The Six Five team discusses Tesla Robotaxi Event
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: this was really anticipated, you know, coveted. Journalists begging for an invite, people wanted to be there. They went to, I think it was Warner Brothers studio. They did this ad. This was not just a average tech event, this was a Hollywood moment. And Elon Musk is so controversial. I mean, people right now either kind love them or hate them.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: I guess this is just reflective of who I am. I’m somewhere in between. I find him really fascinating, I’m not sure. My biggest… So here’s my TLDR. This wasn’t just a Robotaxi event. This was a kind of a paint the future event. There are Waymos and Ubers and there’s a lot of self-driving stuff out there. The difference of what I think Musk is showing with his cyber car is that these things evolve from being cars that look like cars as we know them with seats, steering wheels, gears, buttons, controls to literally moving environments for people to function. He talks about going to sleep and waking up at your destination, but the seats don’t look like cars. You got these Robo vans, they’re like yachts. You’re inside them. They got working spaces. It’s like being on a train. And so these cars, unlike the Waymos with all the lidar all over them and all the gears and the vision and the cameras and the sensors, they look just like ordinary vehicles, but they’re actually becoming designed ergonomically for people to be able to function while they are mobile.
So it’s a very different feature that he’s painting. And I thought that was interesting. And of course, Pat, these humanoid robots. I don’t know if you’ve watched some of these videos. Like, when people were like, “Oh, this was a nothing burger. It was just…” I watched a video, this guy was standing in the middle of the, just having a convo with this humanoid robot. And again, goes back to the Amazon product, VAPR. Is this VAPR, is it real, is it programmed? How far along is this? But we know what large language models are doing. This wouldn’t be surprising to be able to insert a very logical conversational chatbot inside of a physical… But the idea that this thing can go collect packages for you, bring you beverages. I mean, can you see a future where every home has a robot? I mean, I totally could see… This is like, jets in there stuff.
So when people kind of call it nothing, I get a little bit like, are people too small-minded? Do they not see the size of the TAM? I think Jensen came out and said, “More chips.” He said, “Of course, this is great. More chips.” All these devices will need more silicon content, so that’s always great. But we’re moving really fast and we’re at the point now where we’re starting to build to realistically experience the future of mobility, the future of robotics and the consumerization of all this. I will say, final thought, ’cause I could talk about this for a while, is that Musk, my biggest beef with him is that his timelines are never right. They’re not even close to right. We were supposed to have done an FSD drive, what, six, seven years ago now? It was like 2018. I mean, it was sometime at the end of the last decade that we were supposed to be doing a cross-country driverless experience. And here we are going into ’25 and we’re still not really there at scale. We are seeing FSD in regions and markets. So all the things he says always have to be weighed against a little bit of a grain of salt is, I think he’ll do everything he says. He’s going to put rockets out there, he’s going to put links in people’s brains, and he is helping people recover from brain… I mean, he’s doing amazing things. I get –
Patrick Moorhead: Amazing, amazing things.
Daniel Newman: When people pick on him, it’s like, I understand why he doesn’t care because you don’t even deserve to say his name, most of us, including me. But the net is just if you’re an investor, when is this real? When does this become TAM? When does this become dollars and when does this make the stock worth more? Because right now we’re still just talking about Model Ys and Model 3s and shipment volumes, we’re not really looking at how much this could add. And I think that’s what people wanted to see more of.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, you did a great job covering this topic, Dan. And we’re seeing here is a glimpse of the future and not some unattainable type of thing. Musk does stuff that people say can’t be done like reusable rockets by a startup and not a huge government contractor. We’ve seen Boeing basically embarrass itself trying to replicate what SpaceX has already done. And when Musk invented Tesla people saying nobody has been able to create a new car company in 50 years ’cause of the scale involved in manufacturing and quality control and servicing. And he did it. He had to sleep in the factory. He had to… I mean, by the way, read Musk’s biography. It’s amazing how they did this.
Daniel Newman: Is it Isaacson one?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, he was teetering on bankruptcy multiple times. He put all his investment that he made in Zip2 and PayPal right into, he rolled everything in here. I mean, the guy sells his houses and not financially, it’s just about, it takes too much brain space that he wants to be putting in here. So yeah, he does not hit his schedules. I believe that he puts out schedules to put pressure on his engineering team. If you read his methodology of how he thinks, in his brain, he does believe that it’s attainable and he’s waiting for somebody to give him a credible reason to tell him no. Had he accepted what all his engineers told him all the time, SpaceX wouldn’t be around, Tesla would not be around.
And his leadership style too is when he makes the call, he will take responsibility if something screws up. I mean, there was a major SpaceX splash and crash that he gave the thumbs up and there was a tile or something that was off and it got cooked. Heck, he changed materials to fricking stainless steel when that hadn’t been done before for different thermal reasons. So yeah, he’s a great inventor of our time. He’s imperfect like all humans, and what’s interesting, if you read biographies of like Thomas Edison, the Gettys, the Spruce Goose, stuff like that, these inventors are kind of bonkers. Some people would characterize them. And I mean, my gosh, look at Palantir, look at Anderol, defense contractor, creating defense weaponry that are 1/100th the cost with 10X lethality. I mean, these are the inventors of our time, and they are perfect in their imperfection.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
