On an earnings call last night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk spent a lot of time talking up his companyâs plans to âgo ballisticâ on artificial intelligence, and very little time on Teslaâs core business, which is making and selling electric cars.
There was so little attention paid to Teslaâs automotive business, that even a bunch of investors were left scratching their heads.
âIs this a car company?â 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: âAlmost no discussion of the core auto business. While around 80% of the companyâs 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.â
Itâs 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 heâs 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 …