're delivering meaningful value.

Now you're creating scale on not just the vehicle platform, but then like the cloud and all the other sort of IT infrastructure that goes around that, which then potentially makes it easier to find ways to maybe make that work on the consumer side. But if you can't, you still have it propping up margins on the fleet side, which is, you know, in the past, the fleet, again, is not where you would look to prop up margins. So you're seeing an interesting inversion in new technologies in particular.

There's options for monetizing them in the commercial space that are not, that don't really exist at all in the consumer space or at least look very different in the consumer space. And I think by doing one platform and addressing both of those markets, I think you have an opportunity to, again, do things that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do with a purely consumer car, have a smaller battery option, have margin padding. connected services. That's fascinating. It brings to mind when I was looking into the history of electric vehicles. I saw this kind of suggestion. I haven't looked into it closely, but that,

you know, because electric vehicles were more common in the early days of the automobile, right, there was a competition for what kind of, you know, I guess fuel source was going to power these things. And what I read was that in industry, in certain industries, that actually electric vehicles stuck around quite a bit longer than, say, in the consumer space that was taken over by the internal combustion engine, right? But, you know, Ford, to me, seems really interesting. You still have GM saying that, you know, it's looking at electric vehicles. I think it's pushed back. It's kind of timelines on for adoption. It's bringing out a new version of the bolts, you know, the smaller kind of car that it had. You know, you see Volkswagen,

which has really been struggling with the growth of China, but they're starting to push out a lot more electric models, especially in Europe. I wonder, you know, if we're looking at other big automakers, is there anything that really stands out to you there beyond what we see with Ford? You can't talk about EVs without talking about Hyundai, Kia. They've been, you know, some of the most aggressive. Ford hasn't had, right, like the era of the Ford Taurus, where they have, like, that consumer product that's, like, huge volume and, like, everyone's mom has one kind of thing. Like, Ford's not that company anymore.

It's trucks and Mustangs, and they're kind of a niche player in a certain respect. The strategy that they're doing is not one that is going to work in the truly, like, mass, mainstream market. What Hyundai and Kia are doing is, I think, really pushing. towards that, right? Where they're making really compelling products that people find appealing in the way that they found Tesla's appealing, but still have that sort of, you know, real car company finish and quality and reliability and service network and things like that. And they are relentlessly bringing that same sort of package of appeal down market, right? And we're just

about to see sort of the EV3 and the onyck three and just, you know, you go to the nine and then the five. And, you know, and you're getting smaller and smaller outside of China, I think, they're really the standard error in a lot of ways. You know, I'm very curious to see what happens there. Of course, this whole contretemps with ICE in Alabama, I mean, it shows sort of the level of strategic sophistication that's going on here, whatever else you want to say about that whole situation, which I want to get into because we'll be here all day. But like, Hyundai and Kia are doing a lot to bring, you know, high-tech EV manufacturing to the U.S. You know, they're supporting now Waymo with their next generation of robot taxis because

the product that Waymo wanted comes from China and they can't make that work anymore. You know, Hyundai and Kia, in terms of the U.S. market in particular, it's not just in terms of the appeal of their products, but the investments that they're making here, the commitments they're making to building batteries and EVs here is really big and important. And rating them was quite the choice. We talked about the bigger automakers, right? The Ford's, even Hyundai and Kia, you know, these are major players. We also see more experimental propositions being put forward.

I think of something like, I believe it's called the Slate Truck, which is backed by like Jeff Bezos or Amazon or something. There are some different projects like that that are trying to, you know, essentially do something different with electric vehicles. Do you see much prospects in things like that, or are they just kind of like fun games that people are kind of trying out but probably aren't going to hit scale? Well, I think it's a good question. And I think that's what makes Slate interesting is, as it's an experiment. It is definitely not going for the sweet spot of the market. It's going for a part of the market that used to exist and hasn't now for quite some time. And of course, it didn't exist in electric form, right?

That's sort of the wrinkle to it. But a small, basic, affordable electric pickup, I see it as sort of like the Volkswagen Beetle, the original Volkswagen Beetle, you know. At that time, what made the beetle happen, obviously it was developed right, the Nazis for a very different, you know, but it was a people's car from the very beginning. It was meant to be this affordable basic transportation. And it started to be imported after the war into a U.S. market that was dominated by bigger, right? It was the wider, lower, it was the Detroit Baroque era where cars just were getting bigger and bigger and more bells and whistles

and chrome and tail fins and all this sort of stuff. And it was an arms race, you know, seemed like it was, it was never going to end. And the V. Beetle came in like a comet, you know, hitting the dinosaurs. And they didn't destroy it, right? But like it was all of a sudden, it was earth-shattering in the sense that it sort of was like, this car is not playing that game anymore. And I think we have something similar happening where vehicles are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and more bells and whistles and more connected, all this stuff.

And people are starting to say, like, do we need this? And so I think to kind of tie it back to the conversation we've been having about if cars are going to get back to being cars, something like the slate is a really interesting opportunity to redefine that, right? Because also one of the things about cars is that they have to do everything. And I think one of the really interesting things is both with electric and autonomous, we see specialization. Cars are going from this general purpose thing back to the older school model of being more specialized.

And I think if Slate can do that. And I think also that's the question that Waymo and Robo taxis are asking is can we say, hey, maybe you want a car for when you go out to the mountains or where, you know, when you get out of town, but around town, are you interested in maybe just not? Like, maybe is there a world where you could just ride taxis a lot more? Tesla is a company that's pulling new technology and forcing it into the old box of big, heavy, powerful cars. And I think what's interesting is that technology doesn't want to be that.

And now we're starting to see companies like Slate and Waymo and others lean into, like, hey, maybe there's just a post car, maybe there is a postcar reality after all. It's taken a long time to get going and it may not actually happen, but we'll see. I also wonder, like, I moved recently back to a place that's very car dependent. and, you know, I had to get a vehicle, and I just wanted a small car, like, you know, I didn't eat anything big. It was kind of startling to me that at a moment when we're talking so much about affordability and how much car prices have really gone up, especially since the pandemic, that we still

lack those kind of smaller, more affordable vehicles in a concerted way. And if there's any kind of prospect of that returning, I don't know if you've been reading, but in Canada, there's like a discussion now that's being pushed by the dealers, obviously, taking advantage of the situation with the United States that we should recognize European and Japanese vehicle safety standards to allow those vehicles to be more easily imported and sold. I think that there's more of a market for like smaller vehicles in Canada than in the US, you know, as a percentage of the population. But yeah, like I find that intriguing. I don't know if you think there's any possibility of something like that in the United States, not recognizing

other vehicle standards, but like actually getting back to having more cars that are affordable again you know most households have more than one vehicle i think the idea that every single vehicle has to do everything is i think we've been we've been like the frog slowly boiling alive and again this sort of arms race right like it's the same in the 50s and 60s i think in you know it just hadn't no one had said well what if we make a really small really shitty car like it just it doesn't occur to you when you're part of this you know growth feedback loop the beetle did not change everything it was it sort of showed what was possible, which then the Japanese, I think, were able to go and find kind of a more modern, sort of compromised sort of version of what it was, it's really disruption. I mean,

this is really what disruption is when markets form their own dynamic and something comes in that's much cheaper and more basic and says, hey, like the core utility that you get out of this product can be served with something simpler and cheaper. You know, I think there's a lot of things about the U.S. market that make it look ripe for disruption, one of which is that people think that Tesla is disrupted when it's the opposite of it, but people have lost touch with what disruption is. And so I think, again, with Slate, I can't predict what will happen. It's too unpredictable because we don't know.

We don't have experimental data. But that's why it's worth doing, is that this will give us experimental data on what is possible. A lot of money has gone into like, oh, well, Tesla's successful, so we'll just copy that. And clearly, there's not room for a lot of Tesla's. Like, we've run that, we have a lot of experimental data around that. You want to disrupt mobility? you want to explore new opportunities for technology? I think there's a lot there.

And I think capital should be going towards it. And I think what's encouraging is that capital is flowing into things that are more actually, I think, disruptive in that classical sense. And I would put the slate truck as sort of a key example of that. I also wonder like, you know, obviously in the North American market, we don't have the Chinese automakers, right? And I wonder if the Europeans almost have a leg up in the sense that, yeah, there are small tariffs on Chinese vehicles, but they're still sold there, right? And if that

makes them have to really compete in a way that the North American automakers don't really have to and sets them up potentially to be even further laggards, because they don't have this pressure, I'm not sure. The European car market has always had, you know, more affordable options. It's more established part of the market that, like, there are some people who just want a very basic car. That's sort of part of their DNA. And here in the U.S., like, that's, it's a, it's a cultural thing as much as an economic thing. Final question for you. We have talked big picture.

We've talked about Tesla. We've talked about everything we're seeing in these different auto companies and things like that. Going back to one thing that you were saying earlier is these big promises around Tesla and its future and all this kind of stuff. And in the past, Tesla for most people, for everybody, was an electric car company, right? They were innovating on electric cars. They were trying to move this forward.

They were, you know, making it clear that there was a market here that other automakers should pursue. If you go with the narrative that they have been putting out there, right, and that a lot of people kind of followed. It increasingly feels like Tesla is not even trying to be an electric car company anymore. It's talking about supercomputing, even though it just closed down the supercomputing division. It's talking about robotaxies, which is still kind of cars, but a different kind of version of what we've been talking about or what they were presenting in the past. And of course, you know, the focus now, at least rhetorically, seems to be a lot on these robots where it's really not clear that there's anything tangible there. Is Tesla not an electric

car company anymore? What do you make of it? Back in the day, in the good old days of the online Tesla wars, 16, 17, 18, 19, the whole narrative was Tesla's not a car company. Tesla's not a car company. And they were right. It wasn't. And one of the things I've been told, I don't have like multiple sources on this, but I've been told that Elon did not want to do the model Y because it was a boring car and Tesla doesn't do boring cars. And it is, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's barely different. It's what the Model 3 should have been in the first place, but it's barely distinguishable. It's a little more so now that they've done the refresh or whatever.

But he didn't want to do boring cars. Well, if you want to be a car company, you have to make boring car. The market wants boring cars. Elon was never going to lead Tesla. This is the thesis of my book Ludacris, was that Elon's leadership was never going to take Tesla to what at that point was the whole narrative, which is that they're going to become a mass market automaker. His leadership style and the culture that he built around himself is just fundamentally not one that is suited to the business of making cars at scale.

In a sense, there's no big surprise here. Like, this is exactly what I've sort of always expected. What I didn't expect was the opportunity to just endlessly pivot. And to pivot to such sort of unsurious pie in the sky. I think, again, we just sort of, we were through the looking glass on Tesla. It's hard to believe that a trillion-dollar company can be completely unmoored from reality. But the other way of looking at it is that a company has to be. unborn for reality to be worth a trillion dollars. And for them to say now, like, the CEO's stake

in that company is going to be worth a trillion dollars, it just goes to show it. It's become a thing unto itself. We're through the stages of Bodriardian progression to where it doesn't even try to resemble an electric car company anymore. It just, it has its own internal logic now. Tesla is just Tesla. And you can't really think about it in other terms. You can't take lessons from other industries. This has been one of my frustrations this whole time of trying to cover them is that it's so hard to take lessons from other companies and apply them. And when you can and when you do, people are just like, oh, it doesn't matter. It's irrelevant Tesla's Tesla. Well, okay, now we're seeing the consequences of that, right? Like, you say that often enough. Tesla's not a car

company. Tesla's Elon is this unique thing. Okay. Like, you've now spun that up into its own sort of like hardened entity. And now what? Like, how do you create economic value with that? Because at the end of the day you have to, right? Like the laws of economics are not suspended. Elon Musk is not going to create robots that suspend those laws, right? That make them not matter anymore. And so we're back to the old question of like, you know, capital markets. Like, what are you doing? Why do you keep putting money into this thing? You know, just as with autopilot, we've learned that there's been stuff happening behind the scenes that we didn't know about. I think we'll learn there's something similar on the financial side or have been a number of similar

things. I'm not plugged into that world well enough to be the one to report on them. But I think clearly you look at it and people are betting on this company for for some other reasons other than the current creation of economic value and the prospects for future creation of economic value. It's just not plausible. And I think when you look at full self-driving, what's happening there is that it's not that it's plausible, but it's what people want to believe is coming. Elon's very good at identifying what people want and telling him he's going to give it to them. And the only problem is that, you know, at some point he has to, he has to actually do it and he still hasn't. And so this October will be the ninth anniversary of all Tesla's are capable

of full self-driving. A lot longer than I thought it was going to go on. But I guess if we want to get to year 10, let's do that. Let's just see where it goes. We're going to keep watching. That's for sure. You know, Ed, Tesla is a company I follow closely. Elon Musk is someone I've been following closely for years. This kind of EV and auto industry, I follow closely enough. But every time I speak with you, I feel like I learn so much more. And it gives me so many new insights into what's happening. I'm really looking forward to the new book. Of course, we can't encourage people to go pre-order it or anything yet because it's still a bit too early, but I can't wait for it to come out. And I'm really looking forward to reading it and

interviewing you and chatting all about it when it does come out. And of course, I'll be letting listeners know when it's their time to take a look for it. But thanks, as always, for taking the time to come on the show. I really appreciate it. Well, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure. Ed Niedermeyer is the author of Ludacris and co-host of the Atonicast. Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Houston. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to Patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.