Is Tesla still a car company?
On an earnings call last night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk spent a lot of time talking up his companyas plans to ago ballistica on artificial intelligence, and very little time on Teslaas core business, which is making and selling electric cars.
There was so little attention paid to Teslaas automotive business, that even a bunch of investors were left scratching their heads.
aIs this a car company?a Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in his note to clients Thursday. He followed up with a second note that put a finer point on it: aAlmost no discussion of the core auto business. While around 80% of the companyas revenues is (still) automotive, the discussion during the prepared remarks and Q&A was almost entirely around autonomy, AI and robotics. We see a pattern here.a
Itas long been theorized that Musk has grown weary of the day-to-day of running a car business, as evidenced by his growing number of side hustles (SpaceX, X, xAI, Boring Company, Neuralink, etc). And now that heas been elevated to an unofficial-official member of the Trump administration, overseeing a massively controversial effort to slash costs by purging the federal employees, the time he …