“It’s a combination of a Tesla-owned fleet and also enabling Tesla owners to be able to add or subtract their cars to the fleet so that existing Tesla owners will be able to earn money by adding their car to the fleet for autonomous use,” he added.
Musk also mentioned that it may be possible for the Tesla owners to make more money by adding their cars to the self-driving fleet. “I think it is maybe possible for Tesla owners to make more by allowing their car to be added to the self-driving fleet than they (cars) cost them in the lease,” he said.Read more: Elon Musk says Tesla, xAI will continue buying chips from Nvidia and AMD
Musk compared the business model to a combination of Airbnb and Uber. “Just like Airbnb, you can rent out your spare bedroom or your house if you are not using it and make money on it. That’s what we expect Tesla customers to be able to do,” said the billionaire.
Musk also stated that Tesla is not missing out on anything and has all the capacity to scale up, from logistics to creating the app. “Tesla has all the ingredients that are ready to offer a vast self-driving fleet overnight,” he said.Responding to a question on the billionaire CEO indicating more control of Tesla, Musk said that he needs “enough control to not get ousted by activist investors in the future,” adding that around a 25% level is the comfortable limit.
“That’s the number I feel comfortable at because that’s where I have some control but not so much that I can’t be thrown out,” he said.
Speaking on the long-term plans for the company in the automotive business, whether it is all about robo-taxis or robots, Musk said that the only thing that matters in the long term is autonomy and Optimus.
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“Those overwhelmingly dominate the future financial success of the company. As for Q1, we had a global factory changeover for the Model Y. So there’s a new version of Model Y that came out, which required a factory shutdown across the world,” Musk said.
Musk added that Model Y is the number one selling car of any kind in the world. “We can’t make cars if the factories are retooling. The right time to retool is the first quarter, since generally that’s when the least demand occurs.”
“But we have seen a major rebound in demand at this point. I feel comfortable with this demand,” he said, attributing the rise to people not considering his political stance. “When you buy a product, how much do you care about the political views of the CEO or do you even know what they are,” he concluded.
