Hey everybody I'm Zach and I'm Jesse. Today we're talking about Tesla. Record revenues, most cash in the bank and a whole lot of stuff you probably aren't going to hear anywhere else. So much to learn from this quarter's Tesla Q2 earnings call next on in-depth. We're excited to bring you again the chance to win your choice of a Tesla or $50,000 in cash. The 10th annual Tesla raffle from Trusset Chicago is in full swing. So the winner will receive a Tesla Model X, S, Y, 3, or Cybertruck, or you can choose the $50,000 in cash. But why would you do that? Justin Chicago is working to change lives through kindness and providing needs within the community. This nonprofit organization is dedicated to helping families in crisis and is funding 80 plus programs and services right now. Their goal is helping families get back on their feet by offering goods and services like food, furniture, job placement, navigating government funding, and much more. For your chance to win, head to CCRaffle.com where you can get $25 off two tickets or $500 off of 15 tickets by using the promo code NYK. Hurry, tickets are limited in only 9,999 tickets will be sold, so get your tickets today. So much to talk about on this earnings call. I guess I just want to start with the most obvious, which would be vehicles delivered. We already knew this, but of course you get the more fine-tuned numbers. Vehicles delivered, 443,956. That is down 5% year over year. Let's look at this chart here from Main Street Data. I love Main Street Data.com, by the way, you can use our link for premium subscription, save some money. But even if you don't use it for free, it's still amazing. Look at this. Yeah, it would be great if that was a little bit higher, but they're going to see in this episode why the vehicle delivery numbers are not the most important thing going on with Tesla. Yeah, because if we go to this next slide from Main Street Data, record revenue. So you say, wait a minute, but if the car sales weren't at the highest, how'd they have record revenue? We're going to get 10. But $25.5 billion, up 2.3% year every year. So if a company has record revenue, it doesn't really matter how they did it. They did it. How they did it though. One of the pieces of how they did it is 9.4 gigawatt hours of energy storage deployed. That is up 158% year over year. Take a look at this graph from Main Street Data. This is equivalent to 2400 megapacks. Yeah, and according to Morgan Stanley, okay, so if you take one megapack that should, according to them, equal 100 Tesla EV sales in operational profit. So, ipso facto, take 9.4 gigawatt hours of energy storage. There wasn't all megapacks. There was a lot of Powerwalls too, but that would be 240,000 Tesla vehicle sales in operational profit. So it's almost like they sold 680,000 cars in the quarter. Kind of. If we're dealing based off of operational profit. Right. And if we're dealing with people who normally analyze Tesla and only think they're a car company, that's the conversion rate. So if we go to gross profit by segments, yes, most of the money is made by the dark blue, which is automotive. But I do want to point to the light blue there. That is their energy and is getting bigger and bigger. And so as we go on, automotive is going to become less and less like dire. Oh my God. Did they sell enough money? How many cars did they sell? It won't matter because we're going to have energy storage, which is a completely different field. It's a completely different market. And if you're saying, yeah, but how much did they make when they sell these things? Well, let's look at this chart. Okay. So the light blue line, that's energy is gross margin. And wait, it's getting bigger. Yeah, it's going up. They're making more and more money on that. And it's now in the 25% range. So that's phenomenal. So even if you're like, yeah, but the margin on the car is going down slightly. Yeah. That's okay. Just a little, let's talk about just, I do want to look at that orange line, which is service and other feeling that this might be supercharging. And I have a feeling that the reason that we're getting into profitability in service and other is because the supercharging has got to be helping by this point. And one of the reasons for that is because Tesla has opened up the supercharger network to more cars, by which I mean, not just Teslas, they should be making a lot more money off of those other cars. They pay more per kilowatt hour. Right. This slide I love because it's so boring to most people, they don't talk about it. But let's talk about debt to equity. So most companies have debt. That's pretty normal. But Tesla, for some reason, has been able to lower their debt to basically zero. Yeah. I don't know if this last quarter's data is correct if it being absolutely zero. But you can see the trend that they've been on. And if you're like, okay, that's great, whatever their debt seems low compared to their equity, let's take a look at Ford's graph. Now, you might say, oh, okay. So it's kind of stable or whatever. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Take a look at Ford's numbers there. Okay. It's a 3.49. That's the ratio. That's the ratio of debt to equity. So for every dollar and equity they have, they have $3.49 of debt. And you might say, okay, what was Tesla's again? Let's take a look back. Point zero eight. That means for every dollar that they have of equity, they have eight cents of debt and that number may have gone down. I'm not sure. So what does this mean? What does this mean in terms of debt? How much debt does Ford have? Oh, I know how much they have. How much? $140.3 billion debt as of the end of Q1. And if you're like, oh, is that bad? For some context, Ford has about $35 billion in cash. Wow. That's more than Tesla. That's more than Tesla. And we'll, I'll tell you what that number is in a second, but you have to keep in mind that they have $140 billion in debt. Now, Tesla has no debt and they have $30.7 billion in cash, which is up 33% year over year. Yes. And by the way, in Tesla's financials, they said we have sufficient liquidity to fund our product roadmap, long-term capacity expansion plans and other expenses. So they have all the cash they need to do all their plans. And you might say, well, but Ford has more cash, but again, go back to this chart. They're actually swimming in debt. Yep. If they took all their cash to pay off their debt, they'd still be left with over $100 billion in debt. Just, and I know some companies can run with a high amount of debt. I just wanted to compare two car companies. Yeah. Since we care about the cars, people. Let's talk about gap operational income, $1.6 billion. You can see on the chart here, it's, it's been kind of up and down. Let's talk about gap net income. We're at $1.5 billion in Q2. Yeah. We had that crazy quarter, three quarters ago, that basically they were counting for a lot of things. So kind of throw that out. Yes. And so again, sort of, it's been up and down, but this quarter is not bad. And operating cash flow shows that it wasn't bad. Plenty of cash coming in. But this, I can't believe. Okay. I was reading why the regulatory credit line. And I, I thought it was on the wrong line because I read this 890 number and I was like, it can't be that in one quarter, they made 890 million dollars, that would have been a record. And then I found out it is a record. Now, Tesla did tell us that they had a record amount of regulatory credit. But we had to go digging to find the number. They didn't tell us the number. It's 890 million dollars. In one quarter. It's almost a billion dollars. And this money did not come from selling anything. It came from selling credits, which they got from making electric cars, which is the whole thing that they do. That's like if you got credit for breathing, and then you got to sell it to somebody else, and you got that money. No, it's actually, it's not even like that. This is like Vice Admiral Peter Wessel, Tordon Skjord. He was a, he was a vice admiral. Listen, okay. Is this a history? Let's go on quick brief history lesson. Okay. Let's talk about Vice Admiral Peter Wessel. Okay. Okay. He was a vice admiral in the Norwegian slash Danish Navy. Okay. What makes it? During the middle of his battle with the British, it was a 14 hour ship battle. Okay. He sent an envoy to the enemy ships asking to borrow some ammunition. To the enemy ships? He went to the enemy ships and he asked if he could borrow some ammunition. He'd give it back. But he was just asking if he could have some ammunition. Now, they said, no, the British said, no, we're not going to give you any ammunition to shoot at us. What? But I just want to point out what Tesla has done here, getting eight hundred and ninety million dollars, is as if the British had gone, you know, let's have that a reasonable request, and they gave him cannonballs to shoot back at them. That is what these other car companies are doing. That's true. This is where the money is coming from people. It's coming from other cars. It's coming from Stellantis. Yeah. So when Ford says we can't make electric trucks, we'd rather give Tesla the money. We'd rather just pay Tesla to those credits. That's crazy. Eight hundred ninety million dollars worth. It's insane. I'm kind of speechless. I'm speechless too. But then I turned the page and I saw this. Cybertruck became the best selling EV pickup in the US and Q2. We reported this on Tesla Time News a few weeks ago. We weren't sure. Yeah. I was pretty sure, but I wasn't a hundred percent sure. Cybertruck is the best selling EV pickup truck in the US. I'm sorry. It only started being made in November. Wasn't there a company that was making an electric pickup truck for two years? Wasn't there two companies that were making electric pickup trucks? Ford, Rivian, what the heck? What the heck happened, you guys? You had such a lead. Wow. You had such an advantage. You had two years to scale up production and get those trucks moving. Yep. Gee. I'd like to talk about a little thing called a humanoid robot that Tesla's making called Optimus. We haven't even gotten to that. This little thing, which by the way, Elon says will be bigger than everything else they make. It'll dwarf the value of the company. It's already working as we speak. No matter what time you're watching this video, Optimus is working in their factory at Giga Texas right now doing something pretty boring, I'm sure, putting batteries in the box, but it's doing it. We're going to find out more about that later. Let's go to current installed capacities. Tesla's now up to 2.35 million in total capacity. I think it's really fun to see that Cybertruck is up to 125,000. That's really exciting. Before long, we're going to see these other things coming online, including next-gen platform. Next-gen platform, which we're going to be talking a little bit more about. Giga Berlin, just some fun news here, is that Giga Berlin is now producing vehicles for right-hand drive markets and delivered its first units to the UK. They also began delivering vehicles to Qatar while increasing deliveries to Israel and Taiwan. That's good for Giga Berlin. What's this red part of the chart here? If you take a look at this, this is full self-driving miles over time. As you go through the graph, you'll notice that there's that red section. Those are full self-driving version 12 miles. You notice that as soon as they turned on version 12, people started using full self-driving a whole lot more. Tesla has an AI supercomputer being built as we speak. This is showing the H100 equivalent GPUs. The dotted is what it's about to do as they finish off the year. Elon said that, "By December, it should be the most powerful AI computer in the world." They're just a car company. Let's get into the call. Started off with Travis Axelrod. He is the new head of investor relations. We're sorry to see Martin Go, but we're happy to see Axelrod join the company. I'm very excited because they actually started on time. Exactly. They ended exactly on time. Good job, Travis. That's a big ship to steer and he did a great job. Elon started off by making fun of competitors EVs and didn't fully understand what he was talking about. It's really interesting. His argument here is that the reason that we've seen a bit of a slowdown in Tesla's sales is because there were all these other car manufacturers who were started to make EVs. They weren't selling very well and so they discounted the prices on all of their EVs, which therefore took some of the sales away from Tesla. The competitors were selling more EVs, but that's mainly, as Elon put it, because they have been slashing prices to get these things off their lots. That has been hurting Tesla, but he thinks that this is a relatively short-term problem. He seemed really positive because he talked about that everything will be electric in the future, including aircraft and boats. He's never said that before. He said that he's really wanted to make an aircraft electric, but that he hasn't felt like he's had the time. Maybe there's a little hint that that's something that they might be thinking about. I think one of the most exciting things talked about in this call is this next thing, which is Elon said that there's a more affordable model coming in the first half of next year. What does he mean? He said they're going to use the existing lines to build it. Is it just a cheaper Model 3 and Model Y? Is it a completely different car? A hatchback or a two-seater? There's a couple of different things in here that make this a little bit confusing. I want to just do a quick deep dive on all of it. The first thing that they said is that it would have some aspects of the RoboTaxi and that it would have some aspects of current models, which I think would mean Model 3 and Model Y. That points to a two-door car or a coupe or something. I have no idea. What aspects are we talking about? Clearly, they are thinking of something relatively futuristic for the RoboTaxi. What do we know about the RoboTaxi now? We don't really know anything, but one of the things we kind of know from that little glimpse picture we saw was a two-seater. I want to speculate a little bit here. The Model 3 and the Model Y right now, they have some giga casting and so does the Cybertruck. This is like Tesla's big thing. I've got to imagine that the only way that you're going to make RoboTaxi affordable is chunking those things out, giga pressing them and basically making a majority of the thing out of a giga press. That would point to it being smaller. It might point to it being smaller or being made up of multiple giga casts, which we see in the Cybertruck in the Model 3 and the Model Y, but my thought might be maybe you include the skin with the giga cast, like instead of having to take metal and stamp it and weld it onto the side of your vehicle, maybe you're getting down below what you think. I'm sure we're wrong about whatever we're thinking, but let's just go to the numbers here. If Tesla can just reduce the price of their lowest car, which is currently $38,000 for Model 3, the Model 3 rear wheel drive doesn't qualify for the tax credit and we'll talk more about the tax credit in a bit, but doesn't qualify for the tax credit, but it is $38,99. Let's say you could make a $32,000, whatever we call this new model, and it qualified for the tax credit. Model 2 and a half. I know that everyone has some price in their head that they think a car should cost, but look, inflation has been going nuts and the average car cost in America I think is $39,000. So if you could get it down to say $32,000 plus some incentives, I do think you would open up the market to a huge number of new people. We've talked about it before. Every $5,000 you take off the price of a car, the doubling, you get to double the market of people who can afford it. So I think that's all they'd have to do. I don't think they'd have to get down to a $19,000 car or something like that. I think they just need to get it down another $5,000 or $8,000 and it would really open up the market. Yes. But yeah, let us know down below what you think those changes would have to be. I think it's so easy to be like, well, how do you make a car cheaper, right? And you think of the normal things. You're like, get rid of the fake leather seats and put in fabric seats and get rid of the glass roof and put on a metal roof and, you know, get rid of the nice headlights and put in headlights. And I think that that's the Detroit way to think of it. I don't think that that's the Tesla way to think of it. And I want to stress when Tesla was making the Model S and the Model X back in 2016, and then they said, we're going to make a Model 3. All I wanted at the time for my Model 3 was for it to be an electric Corolla. That's not what I got. I didn't get an electric Corolla. I got a car that was in some ways better than a Model S for less money. And I didn't think that that was going to be possible. I really didn't think that that was going to be possible at all. I wasn't expecting you to get a race car spaceship. But that's what I got. So that's what I'm thinking Tesla is going to be able to do their manufacturing, especially with Gigapress, might be able to crunch something out that is going to be so vastly cheaper or at least cheap enough to be an exciting product in between the Model 3 and why and the Robotech. If their competition aren't in their pants right now, they're not, they're not. No, they don't, they don't realize that they've already eaten the bad oyster and they're going to be on their way home when they realize that they have to speed up because they're going to be in their pants. Next year, they're going to realize it. Also, this is big news. Speaking of Robotaxi, Elon did officially, I guess, postpone the unveiling by a couple months. He now says it'll be on the 10th of October. He says he wanted to make some important changes that would improve the Robotaxi and get this. He wants to show off a couple of other things. What are those things? Right. Is it going to be optimists riding in the back and takes your luggage out? What is it? Let us know down below what you think. It's going to be exciting. Yes. So, market calendars, 10-10. That's the new date. I just want to reaffirm here that Elon said several thousand optimists will be produced next year doing useful things in Tesla factories and then production version two will be coming in 2026 for customers. Pre-order right now, please. I want my optimist. So, that means in what, two years, we could have an optimist helping us with the show or with my laundry or with my dishes. I mean, digging ditches in my backyard, but in geothermal. Elon also reminded us that he agrees with ARK Invest that the $5 trillion valuation they give to Tesla with Robotaxi is what he thinks is right. And he thinks with optimists, it would achieve several times that number. So, we're not financial advisors. I'm just saying what Elon said. Their CFO did talk about the fact that the lower finance rates that they tried out last quarter really worked and they're going to continue doing them going forward. So, he said, Tesla is offering extremely attractive financing rates going forward into Q3. It sounds like for a ways on. And then we got into the say question. These are the retail questions. And they didn't do any institutional questions. I was so pleased about this. So, this is a change. At Independent Financial, we know you work hard for your business. That's why we work hard for you. With our business high-yield money market account, your business can earn up to 4% annual percentage yield. That means you'll have easy access to your funds while you boost your bottom line. Ready to get started? Visit iFinancial.com/businessmoneymarket today for details. Independent Financial, banking for business, banking for life. Remember, FDIC certain restrictions apply. This is like very inside baseball, but they usually allowed both retail and institutional investors to ask questions. And the institutional questions were always so stupid. So, we got only retail questions this time, which I was very pleased. Let's see what they got. So, the first one is, what is the status on the Roadster? And Elon said they've completed most of the engineering. There's still some upgrades they want to make. Production will start next year and it'll be something special. Well, that's what we kind of thought. That's what I helped. When do you expect the first RoboTaxi ride? Elon basically said that as soon as Unsupervised FSD works that he thinks that it'll turn on. And he's very optimistic with the current trend that it will happen next year. He said it'd be shocked if we can't do it next year. Right. So, he did put in a lot of caveats about how he's been wrong in the past and all that. But he said it'd be shocked. Well, the Cybertruck is an iconic product that wows everyone who sees it. Do you have plans to expand the cyber vehicle lineup to cyber SUV or cyber van? And he said he won't say because this is not a product announcement. And this is kind of the fight that he's been having for the last few quarters during the investor call is that people are always asking him like, "Who is the next vehicle?" And he's like, "Well, this isn't a, I would be on stage if there's, I was going to tell you." John asked, "What is the current status of the 4680 battery cell production and how is the ramp up progressing?" They said they made 51% more cells in Q2 than they did in Q1. That's a rate of 1400 Cybertrucks per week. Now, the interesting thing is they just finished validation of a Cybertruck with the dry cathode cell. Production launch for that will be in Q4 and that should lower the cost of the 4680, which maybe they would pass on to the price of the Cybertruck. So, that could all be very exciting. And if we remember, we're driving around with wet 4680s. If you remember back to battery day, the dry cathode is a huge breakthrough in battery technology for Tesla mainly in the manufacturing. It's not any kind of magical cell that can be shot out with bullets and will still charge in eight seconds. This is just a battery that is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper, which means that you're going to have hopefully cheaper vehicles. Jackie said any update on Dojo and Elon says we're doubling down on Dojo mainly because in videos are so damn expensive and so hard to get. And so, he said we really have to make Dojo work. And what that means is it's made with Tesla's own hardware. So, they're basically an NVIDIA company. It's really interesting the way that he answered the question because I think that a lot of times, if you're asked between two different things, you would want to put down NVIDIA and say that your thing was better. That's not what he said. He said that NVIDIA makes great chips, that they do a great job, but that they, because the market, they aren't going to be able to afford the a number that they're going to need. So, that's why Dojo is so important. Kurt says what types of accessories will be offered with Optimus and Elon put it this way. He's like, you don't offer humans with accessories, right? So, this is a humanoid robot that should be able to do anything a human does. So, if you need to give it a screw gun, you give it a screw gun, you don't need to have it come with a screw gun arm. It doesn't need shovel hands, so you can just hand it a shovel. Kurt then asks, do you feel you're cheating people out of the joys of owning a Tesla by not advertising? They stress that they are advertising and they did point out that it's working because they said in the US alone, two thirds of the sales of last quarter were to people who never owned a Tesla before. So, they are, the word's getting out. Let's be honest though, they're not doing a lot of advertising. Well, they are, in my opinion. They're selling Cybertrucks and Cybertrucks are actually driving billboards that just drive down the street and it's as if you painted a sexy lady on the side of it because that's how much attention they get. Except it doesn't say Tesla or Cybertruck anywhere on. Doesn't matter and I'm going to tell you why. You will eventually be able to describe this to somebody who will eventually be able to tell you what it is. But for those days, maybe weeks, where you don't know what it is, that is going to be that Cybertrucks going to be driving through your mind. And I think that that is even more exciting. That's true. Then if it said like, "Cybertruck, hey, hey, you know what this is?" They don't need to do that. It's that captivating. Stephen asks, what is the updated timeline for Gigamexico and what will be the primary vehicles produced initially? Oh, oh, Elon's really put the pause here. He said officially we've paused on Gigamexico and why? Well, he said we're waiting till after the election. He said Trump has said that there will be heavy tariffs on cars made in Mexico if he's elected and so they're going to wait and see what happens in the election. Pretty smart that they didn't start building it yet. Pretty lucky. He said we're going to increase capacity in our existing factories. Robotaxi will produce at Gigatexis along with Optimus. There's a question about if Tesla is still in talks with OEMs to license FSD. He basically said, yes, we're still in talks. Aaron asked any updates on investing in XAI and integrating Grock into Tesla software. Elon said that Tesla's learning from XAI, it's helping with Tesla's new data center and full self-driving. Elon is in support if shareholders are, so Tesla shareholders, of allowing him to kind of integrate XAI into Tesla's more. He said it'd be great to have Grock in the cars, but that he would put it to a shareholder vote, which as a shareholder, you got to appreciate when he's not just going to make a decision. He's going to be asking the shareholders. I think that was pretty cool. And then we get into the best part of the earnings calls when we get to hear from the people who have been summoned from their tombs and they arise like a bunch of brainless zombies to ask a bunch of stupid questions of the most important person on earth. And oh my goodness, I don't think we're going to be talking about a lot of these. I think we're going to skip a lot of these questions. I'm just going to pull out some of the things that I thought were pretty interesting. Oh my god, Will from truest coming out with like the stupidest oldest story he could possibly come out with. Yeah, he pulled this gem out from like seven months ago. And Elon just ripped him a new one and it like laid it pretty thick and clear. Yeah, so this was asking about, remember when Elon redirected some of those chips, those H100s from Tesla to X? There's stories about like your misdirecting resources without asking. So he's hurting Tesla. This so Will clearly read that articles wrote it down in his like to ask Elon on the earnings call and then went back to playing golf for the next two or three months. And then finally, I guess like got roused and like, hey, the earnings call is today and he's like, Oh crap, what am I going to ask him? And then he opened up his notebook and was said one line and he was like, Oh, I guess I'll ask him about that. And then of course, Will tried to get in a question about like, Hey, what's the new car going to be? It's supposed to be a follow up question to your first question. Right. We just had nothing to do with. But you know, Elon mentioned something that we talk about a lot in the show, which was he didn't want to talk about the new car because it would have an Osborne effect. And what is that? Osborne was a computer company that was making a computer. Then they said, Hey guys, in a year, we're going to have this amazing computer. Nobody bought their current computer because they wanted the new one. And so they went out of business called the Osborne effect, where you don't tell people too far in advance that something really fun is happening. But that does imply that the next car, even though it'd be cheaper, might be very cool. So just like the Model 3 was awesome, maybe it's going to be an awesome car and it's also cheaper. Yes. Next, we have Ben Calloed from Baird. And he asked, do you ever see auto revenue falling below 50% of total revenue in the future? Elon was like, this is no brainer since Optimus is going to, we're going to make like 20 billion of them. He's already said this. Okay. He's already explained that Robotax is going to make more money. They're so stuck on cars. They can't cars, cars, cars, cars, cars, cars. It's as if this is like giving Ben permission to ask more real questions in the future. And I really do hope, Ben, that you took that answer and you aren't just going to write a stupid article about it, about how like Tesla is becoming not a car company. And that's somehow a bad thing, even though they're going to be making of robots that will basically run our future. I mean, Elon said we're going to enter an age of abundance. There'll be no shortage of products or services. Like, it's not sure what money will even mean. It will become the age of abundance. But yeah, that guy I wanted to ask that stupid question. You can see why the ending of the call is always the worst. Alex Potter from Piper asked about FSD licensing. So when you go to some company, let's say GM or Ford and they want to license FSD from Tesla, he's like, how will that work? And Elon's like, first of all, we're only going to do it if they want to do it on a million cars or more a year. We're not going to do like some little test project. Secondly, it's going to take them a long time because these guys take forever to do anything. So we're not going to know about this for several years. And maybe we'll get some announcement one day, but we're not going to see a Ford with full self-driving for years. So I think that this relates back to the say.com question where they asked if Tesla was still in talks with some OEM. Look, this is one of those things where Ford probably or GM or whoever is doing this, we'll want to keep it quiet till the last possible second, of course. So because every auto company and their brother is working on their own autonomous technology, and if they are in talks with Tesla, well, that's not going to look very good for whatever project to their cousin is working on. Dan Levy from Barclays, I have to give him a little bit of credit. He did ask an interesting question. He wanted to know a little bit about the RoboTaxi strategy, mainly around regulatory approval. I think that his whole question was based around is Tesla basically going to start in one place? Or are they going to just turn it on all at once? Elon didn't really answer the question. And there were like, well, six different people who tried to answer questions to this, but they just said that we're making a generalized system that will work anywhere. Right. I mean, I think Elon did answer at least what he'd like to do, which would be one day he'll turn on the Tesla network. And then all the cars everywhere, as long as the regulations will allow, can do it. And so who would get to decide this? Well, that would be NHTSA following the FMBSS regulations. And so basically, if Tesla can convince them that it's safe and they say, yes, then all of the US would allow it, as long as each state would also allow it. Right. So I mean, I didn't think that he got the greatest answer because I think Elon is pushing for this really big thing, whereas we're not sure if it's actually going to happen. But Elon did say that regulatory approval in his mind will not be the limiting factor. And I think he's right, because even if some state doesn't allow it, they will soon follow and allow it. They don't want to be left out. It's like if you said, okay, 49 states have the car and our state doesn't. Yeah. So then George from Canacord said, well, you know, GM canceled their pedal list steering wheel list car. So aren't you worried? And Elon was like, look, the real reason they canceled it wasn't regulatory reasons is because they couldn't make it work. Cruise automation was not safer per mile than a human. And so they failed. Whereas Waymo, for instance, is safer than a human. So they keep going. And so he was like, if you're safer than a human, you can keep going. Yeah. And I mean, I think that George was confused. And he thought that regulators shut down crews, which is somewhat true, but it's well, it's because they had an unsafe car. The regulators were doing their job, which was to prevent unsafe vehicles from being on the roads. Exactly. I think people like George can't believe that GM can't do it. Yes. Right. Right. And also, he said, he said this thing that like, you know, you've shown pictures of a pedal to driverless car. And I don't think that they have shown a vehicle with no steering wheel in the. Maybe that picture of the robo taxi to come, you know, but it's not a, it's a mockup. I mean, but they haven't even like unveiled that. Yeah. So it's weird. And Elon did mention that they're going to fix the sunglasses nag soon. So right now you can drive without the steering wheel nag. But if you're wearing sunglasses, you do get the nag. He said that should be fixed soon. So that's great. We got Pierre from New Street Financial asking about, like, don't you need enough of these to scale? And Elon said, well, we're going to have six million of them answer the question. He basically said, yeah, every Tesla on the road, basically, right now is capable. So there should be about 7 million Teslas that are capable of full self driving soon. And then there'll be 10 million. And then there'll be 20 million. And so basically, one day, we'll just turn them all on. And then Pierre asked to follow up, which was, how do you start? Because you can't just start with a handful of cars. I just took a minute because I was like, this guy's really this dumb. He doesn't understand, like, your car, if you have a Tesla, could just go on the network tomorrow. Well, and Elon said, probably most people will do it because it'll make the money. Right. I mean, would you rather just have it sit there wasting money or would you rather have it earn money? So I did a little bit of research. Uber last year had 7.1 million drivers. Now, these are not full time drivers because that's not how Uber works, right? Uber can drive once a month. They could be someone who drives all day every day, or they could be somebody who, again, drives once a month. So Uber has 7.1 million drivers. And that's the number one name in Bradger. Tesla has 7 million cars that should be capable of full self-driving. So Pierre's misunderstanding of how full self-driving is going to work and how the Robotax is going to work is just insane to me. Well, I think it's because people can't picture this day when you turn on an app and then your car, like, there's just too much technology for them. They just like, how does that work? Probably because most of these people, let's be honest, they don't drive Teslas. And I'm sorry, if you're going to follow Tesla and be on the call and all that, you should at least borrow your brother-in-law's Tesla and get to know it. And Elon actually said this. I think that he was kind of scolding a lot of these institutional guys. He said, listen, I talked to a lot of really smart people who live in New York or Boston and they don't have a car. And so they don't know anything about either cars or Tesla or full self-driving. He said, you shouldn't invest in Tesla unless you understand full self-driving and you try it and you believe in it. He says that a lot. He says that a lot and he said it again on this call. And I think that that should be something that you should take. If you're thinking about investing at all, if you're listening to an earnings call, it would probably be something that you're interested in. Know what you're investing in. Know what you're investing in. And so yeah, go take the car that you can rent that has full self-driving and try it out. You can actually go to a Tesla showroom and go for a test drive and try it out. And yes, it might be a little stressful, might be a little scary because of the first time a car has driven you around before. But it's pretty insane what they've been able to do. And we're about to hit 12.5, which is going to be even better. Colin from Oppenheimer asked about energy storage saying like, we reach saturation. And basically they said, no. First of all, we get a lot of calls from companies that have tried to hodgepodge solution before and then they come calling us because that didn't work. They have a little thing Tesla does called auto bidder. That is software that is AI software that bids out the electricity in those batteries and makes money for you. Without that piece, it's a lot harder to make money. Because I think that a lot of people, they like to look at infrastructure and they say, oh, it's working, right? And that's not how infrastructure works. I could tomorrow build a really big battery. Okay, I think that I, I honestly, I think I have some of the skills where I could go spend millions of dollars on batteries, put them all in a field somewhere and hook them up to the grid. And I go, Hey, pretty good. Except, you know what, I wouldn't know when to feed the grid and when to charge my batteries. Tesla has an entire software built around that. I wouldn't know what to do. And most grids wouldn't know what to do either. That's why Tesla is the leader right now. And that's why they're nowhere close to saturation. Yeah. And then he went on and said, there is no saturation. The markets continue to open up. So like this idea that like, well, you're making so many, must be near saturation. No, he was like, there is a basically two to three times what the grid is today is needed in batteries. So there's no end to what we need for selling energy. This company, Tesla, that is now just selling so much of it is just going to continue doing that. And he also talked about running power plants at steady state. He said that basically we've created a grid where you need to make enough generation to run the maximum load that you can expect. So the hottest day of the year, everyone has their air conditioners and refrigerators running. So there's so much energy, right? If all these power plants could be running at steady state, as opposed to like turning on and off, you could just charge up batteries and then use them when there's a lot of demand and recharge them when there's less. It would make for a much more efficient grid. And that's why all these grids and utilities want these batteries. Then Colin from Wells Fargo asked if Trump wins, couldn't the IRA get cut? And so all those federal tax incentives go away. And Elon said, you know, there could be some short term impact if IRA went away, but it would be devastating for our competitors. And he said long term, this would actually help Tesla. He said, because look, the value of Tesla is overwhelmingly autonomy, not selling a car or two. So again, he said, sell Tesla stock if you believe that Tesla won't solve autonomy. And there you have it, folks, that was the earnings call again, just gives me like, I say this every earnings call, it hasn't changed. I'm just more positive on Tesla now and more bullish because I just keep getting more of the same great news. And it keeps coming true. Like 12 dot three is all we've got right now in the car. And it's amazing. And I'm can't wait for 12 dot four and 12 dot five. Like, and we will be reporting that to you about whether it's amazing or not. And I think that we're about to enter a new era in Tesla. One where we've been in this, I don't want to say it's a plateau, but we've gone from Tesla being this very small niche company to finally Tesla becoming selling the best car in the world last year. And so it's been great. We've kind of plateaued mainly because there haven't been many new products now that Cybertruck is out. But you have to keep in mind that it was unveiled back in 2019, which is the before times. There hasn't been anything that has happened in the past five years that has been truly very, very exciting. And I do think that October 10 is going to be the date that is going to be very, very exciting. They're going to be unveiling. It sounds like a more affordable vehicle, which means that way more people are going to be able to get into these vehicles. So instead of it being the kind of, you know, established family with the with the older kids, that's like the the wealth demographic that we're talking about who can afford a Model Y is we're going to bring it down a whole other level. It's going to be very, very exciting. And I think that people are going to get really excited about that. And then we just got autonomy and optimists and all sorts of other exciting stuff on the horizon that I think it the people are going to start to realize is going to happen as full self driving gets better. And we actually get to experience it in our cars that we own. And then we haven't put on the network yet, but we will soon look if you don't want to miss any of this stuff, you need to be watching Tesla time news every week we've been doing it for what 411 weeks in a row. We know what we're talking about. Make sure you subscribe, hit that subscribe and bell button right now so you don't miss an episode. We'll see you guys next week. Now you know, America, we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By honoring your sacred vocation of education, you impact your family, your friends, and your community at Grand Canyon University. Our online bachelors, masters, and doctoral education degree programs allow you to balance online coursework with observational and hands-on experience in the field. Find your purpose at GCU, private, Christian, affordable. Visit gcu.edu.
