Investor's Corner
Tesla critic Bob Lutz vs. Elon Musk: A look back behind the bluster
In this corner, the father of the Chevrolet Volt, an auto industry veteran who has held senior positions at Chrysler, Ford and BMW, an unlikely advocate for EVs – a cigar-chomping ex-Marine who has called climate change “a crock.” Bob Lutz!
In the other corner, the mastermind of PayPal, SolarCity, and SpaceX, the archetypal Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who wants to electrify transportation and save Planet Earth – and if that doesn’t work, he’ll take us to Mars to start over. Elon Musk!
Back in the day, Bob Lutz was a champion of Tesla and Musk, citing the Roadster as a major inspiration for the Volt, and saying that he would “always owe them a debt of gratitude for having kind of broken the ice.” After Lutz left GM, he founded Via Motors, which set out to build plug-in hybrid vans and pickup trucks for commercial fleets, but has had a difficult time finding its market. The 85-year-old Lutz has written extensively about the auto industry. For whatever reason, he has evolved into a harsh critic of EVs, and especially Tesla. In 2016, he compared Musk to the leader of a religious cult. (Musk responded on Twitter, saying, “Dear cult members, I love you.”)
Dear cult members, I love you https://t.co/1OzRaSQzhT
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2016
Lutz launched his latest salvo against the California upstarts at a forum sponsored by a provider of insurance for collectible cars, suggesting that collectors buy a Model S now before Tesla goes belly-up. He had nothing but praise for the car itself: “A Model S, especially with the performance upgrades, is one of the fastest, best handling, best braking sedans that you could buy in the world today,” he said. “The acceleration times will beat any $350,000 European exotic.”
However, Lutz said Elon Musk “hasn’t figured out the revenues have to be greater than costs…when you are perennially running out of cash you are just not running a good automobile company. I don’t see anything on the horizon that’s going to fix that, so those of you who are interested in collector cars, may I suggest buying a Tesla Model S while they’re still available.”
Above: Bob Lutz starts to discuss Tesla and Elon Musk at the 1:06:19 mark in the video (Youtube: Hagerty via InsideEVs)
“Twenty-five years from now, [the Model S] will be remembered as the first really good-looking, fast electric car,” Lutz told the LA Times. “People will say ‘Too bad they went broke.’”
This time, Musk does not appear to have responded publicly to Lutz’s zinger, but naturally, a number of his disciples have come to his defense. Enrique Dans, writing in Forbes, notes his admiration for Lutz’s writings on the auto industry, but believes that “he has missed something enormously important. In fact, possibly the most important difference between the old and the new economy: fundamentally, timeframes.”
Lutz (along with legions of stock-market analysts) sees Tesla’s ongoing losses as a sign of the company’s inevitable failure. However, according to Dans, “Seeing the bottom line as the be-all and end-all of management is problematic…The principle that revenue must exceed costs is Management 101. The tricky bit is how you define the timeframe in which that has to happen.”
As anyone following the Tesla story knows by now, the company’s stock market valuation has no apparent connection to the number of vehicles it’s producing. Tesla’s market cap, currently around $59 billion, exceeds that of Ford, and rivals those of GM and Honda (which, interestingly, was once the subject of the same sort of criticism now leveled at Tesla). Stock-market pundits tend to see this lofty valuation as madness, proof of the irrationality of Elon Musk’s mindless minions. However, Enrique Dans finds the reason in fundamental differences in the companies’ missions, and the timeframes in which they expect to fulfill them.
If you parse the pedantic “mission statements” on the legacy automakers’ web sites, you’ll find that they basically amount to: “We want to sell cars.” Tesla’s mission statement is very different: “To accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.”
Tesla doesn’t just want to sell cars, it wants to change the world. This massive difference of ambition is reflected in the longer timeframe that Tesla envisions.
“In the economy Bob Lutz and other traditional car industry players understand, the goal and the metrics were clear: the quarterly results,” Dans writes. “If they were below what the analysts expected, bad; if they were higher, good. End of story. But the rules have changed…For today’s companies, profits are not the goal, they’re the cherry on the cake. Because the idea is, in the long term, to move toward an infinitely more ambitious goal, one that entails a whole new level of change. Companies that have grasped this can spend many years, even decades, without making a profit, as long as they are able to create a narrative that shows they are on the right track toward the defined goal.”
Tesla’s long road to ultimate triumph is not unprecedented – it’s a path that’s been trodden by other tech companies that set out to transform an industry. “For how many years did Amazon continue turning in negative quarterly results while its share price rose steadily?” asks Dans. “Did Jeff Bezos…supply his investors with drugs to maintain their confidence? Yes, he did, actually: a powerful substance called growth and clarity in the use of funds obtained. Amazon’s mission was never to sell stuff, but to change the world.”
Amazon is not the only example. In this age of instant communication, in which whole industries can be radically transformed, or even disappear, “reporting a profit each quarter has never been less important.”
“If Lutz is right, if the grand plans for a new economy that will change the world are bullshit, Tesla will go bust,” Dans concedes. “But if Tesla’s plans and strategy make sense, it may well spend a long time in the red, but it will end up as the auto industry’s benchmark.”
Change is taking place ever faster, and humans’ attention spans are growing ever shorter, so it may seem counter-intuitive that the timeline for corporate success should grow longer. However, even in the fast-paced internet era, changing the world, or even one industry, can’t be done in the space of one quarter. Tesla’s mission is a risky one, but so far investors are willing to accept that risk.
Bob Lutz and Elon Musk look at the world in two different ways, and they have very different visions of the future. Which one will prove prophetic? We shall see.
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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com, by Charles Morris
Source: Forbes
Elon Musk
Tesla Cybercabs narrowly miss deadly Amazon cargo plane crash
An Amazon cargo plane crash near Miami’s airport stopped feet from dozens of Tesla Cybercabs.
An Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo jet overran the runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, killing five people and injuring five more. The jet, operated by North Carolina based carrier 21 Air as Flight 7598, touched down around 2 p.m. after arriving from San Juan, Puerto Rico, then crossed the airport perimeter, plowed across NW 67th Avenue and struck multiple vehicles before catching fire, according to the Associated Press.
Photos and video from the scene show the aircraft’s nose stopped within meters of a fenced staging lot holding dozens of gold painted Tesla Cybercabs, the steering wheel free robotaxi Tesla began putting on public roads in Austin last week. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue has confirmed the plane struck “multiple vehicles” but has not said whether any Cybercabs were among them, and neither Tesla nor airport officials have addressed the fleet directly.
The Cybercabs had not yet entered commercial service in Miami. Tesla’s existing Robotaxi operation there runs on modified Model Y vehicles and has been unsupervised since Ashok Elluswamy confirmed the detail on X in July.
Footage of the plane crash from earlier today | #ONLYinDADE pic.twitter.com/iGoOtnd6cD
— ONLY in DADE (@ONLYinDADE) September 6, 2026
Elon Musk offered the briefest of reactions. Replying to a Zero Hedge post about the Cybercabs sitting so close to the wreckage, he wrote a single word: “Weird.” He has not commented further, and Tesla has not issued a statement.
The timing puts Tesla’s newest vehicle near an unrelated but highly visible tragedy just days after its Austin debut, a launch that had already drawn scrutiny from federal regulators. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an audit how Tesla certified the Cybercab as compliant with federal vehicle safety standards, a process Teslarati covered after the vehicle’s September 3 launch event. That inquiry concerns the car’s lack of a steering wheel and pedals, not the Miami crash.
Investigators from the FAA and NTSB are focused on the plane, not the parking lot beside it. Flight data reviewed by outlets including Simple Flying show the 767 touched down around 170 knots, well above the 135 to 140 knot range typical for the aircraft, though investigators have not determined a cause. Amazon said it is working with authorities and that its priority is the safety of everyone affected.
Whether any Cybercabs were damaged, and what Tesla plans for the fleet parked near one of the country’s busiest airports, remain open questions.
Featured
Tesla Cybercab is coming to Asia this month as US service officially begins
Tesla Asia says Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai this month.
Tesla’s Cybercab is heading to Asia. The official Tesla Asia account posted on X Thursday, inviting Cybercab fans to “Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai.” The post went up within hours of Tesla’s own Cybercab milestone in Texas, where the company said Thursday it had begun offering rides in across Austin.
Exact dates and venues for the Asia tour haven’t been released yet, though Tesla Hong Kong replied to the announcement with “Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong soon,” while Tesla Japan’s response pointed fans to a sign up page for updates. Neither post mentions test rides or a service area, and nothing so far suggests Tesla is launching Robotaxi operations in any of the four cities. Based on how Tesla has run past Cybercab tours, in Europe in late 2024 and at US shopping centers that same December, the Asia stops are almost certainly static displays at Tesla stores or public venues as a means to stimulate buzz for its future driverless ride-hailing service in the big cities.
Cybercab will be on display in Asia this month!
Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai. pic.twitter.com/wGmmEastfX— Tesla Asia (@Tesla_Asia) September 4, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s only prior Cybercab appearance in the region, a booth at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai last November, which Teslarati covered at the time. At that event, Tesla’s regional general manager for Shanghai framed the car as evidence of the company’s broader mission, a message Tesla has since formalized in its Master Plan Part IV, which states that “autonomous vehicles have the capacity to dramatically improve the affordability, availability and safety of transportation while reducing pollution, particularly in our increasingly dense global cities.” The same document is where Tesla lays out its “sustainable abundance” framing for Cybercab and Optimus alike, describing the two as the hardware behind an AI driven push to cut the cost of transportation and labor at scale.
Whether Cybercab actually operates as a robotaxi anywhere in Asia remains an open question, considering China has already pushed an autonomous ride-hailing market that’s run on homegrown players like Baidu’s Apollo Go and Pony AI. For now, the four city tour reads as a marketing push timed to Austin’s momentum.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Cybercab’s next market
Tesla Cybercab improvements are already on the minds of company engineers
