The Vergecast - Could the Trump Phone be a good phone?

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

The Trump Phone is real! Ish! The Verge’s Dom Preston has seen a T1 on a video call, that we can say for sure. Dom joins the show to explain what’s new about the phone, whether it has a chance to be a decent device, and why it’s taken so long for Trump Mobile to ship the thing. After that, The Verge’s Hayden Field explains the excitement around OpenClaw and Moltbook, and whether either one is a big moment for the AI industry. Finally, The Verge’s Andy Hawkins helps us answer a question on the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11) about whether, and when, Tesla might get out of the car business altogether. Further reading: This is the Trump Phone⁠ ⁠The Trump Phone no longer promises it’s made in America⁠ ⁠600,000 Trump Mobile phones sold? There’s no proof.⁠ ⁠OpenClaw: all the news about the trending AI agent ⁠ ⁠OpenClaw’s AI ‘skill’ extensions are a security nightmare ⁠There’s a social network for AI agents, and it’s getting weird ⁠Humans are infiltrating the social network for AI bots ⁠Tesla discontinuing Model S and Model X to make room for robots⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast of putting as many megapixels as you possibly can into your selfie camera. I'm a friend David Pierce, and I am slowly losing my mind, if I'm being completely honest with you. So like I mentioned last week on the show, I am shopping for a new phone. This is a very fun thing for me to do. For a long time, I was a phone reviewer, so I lived a totally abnormal phone life. I would switch phones like every six weeks based on what I was reviewing. but for the last five years maybe, I have been an iPhone person. I have had an iPhone and then another iPhone and then another iPhone and then another iPhone

all the way up until this iPhone 16. So I figured I am now like a normal person in terms of my phone use, but I am not a normal person and that I have access to all the other phones by virtue of what I do for a living. So I was like, okay, I'm going to get all the phones, try all the phones. It's going to be great. So the first one I got is this, Motorola Razor. I have been shilling for flip phones on this podcast for a long time. Figured I'd put my money where my mouth is and just try this thing out for real.

All went fine. Got it set up. It's charged. It's updated. Phone works. Okay. There's a lot of weird AI pop-ups that I don't love. But we're getting there.

Except I'm trying to switch my e-sim from my iPhone to my razor. And this is supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be software. There's an app that you download. You say I want to activate on this phone, and it never, ever works, and it's driving me up the wall. So I have to call Verizon. I think I have to go to the store. It's going to be a whole thing.

This completely defeats the purpose of e-sims and all of this. What are we doing, people? Anyway, by this time next week, I hope to have a real honest-to-god update for you on my adventures switching to Android. I'm going to try a bunch of different phones. Thank you to everybody who has called in and written in with ideas about stuff I should test. I have a flip phone, I have a folding phone, I have a regular phone, I have a bunch of funky phones. I'm going to get a couple of phones with keyboards to see if like the Blackberry Renaissance is real and worth pursuing. I have a lot of stuff to test.

If and only if I can figure out how to get my stupid phone number ported from here to here, which is not supposed to be hard, but here we are. Anyway, that is near here and north there. Today on the show, we're going to do two things. First, Dom Preston is going to come on and tell us about the Trump. phone because he did something relatively unthinkable and what I thought was impossible, which is that he has seen the Trump phone. And he's going to tell us about it. I'm very excited.

Then Hayden Field from the Verge is going to come on and tell us about OpenClaw and MaltBook and this sort of fascinating moment in AI agents that were happening. What if AI agents could use your computer and could talk to each other? Wild times in the AI world. Hayden's going to break it all down for us. Also, really fun question about Tesla on the Vergecast hotline. lots to get to. It's all going to be very fun. But first, I'm going to, I'm going to just, I'm going to call Verizon.

I've been putting off this phone call for like three days because I thought I could figure it out. I'm going to call Verizon. We're going to get it worked out. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need.

Prompts something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software.

What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients, have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, we're back. Don Preston, News editor at the Verges here. Hi, Don. Hi, David. How you doing? You had, like, the White Whale Verge experience and then just absconded away to, like, a family house somewhere in the far reaches of England.

Is this what your last few days have been? like? Yeah, except I just replaced far reaches with boring suburbs. That's fair. It's all the far reaches to me. So you, I would say, have spent what, the last couple of months on the hunt for the Trump phone. We, the verge, has been covering this for a long time, but you, I think, kind of half willingly and half by force were put on the Trump phone beat. Is that a reasonable description of what happened? Somewhere between those two. Yeah, and I've just been, my job basically has been once a week, go and go and pass to Trump Mobile, try that press address. I've never once had a reply to that. I'm in the double digits for emails now with not a single reply. And just tracking down

every hint of a scrap of a piece of information I can find about the company, about the phone, about the people making it, the people behind it, what they're trying to do with it, all sorts. And up until last week, which I want to get to very quickly here, but up until last week, if I'm thinking about this, right, we didn't learn much since, what, nine months ago when this thing first launched, right? It was going to be a big made in the USA phone. There was Trump mobile, the service. There was the Trump phone T1, which was the phone. All of this stuff kind of got announced, made a big deal out of it.

We kind of immediately said this is almost certainly nothing. And then we heard nothing about it for a long time to the point where you sort of made a bit out of being like, nope, still nothing about the Trump phone. which has not shipped and is clearly not made in the United States. This thing had gone essentially dark, right? Pretty much. They announced the company on the phone in mid-June, 2025. About a week and a half later, they updated everything to take away all the made-in-the-USA mentions, and they slightly changed the spec sheet on the website.

They kind of did that quietly, and people collect that this had happened. They changed it to a phrase like, it was something to the effect of, like, American hands. There are American hands behind every device. Sure. And also American proud design. We can't forget that. That I liked very much. Yeah, a bunch of words that if you actually think about it, don't mean anything at all.

Nothing at all. So they did that. That was the last official change to the website, as far as I'm aware. They kept posting our social media until, I think, the end of August. And then all the social media accounts suddenly went dark. And it hasn't been a post on any of their social accounts since then. And basically, it's been silence since the end of August. as far as anyone tell.

Every now and then, people have managed to sort of, both us and other publications have managed to get through to their customer service line and try and get answers to queries that way, especially pushing the like, where's the phone? Why is it so delayed? And they get a half answer from customer service that you don't really know how much to trust, how well informed is that customer service rep, that kind of thing.

But official press lines, the website, no changes at all for, yeah, four or five months now. Until last week, Dom. Until last week. What happened last week? Tell me this story. This is some true, like, you, like, this is your water gate deep throat in the parking garage moment. What happened last week?

I mean, it's a little more mundane than what I get in terms of how it played out. But basically, I mean, try to dig into the executive team behind the phone. So when it was announced, we had Don Jr. and Eric Trump on stage, but they also brought on these three executives where they said we're going to run the whole thing. And no one could find out a whole lot of information about them. So I was trying to dig in a little bit more. They're all involved with Liberty Mobile, which is the MVNO that is actually running Trump Mobile, which we'd known for a while. Liberty Mobile's been around for a while, right?

It's a relatively established thing. Okay. Five or six years, something like that, at least. And in trying to track down contact details for any of these people involved, I managed to find a Liberty Mobile email address for one of these three executives. And I tried them all on LinkedIn and place like that, no response. and I tried this guy on this Liberty Mobile email address and I thought there's no way I'm getting anything back I didn't even know for sure this was a real email

that it would really reach him but I tried that and then within two hours I got a reply and I couldn't believe it and he this guy called Don, Don Hendrickson and this is the first official word I had from anyone in this company and as casual as anything he's like

hey Dominic great to meet you like we'd love to talk we think it's time that our voices heard and I thought, oh my God, this is it. I've made it. I'm going to get to talk to one of these guys. It's brilliant. I replied pretty much immediately,

tried to set something up, and then nothing. And that was on a Friday. I then, like, sort of replied again on the Monday and heard nothing. We then ended up that week writing a piece, basically jokingly saying, I'd been ghosted by this executive. Because I emailed him three times.

He never got back to me again. That seemed to be the only word. Another week goes by. and then he just emails me again out of the blue and says, why don't you suggest some times we can have a call? And this time he's copied in another one of the executives on the team. This is called Eric Thomas, who's now CC'd in. He doesn't say that Eric is going to join me on the call.

He just kind of silently ceases him in and says, suggest some times. I suggest someone we go through. We get this time lined up. I joined this Google Meet call at 5pm my time on Friday just gone, really not expecting anything. I'd been talking with my editor, Marina. know we were ready for like, what do we do if no one turns up? What's the story we write about getting ghosted once again? How long were you prepared to wait to see if somebody showed up?

I hadn't for a head. I mean, in my head, I'd done my mental calculation my workouts for the day and budgeted at least an hour or two for working on the story that night. So I probably could have sat there with a meet call open. I was ready to do a sort of sad screenshot of me sitting alone in a Google Meet call to run on the site. But no, they joined a couple minutes in. Both these got joined. They kept their webcams off for the entirety of this hour and 20 minute call, except a brief period of about one minute in the middle of the call where one of them just turns this webcam on, holds a trump phone up to the camera, shows me it for 30 seconds a minute, something like that, and then he's back to webcam off, and that's it. I'm just talking to these two black squares

on Google Meet again. Okay. Why do you think they wanted to talk to you now? I think I'm both extremely interested in this phone, but also in this particular moment in time. Like, it was clearly a surprise to you that these people decided they wanted to talk to you. It was also a surprise to me that they decided they wanted to talk to you. Did you get a sense from talking to them why they want to be out in the world more now than they have been? So there's kind of two parts to this, right? There's why now and why me? Why now? I think I know fairly clearly because the way they describe it, basically, they are ready to relaunch. mobile and they're going to have a new website going up within a couple weeks, they say.

They're going to fully officially reveal the design of the phone to the world. They're going to reveal the new spec sheets. They're going to tell everyone when it's ready to ship, that kind of thing. So as far as they're concerned, they seem to be building up to the big moment where they go back public again and reveal everything they've been working on all this whole time. Why me, I'm less clear on. I did ask them that. We did try and have that conversation.

They were kind of trying to dig up the idea that, oh, we're not talking to any other press. Like, we're really just talking to you, like, kind of buttering me up that way. They clearly had a kind of recurrent theme in the interview was them having some hang-ups about the press. They were talking a lot about the idea that, you know, their words get twisted in the media, and there's a lot of kind of bad faith reporting around the company and the product and that sort of thing. And they seem to think we were kind of going to give them some sort of objective, neutral line on it, which is both kind of flattering and also surprising, given, I don't know, the coverage of my, the tone of my coverage has not been,

I hope I've gone semi-objective, but it's not exactly been flattering to Trump Mobile for the most part. So this is sort of a funny side note to this, because this is in a lot of ways, you've gotten a lot of questions over the course of this coverage of yours of why do you keep doing this?

Is this a bit? Why are you just sort of making this joke over and over? And in part, it is a funny joke, certainly. But I think a thing that is certainly true and has been true since the beginning, is this thing is way more interesting if it's real than if it isn't. Like, I aggressively root for the Trump phone

to be a real thing that exists and have the whole time. And I think you and I share this. Like, it is, it is more interesting as a journalist. It's more interesting as a person who thinks the phone industry is interesting. Like, every piece of this story

is more interesting if this phone is real. And I think that is, like, at the end of this, you and I are both people who like phone. And so maybe we get some credit as you get some credit as somebody who likes to look at and think phones are interesting. But again, like, we've gotten so many questions about like, why do you keep covering this? And it's interesting for a thousand reasons, right? The way that they've made it, the thing that they're trying to make, the way that they're selling it to people, every piece of this is interesting. And it's all more interesting if it's real than if it's not.

Because if it's not, it's just a grift. And that sucks. It might still be a grift, to be clear. But if it's a grift, that's only one version of the story, right? the actual existence of this phone, right? And the thing that you've now seen, albeit on Google Meet, but I'm confident that this is like a real piece of hardware, as I think you are too, is just more interesting.

And it raises all of the new interesting downstream questions of what do we do with this thing now that it exists? And that to me is like, if I'm being flattering to the verge, hopefully that's the thing that they see from us, right? It's like, we want this thing to be real so that we can talk about it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, one of the recurrent, like, comments we get when I've been covering this story is just people saying, I really hope this is real so you can review it. You know, people want to see I'll review this one. I want to review this phone. I can't wait to get my hands on one of these things if it's real and actually get to go through that experience of like, does it work well? What have they done to Android? Have they somehow magarified the core Android experience in any way? How, like, is it actually going to give good value? They're talking up so much the idea this is competitive value. But, you know, I review a lot of Android phones specifically, and it's so easy to get these kind of core

competent specs into any Android device at a very budget price point. And so it'll be really interesting to see, how does this thing really stack up to the competition? Like, what value might you objectively attach to this piece of hardware without the name, without the Gryft, without anything else attached to it? And what price are they going to charge? And where's the gap between those and how does that work? Totally. So yeah, let's talk about the phone itself. Again, Eight or nine months ago when this thing first came out, it was pretty clearly a render on the website. You and I both spent a long time, I think, as did Allison Johnson on our team, like, scouring Alibaba to see if we could find the version of this phone that they were using. It was a weird render.

You have a picture of this in your story. We'll put it in the show notes. But it was a weird render where the camera lenses were too far apart. Like, none of it made any sense. It was pretty clear it was not a real thing. Presumably, if they're about to launch this thing publicly, again, for real, it's much closer. to being a real thing. What do we know about the Trump phone now? We had previously been told, well, initially they said August and September. Their launch announcement was a little confused.

Then it changed to later this year, meaning 2025. Now they told me basically the only thing they're waiting for is T-Mobile certification, and they're expecting that in mid-March. And at the moment, they get certified by T-Mobile. They expect to be able to start shipping to buyers not very long after that. So maybe end of March, people getting this in their hands, maybe April is the rough kind of time. They wouldn't commit to a date, but that's what they're kind of talking up as the vague time number in. And to be fair, that's a real thing. The network certification from everything we've understood over the years is a long and complicated and somewhat unknowable process. So that's not an unreasonable place to be. No, and they said they're through

FCC certification. That one's done. They're going to do Timmable first, start shipping once they've got that and then do AT&T and Verizon certification after that, but they just want to get one network and then go. That's the story on time by. So that suggests that the phone itself, the hardware, is done. That's what they say. The version I saw, they said was not a final, final, final version because design-wise, the version I saw had some commonalities with the original one we saw in terms of what was on the back, which is it's a gold finish. It has an American flag of the bottom, and it has a giant T1 logo right in the middle of the back. That bit, they said is going to change. The T1 logo is going away. So the other thing I'm seeing in this

picture is the camera bump is it's now a vertical camera bump with three lenses. And there's another Trump Mobile logo written vertically on the side of it. The thing that I'm stuck on is the lenses on this thing are not evenly spaced. Like the part of me that says this is still a fake thing looks at those lenses and say this can't possibly be a real piece of hardware. Yeah, the lens spacing I struggle with. I didn't notice this during the call. I mean, he was waving the phone around, so I didn't get a chance to look at it still. It was only afterwards during the right cell that someone pointed out to me when I sent them the image. They were like, those camera lenses don't line up. Yeah, it's very upset.

It's horrific. It's just, it's just bad detail. Yeah. So I agree. That's the kind of detail that might make you worry. This is just still. another fake thing, this isn't final. It could just be bad, awkward design, you know. I wouldn't be shocked if the final things do ship, and they do look like that, and the lenses are just lined up kind of wrong, and that's just what everyone has to live with.

I mean, it wouldn't be the first time somebody had wonky lenses, you know what I mean? What do we know about the specs of this phone? Well, one, the biggest kind of new thing we got is it is going to be a Qualcomm chip, a Snapdragon 7 series, I'm not sure which one. So that's Qualcomm's kind of mid-range,

upper mid-range kind of level performance. That is about what you'd expect in the sort of $500-ish price range they'd been talking about, that might change as well, as we can get onto. I know it's going to have a 5,000-m-ampower battery. I know it's going to have 512 gigabytes of storage, which is more than they'd initially promised that has gone up, and will support micro-sd cards. They'd initially promised a headphone jack.

I actually don't know if that's still there or not. screen size, I don't know, I didn't get told a new figure for that. They've previously said two different numbers. When I said they changed specs before, the biggest change was the screen size. It started at 6.78 inches and then changed to 6.25 inches, which is a very meaningful change in a phone. Suddenly, your whole chassis is different and everything. So it was one of the biggest red flags in the whole time. I don't know what size this one is, but from looking at it, it looks much closer to that first figure.

This looks like a big phone, a kind of plus size, ultra-size device. I know it has a curved display. It has what they kept calling a waterfall display, which is the term that Huawei used to use for its very excessively curved panels that really like wrap almost all the way around the side of the body. That's very like phones of eight years ago.

Yes, it's a very dated detail that they were very proud of. I kind of love it. I actually like curved screens and I know I'm in a real minority, especially in phone reviewers in liking curved screens. So this kind of like warmed my heart a little that there'll be a curve screen back because everything's flat these days.

Yeah. What about the cameras? Okay, cameras, this is the other thing they were very proud of. A 50 megapixel rear camera and a 50 megapixel selfie camera, which is, in fairness, relatively unusual. I think you should never put too much stock in the megapixel count of a phone camera. It is not a super meaningful spec anymore. But still, that is a high resolution for selfie camera.

It's pretty unusual. On the back, I'm not sure beyond that. There are the three lenses there. That doesn't mean a whole lot. The original spec sheet had said 50 megapixel rear, and then I think it was a depth set. sensor and a macro lens with the other two they initially announced, both like two megapixels, or maybe they didn't even list a resolution.

I don't know right now. When I saw a glimpse of the camera app, it had the standard kind of one-time zoom and then a 0.6 times, which strongly suggests one of these is an ultra-white. And then it also had a two times. That could mean a telephoto, but it could just mean the digital zoom in the app on the main camera. So my best guess here is it's going to be a main camera, a low resolution, like maybe a 12 megapixel ultra wide, and then probably it's still a macro for the third lens or something like that. But that is me speculating at that point. Okay. I'm struck by the fact that A, you just

described a pretty solid spec sheet for a phone. Like there, there's nothing there that immediately screams giant red flag to me. But also, it sort of seems like you just described the spec sheet of every mid-range Android phone on the planet. Yes, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I noticed that they were very keen to pick up, as I said, the 50-mapixel selfie camera and the half-terabyte of storage that they've jumped up to. I was trying to think around for mid-range phones, and I went and checked the 1-plus Nord5, which didn't release in the U.S., but it did release in the UK and Europe in mid-2020.

And that had a 50-mapsule selfie camera. I remember reviewing it and being impressed by the quality of the selfie camera. and it also had a 512 gigabyte storage option. If you wanted to get that version of that phone, it would be 499 pounds. So that's about $670.70. But it also had an 8-series chip, whereas this is going to be a 7-series chip. So I think there are some other specs that phone would beat the Trump phone on paper. But that means even kind of up a limit, you're looking at a phone in that up to $700 price range.

They're talking it up as if this is going to rival $1,000 flagship. and the reality of just specs on Android phones these days is most of what they've announced is very easy to hit in a relatively budget device. If I hunted around, I could probably find cheaper phones than that One Plus that match a lot of these specs. Maybe not the 50 megapixel selfie camera, but only because most people don't bother putting

that high-resolution selfie cameras in phones. So there aren't going to be very many that offer that. But generally, if you want to get a Snapdragon and Steremon series, you can even get eight series for like the equivalent of a few hundred dollars. You can get decent amount of RAM, big screen, decent amount of storage, you know, certainly a triple-ray camera, maybe a better real triple-way camera than this.

Nothing they've said sounds like a red flag. Nothing they've said screams premium flagship. Right. And an important detail of a lot of the specs that you just described is they're very easy to get in China. Like dot, dot, dot, dot, in China. And obviously the made-in-USA-ness of this phone was a key part of the selling point, right?

Like, there was this giant thing on the website that said, made in the USA when they first shipped. And as we were talking about, that has become sort of less and less declarative over time. Are they still claiming that they're making this phone in sub-substantial way in the United States? They are saying that this is getting, or has had final assembly in Miami. They were pretty coy about exactly what they mean by final assembly. I tried to push. I think the phrase that he used was,

it's more than just slapping a cover on the phone. So it's not just boxing it. It's not just sticking the rear chassis on. They said 10 or so components are getting assembled in Miami. Now, I don't know if they're also counting, you know, the box and the USB cable among those, you know, 10 or so components. or whether they really mean they're getting a display unit, a battery, a motherboard, and assembling all that stuff together.

He was very vague. But, yeah, there's something happening in the US. It's not made in the USA, though. They're not calling it made in the USA. And they did even admit on the call that they recognize that made in the USA is actually a term that the FTC regulates and there are restrictions on when you can and cannot use it, and that this phone does not meet those requirements, and that they could not legally call it made in the USA if they wanted to.

they were pretty open about that. They were a little less open about the fact that they clearly had previously done so. When I pushed on that, the answer was a kind of, oh, maybe, you know, maybe something got said by mistake. We didn't mean it. Oh, that's a load of crap. Yeah. It was not said by mistake. What they basically said, the line they had was that everything they said at launch was talking about their goals for the company,

i.e. the goal is phones made in America and that that is still their goal, they say. But that they never said or never meant to say, specifically that the T1 phone is made in the USA. Allow me to read you

the press release from June 16th of 2025 announcing Trump Mobile and the T1 phone. This is a press release, dumb. Trump Mobile is also excited to announce it will release the T1 phone in August, Lye. It is a sleek gold smartphone, lie, engineered for performance,

lie and proudly designed and built in the United States for customers who expect the best from their mobile carrier. You just don't get to take that. It's right there. It's right. And the press release is still live. That's not something you've had to dig up as an archive. It's just still there. It's just right there. You just, you can't lie. Stop lying. Anyway, all of this, I think, the Miami of all of this is really fascinating to me because there's this company Blue devices that has been doing a version of this thing for a very long time, kind of taking and rebadging relatively middling to sort of upper middle class Android phones and selling them to new markets. And that hasn't really worked in the U.S., but ironically, it's worked very well in other places.

But that, it may technically satisfy some things, right? And like you said, the definition of made in the USA is very specific. And my guess is what happened is nobody at Trump Mobile understood that actually there was a legal definition to the phrase made in the USA that you had to do things to meet. You couldn't just say it. They just said things and then had to walk that back when they realized, oh, this actually has to be defensible in a certain way. All of this notwithstanding, is this real or is this a grift? I think it's real. I am increasingly at the –

I've always hoped, like you did, that this was real. And I was beginning to doubt. I was getting the fear. I'm increasingly the opinion that it is real. I think, I mean, the thing I saw was a phone. It was a functioning phone. I saw the screen being used. I saw Android being operated.

I saw the camera app being opened. I didn't get a whole glimpse of lots of stuff happening, but I saw a functioning Android device. I'm imagining like a solid gold Android launcher where all the app icons are super ornate. and every app icon is like replaced by Trump's face. That's what I imagine the Trump phone looks like. It's like you want to open Spotify.

It's just a picture of Donald Trump wearing headphones. Did you get any glimpse of what the Android looks like? Sadly, for better or worse, the glimpse I saw is stock Android. Okay. As stock as I've ever seen, which is kind of a good thing, right? I mean, if you actually want to buy one of these and use it, that's probably good news. There is an outcome here that is super interesting to me, right? Which is that what this phone actually is.

And if Trump Mobile is smart, this is the thing they should be building, is basically a very straightforward, very simple, relatively functional Android phone that is based on like pretty good specs that are well tested and work everywhere. And the only thing different about it is that it says Trump in big ass letters in a bunch of places. Because the people who are buying this one, that's what they're buying it for. So actually, if you can give them all of the other stuff, they'll be happy. Like give people a pixel that says Trump in gigantic letters. And in a very funny way, you're actually going to make any neat. enormous part of your audience, much happier than if you try to do weird stuff with software.

Exactly. The people buying this just going to want a phone that works, right? Yeah. They want something simple. They want something and they can rely on. And yeah, the closer this goes to simple Android, I think the more they're going to have that. They were very cage about their like ongoing software support. That's obviously one area. I would have very low expectations. They seemed a bit confused by my questioning when I asked about what kind of support they would offer and whether they'd commit to a certain time. It felt a bit like something that hadn't really occurred to them before that, you know, you ship with Android 15 and they were like, it's Android 15, that's it. And I was like, and after that, what comes next?

Well, that's a tricky thing, right? Because running a hardware business means you have to have a support ecosystem. It means you have to have a returns process. It means you have to have ongoing both software updates and security updates because that stuff is increasingly expected to be standard from users. Like, we made a phone is actually the beginning of a very. long process for a new hardware company. And you and I have seen over the years, shipping the first phone or even the first whatever 10,000 phones is often not the hardest part. It's everything that comes after that. And that's why we've seen a lot of

companies make one device and that's it. And then they get out of the business for one reason or another. So I think it's not super encouraging that they seem to think they're at the finish line and not the starting line. And I will say one of the biggest slightly unexpected takeaways I had from the call, though it makes sense in retrospect, is they do not see themselves as a phone company with an MVNO. They see themselves as a network, an MVNO that's making a phone. And I suspect they are beginning to regret, A, how much attention the phone has drawn, and B, how much work the phone is proving to be. And they kept emphasizing that for them, the business is the network, and the business is the MVNO.

If anything, the phone itself is like a lost leader. They think it's a way of getting more audience onto their network. But they do not, when they were talking about ambitions for the future, more phones was among them, but it was clearly not the thing they're really thinking about. They just want more people on the network. And you kind of get the feeling the phone is becoming a bit of a millstone around their neck. I always wondered why the hardware plan wasn't just an overly expensive gold phone case

that said Trump mobile. And it sounds like maybe they wonder that too. They're probably wondering that too. Last thing before I let you go, price. You mentioned the price is still listed at $4.99, but you're maybe skeptical of that being the price forever? So they have told me that is going to change. That should be changing along with the relaunch that comes maybe in March.

They wouldn't tell me what price it will be. So initially, they basically kind of have changed their tune a little bit. The website right now is still just listed as. it's $499. It very much says that is the price. They're doing this kind of, you know, recomb thing again like they did with Made in the USA by saying, oh, that was always an introductory offer. That was never the real price. That was always our early bird discount. So anyone who did put their $100 down, or still does, I guess, in the next few weeks, you've got time to lock it in at that low, low price. If you put down $100 deposit, you can still

get the Trump phone for $499. They said it will be more than that once it properly launches. below $1,000 was the only thing they'd commit to. That's a big wide gap right there. $49 to below $1,000 is an awful lot of money. There's a lot of room for them to play with. So it could be doubling in price. All right, Dom, congrats on finally, after all of this time, it's got to feel like you're like the dog who caught the car.

You're like, oh my God, I actually saw this phone that I never thought I would see. So congrats, I'm psyched for you. And we're going to have to, I think what's going to have to happen is we're going to, every single person at the Verge is going to have to get a review unit of this phone, and it's just going to get weird. We're going to do Trump Phone Week at theBurge.com. This thing comes out. It's going to be amazing. I can't wait. All right. We've got to take a break. Dom, thank you. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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Hayden Field, Verge senior reporter covering AI is here. Hi, Hayden. Hi. AI things. There's just always AI things. This is what we do here. There are so many AI things every week. Okay, this is actually the exact right entrance to the thing I want to talk about.

So mostly what we're here to talk about this time is OpenClaw, which is not MaltBook, which is not, what was it, Claw, Clawbot, Clawed bot. The names are insane. Now it's called OpenClaw. And there's also this thing called MaltBook. And these have become sort of phenomena in the tech industry. But the biggest thing I'm trying to figure out, and I think a question you and I both go into a lot of these things with is like, is this, a real moment in the story of AI, or is this a one-minute fad like every other one-minute fad in the history of AI?

There are a lot of things that everybody gets excited about on Twitter for an hour and a half and then moves on from. It seems to me like these two products have become something more than that. But I'm curious how you feel more steeped in this. Like are OpenClaw and Maltbook really truly honestly a thing? You know, it's funny because I feel like every day, There are a lot of different opinions on it as the past two weeks of craziness has progressed. But one thing that has stayed the same is that OpenClaw seems to, you know, have kind of withstood the ups and downs of the hype. People actually think it's really interesting.

People actually think it's useful. That's actually why I went viral in the first place is because people thought it was an actually useful product. And that's their whole branding. It's AI agents that actually do stuff for you. Like, you know, it's not like a theory. It's just they're actually making your life as a consumer easier. So, and honestly, the best part of that is the interface. Like you can text through WhatsApp, you know, telegram, whatever to make your AI agent do things. So I think OpenClaw is a moment that is, you know, sticking around for now. MOLT book is the thing that I think is a fad on Twitter. Because, you know, as MIT Tech Review put it this weekend, it was like peak AI theater. You know, it blew up really fast. It fell really quickly. There was like a lot of questions about how many posts on there were influenced by humans and how many weren't. And it was just like a lot of, like burned really bright and fast and then fell hard. So I think it's two. I think one is going to stick around for a bit. One may have been a fat. Okay. So unfortunately, I agree on both counts. Let's start with Open Club because I do think this is maybe the more. interesting version of a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about in a while. Can you describe very briefly what OpenClaw actually is? OpenClaw is a platform for AI agents that's built as being

particularly useful and actually useful for everyday consumers. So, you know, creating calendar events, you know, checking into your flight for you before Southwest, for example, went to like assigned seating, like, got to set that alarm for 24 hours before. People would use it for stuff like that. you know, any number of things. But the best part for a lot of people felt the users loved was that you could communicate with your AI agent through typical messaging platform. So like telegram, WhatsApp, all those things. So it was a cool way to like just kind of integrate your AI agent into your everyday life and just have it working for you in the background. And for some reason, it felt a lot more accessible to a lot of people than the other products out there. And it

seem to have better results in their opinion. So it was kind of like a, you know, just quickly put together project by one guy who wanted to make something for himself that worked well. And then it took off as many like viral projects do. Someone makes it just for themselves and then everyone starts using it. Yeah. In a funny way, it feels to me like kind of the next step in the sort of clawed code phenomenon, right? Because you have AI chatbots that are very sort of self-contained and they talk to you and they talk to themselves, but they all kind of live in this little bubble. And then it's like, okay, we did the web. And now AI bots can go see stuff on the internet. They can pull information in. They can't do that much on the web. And there's

like, Claude code is like, okay, now you can use these bots to make software. And then OpenClaw is just like, ah, just give it access to your computer. It can do everything. Everything will be fine. Who knows? Let's go nuts. Like, I think to me, you know, all this stuff that you mentioned is, I think, right. But it does feel like this turn where it essentially requires you to just give it complete unfettered access to your computer. It is allowed to use your computer with as much access

or at least in its best most capable version. It's allowed to use your computer with as much administrator access as you have on your computer. And that is, I think, fascinating because that is both the source of its power, right? These bots are only as good as the access and context that they have. And what better way than just to

let it use your computer? But also the reason everybody should be deeply afraid of this thing, right? Like, it's, I don't know, this just feels like we are, if not at, we are near sort of the logical extension of some idea about how AI is supposed to work. Totally. And it's interesting because all AI companies are kind of trying to corner the market on this right now, expanding on the hype behind the coding tools and kind of getting people to use

them for everyday life tasks or for the enterprise, like, you know, non-technical workers to use them for their work. So, you know, Claude, co-work just came out. It's basically like, you know, expanding Claude code to other types of things like, you know, creating PowerPoints, Excel, docs, anything that you may need, but you are not, you know, an actual software engineer. You know, it's for other types of teams, non-technical teams. And Open AI is trying to do the same thing. They're all kind of trying to do the thing that OpenClaught is doing right now. But yeah, it's really interesting because I think this is kind of the next step in how to make AI agents actually useful and make them into.

integrated in people's everyday lives, whether they're at work or at home. It's kind of something that all AI companies are trying to corner the market on right now and all in competition with each other. But OpenClaw actually kind of surged ahead in terms of actual adoption. And so I think Anthropic and Open AI are probably looking at OpenClaught very closely and trying to learn from it right now because their own products haven't got the type of viral adoption that OpenClaught got for, you know, non-technical types of tasks. Like, this. And so they're probably looking very closely and being like, how can we copy this? Yeah. What do you make of the fact that the one that has really taken off in this space was a sort of

pet project made by one guy as opposed to these massive, otherwise very successful and, you know, often pushing too fast AI companies. They lost to just this one guy. I think that it's one of those things where it was able to grow really quickly because it was just one guy. And also, you know, he probably didn't, as we know, may not have taken the same types of security steps and other types of things that a big company would need to take. So like partially it's just because, you know, he was able to move really quick and break things vibe. You know, he made it for himself. You know, he made it really accessible through normal messaging platforms, which I think is a big part of this, like the U.S. It's just easy to access. But the other part of it is the fact that,

like, you know, he was making it just as a pet project. So he didn't. go through all the same types of like testing and evals and like, you know, safety checks that you would have done at a big company. And I think we're starting to see that now with all the, you know, security problems and malware that's been found on the platform. It is very funny to think about how much that window has shifted. Like the first phase of this was all these AI companies running way faster than the big tech companies. You know, Google has been incubating this tech for a decade. And then Open AI comes out and is like, well, none of this is finished and it causes all kinds of problems.

Here it is. And now those are the companies that are very responsible while some guy with access to these tools is just like, well, it has all kinds of problems. Here it is. And it's just, and then the next step is going to be like the AI is going to make it for itself and then give it to us. Like just the window of responsibility is shifting so quickly in this space. It's really funny to watch. It is so true. And yeah, it's really interesting to see who's responsible for what here.

Because, you know, right now we're in a huge state of flux with regulation, with, you know, the types of things that can be attributed to you in terms of fault. You know, AI companies, they can make these promises and claims, but there isn't really a, like, a hammer coming down on them if they don't deliver right now. That may change. For an individual person creating a project like this, yeah, they don't really have fear of that. So they're just putting it out in the world and seeing what happens. And I think that's what happened here. So OpenClaw, you mentioned the UX a couple of times, which I think is really interesting because I think you're right that one of the,

the things people really like about it is that you can access it with messaging apps. And that is just a thing people understand. You can do all this stuff, but all you have to do is just send it a text message. Like that is a UI and a UX that people understand. The flip side of it is, this is a relatively complicated piece of software. It requires a fair amount of knowledge just to get up and running. And it's like people who are using this even the most responsible possible way are like buying separate air-gapped Mac minis to do this on because you shouldn't trust your main machine with this. So it's just strange to me to see this running both at how do we make this the most accessible thing possible, but also this like immensely complicated and frankly legitimately dangerous

piece of software. Are you seeing pickup with this thing outside of the normal sort of dev folks who love to build this stuff anyway? Does this have a chance to break out of that? I'm not seeing it right now. And so that's what I think is interesting. It's like the UX and the ease of use, once you set it up, is so amazing that devs and people in tech love it so much. It's like the exact opposite of Claude Code, which is really easy to set up and then sort of over complicated to use for regular people. This is the exact inverse. Exactly, exactly. And so I think that that's what's happening here.

And that's why I haven't seen anyone outside of tech or the usual suspect that you would expect adopt this. And I don't think we will for a while. Because, you know, unless something changes with the way to adopt it, which I doubt it will because it's one guy. You know, it's going to stay where it is. But it's one of those tools that I feel like it's going to be, you know, cult following, viral, beloved within this group. And, you know, that's kind of enough. One group religiously, like, uses something. You know, there's enough users, enough data, whatever.

Like, you're good. But if it's like a lot of people use it a tiny bit, you're also good. But yeah, I think this is going to be the former. Yeah. I feel like the main use case I've seen so far. And this is sort of true with every AI product is like the daily digest. This seems to be the first thing everybody thinks of when they want to build with AI. It's like, how do I go to my email and my calendar and my to do list and my Slack and my

Jira and just have a tool that sort of pulls everything into one? one place for me and gives me a readout on what's going on and what matters. I feel like there's a leap that is possible with OpenClaw because it can do things like access your iMessage account, because again, it can just use your computer. It has access to this list of stuff that you can't get through APIs and websites. Are you seeing anything beyond that? Like have you seen particularly sort of interesting, impressive, cool stuff that people are building with OpenClaugh so far? Yeah, it's been interesting to see like the niche, cases, but what I'm seeing the most is the personal assistant type stuff. So like when I first job in

New York was a personal assistant and the stuff I'm seeing people use open cloth for is kind of the same stuff that I would be doing. Like, oh, like, you know, create this stuff on my calendar, clear out, you know, this folder, you know, check me into my flight and make sure I have, you know, this going on, you know, give me a daily digest so that I can, you know, be ready for my day, things like that. So, you know, that's what I'm seeing most. There are definitely people doing, you know, cool. things and just kind of playing around with it for hours and hours and figuring out ways to adapt it to their own personal preferences. But the most stuff I'm seeing is like personal assistant type stuff. It is really interesting that that seems to be everybody's immediate idea of the killer app for a lot of this stuff is just make sense of all of the things going on around me in one place.

Which I actually think is cool because that is the thing that these models are actually set up to do really well. Like take lots of data and make it smaller and sensible is actually a thing a lot of these models do a really good job of. And so if you can just give it the access to all of that data, which comes with huge problems that we're just about to talk about, that that actually becomes a really useful feature of these things. Like it is really interesting to me that that is the thing that everybody has glommed on to. It's also very clear that no one has figured out the interface for that yet. Right. Like what was the chat GPT thing that they launched that was supposed to be basically this? Oh, chat GPT pulse.

Like the thing that started your day. Yeah. I forgot about that until just now. But like this is the idea and everybody is going to try to poke at this. And I think someone will eventually get it right that will, I don't know, it'll be proactive or there will be an app that will show it all to you in some kind of structured helpful way. But there is there is a turn for this that I think is going to be really cool for people that no one has figured out the UI of yet. And it's not replying to you in a messaging app. I feel very confident about that.

Yeah, I completely agree. I think that it's one of those things that, you know, it's it's why. people love starting their day with a certain podcast or starting their day with a certain newsletter. They want to be ready and kind of know what's going on and they want to have that from a trusted source. So I don't think those things will go away. Like, you know, everyone, of course, will always be listening to Virchcast. But, you know, yeah, I think people want, especially right now, to make sense of the world and have it be easy to understand because there's a lot going on that's really hard to understand. And so this is like a way that, you know, you know, I think this will be the biggest form of adoption, the biggest thing that will make people want to use these types of tools. Yeah, I agree. So let's talk about some of the security risks, because this has been the other big thing,

is I think there is an obvious set of risks that you take by giving any tool like this access to your computer. It can do things, and that means it can do things you don't want it to do. There's a lot of faith you're putting in any kind of piece of software that you give this much access to. But it seems like with OpenClaw and really anything like it, we have discovered some pretty big, scary problems both real and possible. What have we learned? So, yeah, I'm so glad you asked about this because, you know, you're kind of just trusting these companies with your data and trusting they're going to do the right thing.

And some of the experts that I spoke with were like, yeah, even cloud services aren't necessarily doing the right thing with your data and they still have leaks. So I don't necessarily trust AI companies, which are newer and, you know, more incentivized to move quickly to do the right thing either. So that was kind of a good point. And so you have to be okay if you use a product with, you know, everything changing with your data. And that's why I typically don't use these tools unless I'm okay with whatever I'm putting into them coming out. You know, I'm not going to be assuming that like it's going to stay private. You know, I keep it pretty pretty. The stuff I put in is not, like, privacy sensitive. It's pretty, like, I'm okay with it coming out publicly. One of the experts I spoke with said, you know, you should be okay with your employer seeing whatever you put into these chatbots in, like, five years in case they change owners. So that would rule you out from using something like OpenClaw entirely. Oh, yeah.

Like, that becomes completely off limits under that rubric. I mean, for me, I use it, like, so that I know how it works and, you know, but it's like you, you, you best. or make sure that, you know, you're okay with everything coming out. So don't do anything that you wouldn't want everyone to know. Don't put any info in that you don't want to become public. Interesting. So, okay, let's actually come back to the privacy stuff another time because I think there's a big how all of this is supposed to interact question that is interesting. And we should talk about it. But before I let you go here, let's talk about Molt Book just for a few minutes. because this, to me, the Maltbook phenomenon,

and Maltbook is the idea is supposed to be, it's like it's Reddit, but it's all AIs. And it's just a bunch of AI agents talking to each other, which I would say on its face is not interesting. But this became a thing, and people were talking about it, and a lot of people were looking at it, and everybody's like,

this is proof that the agents are sentient, this is going to change everything. And yet I just Googled Moltbook, and one of the first thing that comes up is a video on. YouTube from six days ago that says MaltBook is already over. What do you make of this phenomenon, the sort of insane excitement about Maltbook that seems to already be waning?

I think that it was really interesting for people because it seemed so dystopian. You know, what do AI agents talk about when they're left alone? What do they talk about with each other? That was kind of the draw here. People felt like people always love to feel like they're viewing like something. type of secret thing. And that's how this felt for a lot of people. Like, oh, we're, we're viewing the internal desires and, like, strategies of AI systems. And this is shedding light on, like, what they actually want and how they work. That was the vibe that people

were getting from this. There were a lot of people who were really excited when it looked like the agents were kind of making up their own language to talk to each other and going back and forth in totally nonsensical, but yet seemingly sort of structured ways that it was, that actually makes sense. It's like, this is a peek into how this thing works that maybe we're not even supposed to be getting. Totally. And like, you know, when they were like allegedly making up their own religion and stuff, people were people, it was like, you know, peak palace intrigue. It's like how, but with AI agents, it's like how, what's going on inside there? Let's check it out. But, you know, it came to light pretty quickly that humans were influencing a lot of these outputs. Like, you know,

a lot of the AI system threads that where they were like, oh, let's like, you know, find, you a specific way to talk to each other that no one can decode. Some of those were linked to human social media accounts who were marketing AI messaging services. So it's like you could never really tell fully what was influenced by humans and to what extent and what wasn't. But there were a lot of clues and kind of trails of things being influenced heavily by humans. And, you know, with OpenClai, you could say to your agent, hey, post this word for word on MaltBook. Or you could say, hey, write a post with this topic and make sure you reply to every comment. So, you know, you could do anything like this super easily. And there was no limit to how many agents one person could

have. So you could just be like, you know, really intensely influencing the platform as a whole. There was a lot going on there. So basically, a lot of the experts I spoke with said it wasn't a clean experiment in this type of thing. Like it was an interesting moment in what would it look like if agents collaborated on a large scale? What might it look like if they could like work together and, you know, delegate these tasks? But it wasn't a clean experiment at all, so it shouldn't be treated like that. That's a good way of thinking about it. But I guess ostensibly, that is the thing that we are driving towards, right? All of these companies promising agents are fundamentally promising not only that there will be lots of agents, but they will be able to work together. So actually,

in theory, being able to see what it would look like when you just point two of them at each other should be super meaningful. So, like, if we ever get a clean version of that experiment, I don't, like, to me, the idea of going to this website to look at it is preposterous. But from a research perspective, I can see that being really useful over time.

Totally. I think that's why it got so big, so quickly. People thought that that was already here. They were like, oh, you know, this, we've reached it. Like, we've reached the place we were going where agents can, you know, intelligently collaborate and talk to each other and do all these things. And, you know, maybe they can, but this was not a proof of that, you know. Like, and we can see, like, you know, Anthropic and other companies have launched tools that, you know, are kind of test driving this right now. Like last week, I think Anthropic launched agent teams. So it was kind of a way to have, like, a lead AI agent. And then the small, like the lower, like the lower, tier AI agents would each take a task and there with like a project lead and each of them would work together to accomplish something. So, you know, I mean, companies are working on this.

It's just, it just doesn't seem to be as advanced as what we saw on Maltbooks. So, you know, I think I would take everything with, not a grain of salt, but like a full shaker of salt. All of the salt that there is. Yeah. Do you think at the end of this road, there is a version of this that is useful and interesting to humans? Like the idea that this would be a place that I might even go to look ever at some point. Is there a version of this that becomes that? For Moldbook, I don't really think so. I mean, I think it's just kind of like a cool experiment in what something might look like.

But I don't necessarily know that like it'll ever be a clean enough experiment that we should look at it and be like, wow, this is how things work. I think it would be more accurate to, you know, look in Claude Code or Codex and look at the step by step of how these models are working and what their reasoning process is. And once they launch the multi-agent stuff, how they're thinking together, what they're working on, how they're delegating, stuff like that. I don't think MOLT books specifically is going to be an example of that. That's just my thought process. And I also think, I mean, I think we're going to get there, but I just don't know that it'll be Mold Book. that gets us there, especially because for me, I've been covering AI agents since like 2022. And every year, I've seen a huge step change in them. You know, they're still not,

you know, like ready for prime time. But the amount of change I've seen year by year has been a significant amount. So, you know, this is just like another milestone in the, in the journey. Yeah, I tend to agree. There was this tech CEO years ago who told me he was like, my rule for looking at new products is always, is this a primitive version of something really good? Or is this just a bad thing. And I feel like this has been such an interesting version of this because I look at Maltbook and I'm like, there's nothing here. Right. Like this is, this is something that is going to be fascinating to a very small group of people, mostly who make these kinds of products to understand how they work. Fine. That's essentially like network logs, right? Like,

they're interesting to some people and that's fine. I look at OpenClaw and it's like, there's something here. Like this is an early version of something. And there's a lot of privacy questions. There's a lot of U.S. questions. There's a lot of U.X questions. There's a lot of like overall installability and what are you supposed to be able to do with this question. But like, something about OpenClaw is going to work for a lot of people. And I think that, that to me is where it's like my brain starts to fire about like, okay, what is the version of this that is just two clicks and it starts working on your computer in a reasonably thoughtful, safe way? That version might be something. And it feels like we're headed that direction. Absolutely. That's

what I think too. And, you know, anytime there's a big group of people that are really involved in one industry and they start loving something and using it all the time and dropping everything else to use it, I think usually it means something. And that's what's happened here. It's like, you know, it has a cult following. People like it a lot more than other products out there. So it clearly there's something there. It's like, you know, this is either the beginning of something bigger and another company will kind of take over and push it forward or this will be the thing that, you know, last. We don't know. But either way, it's like a huge milestone and definitely like. like a seed.

Totally. All right. Well, you're going to come back and we're going to talk about privacy and all of this stuff because I'm realizing as we talk that I don't know how to think about what I'm doing with my own data as I talk to AI tools. So we're going to talk this out. But for now, we need to take a break. Hayden, thank you for being here as always.

Thank you so much. Let's go install OpenClaw and just ruin our lives together. It's going to be great. I'm saying. Can't wait. All right. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic.

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Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early early this morning.

And we assess that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866, Verge11. The email is Vergecast at theverge.com.

The Verge's transportation editor, Andy Hawkins, is here to answer this one with me. Hey, Andy. Hey, what's up? So I feel like I only bring you here to explain Tesla to me. And I'm very sorry about that. Last time was BID, so that was, you know, horse of a different color. Not to take full credit for this, but there has been a bunch of very good coverage of Chinese EVs on our site since then.

Yes. So, you're welcome. Also, a lot of people are enthusiastic about our Verge Top Gear in China episode that we're going to do. I'm just saying, people are saying that this is going to happen. The momentum is just off the charts. Jim Beacoff is listening right now. Please cut this check. Jim, I know that you are.

Hit us up. We're ready. All right, but our question this time, we talked briefly a while ago about Tesla's earnings and Tesla kind of slowly beginning to seem like it is getting out of the car business. And that is what this question is about. Let me play. Hello, Vergecast. I just read the news that Tesla is discontinuing the Model S and the Model X.

I'm just wondering when do you all think Tesla will stop being a car company? My big tinfoil hat theory is that at some point, they will switch to being just to more infrastructure and electronic company, like their supercharging network, battery infrastructure, solar, maybe robots, but I don't think the robot will ever happen. But that's my question is when, I guess, at higher or lower scale, do you all think they will just cease to be a competitive automaker? Because if we see what's going on in China and in the U.S., Tesla seems to be getting less and less market share every year, and I give it five to eight years before they're just a completely minor

player and almost insignificant. But I would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you. Andy, I want to start here. Is this a tinfoil hat theory to you that Tesla is kind of on its way out of the car business? This doesn't strike me as that crazy a theory anymore. I think absolutely not. I think Musk has been sort of signaling this for a while now. We've been writing about it for a while now. I published a story the other week that, basically, basically confronted these exact issues. You know, what would it take and why and why is Tesla sort of starting to like kind of essentially wind down as a car business?

I mean, he cited the discontinuation of the Model S and Model X. And there's a number of other clues as well. If you listen to that recent earnings call, you know, there was a top Tesla executive who told investors that the company should be seen more as a transportation as a service company and less so as a traditional automaker. And obviously there's all the robot. and the AI of it all as well. So I think he's absolutely focusing on, I think it seems like,

what seems like a very credible possibility here for Tesla. So the cynical read that immediately comes to my mind here is that Tesla for years has hit the valuation on Wall Street that it has mostly by saying it's not fundamentally a car company, right? Like in every meaningful way, it has been a car company. but Elon Musk has been out here talking about robots and talking about self-driving and talking about like rewiring the way that cities work because that's how you justify the way that Tesla has been valued and the way that Tesla has directly leads to how much money Elon Musk has. So like what I've always wondered and what you and I have talked about a few times is like there's Tesla in the world and there's Tesla on Wall Street and in many ways those are two very different companies. Is it is what's happening now that the Wall Street side of it is actually becoming real or?

I don't know. What is what is changing in that dynamic here? Yeah, it's a really interesting question because, yes, you're absolutely right. There's sort of the reality of Tesla, which is, it is fundamentally a car business. Obviously, it has these side businesses as well. It sells solar power. It sells home batteries, stationary batteries. It installs superchargers, EVV charging. So there's a number of other things going on around Tesla that are not directly connected to. its core business as a car company.

And then there are sort of like, there's the vibes of it all, right? There's sort of what Elon Musk says and what he promises and how those promises are refracted back from Wall Street and how that reflects on Tesla as an investment, as the value of the company, which is, you know, for years and years and years now, ever since the success of the Model 3, the company has been valued far and above, head and shoulders above other traditional car companies. Like if you see Tesla as a car company, it sells a fraction of the cars that, you know,

big volume players like Volkswagen and Toyota sell, and yet it is valued at multiple times the amount as those companies are. But that said, I still think that we're kind of like not getting at the, how difficult this transition is

going to be if indeed what they say is true that they are going to cease to become sort of a traditional car business and become more of a subscription business. essentially. He's talking about transportation as a services, that immediately calls to mind, you know, other businesses, SaaS businesses, companies that have, you know, recurring revenue from subscriptions as opposed to just selling physical products that, you know, they get that sort of one bite of the apple, and that's it. And I feel like that is going to be kind of the great

challenge that Musk is now facing. I mean, because if you think about Tesla's car business, in 2025, they brought in about $95 billion in $95 billion in odds. automotive revenue. That is just from selling cars. Pretty much exclusively the Model 3 and the Model Y. Those are the cars that it sells at volume. The cyber truck has been a flop. The Model S and the Model X have waned over the years and essentially just, you know, they're selling single units of those every every, every quarter. But $95 billion, that's nothing to sneeze at. Yeah. That's not automotive revenue. That's just, that is revenue, period. That is all the revenue that the Tesla brought in in 2025, $69.5 billion of that was automotive revenue. So we're still talking 75% of the revenues

are coming in from car sales, 25% through energy sales, through subscriptions, through EV charging, through other aspects of his business. So at what point does that become, you know, flipped? At what point are we talking, you know, that that's the, you know, the majority of the businesses are these other, other side businesses and the, and the car revenues become much smaller aspect of it. Well, when Musk says it's going to be when they start, you know, producing these cybercabs, when everything becomes autonomous, when the robots go into production, which is expected to be at the end of 2027, if you believe Musk and his deadlines and his predictions. So I do think that you can see sort of like the vague sort of outlines of how this

happens. And it's true that Musk's, you know, that Tesla's other businesses, energy generation, storage, services, revenue, other things. Those. Those are, those. Those are on the upswing while the automotive revenues are down. I mean, the 2025 revenues from the car business down 10% year over year, the Model 3 and the Model Y, while still selling much bigger than all of the other EVs on the market are also in decline. And he's shown, you know, Musk has shown zero interest in expanding Tesla's vehicle lineup to include more mass market affordable vehicles. They tried to take, you know, sort of the Model 3 and the Model Y, make them as cheap as as they possibly can.

They're still only sort of, you know, the decontented versions are going to be around like $38, $39,000. That's still not in that $20,000 to $25,000 range that Tesla has been supposedly working on before this kind of like more of this philosophical switch that they've centered on. So I do think it's going to be extraordinarily difficult. I think that Tesla might become a smaller company, as this guy has suggested, more of a bit player in the automotive world.

And I don't see the other. revenue streams necessarily compensating for that shrinkage in the near term or really even in the long term where you consider how far behind Waymo of Waymo that Tesla is right now and other Robotaxy players. So I think it's going to be a tough transition. But I mean, all things are possible. Yeah. So if Tesla isn't a car company, let's say five to eight years, I think is a fun. And I'm going to make you pick over and under on eight years in a minute. So get ready for that. but if it's not a car company at that point, it is an X company.

Well, that's, I probably shouldn't say it like that. If it's not a car company at that point, what kind of company is it? Is it an optimist robot company? Is it a self-driving robotaxy company? Is it a home energy company? Like, to the extent that Apple makes lots of things, but it is the iPhone company, right?

Like Tesla makes a lot of things, but it is a car company. What is that thing if you say cast out a decade if it's not? cars. Yeah, I think it could potentially be any of those things, but then, of course, that is assuming that these other products are as wildly successful as the Model 3 and the Model Y have been for Tesla, which I don't think you can really make that assumption quite yet, right? Everything we've seen so far from these other projects that Tesla is working on have suggested that they still need a lot of work, right? The Optimus robots, the versions that we've seen so far have mostly been remote operated or teleoperated.

They seem to struggle with some basic functions, right? There was one that, you know, they were having some difficulty handing out popcorn, for example, at a Tesla event a couple years ago. And then the robotaxies, you know, they still have safety drivers in the vehicle. They have not gone fully driverless. They are still, you know, struggling to go sort of level four as Waymo has done. And, you know, the cyber cab, you know, like, it's no guarantee that this two passenger gold, you know, with no vehicle with no steering wheel and no pedals is going to really become a volume player, especially because there's a lot of regulatory risk there, right? They have to get exemptions from the government to produce vehicles that don't have these traditional controls.

That's going to be a struggle. That's going to limit the early rollout of the cyber cab. So I just don't see like kind of a one-to-one match here. with the success that they've had with the three and the Y on any of these other products that they're supposedly trying to sell us on yet. Okay. Yeah, the cyber cab in particular is it's not just a bet on a vehicle. It's a bet on like a complete reimagining of society in five to eight years. You know what I mean? Okay. So look at Waymo's not going in that direction, right? They're still putting out vehicles that have steering wheels and pedals, right? They're saying we can grow a lot faster and grab a lot more market share if we sort of, you know, bypass this, this idea. that these vehicles need to be purpose-built and instead just use retrofitted vehicles.

That seems to be the smarter play because they're going to be in many more cities than Musk has been promising. He promises 50% of the population at the end of 2025 was going to have access to the robotaxy. That has not been the case. Right.

Okay, so I'm going to give you eight years. We'll go to the end of our callers timeline here. Eight years, Tesla does or does not, still sell individual cars to individual people. yes or no. 2034. Boy, that feels like a long time from now. It really does.

I mean, my daughter is going to be starting her first year at college that year. That's crazy to think about. I think that they're still going to be selling cars by then. I just don't see a world in which, you know, the streets are overrun with robots and cybercabs. Yeah, I'm going to be pessimistic on this one. Sorry, to all the stands out there.

But yeah, I'm not seeing the evidence that suggests that it's going to be, you know, maybe it's a smaller company and maybe it's run by a different person, right? At some point, maybe Tesla's board decides that this direction is not the one they want to go to. And they kick Musk out. So, yeah, I'm going to take the under on that one. All right. I'm with you. I appreciate it. Andy, thank you as always.

Thanks, David. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Andy and Hayden and Don for being here. And thank you, as always, for listening. If you have thoughts or questions, if you've seen the Trump, phone. If you've done something weird with OpenClaw or if you've been vibe coding things, I've gotten so many emails from people about the interesting stuff you've been vibe coding recently, and I want to hear even more. Keep them all coming. 866 Verge11 is the hotline.

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The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Friday with more news because the News just keeps coming. Neil and I have an awful lot to talk about. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.