elon musk yacht 2023

tesla's cybertruck to transform into functional boat, according to elon musk

Tesla ‘mod package’ allows cybertruck to double as a boat.

In a recent tweet, Elon Musk stated that the Cybertruck is set to double as an actual functional boat. Tesla’s CEO announced that the company plans to offer a ‘mod package’ that enables the vehicle to traverse at least 100 meters of water. ‘Mostly just need to upgrade cabin door seals,’ he added.

The announcement comes just weeks after the highly anticipated Cybertruck delivery launch , which finally commenced on December 1st, 2023. For those who are unfamiliar with the project, Tesla claims that the Cybertruck, an electric vehicle , is faster than a sports car and, depending on the model, can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 2.6 seconds with a tri-motor variant.

Elon Musk’s Teases Cybertruck’s Amphibious Capabilities

The announcement didn’t catch Tesla enthusiasts off guard, given Elon Musk’s hints about the Cybertruck’s amphibious capabilities dating back to 2020. In response to a 3D artist’s rendering depicting the Cybertruck as a boat, Musk’s initial tweet hinted at the possibility, stating, ‘I think we could make that work.’ Over the years, Musk continued to tease the truck’s water-friendly features, affirming that the Cybertruck would be ‘waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, so it can cross rivers, lakes, and even seas that aren’t too choppy.’

While Musk’s recent tweet appears more specific, public skepticism persists, a common response to many of Musk’s statements. Nevertheless, numerous enthusiasts have expressed excitement, showcasing their enthusiasm through Cybertruck-boat hybrid renders and AI-generated images depicting the Tesla vehicle effortlessly navigating through waters. The announcement also brnigs to mind the Cybercat and Cybercat foiler, components designed to quickly transform cybertruck into a high-performance amphibious catamaran (see designboom’s previous coverage here ). 

image courtesy of Cybercat

project info: 

name: Cybertruck company: Tesla | @teslamotors

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A Voyage Through Elon Musk's Futuristic Yacht

Elon Musk, the pioneer behind SpaceX and Tesla, is renowned for pushing the boundaries of technology. But his influence extends beyond space and electric cars—his yacht is a veritable sea-bound spaceship, a marvel that merges luxury, design, and technology.

A Fusion of Luxury and Tech

Elon Musk's yacht effortlessly blends opulence with cutting-edge technology. The interiors are awash with sleek, futuristic design elements that echo the aesthetics of Tesla's vehicles and SpaceX's spacecraft. From the smart lighting system that adjusts according to the time of day to the innovative climate control mechanism, the yacht exemplifies smart living.

Each stateroom is outfitted with a state-of-the-art entertainment system, which syncs with personal devices to offer a customized multimedia experience. Musk's love for minimalism is evident in the yacht's design—the furniture's clean lines and the muted color palette create a tranquil environment.

Navigating the Green Wave

Musk’s commitment to sustainability is well-documented, and his yacht is no exception. The yacht’s hull has been crafted from an eco-friendly composite material, and solar panels integrated into the design provide clean energy.

The onboard water purification system ensures that no waste water is discharged into the ocean, thus protecting marine life. Additionally, the yacht is powered by an electric motor, reflecting Musk's endeavor to promote zero-emission transportation.

Luxe Amenities on Board

The yacht houses a variety of upscale amenities. The onboard gym, equipped with cutting-edge fitness technology, allows guests to maintain their workout regimen while at sea. The yacht also features a modern spa with a sauna and massage room for the ultimate relaxation.

The highlight, however, is the panoramic observation deck. This magnificent space offers a 360-degree view of the surroundings and is the perfect spot for stargazing or watching the sunrise.

Gourmet Dining Experience

No yacht is complete without a sophisticated culinary setup, and Musk’s vessel is no different. The yacht houses a gourmet kitchen, featuring state-of-the-art appliances and a team of world-class chefs. Here, guests can indulge in a diverse menu of international cuisines, all prepared with locally-sourced and organic ingredients.

Adjacent to the kitchen, the elegant dining area can comfortably seat multiple guests, making it the perfect spot for intimate dinners or lavish parties.

Innovative Navigation and Safety Features

Consistent with Musk's reputation for technological innovation, the yacht’s navigation system employs advanced satellite technology and AI-assisted guidance. This not only ensures efficient travel but also significantly enhances safety at sea.

The yacht’s safety features are equally impressive, with comprehensive onboard surveillance, state-of-the-art fire suppression systems, and automated emergency protocols. These measures ensure that guests can enjoy their sea voyage with complete peace of mind.

Exploring the Underwater Realm

One of the most captivating features of Musk's yacht is the onboard mini-submarine. This underwater vehicle allows guests to explore the ocean depths in comfort and safety, offering a unique perspective of the marine world. The yacht also provides an array of diving and snorkeling equipment, inviting guests to take a closer look at the underwater life.

The Future of Yachting

Elon Musk’s yacht is not just a vessel; it’s a statement of the future. It stands as a testament to how technological innovations can revolutionize our lifestyle, even when we're out on the ocean. With its groundbreaking design and eco-conscious features, Musk's yacht sets a new standard for luxury sea travel, signaling the dawn of a new era in yachting.

In conclusion, Elon Musk's yacht is a testament to his vision for the future - a future that seamlessly blends luxury, technology, and sustainability. From the gourmet kitchen to the mini-submarine, every aspect of the yacht underscores Musk's commitment to redefining our experience of the world. And as we look ahead, one thing is certain: the future of yachting will indeed be exciting.

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Starlink: The lowdown on Elon Musk's satellite internet system

Starlink Maritime is rewriting the rulebook when it comes to connectivity at sea – but how does it compare?

It’s not just Tom Cruise who feels the need for speed. For guests and crew alike, fast, ubiquitous internet access at sea is now seen as a must-have provision. Everyone wants to surf on the surf.

“Connectivity is no longer regarded as a luxury,” says Nick Maynard, marketing director for communications company OneWeb. “It’s now right up there with reasons why a superyacht might not go to sea, such is the expectation from principals.”

This rise in demand goes way beyond Netflix and TikTok users on board. From audiovisual systems to artificial intelligence, fast, reliable data connections have become de rigueur and in demand – and there’s a revolution afoot.

The transformative technology everyone’s talking about is Elon Musk’s Starlink Maritime. A SpaceX offshoot, Starlink currently comprises a constellation of 3,300 low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites circling the planet at an altitude of 550 kilometres, give or take. In time, this is expected to increase to 12,000 satellites. It’s a radically different approach to the traditional VSAT system yacht owners will be familiar with: geostationary (GEO) networks that rely on satellites parked at some 36,000 kilometres and MEO (medium-earth orbit) satellites hovering around 20,000 kilometres.

The system is exciting to those in the connectivity business because LEO satellites can outperform GEO and MEO satellites by offering faster internet speeds. They’re also far cheaper to make and deploy, mainly due to their size. GEO satellites are physically bigger (around the size of a large van) and can only be launched one at a time, whereas Starlink’s LEO satellites weigh just 260 kilograms and 64 can be launched at once.

Why the need for so many? Simply put, fewer GEO and MEO satellites are required for coverage as they see so much more of the planet, given their distance from earth, whereas LEO satellites only see a fraction of the planet at any one time. GEO satellite coverage is planetary (barring the poles) but latency – the delay in data transmission – is high; LEO satellites can deliver much quicker speeds, but lots of them are needed to guarantee coverage. Imagine a torch shining on a globe – move it in and the beam gets tighter and brighter; move it out and it gets broader and dimmer.

Currently providing internet service to around 40 countries, Starlink is proving to be quite the disruptor. Compared to more conventional satcom systems, it also promises lower running costs and simpler installation, as there’s no requirement for a satellite dome. Instead, a flat antenna can be unobtrusively accommodated on deck. The only requirement is a clear line of sight with the sky overhead.

Starlink’s antennas can be flat because LEO satellites fly so low; the “look angle” of the receiver, therefore, is always close to vertical, so it doesn’t need a wide range of movement. The panels can also be smaller, given the strength of the signal. At the time of writing, Starlink was not yet offering global coverage, with internet provision restricted to the Mediterranean and coastal areas of the US, Europe and parts of South America and Australia. The company is expecting to achieve global coverage by around March this year.

One of the first yachts to install Starlink Maritime was the 54.9-metre Loon . Captain Paul Clarke reports the installation was easier than previous VSAT systems. “Almost six months after installing Starlink, we’re still in love with it,” he tells us. “We were able to turn off our satellite TV dishes and we now stream everything on all the TVs throughout. There’s no need to be locked into expensive, high-maintenance sat TV provider contracts, so it saves us $20,000 (£16,200) a year.”

Starlink Maritime’s pricing is also appealingly straightforward: $10,000 for two flat-panel antennas (only one is needed to provide internet, but two are supplied for redundancy in case of an output failure), and a monthly charge of $5,000 for unlimited data. Resellers, meanwhile, have recently started making the pricing even more attractive; connectivity company Anuvu is now selling single a Starlink Maritime antenna for as little as $2,500.

The upfront cost of the equipment is well below the tens of thousands you’d expect to pay for a sat dome on a superyacht, but the monthly subscription cost is similar or higher – but then again, so are the speeds.

Under optimal conditions, Starlink can offer a maximum upload speed of 40Mbps, and 350Mbps download per installation, which is considerably faster than most home broadband users experience. Of course, it won’t deliver this level of performance consistently in real-world conditions, particularly when coverage is patchy, or when you’re in port, competing for bandwidth.

Clarke notes that the system’s growing popularity does appear to be slowing things down. “We are definitely noticing congestion as more and more people make the change to Starlink,” he says. “We’ve also noticed that when in the same ports as cruise ships, we have a massive reduction in bandwidth. There is nothing official from Starlink about this, but it seems that they get priority.”

Still, Clarke remains enthusiastic. “You’ve got to understand that Starlink is still in its infancy and will continue to grow and get better over time as it launches more satellites.” He’s also a fan of the design: “Starlink dishes are flat, so no more need for the big sat domes. I think we will see some more sleek yachts coming out of the yards in the near future as a result.”

What are the alternatives to Starlink?

Of course, Starlink isn’t the only LEO game in town. Its sole competition – for now – is OneWeb, which has been steadily building up its own network of LEO satellites since 2019, with the aim of offering global coverage during 2023. Amazon, meanwhile, is about to muscle in with Project Kuiper, its proposed constellation of 3,000 LEO satellites. The company’s first prototype satellites will be launched this year.

Further providers are coming, too. If all the proposed constellations make it into space, it would increase the current number of satellites orbiting the earth 40-fold to around 200,000.

OneWeb’s Maynard says that the creation of a global constellation has been “a monumental, even Herculean” challenge for the company. “Each day our team has grappled with some big questions and decisions, for example how to efficiently manage a fleet of spacecraft from down here on earth, devising space-based connectivity service propositions that are relevant and easy to use, preventing orbital debris and cleaning up what’s already up there.”

Each OneWeb satellite is about the size of a washing machine and orbits the earth at 26,000km/h, at an altitude of 1,200 kilometres, which is described by Maynard as the “sweet spot” for delivering high-speed, low-latency connectivity globally.

A key differentiator between OneWeb and Starlink is that OneWeb’s constellation operates further away from earth, with a smaller fleet of satellites that each have a wider beam width. “We’re delivering global coverage with an agile, efficient and responsible fleet of just 648 satellites, far fewer than some other planned constellations,” says Maynard.

While OneWeb won’t be drawn on pricing  (“We are an indirect business, we can’t really comment on pricing as this would be determined by our distribution partners,” says Maynard), the company says it’s more cost-effective than the traditional VSAT hardware.

Using a dual parabolic antenna (more like a traditional satellite dish), yacht owners can expect up to 125Mbps download and 25Mbps upload speeds. OneWeb’s antennas are also smaller than those picking up higher-earth-orbit satellites, so they don’t need so much space on the radar mast.

It is offering a flat-panel version called OW1 for land-based installations, teaming up with Intellian to make it, but a marine version is not yet available, although market watchers don’t expect it to be too long before one is announced. Third-party flat-panel antenna company Kymeta, meanwhile, has been around the yachting scene for some time and offers a flat-panel antenna for superyachts that can integrate with OneWeb’s constellation.

Cardiff-based Excelerate has been in the satcom business for more than 20 years and is a OneWeb partner. “I’ve often said that in a technology business, I spend half my time being totally excited and enthused and half being terrified. Things never stand still, and the pace of change seems to be getting faster,” says David Savage, the group’s executive chairman.

The complexities of LEO are staggering compared to a GEO network, he says, which is why the technology has taken so long to realise and has led to several high-profile failures. The concept of LEO connectivity was first proposed 30 years ago, but the high costs scuppered the first companies through the door, including Iridium, which was forced into bankruptcy.

“LEO satellites are travelling at 25,000km/h, so when a yacht connects to just one it can only ‘see’ it for about 10 minutes and then it’s gone, so during that process, the yacht has to be handed over to the next one and so on and so on. LEO satellites have to work with each other as well as the ground – all at 25,000km/h – and there might be thousands of them, or at least hundreds, depending on which network,” says Savage.

Does this mean the end of satellite domes?

So is the writing on the wall for traditional VSAT linking to high-orbiting satellites? According to the owner of the 38.8-metre sailing yacht Atalante , an early adopter of Starlink Maritime, LEO is a serious contender. He describes Starlink’s tech as “transformational”, adding: “When the Atlantic and Pacific coverages are complete in March 2023 it will be revolutionary.”

Atalante had one of the first Starlink Maritime systems fitted in October 2022. “We have trialled it in port and on the recent transatlantic crossing from Palma to St Martin. In Palma, we would regularly see speeds of 35 to 50Mbps and sometimes even 80 to 90Mbps. There was not a noticeable difference between Palma and on passage to the Canaries.” He says the crew lost Starlink coverage about 430 nautical miles southwest of the Canaries and picked it up again about 175 nautical miles off St Martin.

“Class rules and insurance will mean we have to maintain our FleetBroadband service for safety communication, but if the reliability of the Starlink service continues to be good, I cannot see the point of paying for two parallel services when Starlink appears to be superior.”

As to whether Starlink is the future, Savage is sceptical. “For sure, I am in the ‘how cool is this’ camp, but I am also in the ‘where’s the catch’ camp, too. The Starlink Maritime option has  a lower contention rate, which means that  the service is shared by fewer users than the recreational vehicle or consumer offering, but  as far as I am aware, unlike the current GEO offerings, there is no way to guarantee a minimum level of service.”

Echoing the view of Loon ’s Captain Clarke, Savage adds, “The jury is out on what will happen when a large group of yachts are all trying to use Starlink in a crowded port or bay simultaneously. When it comes to guaranteed connectivity, a yacht needs as many plan Bs as possible. To rely on a single public or private network is courting disaster.”

A number of satcom equipment companies are now starting to offer solutions with as many of these plan Bs integrated as possible – taking advantage of the high speeds of LEO satellites, but with the ability to switch to higher-earth-orbit satellites if required. Whereas Starlink receivers can only see Starlink satellites, these companies have spread their bets.

Launched in January, Intellian’s latest offering, the XEO Series, automatically switches between GEO, MEO and LEO satellites – depending on which is offering the best coverage and speed. The XEO series requires the installation of a dual-band antenna, but its ability to operate across multiple frequencies means fewer domes are required.

Fort Lauderdale-based FMC GlobalSat, meanwhile, also offers a solution that packs in as much redundancy as possible, able to pick up GEO, MEO, LEO satellites across 210 countries, as well as 5G and 4G wireless networks. Emmanuel Cotrel, CEO and founder, says the best option for yacht owners is a hybrid solution.

Connection and navigation specialist KVH recently launched TracNet H90, a hybrid system that marries VSAT with 5G and Wi-Fi. Of Starlink and other LEO and MEO services in development, KVH’s Chris Watson says: “People are eager to learn about what they’ll offer. LEO services may be enough for some customers, and if they’re willing to accept the occasional outages, lack of live support and additional services and more.

“However, we’ve always believed that ‘good enough’ is never good enough when you’re on the water. That’s why we see the new LEO services as part of a genuinely robust connectivity solution for yachts. We designed our TracNet systems to offer that hybrid concept by seamlessly combining VSAT, 5G and Wi-Fi into a single antenna, while integrating and managing additional services, like Starlink, through intelligent, automatic switching for the best connections all the time.”

Savage’s company Excelerate, meanwhile, has launched a product called Hybrid Edge, which can pull in feeds from OneWeb, Starlink, 4/5G and higher-earth orbit satellites to offer the ultimate in redundancy and speed, since the device is able to combine bandwidths. It should be noted, however, that users will still need the relevant receivers on their radar masts for each connection to work.

“Starlink is grabbing the headlines now because it is the first LEO service to hit the mass market,” says Savage. “And while it isn’t the  only LEO service out there, it is enjoying a  period of very little competition, particularly because of the low capital outlay required by users to enjoy the service and the relatively low monthly connectivity costs compared to anything else out there.”

But competition for Starlink is growing as space gets more and more crowded with LEO constellations. Astronomers aren’t happy, but your teenager will be when they’re streaming the latest Netflix release in the middle of the Pacific.

First published in the March 2023 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.

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The Tesla Roadster Is Finally Arriving in 2023, Elon Musk Says

The ceo made the announcement on wednesday via twitter, attributing the ev's third delay to supply chain shortages., demetrius simms, demetrius simms's most recent stories.

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Tesla obsessives may soon have a new reason to rejoice.

On Wednesday, Elon Musk shared that the much-delayed second-generation Tesla Roadster is now expected to ship within two years. Announced via Twitter , the CEO attributed the model’s third setback to supply chain shortages this year, adding that if “2022 is not mega drama,” the new EV will start delivering in 2023.

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The eagerly anticipated new roadster was first expected to reach drivers in 2020, yet in May of that year, Musk announced it was more likely to debut in late 2021. When the following January arrived, he then stated production wouldn’t begin until 2022.

2021 has been the year of super crazy supply chain shortages, so it wouldn’t matter if we had 17 new products, as none would ship. Assuming 2022 is not mega drama, new Roadster should ship in 2023. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2021

Following the 2008-2012 production of Tesla’s first all-electric supercar, the marque teased a second model at Tesla’s Semi event in 2017. The details of the ultra-performance EV took auto enthusiasts by surprise when first revealed, mainly for claims that it would be able to sprint from zero to 60 mph in a head-spinning 1.9 seconds and would have a top speed of more than 250 mph (making it possibly the world’s fastest production car.) The EV, the company claims, can even rocket through a quarter mile in just 8.8 seconds with a powerful torque of 738 ft lbs.

Once released, the new model will come with a massive 200 kilowatt-hour battery that offers an equally staggering 620 miles of driving range, according to Tesla. (Though the figures have yet to be confirmed, that range would put the EV head and shoulders above any other on the market.) It also is designed with four seats rather than the standard two found in most traditional roadsters. The additional seating is made possible because of the model’s compact electric four-wheel drive system.

The Tesla Roadster will reportedly have a base price of $200,000 and is available for pre-order, though you’ll have to plunk down $50,000 to get to front of the list. If you can’t wait until 2023, Mattel’s miniature Matchbox model will beat the life-sized version to market. Made with 99 percent recycled material, the pint-sized roadster will be available via Mattel.com next year.

Demetrius Simms is a digital staff writer at Robb Report. Following a brief stint in public relations, their work has now appeared in lifestyle and culture publications such as Men's Health, Complex…

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MIT alums develop electric boat that aims to be the Tesla of the seas

Last Saturday, a group of people lined up on a narrow floating dock at Boston’s Long Wharf to experience what may have been a first: an electric-powered boat rising above the water on three stilts and gliding quietly — and with just the lacy trace of a wake — past Logan Airport and the Leader Bank Pavilion.

A San Francisco startup called Navier, founded by two MIT alumni, was in town showing off one of its first boats to potential customers and some of the company’s investors. That latter group includes local firms such as Boston-based NextView Ventures and the aptly-named Propeller VC, as well as individuals like Rich Miner, the Cambridge-based co-creator of the Android operating system, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk was recently spotted taking the sleek-looking Navier prototype for a test drive in San Francisco Bay.

The dream of creating a Tesla of the seas is being pursued by Navier and Candela, a Swedish company. Both have solved one of the biggest challenges for an electric motor installed on a traditionally designed boat: plowing through a huge amount of resistance from the water.

Navier and Candela rely on a system of underwater foils, or wings, to lift the hull of the boat above the water, and radically reduce that resistance. Navier’s boat rises off the surface at about 17 miles per hour and stands on three struts — one below the bow, and two at the stern.

The price tag would barely make a billionaire blink: about $375,000. But Navier CEO Sampriti Bhattacharyya says that the cost to operate her electric boat is about 40 cents per nautical mile, compared to $5 or more for a gasoline-powered boat that doesn’t foil. She also contends that maintenance costs will be far lower.

While earning her doctorate in mechanical engineering at MIT, Bhattacharyya started a company to develop underwater drones, Hydroswarm. That company build jet-powered drones the size of a rugby ball for tasks such as monitoring water quality or inspecting ships’ hulls, but the business didn’t pan out. “The process of commercializing the technology proved to be quite complex, and the timing didn’t seem right,” she said.

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Bhattacharyya moved to San Francisco in 2019 and started Navier with Reo Baird. (Baird has since left to work for another electric boat startup, Boundary Layer Technologies ; its first product is a small personal watercraft that can foil.)

Why go west? One reason was weather made it easier to test watercraft year-round. Another was the burgeoning startup scene around autonomous vehicles. While Navier’s boat still requires a captain at the wheel, the company is developing an autonomous docking feature that would allow boaters to shift to autopilot to accomplish the stressful procedure. So far, the company has raised $12 million from investors.

The 30-foot boat in Boston last weekend is touring the East Coast. It’s just the second craft that Navier has built. You enter it on an open back deck, close to the twin electric motors that each power a propeller. Underneath that deck is an array of batteries. You then then step into an enclosed cabin with gray bench seating. The spot on the right, equipped with two digital displays, a wheel, throttle, and joystick, is for the captain .

When the boat starts moving, you can feel the impact of any waves or wakes around you. But once the hull rises above the water, lifted by manipulating underwater “wings” that extend laterally from the bottom of each strut, the ride gets smoother. It’s hard to tell exactly when the boat transitions from plowing through the water to foiling above it.

Navier already has 30 individual buyers who have put down deposits. But Bhattacharyya also has a vision of using them as ferries and water taxis to get people out of their cars and move them faster, more quietly, and with fewer emissions.

“We want to turn waterways into highways,” she said.

Brian Halligan, co-founder of Propeller, one of Navier’s backers, said he was attracted to company because it has the potential to dramatically lower the carbon emissions of the boating industry.

“We are going to need to electrify every industry,” Halligan said. “I also like that it has the potential to transform urban transportation via an Uber-like service on the water.”

But with all the potential, Navier and other makers of similar boats still have to grapple with one issue: boats can’t go faster than 5 miles per hour in many urban harbors because of the effect of their wakes on other boats. Will Navier convince harbormasters and the Coast Guard to lift that rule for its boat, which creates very little wake even at higher speeds?

We’ll see. On my ride, the captain — Navier head of operations Sam Seder, was sticking to the rules about where you can go fast in Boston Harbor, and where you need to slow down. (Candela spokesman Mikael Mahlberg says that his company has been granted an exception to the speed limits in Stockholm’s harbor.)

Before you see Navier’s electric boat on local waterways, you’ll likely see one made by its Swedish rival, Candela. Don Symington, a charter captain, plans to add a 28-foot boat from Candela to his fleet early next year. It costs about $400,000.

“An expensive boat to purchase,” he said, “but a cheap boat to operate.”

The boat, like Navier’s, can be charged by plugging into so-called “shore power” outlets that exist at most marinas. Symington estimates it will cost about 80 percent less to operate than a comparable diesel-powered craft. He plans to run charters and 90-minute harbor tours, but he also wants to explore operating water shuttle service for a seaside community that doesn’t yet have it — perhaps Nahant or Dorchester.

Symington expects his Candela C-8 model to arrive in January or February. And by spring, when boating season returns, Symington hopes you’ll see his electric foiling boat docked behind Legal Harborside — waiting to offer zero-emission rides.

Scott Kirsner can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him @ScottKirsner .

Private planes, mansions and superyachts: What gives billionaires like Musk and Abramovich such a massive carbon footprint

Distinguished Professor and Provost's Professor of Anthropology; Director of the Open Anthropology Institute, Indiana University

Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, Indiana University

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Tesla’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have been vying for the world’s richest person ranking all year after the former’s wealth soared a staggering US$160 billion in 2020, putting him briefly in the top spot .

Musk isn’t alone in seeing a significant increase in wealth during a year of pandemic, recession and death. Altogether, the world’s billionaires saw their wealth surge over $1.9 trillion in 2020, according to Forbes.

Those are astronomical numbers, and it’s hard to get one’s head around them without some context. As anthropologists who study energy and consumer culture, we wanted to examine how all that wealth translated into consumption and the resulting carbon footprint.

Walking in a billionaire’s shoes

We found that billionaires have carbon footprints that can be thousands of times higher than those of average Americans.

The wealthy own yachts, planes and multiple mansions, all of which contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. For example, a superyacht with a permanent crew, helicopter pad, submarines and pools emits about 7,020 tons of CO2 a year, according to our calculations, making it by the far worst asset to own from an environmental standpoint. Transportation and real estate make up the lion’s share of most people’s carbon footprint, so we focused on calculating those categories for each billionaire.

To pick a sample of billionaires, we started with the 2020 Forbes List of 2,095 billionaires. A random or representatives sample of billionaire carbon footprints is impossible because most wealthy people shy away from publicity , so we had to focus on those whose consumption is public knowledge. This excluded most of the superrich in Asia and the Middle East .

We combed 82 databases of public records to document billionaires’ houses, vehicles, aircraft and yachts. After an exhaustive search, we started with 20 well-known billionaires whose possessions we were able to ascertain, while trying to include some diversity in gender and geography. We have submitted our paper for peer review but plan to continue adding to our list.

We then used a wide range of sources, such as the U.S. Energy Information Administration and Carbon Footprint , to estimate the annual CO2 emissions of each house, aircraft, vehicle and yacht. In some cases we had to estimate the size of houses from satellite images or photos and the use of private aircraft and yachts by searching the popular press and drawing on other studies . Our results are based on analyzing typical use of each asset given its size and everything else we could learn.

We did not try to calculate each asset’s “ embodied carbon ” emissions – that is, how much CO2 is burned throughout the supply chain in making the product – or the emissions produced by their family, household employees or entourage. We also didn’t include the emissions of companies of which they own part or all, because that would have added another significant degree of complexity. For example, we didn’t calculate the emissions of Tesla or Amazon when calculating Musk’s or Bezos’ footprints.

In other words, these are all likely conservative estimates of how much they emit.

Your carbon footprint

To get a sense of perspective, let’s start with the carbon footprint of the average person.

Residents of the U.S., including billionaires, emitted about 15 tons of CO2 per person in 2018. The global average footprint is smaller, at just about 5 tons per person.

In contrast, the 20 people in our sample contributed an average of about 8,190 tons of CO2 in 2018. But some produced far more greenhouse gases than others.

The jet-setting billionaire

Roman Abramovich, who made most of his $19 billion fortune trading oil and gas, was the biggest polluter on our list. Outside of Russia, he is probably best known as the headline-grabbing owner of London’s Chelsea Football Club.

Abramovich cruises the Mediterranean in his superyacht, named the Eclipse , which at 162.5 meters bow to stern is the second-biggest in the world, rivaling some cruise ships. And he hops the globe on a custom-designed Boeing 767 , which boasts a 30-seat dining room. He takes shorter trips in his Gulfstream G650 jet, one of his two helicopters or the submarine on his yacht.

He maintains homes in many countries, including a mansion in London’s Kensington Park Gardens, a chateau in Cap D’Antibes in France and a 28-hectare estate in St. Barts that once belonged to David Rockefeller . In 2018, he left the U.K. and settled in Israel , where he became a dual citizen and bought a home in 2020 for $64.5 million.

We estimate that he was responsible for at least 33,859 metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2018 – more than two-thirds from his yacht, which is always ready to use at a moment’s notice year-round.

Massive mansions and private jets

Bill Gates, currently the world’s fourth-richest person with $124 billion, is a “modest” polluter – by billionaire standards – and is typical of those who may not own a giant yacht but make up for it with private jets.

Co-founder of Microsoft, he retired in 2020 to manage the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest charity, with an endowment of $50 billion.

In the 1990s, Gates built Xanadu – named after the vast fictional estate in Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” – at a cost of $127 million in Medina, Washington. The giant home covers 6,131 square meters, with a 23-car garage, a 20-person cinema and 24 bathrooms. He also owns at least five other dwellings in Southern California, the San Juan Islands in Washington state, North Salem, New York, and New York City, as well as a horse farm , four private jets, a seaplane and “a collection” of helicopters .

We estimated his annual footprint at 7,493 metric tons of carbon, mostly from a lot of flying.

The environmentally minded tech CEO

South African-born Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has a surprisingly low carbon footprint despite being the world’s second-richest person, with $177 billion – and he seems intent on setting an example for other billionaires .

He doesn’t own a superyacht and says he doesn’t even take vacations .

We calculated a relatively modest carbon footprint for him in 2018, thanks to his eight houses and one private jet. This year, his carbon footprint would be even lower because in 2020 he sold all of his houses and promised to divest the rest of his worldly possessions .

While his personal carbon footprint is still hundreds of times higher than that of an average person, he demonstrates that the superrich still have choices to make and can indeed lower their environmental impact if they so choose.

His estimated footprint from the assets we looked at was 2,084 tons in 2018.

The value of naming and shaming

The aim of our ongoing research is to get people to think about the environmental burden of wealth.

While plenty of research has shown that rich countries and wealthy people produce far more than their share of greenhouse gas emissions, these studies can feel abstract and academic, making it harder to change this behavior.

[ Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter .]

We believe “shaming” – for lack of a better word – superrich people for their energy-intensive spending habits can have an important impact, revealing them as models of overconsumption that people shouldn’t emulate.

Newspapers, cities and local residents made an impact during the California droughts of 2014 and 2015 by “drought shaming” celebrities and others who were wasting water, seen in their continually green lawns . And the Swedes came up with a new term – “ flygskam ” or flying shame – to raise awareness about the climate impact of air travel.

Climate experts say that to have any hope of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, countries must cut their emissions in half by 2030 and eliminate them by 2050.

Asking average Americans to adopt less carbon-intensive lifestyles to achieve this goal can be galling and ineffective when it would take about 550 of their lifetimes to equal the carbon footprint of the average billionaire on our list.

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Twelve billionaires’ climate emissions outpollute 2.1m homes, analysis finds

Research shows impact from lifestyles and investments of likes of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk

• Introduction: the great carbon divide
• Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%

Twelve of the world’s wealthiest billionaires produce more greenhouse gas emissions from their yachts, private jets, mansions and financial investments than the annual energy emissions of 2m homes, research shared exclusively with the Guardian reveals.

The tycoons include the Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich , the tech billionaires Bill Gates, Larry Page and Michael Dell, the inventor and social media company owner Elon Musk and the Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim.

Analysis by Oxfam and US researchers of their luxury purchases, which include superyachts, private jets, cars, helicopters and palatial mansions, combined with the impact of their financial investments and shareholdings reveals that they account for almost 17m tonnes of CO 2 and equivalent greenhouse gas emissions annually.

This is the same as the CO 2 and equivalent emissions from powering 2.1m homes or the emissions from 4.6 coal-fired power plants over a year, according to conversion data from the US Environmental Protection Agency.

The true scale of the investment emissions of these individuals is not generally systematically calculated or reported. Oxfam analysts working with two US academics, Beatriz Barros and Richard Wilk, used publicly available data to calculate the greenhouse gas impacts.

“Billionaires generate obscene amounts of carbon pollution with their yachts and private jets – but this is dwarfed by the pollution caused by their investments,” said Oxfam International’s inequality policy adviser Alex Maitland.

“Through the corporations they own, billionaires emit a million times more carbon than the average person. They tend to favour investments in heavily polluting industries, like fossil fuels.

“The world’s poorest communities, those who have done the least to cause climate change – those who are least able to respond and recover – are the ones who are suffering the worst consequences. This is unfair and immoral.”

The lifestyle emissions were estimated by examining the carbon footprint of the billionaires’ purchases, such as the $500m superyacht that Oceanco built recently for Bezos.

The yacht, which is 127 metres (417ft) long and took three years to build, boasts the title of the largest sailing vessel in the world. Its carbon emissions are at a minimum about 7,154 tonnes a year, according to the analysis by Wilk and Barros.

The superyachts owned by the likes of Bezos, Abramovich, the former Google tycoons Page and Eric Schmidt and by Bernard Arnault , the French tycoon at the helm of a jewellery and fashion empire, have carbon footprints that far exceed those of the private jets owned by 10 of the 12 billionaires.

Bernard Arnault

The luxury king

Nicknamed the “pope of fashion”, Bernard Arnault is the founder, CEO and chairman of the biggest luxury company in the world.

After taking over his father’s construction company in 1971, Arnault changed direction, first to real estate and then into fashion and luxury goods. By 1990 he was at the head of of LVMH, the company that had resulted from a merger between Louis Vuitton and Moët Hennessy, and over the following decades he added Fendi, Bulgari and Tiffany to the already powerful LVMH fold. Arnault recently lost his spot as the  second richest man  in the world. Forbes currently estimates his net worth at about $191bn.

A superyacht kept on permanent standby generates about 7,000 tonnes of CO 2 a year, according to the analysis.

“The emissions of the superyachts are way above anything else,” Wilk said. “They have to have a crew, and they have to be constantly maintained even when they are docked. Then you have the helicopters onboard, the jetskis, the high energy-using luxury items like pools, hot tubs, private submarines and tenders, all of these require power, the air conditioning, the sophisticated electronic items. It is like having a hotel running on the water all the time.”

Wilk said the calculations of lifestyle emissions were a minimum: for example, the researchers attributed superyachts to the billionaires only if they were held in their names rather than company names. The footprint of the dwellings was based on estimates of their energy use.

Carlos Slim

The serial entrepreneur

Born in 1940 in Mexico City, Carlos Slim has extended the reach of his business empire deep into almost every branch of the Mexican economy. Slim’s father, who moved to Mexico from Lebanon, ran a number of shops and businesses around the city, and Slim famously began investing at the age of 11, buying government bonds.

The industrial group he eventually built up incorporated telecoms, construction, real estate, banking and media – Slim owned 17% of the New York Times for a while. At one point, Slim was ranked the world’s richest man by Bloomberg. He is currently 12th. 

As well as making a huge negative contribution to global heating, the financial interests of the elite billionaires give them enormous influence over economic and policy decisions, the researchers said.

“These people have an outsize political influence because of their enormous wealth, which they use to leverage local and national governments, gaining exemptions from taxes and privileges that allow them to pollute and to influence laws regulating pollution,” said Wilk, a professor of anthropology at Indiana University. “If you look at them as entities, some of them are rivalling states in terms of their influence.”

Some use that influence to tackle social and environmental issues. Bezos has committed to spending $10bn via his Earth Fund. The Google co-founder Sergey Brin has funded a non-profit focused on climate change.

Page, Schmidt, Dell, Slim and Oracle’s Larry Ellison all have philanthropic foundations. Musk has argued that his work with Tesla and Solar City has made huge contributions to change. Another one of the 12, Laurene Powell Jobs, runs the philanthropic Emerson Collective. Arnault’s LVMH established an environmental development unit in 1992.

Laurene Powell Jobs

Philanthropist and donor

Laurene Powell Jobs, born on 6 November 1963 and the widow of Apple’s founder Steve Jobs, founded the non-profit Emerson Collective, which supports underprivileged people via philanthropic grants, advocacy and media communication, and the XQ Institute, which works to improve the educational experiences for young people.

She also manages the Steve Jobs Trust and is a major donor to the Democratic party.

A spokesperson for Gates told the Guardian that he had taken many steps to reduce his personal emissions impact by buying sustainable aviation fuel to reduce his air travel pollution, switching to electric cars, using solar panels and buying offsets delivered through carbon removal technologies.

“Bill will continue to invest billions of his own resources into clean energy and climate change innovations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help make these technologies more affordable. Additionally, any returns on these investments will go back into fighting climate change and supporting the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help as many people as possible around the world,” the spokesperson said.

None of the other billionaires provided comment on the record.

The carbon footprints of the investments were calculated by examining the equity stakes that the billionaires held in companies. Estimates of the carbon impact of their holdings was calculated using the company’s declarations on scope 1 emissions – direct emissions from sources owned or controlled by a company – and scope 2, indirect emissions.

Oxfam’s research found that the emissions from the investments of 125 billionaires averaged 3.1m tonnes per billionaire. This is more than a million times higher than the average emissions created by the bottom 90% of the world’s population.

• Greenhouse gas emissions
• The great carbon divide
• Climate crisis
• The super-rich
• Roman Abramovich

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From Elon Musk to Kim Kardashian, this luxurious explorer yacht can be configured to satisfy a billionaire’s every whim. The 262 feet long vessel can have everything from a full fledged laboratory to a dive center to a helicopter hangar to even a rocking nightclub.

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An ex-Saudi crown prince cleverly saved this Russian oligarch’s $150 million superyacht from being seized by becoming its owner at the last minute. The 279 feet vessel boasts a cinema, hammam, infinity pool, and more.

Just a day after the Alfa Nero superyacht, owned by the sanctioned Russian billionaire Andrey Guryev, was relocated, a massive fire engulfed and destroyed the Antigua Marine Yacht Club. The 267-foot-long vessel was unharmed.

After rushing across the Pacific ocean for 18 days to avoid getting captured, the Fiji police seized the $350 million superyacht Amadea of sanctioned oligarch Suleiman Kerimov. So luxurious is the vessel that the ceiling of the owner’s cabin recreates the night sky using 2,000 fiber-optic cables.

Australian mining billionaire has revived plans to build a $1 billion replica of the doomed Titanic after millions of people have registered interest to travel on the vessel. Titanic II will have grand ballrooms, a casino, Turkish baths, squash courts and even third class cabins.

Fisherman turned billionaire Kjell Inge Røkke is building the worlds largest superyacht. The 640 feet long vessel will not entertain celebrities but house hundreds of scientists who will study the ocean. The ‘Rev Ocean’ will have 8 laboratories, a submarine, and 3 pools.

Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are so rich that they have support vessels to accompany their megayachts. The shadow vessels carry their jet skis, submarines, and helicopters, and for the first time, they are docked close to each other in Fort Lauderdale.

This palatial 314-foot Expedition yacht comes with a lounge that is partly submerged underwater

Steve Jobs’s stunning $120 million Venus superyacht is stealing the spotlight on Australia’s Gold Coast. Owned by the Apple founder’s billionaire widow, Laurene Powell, this futuristic 255-foot-long vessel features 6 bedrooms and 27 Mac computers for entertainment.

OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman patiently allowed an inquisitive father-and-son duo to check out his $20 million McLaren F1 at a California gas station. The billionaire genius even stepped out of the iconic vehicle and took the time to chat with them.

Elon Musk’s Maritime Marvel: A Closer Look at His Extravagant Yacht

If you’re an avid follower of Elon Musk, you’ve probably heard of his latest addition to his impressive collection of toys – a yacht. Yes, you heard it right. The billionaire tech entrepreneur has recently purchased a massive yacht, and it’s turning heads for all the right reasons. Dubbed as the “ultimate luxury escape on water,” the Elon Musk yacht is not your ordinary sea vessel. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at its specifications, features, photos, and price.

Elon Musk’s yacht is an impressive display of wealth and technological prowess. It merges luxury with innovation, bringing together the best of both worlds. This seafaring sanctuary is much more than a floating mansion. It’s an embodiment of Musk’s unique style and penchant for the extraordinary.

Specifications:

The Elon Musk yacht, also known as the “Dragon,” is a sleek and sophisticated vessel that spans a whopping 367 feet in length, making it one of the largest yachts in the world. It was built by Italian shipyard Benetti, and designed by the award-winning team at H2 Yacht Design. The yacht boasts a modern and futuristic look, with clean lines and a distinctive metallic gray finish.

The Dragon is powered by a hybrid propulsion system, featuring diesel-electric engines and battery packs. This setup allows for a maximum speed of 17.5 knots and a cruising range of 6,500 nautical miles. The yacht can accommodate up to 14 guests in seven luxurious cabins, and it’s operated by a crew of 25.

The Elon Musk yacht is packed with impressive features that cater to its guests’ every need. On the main deck, you’ll find a spacious salon, a formal dining area, and a cinema room. The upper deck houses a panoramic lounge, a bar, and an outdoor dining area. On the bridge deck, you’ll find the master suite, which features a private balcony, a study, and a lounge area. The yacht also has a helipad and a garage that can store a submarine or a car.

Aboard the yacht, one is treated to an array of amenities designed to offer unrivalled comfort. From the plush, spacious cabins to the state-of-the-art kitchen, every element radiates Musk’s commitment to creating an unparalleled maritime experience. It is the amalgamation of high-end luxury and advanced technology that makes this vessel a marvel.

One of the most notable features of the Dragon is its “floating island.” This feature consists of a large pool, surrounded by a circular deck that can be raised or lowered to adjust the water level. The deck can also be transformed into a dance floor or a stage, making it the perfect spot for a party or a concert.

Staying true to his ethos of sustainability, Musk’s yacht incorporates various energy-efficient solutions. The yacht boasts solar panels and an advanced propulsion system, reinforcing Musk’s commitment to renewable energy. His yacht not only stands as a symbol of wealth and luxury but also of sustainability and environmental consciousness.

he sleek design of Musk’s yacht is a nod to his futuristic vision. Its streamlined structure and modern aesthetics not only exude elegance but also improve its performance at sea. The elegance is not just confined to the exterior. Inside, the yacht is a haven of refined taste, with every detail carefully considered and executed to perfection.

The Elon Musk yacht reportedly cost around $200 million to build. However, the actual price may be much higher, considering the customization and additional features that Musk might have added.

Elon Musk’s yacht is more than a luxurious possession. It’s a nautical representation of his vision – the perfect blend of comfort, technology, sustainability, and style. From its sustainable features to its breathtaking design, it serves as a testament to Musk’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

In the end, the yacht stands as an embodiment of Musk’s forward-thinking approach. It isn’t merely a vessel that sails the seas; it’s a testament to the tech mogul’s inventive spirit and his relentless pursuit of excellence.

Explore the fascinating world of Elon Musk with the best-selling book, “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.” Delve into the extraordinary life and vision of this visionary entrepreneur as you sail through the pages of this captivating biography . It’s a must-read for anyone intrigued by Musk’s achievements. And the best part? You can also enjoy the free audio version of the book.

Elon Musk: The Quest

For a fantastic future.

Written by:

Daniel Anderson

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The daily schedule of Elon Musk, from a morning donut to upping his sleep hours

Posted: May 4, 2024 | Last updated: May 4, 2024

• Elon Musk has amassed a $198 billion fortune through his work at Tesla, SpaceX, and more.
• The 52-year-old is also the father of 10 children and finds time to post on X almost daily.
• Here's how the Tesla CEO structures his days.

Elon Musk is a busy man, with interests across several massive tech companies.

He's the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, the owner of Twitter — now X — and he's also a father of 10 children.

According to Forbes, he's amassed a fortune worth $198 billion, making him the world's third-richest person. Musk said he didn't get there by working 40 hours a week. The billionaire is known to have a strenuous schedule that he said has demanded 120-hour workweeks in the past.

Still, the South African mogul has similarities to the average Joe in his routine. Like many of us, Musk has a sweet treat in the morning and spends time scrolling social media.

Here's how his days go, according to interviews and posts by Musk himself over the years.

Musk wakes up around 9 a.m. and has said he starts every morning with a donut

Musk told The Wall Street Journal in 2023 that he usually goes to bed around 3 a.m. and sleeps for six hours. So, he's typically waking up around 9 a.m. each day.

He might've been trolling when he wrote a response to a doctor that same year on X saying he eats "a donut every morning," but a quick search of Musk's posts reveals he's quite a fan of the pastry.

But, it's all about moderation, according to Musk.

"I only have 0.4 donuts at a time, because my brain neural network quantizes it down to 0 donuts," he posted to X in October.

His mornings usually start with his phone in his hand

Musk said in 2022 that he was trying to break the cycle of checking his phone as soon as he woke up. While on the Full Send Podcast , Musk described it as "a terrible habit" he hoped to escape.

But as of last year, he still wakes up and immediately looks at his phone for emergencies, the Journal reported.

If his posts on X (formerly Twitter) are any indication, the habit persists. He's been active on Twitter since before he bought it in 2022.

It's unclear if Musk slots in time to post and respond to others each day, but it certainly looks like he rarely takes a day off from the app.

"Some days I wake up and look at Twitter to see if it's still working," Musk told Walter Isaacson in the "Elon Musk" biography.

Showering is an important part of his daily routine

Musk previously credited showering with having the biggest positive effect on his daily life .

During an AMA session on Reddit in 2015, a user asked which of his daily habits impacted his life the most.

"Showering," Musk responded.

He decides which Tesla to commute to the office in

As the CEO of one of the leading EV makers, it's no surprise that Musk has more than one option for his daily commute.

When an X user posted a meme about deciding between driving a Cybertruck without autopilot or Tesla Model S with self-driving technology, Musk responded that it's a choice he faces "every day."

The Cybertruck has been in the backdrop of many celebrity paparazzi shots and Instagram posts since its official launch in November.

It's unclear if Musk is keeping up with the daily lifting routine he spoke about in 2023

Like many, Musk appears to have had ups and downs in his relationship with physical exercise over the years. In 2021, he told Joe Rogan that he'd avoid it altogether if he could.

"I almost never work out, except for picking up my kids & throwing them in the air," he said on X in June 2023.

But less than two months later, he said he was "lifting hard almost every day." Around the same time, talks of Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg going head-to-head in a fight swirled online.

Sometimes, his work days can last all night

Musk has admitted on several occasions that running more than one company isn't easy. He splits time between his companies depending on the "crisis of the moment," the 52-year-old said in 2021.

One X user pointed out in January 2023 that Musk had testified in a lawsuit in the morning, attended an event at a Nevada Tesla factory in the evening, and worked with Tesla on AI at night — all in one day.

Musk responded that he'd also spent time at "Twitter HQ past midnight."

"I go to sleep, I wake up, I work, go to sleep, wake up, work—do that seven days a week," Musk told the Journal in 2023. "I'll have to do that for a while — no choice — but I think once Twitter is set on the right path, I think it is a much easier thing to manage than SpaceX or Tesla."

On the Tesla earnings call in April 2024, Musk said: "Tesla constitutes the majority of my work time, and I work pretty much every day of the week. It's rare for me to take a Sunday afternoon off."

Musk goes to bed around 3 a.m. and gets about 6 hours of sleep every night

Although he's not getting eight hours a night, Musk has upped his sleeping schedule from being nearly nonexistent in the past.

In May 2023, Musk told CNBC that he's no longer pulling all-nighters. Instead, he said he tries to get at least six hours of sleep.

According to Isaacson's biography of Musk, the billionaire has spent many nights awake and pondering the issues his companies face. His former partner Claire Boucher — known by her stage name Grimes — also told Isaacson that Musk once stayed up all night playing the "Elden Ring" video game when it first came out.

He has a history of sleeping on the floors of his offices and the Tesla factory .

After purchasing Twitter in 2022, Musk all but moved into its San Francisco headquarters . He said there's a couch in the library that he would crash on from time to time.

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Tesla’s Profit Fell 55%, Adding to Concerns About Its Strategy

The first-quarter results are likely to fuel worries that competitors will continue grabbing a bigger slice of a market dealing with slowing electric car sales.

By Jack Ewing

Tesla reported on Tuesday that it made significantly less money in the first three months of the year because of its tepid car sales, reinforcing concern among investors that the company led by Elon Musk is losing ground in the market for electric vehicles.

Profit fell 55 percent, to $1.1 billion, from the first quarter of 2023, the company said. And revenue fell 9 percent, to $21.3 billion.

A slump in earnings was seen as inevitable after Tesla said this month that sales in the first quarter fell 8.5 percent from a year earlier, and after the company announced plans to lay off more than 10 percent of its employees worldwide, or about 14,000 people.

The job cuts, including more than 2,000 workers at the company’s factory in Fremont, Calif., and nearly 2,700 at a factory in Austin, Texas, were interpreted as a sign that Tesla was struggling to bring costs in line with sinking revenue.

In the first quarter of 2023, Tesla made $2.5 billion and had one of the best profit margins in the industry, the company said a year ago. But it has been forced to cut prices, including in a new round last week, lowering the amount it makes on each car it sells. For a while, that strategy seemed to help bolster the company’s sales, but Tesla now appears to be struggling to attract buyers even with lower prices.

Tesla’s operating profit margin last quarter was 5.5 percent, half as much as a year earlier and in line with how much other automakers tended to earn.

Tesla investors are increasingly worried that its falling sales and profit are a symptom of larger problems , possibly pointing to the company’s inability to effectively respond to increased competition from established automakers and new carmakers from China .

Mr. Musk signaled recently that Tesla would focus on autonomous driving technology and a vehicle he called the Robotaxi, sowing doubt about the company’s plans to develop a new, lower-priced model that could make electric cars affordable to a broader range of customers and people in more countries.

Self-driving cars have long been an obsession for Mr. Musk. In 2019, he said Tesla would have one million autonomous taxis on the road the next year; the company still has no such cabs.

“Tesla lived on the coolness of its car, the idea that the company was about to launch autonomous vehicles and investor confidence in Mr. Musk’s ability to do nearly impossible things,” Erik Gordon, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said in an email. “Now its cars are old, the fleet of Robotaxis promised five years ago hasn’t arrived, and confidence in Mr. Musk is battered by disappointments and behavior that mystifies investors.”

Tesla said on Tuesday that it remained on track to start producing a lower-priced vehicle next year. But in a change designed to reduce upfront investment, the car will use some new components and some borrowed from existing vehicles. That strategy will allow Tesla to make new models without building new factories, the company said.

“This update may result in achieving less cost reduction than previously expected,” the company said in a presentation to investors.

Tesla’s share price, which had fallen by about 40 percent this year, surged in extended trading Tuesday after its first-quarter report. Investors appeared to be pleased that the company was still planning a more affordable model.

Mr. Musk has defended Tesla’s price cuts, saying all carmakers adjust prices, but usually through dealer incentives and other measures that are not quite as visible to buyers. Tesla sells cars directly to customers online rather than through franchised dealers.

“Tesla prices must change frequently in order to match production with demand,” he said.

Tesla attributed the sales decline to conflict in the Red Sea, which has disrupted global supply chains; a fire that halted production at the company’s factory near Berlin; and the ramp-up of an upgraded version of the Model 3 sedan in Fremont. Tesla also blamed a decision by other carmakers to sell more hybrid vehicles, which include a gasoline engine and batteries and electric motors, for putting pressure on sales of fully electric vehicles.

The second quarter “will be a lot better,” Mr. Musk said on a conference call to discuss the company’s results.

He postponed a planned trip on Monday to India, where he was expected to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and announce plans for a factory, citing “very heavy Tesla obligations.”

While the postponement may disappoint investors who had hoped India could be a new source of growth, it could also provide reassurance that Mr. Musk was addressing Tesla’s problems more urgently. The company’s models are unlikely to sell in large numbers in India, where most car buyers prefer smaller and more affordable vehicles.

Tesla’s newest vehicle is the Cybertruck, a pickup that the company began producing last year. But the company has sold only around 4,000, according to information that emerged in a recall last week, suggesting it will not be a significant source of growth.

The self-driving taxi is seen as a long shot, partly because even the most advanced autonomous systems available today sometimes make glaring mistakes. In addition, federal and state regulators will have to sign off before Tesla can put such taxis on the road. Tesla does not yet have a license to test driverless vehicles in California, where it would be expected to develop Robotaxi software.

“Elon Musk has promised Robotaxis since 2016,” said Jan Becker, chief executive of Apex.AI, a company that provides software used by autonomous driving systems. “I don’t see enough evidence of Tesla releasing a Robotaxi, at least in the short term.”

Mr. Musk said Tuesday that the technology was improving rapidly because of advances in artificial intelligence. Answering questions from analysts, he expressed impatience with anybody who viewed Tesla as primarily a car company.

“We should have been thought of as an A.I. and robotics company,” he said. Anyone who doesn’t have faith in Tesla’s ability to perfect autonomous driving, he added, “should not be an investor in the company.”

Until recently, Tesla was among very few carmakers making money on electric cars, but established carmakers are catching up. General Motors, which also reported earnings on Tuesday, has ironed out production difficulties in battery-pack manufacturing and is ramping up output, Paul Jacobson, the company’s chief financial officer, said in a conference call with reporters.

G.M. remains dependent on its gasoline-vehicle business, which was primarily responsible for a 24 percent jump in profits for the first three months of the year, to $3 billion. But the company expects to be selling electric vehicles profitably later this year, Mr. Jacobson said.

Focus on Tesla’s earnings report Tuesday was unusually intense after a series of recent events that raised questions about the company’s direction and Mr. Musk’s leadership.

Last week, Tesla’s board of directors disappointed investors who had hoped it would do more to get Mr. Musk to focus on the car business and spend less time on X, where his polarizing comments and affinity for right-wing conspiracy theories have alienated many potential customers.

The board took steps to reinstate a $47 billion pay package for Mr. Musk that a Delaware court had voided. The board also said it would ask shareholders to approve moving Tesla’s corporate domicile to Texas, a change Mr. Musk called for on the day the Delaware court struck down his pay package in January on the grounds that it was excessive and that shareholders were not properly informed when they approved it in 2018.

Neal E. Boudette contributed reporting.

Jack Ewing writes about the auto industry with an emphasis on electric vehicles. More about Jack Ewing

The World of Elon Musk

The billionaire’s portfolio includes the world’s most valuable automaker, an innovative rocket company and plenty of drama..

Tesla: Elon Musk has gutted the part of the carmaking company responsible for building charging stations for electric vehicles , sowing uncertainty about the future of the largest and most reliable U.S. charging network.

X: An Australian court extended an injunction ordering the social media platform to remove videos depicting the recent stabbing of a bishop , setting the country’s judicial system up for a clash with Musk.

A $47 Billion Pay Deal: Despite   facing criticism that Tesla is overly beholden to Musk , its board of directors said that the company would essentially give him everything he wanted, including the biggest pay package in corporate history.

SpaceX: President Biden wants companies that use American airspace for rocket launches to start paying taxes into a federal fund  that finances the work of air traffic controllers.

Business With China : Tesla and China built a symbiotic relationship that made Musk ultrarich. Now, his reliance on the country may give Beijing leverage .  

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Supreme Court Won’t Hear Elon Musk Dispute Over SEC Settlement

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear Elon Musk’s bid to throw out part of a securities fraud settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission restricting the billionaire businessman’s public statements about his electric car company Tesla.

The justices turned away Musk’s appeal of a lower court’s decision upholding the 2018 settlement reached after he said on social media that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private—a statement the SEC in a legal action called false and misleading.

Musk’s settlement resolved the SEC lawsuit accusing him of defrauding investors. Under the agreement, Musk and Tesla each paid $20 million fines and he gave up his role as the company’s chairman. Musk also agreed to let a Tesla lawyer pre-approve some posts he made on the social media platform then called Twitter before Musk bought the company and renamed it X.

Musk later sought to terminate the pre-approval mandate, with his lawyers in a court filing calling it a “government-imposed muzzle” that amounted to an illegal prior restraint on his speech.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman in Manhattan in 2022 rejected Musk’s request. A three-judge panel of the Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit of Appeals in 2023 upheld that decision.

The 2nd Circuit said Musk chose to allow screening of his Twitter posts, and had no right to revisit the matter “because he has now changed his mind.” The 2nd Circuit last year denied Musk’s request to rehear the case, prompting his appeal to the Supreme Court.

Musk’s lawyers argued that the SEC had no right to impose, as a condition of settling, a “gag rule” that they contend violated the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment constraints on governmental limits on free speech.

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The ex-Twitter director who went 'hardcore' for Elon Musk and slept on the floor of X's office is now working for his Meta nemesis, Mark Zuckerberg

• The former Twitter director Esther Crawford says she has joined Mark Zuckerberg's Meta.
• Crawford was one of Elon Musk's top lieutenants at Twitter after he took over the company.
• She went viral for embracing Musk's hardcore work culture before getting laid off just months later.

A former top lieutenant at Elon Musk 's Twitter says she's working for Mark Zuckerberg at Meta now.

"Some personal news: I've joined the @messenger team at @meta as Director of Product," Esther Crawford wrote in an Instagram post on Monday.

Crawford was Twitter's director of product management for more than two years before she was laid off in February 2023.

"Although I considered a lot of great options, Meta was my top choice because I am obsessed with how humans connect through technology — and no other company has a bigger scale of impact in that space than Meta, which connects nearly 4B people (half of humanity)," Crawford said in her post.

Besides lauding "the exceptional quality of the people" working at Meta, Crawford said she was attracted by Zuckerberg's "vision and intensity."

"Seeing how he's made the company more efficient and less bureaucratic in the past year makes me even more bullish to be joining now because I want to move fast and ship awesome products," Crawford said of Zuckerberg.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Esther Crawford (@esthercrawford)

Crawford's announcement came just more than a year after her departure from X. She joined Twitter in December 2020 after the company acquired her video-chat startup , Squad.

Related stories

Crawford was identified as one of Elon Musk's top lieutenants after he took over the company in October 2022. Besides being put in charge of Twitter's subscription service, Twitter Blue, Crawford made headlines when she publicly embraced Musk's hardcore work culture .

"When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork," Crawford tweeted in November 2022, after reposting a now-deleted photo of herself sleeping in Twitter's office .

But despite surviving Twitter's first three rounds of layoffs , Crawford was eventually let go in February 2023. She eventually revealed her thoughts on Musk and his leadership in July of that year.

"In person Elon is oddly charming and he's genuinely funny," Crawford wrote on X in July 2023, adding that Musk likes "telling the same stories and jokes over and over."

She said Musk could be difficult to deal with because "his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry."

"Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him," Crawford said.

"At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said," she added.

Crawford's latest career move could be an indicator of big moves Zuckerberg may be making in his bid to vanquish Musk's X . In July, Zuckerberg launched Threads , a text-based app that's Meta's answer to Twitter.

"It'll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn't nailed it. Hopefully we will," Zuckerberg said in July about Threads' chance to dethrone X.

That said, Crawford told BI she won't stop using X just because she joined Meta.

"I do plan to keep using both X and Threads," she said in an email to BI on Monday. "I'm a big believer in using all social products that one can as a product builder."

Representatives for Meta and X didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

Watch: 5 ways Elon Musk shook up Twitter as CEO

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Elon Musk Says Tesla’s Humanoid Optimus Robot Could Launch Next Year—Here's What Experts Think

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Tesla could start selling its humanoid Optimus robot by the end of next year and one day will rake in more cash from robots than cars, CEO Elon Musk told investors on Tuesday, another ambitious claim from the billionaire that experts said might just be within the realm of possibility—though is highly unlikely to make the carmaker any money in the near future.

Elon Musk hyped Tesla's Optimus robot after an earnings report on Tuesday.

Optimus, Tesla’s still-in-development humanoid robot, will be able to perform useful tasks in the factory by the end of the year and could reach the market by the end of 2025, Musk told investors after a disappointing earnings report on Tuesday.

Musk, who has a history of making bold claims about his companies that fail to materialize, said he thinks Tesla is the “best positioned of any humanoid robot maker” to produce the bots at scale, adding that they could become the company’s most valuable asset and “more valuable than everything else combined” as there is “no meaningful limit to the size of the economy.”

Animesh Garg, assistant professor of AI robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told Forbes Musk’s timeline is “aggressive” but “realistic from a pure release perspective,” but said the question will be “how useful are the skills that ship out of the box,” particularly when it comes to breadth, generalizability and robustness.

To launch, Garg said he would expect Tesla to have a humanoid platform with limbs, though it’s “unclear how robust and useful” the hands will be, but would be surprised if Optimus could perform tasks beyond competent locomotion and skills like picking up objects that aren’t complicated to grasp, with other features like interacting with objects like windows and doors to possibly follow a year or two later.

Jonathan Aitken, a roboticist at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., agreed Musk’s “timeline would be very challenging” and described 2025 as “ambitious but not out of the question,” saying that a lot depends on “the details of exactly what” Musk is suggesting for its applications.

Christian Hubicki, a robotics professor at Florida State University, said he “wouldn’t be shocked to see some carefully prepared video demos of an Optimus doing some nominal tasks in a factory” by the end of the year but warned it will be “incredibly difficult” to get the bots into the hands of customers who will find them useful in that time.

What We Don’t Know

Hubicki said there are several unknowns surrounding the humanoid robots of Tesla and its competitors like Boston Dynamics and Figure AI that are critical to evaluating their potential for use in the real world outside of glitzy, carefully staged demo videos. Foremost among these is reliability, he said, adding that “the only useful robot is a reliable robot.” Hubicki said this “is a problem for humanoids,” where control is still in the laboratory phase and hardware is fragile. “Will they work 90% of the time? 99%? How many 9’s are enough before they’re more useful in your production line than they are a hassle to fix and babysit? Those are the numbers I’d want to know from a humanoids company.”

What’s The Point Of Humanoid Robots?

Most of the built world is designed for humans and humanoid robots, by design, are well suited to this. While work environments and tasks can be challenging for robots with wheels or other designs to navigate, a humanoid could feasibly thrive and undertake kinds of work that are otherwise limited to humans or very specific machinery. The design imposes a number of formidable technical challenges for both hardware and software, including tasks most humans take for granted like movement and grasping objects. The current boom in AI is helping to drive the field forward, Aitken said, as generalizability is crucial to making humanoids viable tools. “We can't program a robot to pick up 1000 different objects by programming a process for each one individually,” he explained

What To Watch For

It’s tough to imagine Musk’s claim that Optimus will one day overshadow Tesla’s other products will be realized at any point in the near future, robotics experts told Forbes, particularly its cars. Garg said humanoids are “unlikely to be cashflow positive anytime soon” and despite the hype, they lack a convincing use case that other emerging technologies like driverless cars have. They “will not likely come close to the car business in terms of revenue” for the next decade, he said. Aitken told Forbes “it's hard to see a humanoid competing seriously with the large industrial players in the sector” and questions whether they’d be able to do the kinds of “high-value, dull, dirty and dangerous” work that would motivate a company to invest. Hubicki said he “would not bet on that market approaching automotives for the foreseeable future.” While humanoid bots have “progressed impressively” in recent years, he said they lack a compelling use case suggesting “a massive market is imminent” and at the moment remain “a complicated technology for completing tasks we can already do better.”

Chief Critic

Analyst Gordon Johnson, of GLJ research, said Musk’s claims were “absurd” and dismissed his year-end 2025 target for Optimus as “utter nonsense and borderline investor fraud.” Johnson said companies that have worked on humanoids for decades haven’t got anywhere close to “where Musk is claiming he will be by the end of 2025.” Optimus is a “pipe dream stock pump,” Johnson said. “There is no product.”

Forbes Valuation

Musk is worth an estimated $191.6 billion. He is the third richest person on the planet, after LVMH’s Bernard Arnault and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

$6 billion. That’s how much Goldman Sachs’ analysts predict the global market for humanoid robots could reach in the next 10 to 15 years. According to research and analysis company GlobalData, the broader robotics market will be worth $218 billion by 2030.

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Elon musk says you shouldn't invest in tesla stock unless you believe this 1 thing about the future.

Few companies can polarize bulls and bears faster than Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) . Shares are up more than 1,100% in the last five years, which is certainly in the bulls' favor. But bears question the high valuation and worry about the unpredictability of CEO Elon Musk.

Sentiment is certainly strong on both sides. But what's a neutral, level-headed investor to do with Tesla stock today? Well, one could start by listening to the company's leader himself. Musk has straight up said who shouldn't be investing in Tesla stock, and that's what we'll explore.

The key to Tesla's future, according to Musk

Tesla makes and sells electric vehicles (EVs) , installs solar-energy products, and has products and services for power storage. But in the first quarter of 2024, Musk didn't mention these things when talking about who should or shouldn't be investing in Tesla .

In the Q1 earnings call, Musk said, "If somebody doesn't believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company." In other words, Tesla's future is all about autonomous driving.

In context, Musk was referring to autonomous taxis, or "robotaxis." With the robotaxi vision, someone who owns a Tesla vehicle can add it to the robotaxi network. The company will also have its own dedicated robotaxi vehicles. People will just use the app to request a ride, and a driverless Tesla taxi will navigate to the user.

In theory, the benefit of the robotaxi system will be twofold. First, it will incentivize people to buy a Tesla vehicle. In 2019, Musk said that owners who add their vehicles to the network could make between $10,000 and $30,000 per year, offsetting the cost of ownership.

But the bigger theoretical benefit to Tesla will be the money it makes directly from robotaxis. Even if it's someone else's car being used, Tesla will still take a cut of the robotaxi fare. Moreover, it will have its own cars on the road autonomously making money.

Fund manager Cathie Wood is the founder of Ark Invest, which is notoriously bullish when it comes to Tesla stock. In 2023, the investment firm put a stake in the ground, expecting that Tesla stock could hit $2,000 per share by 2027 -- that would be mind-blowing gains from the $190 per share it trades at now. But many investors might not realize how much of this upside is riding on robotaxis.

By 2027, Ark Invest suggests the robotaxi business alone could account for two-thirds of Tesla's enterprise value. To frame these numbers differently, Ark Invest is saying that 74% of the upside for Tesla stock today could be from the robotaxi vision. Elon Musk is thinking in the same general direction, and that's why he said investors shouldn't buy Tesla stock unless they believe the company can solve autonomy.

What should investors do now?

To reiterate, Musk said one should only invest in Tesla stock if they believe it can solve autonomy. Here are my thoughts on this.

First, in a manner of speaking, autonomy has already been solved from a technological standpoint. GM 's Cruise unit and Alphabet 's Waymo have already been operating in major U.S. cities. Cruise is currently suspended due to a safety review following an accident. But Waymo is still on the road and has even partnered with Uber Technologies to find more riders. Uber's ride-hailing rival Lyft is also experimenting with autonomous driving.

Tesla itself has demonstrated compelling autonomous capabilities as well. Therefore, autonomous driving can be done. Since this is true, why isn't Tesla stock racing higher toward Ark Invest's price target? Well, there's simply more to it.

At Tesla's Autonomy Day presentation in April 2019, Musk said he was confident there'd be robotaxis on the road in 2020. But he did hedge this statement by mentioning regulatory approval. That's a tough nut to crack and outside Tesla's control.

For example, Cruise already had approval and took a victory lap in April 2023, citing that it had gone 1 million driverless miles with 54% fewer collisions than a human driver. But even with a tangible safety record such as this, it lost approval after an accident with a pedestrian in October.

It's hard to imagine that Tesla could quickly achieve a better track record than Cruise's. But even Cruise's track record wasn't enough to keep it on the road after something went wrong.

Moreover, Musk has talked about having a million robotaxis transporting passengers for around 100 hours per week. Many investors think this scale can be achieved almost overnight once it clears regulatory hurdles. Therefore, these investors are already factoring in the robotaxi network when valuing the stock today.

The first part of this assumption is reasonable -- there are more than a million Tesla vehicles on the road already, and they could all be robotaxis with a software update and owner opt-in.

But 100 hours a week assumes Tesla vehicles will be in use more than half of the day, and that's before considering the owner driving anywhere or taking time out to charge. Maybe some high-traffic areas could demand something like this. But I find it hard to believe there are 100 million hours of weekly taxi demand across the U.S. for Tesla.

In conclusion, I don't necessarily doubt that Tesla can solve autonomy because it's already been solved. The real issue is finding enough demand from users after retaining regulatory approval, assuming it does. I don't personally believe all this will happen on a wide scale before the end of the decade. Considering its valuation already factors in the upside from the robotaxi vision, this is one reason I'm not a buyer of Tesla stock today.

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Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Jon Quast has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Tesla, and Uber Technologies. The Motley Fool recommends General Motors and recommends the following options: long January 2025 $25 calls on General Motors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy .

Elon Musk Says You Shouldn't Invest in Tesla Stock Unless You Believe This 1 Thing About the Future was originally published by The Motley Fool

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On a crucial earnings call, Musk reminds the world Tesla is a tech company. ‘Even if I’m kidnapped by aliens tomorrow, Tesla will solve autonomy’

As the debate over whether Tesla should be valued as an automaker or a software company rages, CEO Elon Musk laid out his view in no uncertain terms. 

“If you value Tesla as just an auto company, fundamentally, it’s just the wrong framework,” Musk said during Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call on Tuesday. 

Musk’s comments came during a critical moment for Tesla. Heading into the earnings announcement, Tesla faced mounting pressure from investors over its future. Investors were especially concerned that Tesla might scrap plans for a new, more affordably priced car altogether, given that Musk had repeatedly telegraphed his intentions to turn much of Tesla’s resources toward robo-taxis and self-driving car technology. Investors have balked at the idea that a car company with declining sales would delay the release of its new model in favor of developing a technology that does not exist yet. 

Instead, Tesla split the difference. It moved up the production schedule of its new models from late 2025 to early 2025, with the possibility they may even arrive by the end of this year, according to Musk. At the same time the CEO made it crystal clear that the investment thesis for the company should be entirely focused on its tech endeavors. 

“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, they should not be an investor in the company,” Musk said. 

When asked if Tesla could develop self-driving cars without him, Musk was confident the work was close to completion. “Even if I’m kidnapped by aliens tomorrow, Tesla will solve autonomy—maybe slower, but for vehicles at least,” he said.

A bad quarter for Tesla

However, the down-the-middle strategy Tesla opted for belied what was a particularly high-stakes earnings call given how poorly the company performed. Investors and analysts had already been primed to expect a historically bad quarter from Tesla—which it was. 

Earlier this month, Tesla released figures that showed its vehicle deliveries were down 8.5% in the first quarter, its first year-over-year decline in four years. As earnings reports showed, those poor numbers trickled down to the rest of Tesla’s business . Revenue slid 9%, the largest decline since 2012, for a total of $21 billion in the first quarter, according to an earnings release. Total vehicle sales were down 13% compared with the year before. Net income didn’t fare much better, dropping 55% , as the company brought in $1.1 billion in the quarter. 

Perhaps the one silver lining for investors was that Tesla announced it would speed up the production of its upcoming cars. Investors had been eagerly awaiting further news from Tesla leadership about when new models would hit the market after a report the company was scrapping them entirely in favor of its robo-taxi efforts. The new model, rumored to be an affordable car priced under $30,000, is still in the works. 

When pressed by an analyst on the call regarding details about the lower-cost Tesla, Musk declined to go into specifics. “We’ve said all we will on that front,” he replied. 

The lack of specifics was good enough for Wall Street, though. Tesla stock was up more than 13% and climbing in post–market trading Tuesday evening. 

Tesla is ‘solving autonomy’ for driverless cars

Alongside the new car models, Musk also gave guidance about the self-driving technology Tesla is developing. In describing the project, Musk painted a picture of flipping a switch to turn millions of Teslas around the world into self-driving cars. 

“Really the way to think of Tesla is almost entirely in terms of solving autonomy and being able to turn on that autonomy for a gigantic fleet,” Musk said. “It might be the biggest asset-value appreciation in history when that happens, when you can do unsupervised, full self-driving.”

Currently, Tesla does not have a completely self-driving car. Its latest autonomous-vehicle software, which is called Full Self-Driving, still requires human supervision. To juice demand, Tesla cut prices of the add-on software from $12,000 a year to $8,000 earlier this week. 

On the call, Tesla executives sought to reassure investors that the bad quarter was just a lull until the company could perfect its self-driving technology. Musk reiterated that it was “currently between two major growth waves.” The first wave referenced the initial proliferation of EVs that Tesla helped usher in when it succeeded in selling its cars to people other than environmentally conscious consumers. The second wave, according to Tesla, will come once self-driving cars become the norm, with it dominating the market. 

Because of that, Tesla anticipates a difficult remainder of the year with middling sales growth. “In 2024, our vehicle-volume growth rate may be notably lower than the growth rate achieved in 2023, as our teams work on the launch of the next-generation vehicle and other products,” Tesla wrote in a shareholder presentation. On the call, Musk said he did expect sales in 2024 would be higher than last year. 

A first glimpse of Tesla’s robo-taxi app and prototype will be unveiled on Aug. 8, according to a post from Musk on X . Musk made a similar claim in 2019 , saying Tesla robo-taxis would be ready in 2020. Four years later, investors are still waiting.

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