Speaking: Tesla General Counsel and Corporate Secretary Brandon Erhart, Board Chair Robyn Denholm, CEO Elon Musk, and other executives and analysts
2024 Annual Shareholder Meeting held on Thursday, June 13
Brandon Erhart: Welcome to Texas, the home of Tesla. My name is Brandon Erhart, I’m the General Counsel and corporate secretary and this meeting is going to be in two parts. First, we’re going to cover the 12 items that stockholders have been asked to vote on, as well as any other matters that have been properly presented. Second, our founder and CEO, Elon Musk will provide a presentation.
During the course of the following sessions, we may discuss our business outlook and make other forward-looking statements. Such statements are predictions based on current expectations, actual events or results could materially differ due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those disclosed in our most recent 10-K or 10-Q as filed with the SEC. Such forward-looking statements represent our views as of today should not be relied on hereafter, and we disclaim any obligation to update them after today.
At this time, I’d like to thank members of the Tesla team and the board that are here in attendance. A representative from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Tesla’s independent auditor, is also present. But before we begin, I’d like to introduce you to our board chair, Robyn Denholm, who would like to say a few words.
Robyn Denholm: Thanks, Brandon, and hello, everyone. As chair of Tesla’s board, I’m honored to welcome you all to our home, Texas. For our annual 2024 annual shareholder meeting. And when I say I’m honored to welcome you, our shareholders, I truly am. No other company in the world has such a diverse, engaged, and supportive set of shareholders as Tesla. No other shareholder base understands its company like you do, nor is as committed to Tesla’s mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy like you are.
It is a shareholder base whose interests the board are proud to represent. It is also a shareholder base that understands that in order to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, and a sustainable energy economy, Tesla needs to develop the most revolutionary technologies not only in autos, but in energy and artificial intelligence as well.
Our achievements this past year, our steps towards fulfilling our mission.
Some highlights include the Model Y becoming the best selling vehicle in the world in 2023, beginning deliveries of the much anticipated Cybertruck proving that the muscle and utility of a pickup truck can be electric and cool. And our energy storage deployments reaching an all-time high in 2023, with the deployment trend continuing in 2024.
By using our products, Tesla customers avoided releasing over 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023. That is the equivalent of 51 billion miles driven by ICE vehicles, an increase of about 18 billion avoided ICE miles since 2022.
But to continue the exponential growth in greenhouse gas emission avoidance, we not only have to get our products into as many customers hands as possible, but we also need to increase the utilization of our products. And to help further with that goal, we released FSD Supervised, demonstrating that our approach to autonomy is scalable. And that accomplishments in artificial intelligence, along with leveraging our existing production lines to get our next generation products to market faster, are essential to achieving our mission.
We have made and plan to make further investments in hardware and software ecosystem to further advance our path to autonomy and set a course to realization of Robotaxis.
But sustainability is not just about avoiding emissions. It needs to take into account the whole lifecycle from the manufacturing of the products to the product’s end-of-life. That is why we sourced responsibly. We design our manufacturing processes to use less water per vehicle than the industry average, and for the third year in a row, we power our Supercharger network with 100 percent renewable energy.
And we are also working to build a battery material recycling ecosystem, both internally and with others, to ensure that we are moving towards a truly circular economy for energy storage. In 2023 alone, we supported the recovery of enough battery materials to build 43,000 new Rear-Wheel-Drive Model Ys. That result is the epitome of a sustainable economy.
While sustainability is our mission, we also have the goal of safety. Our cars are engineered to be some of the safest in the world and we take real-world data from our fleet, and our ability to push over-the-air updates to optimize safety for all our vehicle models.
Our attention to autonomy also plays a role in our goal of safety. Based on 2023 data, Tesla vehicles with driver-assist technologies engaged had only one vehicle accident per 5.64 million miles driven, compared to the U.S. vehicle fleet of one accident per 670,000 miles driven. So not only are you protecting the environment by driving a Tesla, you’re also protecting yourself and those who ride with you.
With another year of progress in furthering our mission under our belt, I want to take this moment to thank our phenomenal Tesla employees whose creativity, hard work, and dedication are the source of our success. And as most are also shareholders alongside each and every one of you, I hope each employee takes pride in in the role that you have played in Tesla’s accomplishments. I am proud of you and the board and I appreciate you tremendously.
Finally, I want to remind our shareholders that your board is listening and we are here to represent your interests. You are the owners of the company and your voices, your perspectives, and your input are critical to us as a board and to the direction of the company. My fellow directors and I serve as your fiduciaries and oversee Tesla’s mission, purpose, and strategy with those responsibilities in mind.
We continuously set the highest standards for ethical behavior, corporate citizenship, and corporate governance. You don’t see the day-to-day work of the directors, but I can assure you: this is a highly engaged board. And I would like to thank my fellow directors for their dedication, whether it be inside the boardroom, meeting with our shareholders, or working closely with our team members throughout the company.
Tesla is unique in how active and large our retail shareholder base is, and we hope you here in this room and our shareholders joining us virtually today continue to take advantage of our shareholder platform to enhance your engagement with Tesla. I want to give a special shout out to our small but mighty IR team and legal team, and everyone involved in running this year’s proxy campaign—both inside and outside of Tesla.
There is still much to do, but it has galvanized us around the strong belief that the right things are always worth fighting for. Thank you. And now I’ll hand it back. Thank you. Now I’m gonna hand it back to Brandon, thank you.
Brandon Erhart: Thank you, Robin. So I will now call the meeting to order. The time is now 3:40 p.m. Central, and I declare that the polls are now open. We have already received over the past few weeks voting proxies from our stockholders. However, if you wish to vote your shares at this time, you may do so through the virtual meeting portal. Or if you want to vote in person, ballots and ballot boxes are available at the front.
Tesla’s board of directors has appointed Tony Cardidio, a representative of the Cardidio Group, to serve as the inspector of election. In addition, Broadridge Financial Services has certified that starting on April 29, 2024, the proxy materials, or notice of internet availability for proxy materials, were mailed or provided to all Tesla stockholders of record on April 15, 2024. We have a majority of outstanding shares represented at the meeting, so I declare that there is a quorum present and then we may proceed with the meeting.
The items on the agenda are as follows, there are five Tesla proposals: The election of two Class 2 directors, James Murdoch and Kimball Musk, to serve for a term of three years or until their respective successors are duly elected and qualified; to approve executive compensation on a non-advisory basis; to approve the re-domestication of Tesla from Delaware to Texas via conversion; to ratify the 100-percent performance-based stock option award to Elon Musk that was previously approved by stockholders in 2018; to ratify the appointment of PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP as Tesla’s independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year 2024.
Tesla’s board has recommended that our stockholders vote for each of the two director nominees and for each of the four other Tesla proposals. We have also received seven stockholder proposals that are described in the proxy statement. I would like to remind our stockholders that Tesla’s board has prepared a statement in opposition to these proposals which also appear in our proxy statement. So let’s turn to those seven stockholder proposals.
The first one is an advisory vote regarding reduction of director terms to one year. Our board has recommended that our stockholders vote against this as explained in the proxy. This stockholder proposal is proposed by Mr. James McRitchie, who has prepared a pre-recorded message.
James McRitchie: Thank you. We presented a similar proposal in 2021. 55 percent supported it, even though the board put up a competing proposal, accountability every other year instead of every year, neither received the required 67 percent of shares owned. 90 percent of the S&P 500 have a declassified board. Most institutional shareholders will again support our proposal. Join them.
The recent Delaware court case identified three legal deficiencies at Tesla: directors are not independent; the facts of the pay plan presented to investors were misleading; and the board failed to negotiate properly. A major part of a cure is declassifying the board so shareholders can hold directors accountable or submit their own nominations.
Matt Moscardi of Free Float calls proposal number six the most important vote today, since it may enable investors to change the board, bringing new skills and professionalism. John Chevedden and simple majority vote is the other crucial vote. Another important endorser is Nell Minow, co-founder of companies including proxy advisor ISS.
The Musk premium is already eroding. Tesla is Musk’s liquid piggy bank, since it’s publicly traded. His other companies are not. Either he sticks around long enough to use our shareholder capital to fund his other ventures, or he shifts his attention sooner if we reject his pay package and turn off the money tap.
Bite the bullet. Prepare for a future that doesn’t depend on a superhero dictatorship. We need to transition from a board dominated by friends and family to one of expert independent directors in engineering, software, and other relevant fields. Musk is a genius. I’m saddened to see him focus his attention elsewhere, but it is happening. Don’t let him siphon off more from Tesla. We need to transition to a more democratic Tesla that can attract customers, employees, and shareholders seeking a better world ahead.
Again vote for number six and seven. Declassify the board for accountability, lower the voting threshold for more flexibility. Vote now before the polls are closed. Your vote can make a significant difference in our future. Thank you.
Brandon Erhart: Thank you, Mr. McRitchie. As a reminder, the board’s response was contained in our proxy statement.
The second stockholder proposal is an advisory vote regarding simple majority of provisions in our governing documents our board has recommended against and are set forth for the reasons in the proxy. This stockholder proposals proposed by Mr. John Chevedden, who is on the line to present this present this proposal. Mr. Chevedden, I would like to invite you to speak. You will have three minutes.
John Chevedden: Hello, this is John Chevedden. Proposal seven simple majority vote. Shareholders requested the board of directors take the necessary steps so that each voting requirement in the charter and bylaws that calls for a greater than simple majority vote, be replaced by requirements for a majority of the votes cast for and against that proposals for a simple majority. This includes making the necessary changes in plain English.
This proposal seven is exact same concept at the Tesla Board of Directors supported at the 2022 Tesla Annual Meeting. The 2022 Tesla Board of Directors proposals then won 98 percent support from the Tesla shareholders who voted. And the Board of Directors version of this proposal would have been adopted earlier, if the board of directors had only made a slight effort to encourage more Tesla shareholders to vote for their proposal.
This simple majority vote standard proposal will help improve Tesla shareholder rights. Tesla now scores a dismal 10 in shareholder rights, with 10 being the worst possible score. The Tesla Board of Directors supported this proposal concept in 2022, and should do so today.
Shareholder rights and a simple majority vote standard are all the more important when Tesla has a CEO, Elon Musk, who is threatening to give less attention to Tesla and threatening to withhold advanced technology from Tesla unless he gets a $56 billion paycheck. Never before have shareholders been under such duress, when asked to prove an outrageous $56 billion CEO paycheck.
Plus, there’s no promise with the $56 billion paycheck that Mr. Musk will devote any minimum percentage of his time to Tesla, or pursue any minimum amount of advanced technology at Tesla. Ross Gerber of the investment firm Gerber Kawasaki said, “I believe the Tesla board of directors is the most conflicted, least independent, and most incapable board of directors in the history of business.”
Please vote yes, simple majority vote, proposal seven.
Brandon Erhart: Thank you, Mr. Chevedden. As a reminder, the board’s response is set forth in the proxy.
Our third stockholder proposal is an advisory vote regarding annual reporting on anti-harassment and discrimination efforts. Our board has recommended against for the reasons set forth in the proxy. This stockholder proposals proposed by the New York State Common Retirement Fund as the lead filer, which is requested that Dr. Kristen Hall, as represented for Nia Impact Capital as co-filer for this proposal, present this proposal. Dr. Hall, I would like to invite you to speak. You have three minutes.
Kristen Hall: Thank you. Hello, I’m Dr. Kristen Hall of Nia Impact Capital. I’m here on behalf of lead filer, New York State Comptroller Thomas DePaoli, trustee of New York State Retirement Fund, owner of Tesla shares valued at over 650 million as of March of this year. And I’m here as a co-filer of proposal eight.
The fund is a significant long term owner of Tesla and has an explicit focus on investing in climate solutions. LongView large cap funds through its trustee Amalgamated Bank, AP Seven, and our Juna join us in filing this resolution.
Our firm name Nia means intention and purpose. We invest only in those companies we see building toward a better world, a sustainable and inclusive future. As the founder of Nia, I had been proud in our early ownership of Tesla. I saw the potential and the need for innovation in the automotive and the clean energy market space. However, when looking under the frunk we find failures in workplace management—one of the most important components of any business.
Employees need to be hired, trained, motivated, and engaged to do high-quality work, and we need those employees to be able to contribute to their top ability. To do so, they must feel both physically and emotionally safe at work. Investors are requesting the report outlined in proposal eight because workplace abuse, harassment, and discrimination have no place at Tesla. That can result in substantial costs, including employee turnover, increased absenteeism, and reduced productivity, as well as legal costs, all of which can impact shareholders’ investments in the company.
They may also lead to difficulties in recruiting high-quality employees, something that Tesla needs to remain innovative and at the forefront of a quickly-moving technological landscape.
We have expressed concerns about Tesla’s workplace for years, and year after year, more harassment and discrimination allegations have emerged with few visible improvements in Tesla’s people, management policies, or practices to assuage our concerns. Lawsuits and class actions before Tesla now involve thousands of employees, with allegations including repeated use of racial epithets by managers and employees, segregation, and discrimination against non-white employees in job assignments, pay and promotion, and retaliation when employees report their experiences.
These concerns are why I now formally move proposal eight, requesting that Tesla’s board commission an independent report on the effectiveness of the company’s efforts to prevent harassment and discrimination within this revolutionary and innovative workspace. Thank you.
Brandon Erhart: Thank you, Dr. Hall. The board’s responses set forth in the proxy materials.
Let’s turn to the fourth stockholder proposal which is an advisory vote regarding the adoption of freedom of association and collective bargaining policy. Our board has recommended against for the reasons set forth in the proxy. This stockholder proposal is proposed by SOC investment group, whose representative, Tejal Patel, has prepared a pre-recorded message.
Tejal Patel: Hello, I’m Tejal Patel, the Executive Director of the SOC Investment Group, and I hereby move proposal nine, a shareholder proposal requesting that Tesla Board of Directors adopt and disclose a non-interference and collective bargaining policy that upholds International Labor Rights standards in its operations.
This resolution was submitted with other co-filers and we’re concerned that Tesla’s existing policy fails to clearly explain how conflicts between international and local labor law will be resolved. And because of clear indications that Tesla is not adhering to its current policy despite the operational legal human capital management and reputational risks involved.
We recognize that Tesla revised its global human rights policy in April 2023 to explicitly refer to the rights of workers to free association and collective bargaining, but these revisions were fatally compromised. The statement committing to respect these rights includes the qualifier in conformance with local law, rather than referencing the often higher international human rights standards, suggesting that Tesla respects these rights only as explicitly required by local laws.
Numerous signs suggest that Tesla is not respecting its workers’ fundamental rights.
In Sweden, Tesla has faced months-long strikes and boycotts over what has been characterized as a refusal to bargain. Moreover, as part of its reporting on the situation, Reuters wrote that Tesla has a policy of not signing collective agreements, which, if true, would directly contravene the company’s current policy. In Germany, Tesla faces allegations of refusal to bargain and poor working conditions.
In the United States, Tesla has had adverse decisions by the full National Labor Relations Board and the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals over labor rights violations. Just last month, the NLRB issued a complaint alleging that restrictions in Tesla’s workplace technology policy served to unlawfully discourage employees from joining unions or acting concertedly.
It is also relevant for shareholders to consider the broader human capital management risks Tesla faces, including reports of higher health and safety violations and injury rates than peers, and numerous lawsuits alleging of hostile work environments. Freedom of association and collective bargaining are considered enabling rights, meaning that they empower workers to effectively advocate for additional labor rights, including the right to a safe and healthy workplace, free from discrimination.
The adoption of a comprehensive labor rights policy that clearly articulates a commitment to non-interference, good faith collective bargaining, and adherence to higher international standards would help Tesla better mitigate these human capital management risks, as well as operational and reputational risks like we are seeing and Sweden. Therefore, we urge you to vote for item nine. Thank you.
Brandon Erhart: Thank you, Ms. Patel. The board’s respons is set forth in the proxy.
The fifth stockholder proposal is an advisory vote regarding reporting on effects and risks associated with electromagnetic radiation and wireless technologies. Our board has recommended against for the reasons set forth in the proxy. This stockholder proposal is proposed by Landry Purcell, who’s representative Dr. Devra Davis has prepared a pre-recorded message
Devra Davis: I am Devra Davis, founder of Environmental Health Trust. I am speaking with you today on behalf of shareholder Landry Purcell regarding her proposals seeking an annual report on the risks for magnetic fields and wireless radiation in their products. I’m also speaking on behalf of millions of young children, infants, and toddlers, and pregnant women, who are more vulnerable to wireless radiation, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
I’m the founding director of the board on environmental studies and toxicology from the National Academy of Sciences, and I’ve published more than 220 scientific articles on environmental health, and have concluded, along with hundreds of other experts, that current exposures to non-ionizing electromagnetic fields called EMF constitute a serious and unrecognized public health risk.
Tesla vehicles operate with the 1200-pound battery that emits magnetic fields, and also uses wireless equipment such as Wi-Fi, and radar, emitting wireless radiation. Tesla should provide transparent information on measured exposures and efforts to reduce them. The World Health Organization has concluded that both low levels of EMF and microwave cellular radiation are “possible carcinogens,” the same category as some pesticides and gasoline.
The companies that provide secondary insurance, like Lloyd’s of London and Swiss Re, have long considered electromagnetic fields to be uninsurable, comparable to asbestos due to potential health and environmental damages. Tesla’s shareholders have a right to know how the company insures itself against such risks.
The fact that current levels may be legal does not mean they are safe. In fact, U.S. regulations were set more than a quarter-century ago. It has been three years since the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia determined that the FCC had been “arbitrary and capricious” in its failure to consider all the science and refusal to update wireless limits. Tesla has failed to inform consumers about measured levels of magnetic fields and wireless radiation within the automobile or their other products.
Infants and toddlers by law are strapped into seats to protect them during crashes, but they have no protection from EMF that can go more deeply into their thinner skulls. To mitigate risks for Tesla, the company could shield its vehicles and ensure wireless attendance could be easily turned off. Hardware and software changes can lower exposures generally. Tesla has developed extremely rigorous compliance and hazard screenings, beyond regulatory requirements for certain toxic chemicals. Investors can encourage the company to take a similar leadership role regarding reducing EMF.
It’s time for the company to unambiguously compete on safety regarding wireless radiation and non-ionizing radiation emitted by its products. Thank you.
Brandon Erhart: Thank you, Dr. Davis. The board’s response is set forth in the proxy.
Let’s move on to the sixth stockholder proposal, which is an advisory vote regarding adopting targets and reporting on metrics to assess the feasibility of integrating sustainability metrics and to senior executive compensation plans. Our board has recommended against for the reasons set forth in the proxy.
This stockholder proposal is proposed by Tulipshare Securities Limited, whose representative, Constance Ricketts, has prepared a pre-recorded message
Constance Ricketts: Good afternoon. Fellow shareholders, thank you for your time. I’m Constance Ricketts and today I’m speaking on behalf of Tulipshare, in support of proposal 11, urging Tesla to integrate sustainability metrics, including diversity among senior executives, into executive compensation plans.
This proposal calls for robust quantitative targets and transparent reporting to both resolve executive pay plan controversies and ensure our company’s long-term stability and success. Diversity and independence in leadership are essential for innovation and enhanced decision-making, while sustainability metrics and executive compensation reflect alignment with regulatory pressures, investor expectations, and responsible business practices.
Despite 75 percent of S&P 500 companies incorporating sustainability metrics into executive pay plans, Tesla fails to do so. This is especially concerning given our mission to accelerate the world’s transition to renewable energy, the recent ruling that voided our CEO’s $56 billion dollar pay package highlighted the need for fair and negotiated compensation plans that serve stockholders’ best interests.
Tesla’s proxy statement does not offer substantive evidence of how the voided 2018 award harms stockholder democracy or how its ratification will cure prior deficiencies and lead to a different outcome. Likewise, the opposition to this proposal fails to show any evidence of an existing performance-based component integrated into the executive pay structure that respects established human rights due diligence processes and principles.
Instead, it cites its human rights policy that is wholly unrelated to executive compensation and doubles down on the argument that the currently-contested executive pay structure is the only means of motivation to achieve our company’s mission. This commitment to the status quo essentially dismisses the ongoing controversies that Tesla must face and overcome, including softening sales, advancing competition, split focus in leadership, a 30-percent drop in stock price, reduced market cap, mass layoffs, human rights violations, and ongoing legal challenges.
Tesla’s executives absolutely should be duly compensated for innovative and successful business. However, stockholder democracy allows us to oppose demands like 25 percent control of the company and the largest pay package in corporate American history via further share issuance. We also have the right to vote for leadership’s compensation to be commensurate with financial and sustainability performance. This does not mean we do not respect our leadership’s time, energy, and contributions. Quite the contrary, as it is our duty as stockholders to ensure long-term viability and success for our company.
Brandon Erhart: Thank you, Ms. Ricketts. The board’s response is set forth in the proxy.
Let’s move on to the seventh stockholder proposal, which is an advisory vote regarding committing to a moratorium on sourcing minerals from deep sea mining. Our board has recommended against for the reasons set forth in the proxy. This proposal is proposed by As You Sow, whose representative, Elizabeth Levy has also recorded a pre-recorded message.
Elizabeth Levy: Good afternoon Chairman, members of the board. My name is Elizabeth Levy representing As You Sow, speaking on proposal number 12.
We know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the bottom of the ocean. Even so, a new industry is moving forward to exploit the deep sea. We believe this industry poses risks to Tesla now and into the future.
Deep sea mining is the process of dredging the ocean floor to extract battery-related minerals. It will indiscriminately destroy habitats and obliterate life in its path. Seabed mining could release carbon stores and toxic sediment plumes, poisoning marine food chains, and disrupting sea life breeding and migration. The deep sea is complex and abundant with life. Its ecosystems are slow-growing and fragile, with little to no ability to recover from outside disturbance. Plans are moving forward to launch the process for commercial scale deep sea mining with or without regulation.
Tesla’s membership in the OECD and IRMA mining protocols does not resolve this issue, as neither currently applies to mining in the deep sea. Over 800 marine science and policy experts, 25 countries, 72 indigenous groups, and 48 companies are calling for a ban, moratorium, or precautionary pause on deep sea mining. This includes Tesla’s competitors BMW, Renault, Rivian, Volkswagen, and Volvo. Even General Motors has stated it does not plan to use deep sea mining, minerals.
Our company’s public stance on deep sea mining matters. Tesla is the face of the EV transition, and its ambiguous position on deep sea mining could drive investment in this controversial industry. Conversely, a clear stance restricting Tesla’s use of deep sea minerals can drive innovation and battery mineral tech, recycling, and circularity. With these technologies, even the most ambitious future EV scenarios could be met without harming the deep sea.
Tesla’s failure to take a stand on deep sea mining, combined with the fact that a former Tesla board director is now serving as a board member and Special Advisor to the CEO of The Metals Company, the very company leading the charge on deep sea mining, raises concerns. Such a relationship appears to imply that Tesla supports The Metals Company and its deep sea mining activities.
Committing to a moratorium will clarify expectations and reduce reputational harm to the company, assuring customers and investors that Tesla will indeed wait until science shows deep sea mining will not cause significant or irreparable damage. Thank you.
Brandon Erhart: Thank you Miss Levy. The board’s respons is set forth in the proxy. Please note that now is the final opportunity to submit any votes in order for them to be counted.
I declare that the polls are now closed.
Based on the proxies that we’ve received, and the votes submitted at this meeting, I’d like to announce the results on a preliminary basis.
With respect to the seven stockholder proposals, our stockholders have approved the recommendations of the Tesla board on all of them except for proposal six regarding director terms, and proposal seven regarding simple majority voting. Now, moving on to the five Tesla proposals.
First, our stockholders have approved the election of our two Class 2 directors, James Murdoch and Kimball Musk, to serve for a term of three years and until their respective successors are duly elected and qualified.
Second, our stockholders have approved executive compensation on a non-binding advisory basis.
Third, our stockholders have approved the ratification of appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as Tesla’s independent registered public accounting firm for the 2024 fiscal year.
Fourth, our stockholders have approved the re-domestication of Tesla from Delaware to Texas.
Fifth, and finally, our stockholders have approved the ratification of the 100 percent performance-based stock option award to Elon Musk that was approved by stockholders in 2018.
The meeting is now closed and, with that, Tesla shareholders, let’s welcome Elon Musk.
(Recorded video montage ft. Musk and news personalities):
Elon Musk: The goal is to give people hope that there is a path to a fully sustainable global economy that we are on that path that we are accelerating that path and that, so long as we don’t get complacent about it, it will happen.
Per Lekander: This was really the beginning of the end of the Tesla bubble. I actually think the company could go bust.
Unknown News Anchor: Tesla’s Model Y is the world’s best-selling car, beating out Toyota RAV-4 and Corolla its models.
Elon Musk: Regarding FSD version 12, efficacy version is profound. The rate of improvement is rapid. It might be the biggest asset value appreciation history when you can do unsupervised or Full Self-Driving.
Unknown Analyst: Sounds like a story stock. Autonomous taxi? Can you really balance your checkbook with those sort of pie in the sky predictions like that?
Elon Musk: If you ask the wrong question, the right answer is impossible.
My prediction is that a majority of Tesla’s long term value will be Optimus. And that prediction I’m very confident of.
It’s very rare a product comes along that is seemingly impossible that experts said would never be made. And this is one of those times. Finally, the future will look like the future.
People say like “why did you make a bulletproof?” I’m like, “Why not?”
Energy storage deployments, the Megapack in particular, reached an all-time high in Q1 leading to record profitability for the energy business.
This is the machine that builds the machine and the factory is the product and this building is the most advanced car factory that Earth has ever seen.
If you value Tesla as an auto company, it’s the wrong framework. If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla’s gonna solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company. But we will, and we are.
(Recorded video montage ends and Musk enters the stage):
Elon Musk: Hey guys! Welcome to the Tesla shareholder meeting. I just want to start off by saying, hot damn, I love you guys. Yeah. We have the most awesome shareholder base. I mean, any public company, it’s incredible. Wow. So and, we’ve got a great sort of shareholder meeting here to recap the achievements of the company and tell you about where we’re going, and I think it’s incredible.
We’re not just opening a new chapter for Tesla, we’re starting a new book.
So, those of you who’ve been following Tesla closely understand, like you get it, you know. So like, the important thing is you get it.
Yeah, where things are going I think is just going to be absolutely mind-blowing. We’re obviously making great progress in solving the sustainable energy problem, you know, with electric vehicles, with stationary storage, with solar. And I think in terms of the, the value of the company, autonomy is just such a mind-blowing thing that, like I said, you guys understand, but I think most of the world does not yet understand.
In talking to a lot of the sort of big institutional investors, they’re often in like New York, and they don’t drive cars.
So I’d be like, “Have you driven our car? Have you tried Self-Driving? You know, the version 12.3?”
And they’re like, “Oh, no.”
“Okay, well you should try it. That would be a good thing to do.”
And if you just plot the points on the curve of how well autonomy is progressing, and just believe the curve, it’s headed towards unsupervised Full Self-Driving very quickly, at an exponential pace.
It’s really as simple as that. And in fact, I invite you to just do it personally. Just say “okay, with each release, how many miles do you drive before you have to intervene?”
It’s like literally that simple. And with each release, you’ll see that there’s a big improvement, big improvement, and it looks like an exponential. And it’s very clear that that will actually go to the point where it is actually far safer than a person driving the car.
I have some insight into, you know, the next releases because we’ve got, basically, for every release that’s on the road, we kind of see what the next generation release is, and a little bit about the release after that. So we have some insight into where it’s going and it’s really amazing. No question whatsoever that will far exceed human safety. Yeah, no question.
And I think I have mentioned this. Like, sometimes it’s helpful to sort of reiterate and connect some of the dots, because sometimes people wonder, “well, how do you go from this big fleet, to actually monetizing the fleet in an autonomous situation?” And it’s actually a combination of like, Airbnb, and Uber to some degree.
So like, there’ll be some cars that Tesla owns itself, it’s kind of like an Uber fashion, but then for the fleet that is owned by our customers, it will be like an AirBnb thing. You can add or subtract your car to the fleet whenever you want.
So you can say like, “I’m going away for a week.”
Just one tap on your Tesla app, your car gets added to the fleet, and it just makes money for you while you’re gone.
So you can say you can add it to the fleet for a few hours, for a few days, for a few weeks. Whenever you want to back, you can say “come back” and the car will come right back. And I’m highly confident that it will far exceed, the value of like the revenue made by the owner of the car, will far exceed the actual monthly payment.
And then Tesla will obviously take a rev share on that, but most of the money will go to the owner of the car. And it’s… this is actually going to work. This is what will happen. So, I mean, mark my words. This is this is simply a matter of time.
Now, admittedly I’m a little optimistic sometimes. You know, I don’t have a complete lack of self awareness. But if I wasn’t optimistic, this wouldn’t exist this factory wouldn’t exist.
So, that’s what my brother, who is awesome, just got re-elected… no, sorry.
So, a little anecdote. When were kids in school, my brother would tell me the wrong time for the bus, so that I wouldn’t miss the bus.
And then it’d be upset with him like, “Why’d you tell me the bus was gonna come earlier than it was?” And he’s like, “Well, because otherwise you’d be late for the bus.”
This is an actual thing that would happen, so I guess I’ve been sort of pathologically optimistic from birth. But like, that’s the reason why this is all the stuff is happening anyway, it’s like, I gotta be somewhat pathologically optimistic, but I do deliver in the end. That’s the important thing.
So, yeah. And it’s really just gonna be something else. And I’ve mentioned this before, but for Ark Invest, I’d recommend reading the Ark Invest analysis. That’s the most accurate. There may be more accurate ones, but the most accurate sort of analysis of the potential of autonomy, the most accurate that I’m aware of is, is Cathie Woods’, Ark Invest.
And if I recall correctly, they predicted somewhere over a $5 trillion valuation for Tesla just based on vehicle autonomy, not counting Optimus. Yeah, I agree with that.
So I think, I think just based on vehicle autonomy, we can we can 10x, more than 10x, the value of the company. I believe that’s what will happen. And what do you know, it’s 4:20 p.m. Just noticed that.
So, I think that’s actually, that’s pretty accurate. But it actually gets way crazier when you think about the the Optimus robot, which is really a humanoid robot that is intended to be able to do anything you want it to do. It can be your companion, it can be at your house, it can sort of babysit your kids. It can teach them, great teacher. It can do factory stuff.
Like I think that the ultimate ratio of say how many super-useful humanoid, helper droids do you want? Like who doesn’t want a C-3PO, you know? You know, but a C-3PO plus an R2-D2 plus, you know, plus plus. It would be pretty awesome. I think everyone in the world is gonna want one, like literally everyone. And then there’ll be obviously robots in industry, making stuff.
I think the ratio of humanoid robots to humans will probably be at least two to one, something like that. One to one for sure. Which means like somewhere around the order of 10 million humanoid robots, maybe 20 or 30.
And so then it’s like, okay, well, let’s say the baud rate is… I think the baud rate will be probably something ultimately, like a billion a year humanoid robots, like actually.
And if Tesla just has a 10 percent share of that, and it might be a lot more than 10 percent, and we make like 100 million Optimus units a year. I mean, for reference, the auto industry is roughly 100 million vehicles per year. So that sort of similar ballpark at least within an order of magnitude.
And I think we could make one for a cost of maybe at at really high scale of about $10,000. It’d be less expensive than a car. And I think if you sell it for $20,000, I think, this is at large scale volume, Tesla would basically make about a trillion dollars of profit a year from that.
If the price earnings multiple is saying under 20, or 25, something like that, that would mean a $20 trillion market cap from Optimus alone, and probably 5 to 10 from autonomous vehicles. So like I think it’s actually conceivable, it’s within the realm of possibility for Tesla to achieve a valuation 10 times that of the most valuable company today.
So when I say this is like we’re starting a new book, I mean, it’s gonna be the best book. Next level. Next, next, next, next level.
We’re gonna make sure these robots are nice to us and you know, that’s very important. So anyway, with that, let me get into the presentation. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. I think it might be worth just putting a word limit on future shareholder proposals. It’s like, you can’t have like a novel length. You can’t have a whole novel as a Tesla proposal.
So, as you can see, our impact is accelerating, you know, we’re starting to make a real noticeable dent in carbon emissions. So we’re really, you know, making a lot of progress towards achieving a goal of sustainability.
And one of the effects of autonomy is actually is going to be an even greater effect on carbon emissions because I suspect that we’ll go from passenger cars having about 10 hours of usage per week, about an hour and a half per day, to probably 30 hours in the week, maybe 50-55 hours, which means the same car will be used five times more often. So you need a certain amount of resources to make the car but we’ll have five times the usage in my opinion. I think that’s quite likely, which will be an even more dramatic impact on carbon emissions.
So, we care a lot about sustainable manufacturing. Our factories are beautiful, you walk around the factory, it’s actually you know, contrary to what you read in the press, it’s a good vibe in the factory, like people are smiling and happy. It’s nice.
So, I mean, we do care. We actually do care a lot at Tesla about doing the right thing. And we’re not going to be perfect, but we do care a lot about doing the right thing. So our vehicles are water efficient, energy efficient. We try whenever possible to use renewables for powering the factory and we do our best to do the right thing.
Our batteries are lasting, longer… I got too many things in my hand. The batteries are lasting a lot longer, which is good. Safety is good in the factory. We’re improving the affordability of EVs. You know Model Y is comparable to BMW X3, but its actual cost of ownership on a monthly basis is much lower.
We were number one in EVs globally last year, so yeah. Let’s see. And congrats to the Tesla team on making 6 million vehicles all-time. The Tesla fleet is really becoming very substantial. I mean, it’s gonna be 7 million vehicles by the end of this year, over 7 million vehicles.
We have our factory in Fremont is currently the highest-volume auto factory in North America. And we broke the prior production record from when it was NUMMI. It’s actually pretty wild that we have a giant car factory in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s not exactly the cheapest place to have a car factory. It’s like that and the Swiss Alps or something.
But we still manage to make great cars at high volume, and that’s a testament to the great team we’ve got in Fremont. So congrats to the Fremont team.
And a lot of people were saying the Cybertruck is like fake, it’s never gonna come out. And now we’re shipping a lot of Cybertrucks. We hit a weekly record of 1,300.
And I think with the Cybertruck, It really is something special. Some people have like different opinions on the Cybertruck, but if you really want to know if something is cool, if it’s a great product, like show it to a kid, okay?
No filter, okay? A kid’s got like no filter, like a five-year-old, six-year-old, something like that. Or even a three-year-old and say “Which car do you like?” “Cybertruck.”
So it’s like, that’s how you know.
And it’s finally something that it just looks like the future, and it drives so well. It’s comfortable. It’s just a fantastic product. I think it’s our best product, and it’s a lot of innovations. It’s got a 48-volt low-voltage system, finally instead of 12 volts, 800-volt drive train, the world’s biggest castings. It’s bulletproof; all the cool things. It can outpull an F-350 Diesel, which is a very impressive truck, and it can it can do a quarter-mile faster than a Porsche 911 while towing a Porsche 911.
That’s insane! So yeah. If you think about it, how often do companies make products that move your heart that are really special? It’s so rare, and I think this is one of them.
And we launched the upgraded 3, which is actually a fantastic car, I’d recommend trying it out. It’s really a great car, and it’s only $216 after gas savings. Like total cost of ownership is basically 200-something dollars when compared to gasoline cars, a similar gasoline car. So it’s really a great deal and a fun car.
And the Performance, Model 3 Performance, it’s faster than a Porsche 911. It’s just a great, great car. So yeah.
And of course, the Model Y became the best-selling vehicle globally, and this is something that we predicted. I think I said in 2022 the Model Y would be the biggest car in the world by dollar volume sales, and by 2023 it would be the biggest in unit volume, and it was. And again this year it will be the best-selling car on Earth.
The Tesla Semi: we’re in low-volume production of the Tesla Semi, and just last week I approved the plans for volume production of the Tesla Semi.
So we’re gonna make a lot of Semi trucks. We’re gonna start off with… Yeah, it’s something I think it’ll actually move the needle financially. It’s not a small thing. The thing about like, commercial vehicles is that companies that use them are super objective. I mean obviously we’re gonna make it have cool style and be an awesome car.
But for commercial vehicles, the companies that make the buying decisions, they just look and say like, “What are the numbers? Does this cost less to transport or cost more to transport than, say a diesel truck?” And the thing is the economics are much better than a diesel truck. It’s kind of basically a no-brainer.
If you’re a transport company, and you don’t use an electric, the Tesla electric Semi, you’re just losing money. Why would you do that? Do you not like money? Okay. But if you do like money, then I recommend using the Tesla Semi.
So I think this is really going to actually sell at a scale that people will be surprised at, and we’ll actually move the needle financially, and do a lot of good. And also for CO2 and sustainability, because Semis are driven all the time. Actually, even at much smaller numbers, they have a very big effect on total carbon emissions solved.
So obviously, we’ve got some new new products that we’re working on under the covers and I think these are going to be pretty special. Some of them, I think people maybe at first may think, “Oh, it’s not going to be that amazing,” but just wait. It will be.
Our Supercharger network is continuing to grow. Rumors of the death of the Supercharger are greatly exaggerated.
We are in fact, continuing to grow the Supercharger network significantly. In fact, this year, I think we’re deploying more Superchargers this year that are actually working, than the rest of industry combined. Just FYI.
Now we are gonna be more careful about the capital efficiency of where we deploy Superchargers. But for sure, any place that has congestion, any sort of missing parts of the map that we’re missing, we’re gonna put the Superchargers there. Even for the remainder of the year, we expect to spend about half a billion dollars on on Supercharger deployment, so it’s very significant, and it will be a well spent half a billion. It’s a lot.
This is actually not showing a bunch of new markets that will be opening up later this year and next. We obviously want Tesla to be worldwide, and there’s still a lot of countries that have zero to very few Teslas, and we obviously want Tesla everywhere. So there are a lot of new markets that we’re gonna open up later this year or next.
We’re also opening our Superchargers to other companies… That’s the adapter to the old, somewhat clunky connector. But our goal is to be helpful to other car companies, so any companies that are going electric, we do want to be helpful to them with our Supercharger network. So we’re providing them with adapters and enabling them to have access to the Tesla Supercharger network, because we think it’s better to do that than to create a walled garden that inhibits EV growth.
And we’re also innovating a lot in battery production with the 4680 that’s built right here. And it is it’s a hard problem, like there are entire companies that just make battery cells, that’s all they do. But we’re making good progress. All the Cybertrucks that you see use the Tesla 4680 cell, and we have a clear path to the 4680 being, we think, probably the most competitive cell from a manufacturing efficiency standpoint.
But it is a hard problem, I have to say. There’s quite a lot of brain damage required to be good at cell manufacturing. It’s like a brain damage high. But I think it does give Tesla resilience in the face of… if there are changes in the, I don’t know, geopolitical situation somehow. It’s good to have some independence in cell manufacturing.
We’re making steady progress and we also have the cathode refinery, which you can see behind the main factory; you can sort of see it in the picture there. That’s the cathode refinery and then we’ve got the lithium refinery in South Texas, and so we’re just making sure we’ve kind of got the pieces of the puzzle.
If you were to look at sort of a video of how Tesla does say cathode and lithium refining and how the rest of industry does it, it’s night and day. I mean, you can sort of eat off the floor in the Tesla refinery and I would not recommend doing so in the others. We’re definitely going very vertical here, but I think it’s a wise investment that will pay off more than people realize.
I don’t think this thing is working.
So this year, we’re also on track to complete a massive number of energy deployments, so that is a gigantic increase in deployment capability. We seem to be tracking to sort of a 200- to 300-percent year-over-year growth in energy storage deployment and stationary pack. So it’s giant. And the the limiting factor really is being able to build more Megapacks and build more Powerwalls.
So we’re ramping up production of the Powerwall 3, which is really a game-changer for, at the personal level. The Powerwall 3… It usually takes about three iterations of any given technology to really… for it to be something where it’s like “Okay, now we’re really hitting the sweet spot.” So Powerwall 3 is like, an epic product.
The Megapack is also—I’d call it sort of iteration two of the Megapack—is also an epic product. With the Megapack 3, which is, I don’t know, probably a couple years away, we’ll start actually absorbing more and more of the substation of the sort of power electronics. I sort of think you want to get to the point with the Megapack where you can literally just take the high-voltage power lines and plug them in. There’s no substation. We just plug them in. Just drop them down and drop it down, and plug it in, and now it works.
Which is like mind-blowing for the utility industry by the way. They’re like “What?” Yeah, just plug the wires in and it’ll work for very high voltage. So that I think is actually going to be major. So yeah, this is great. Excellent work by the energy storage team.
Services and other are also looking good, so we’re actually now making money on the services and other stuff. So this is a kind of a big deal. And Tesla’s obviously way more than a car company. We do a lot of software Tesla. Roughly half, or a very huge percentage, of the engineering we do is actually software engineering.
So Tesla is, I’d say, as much a software company as it is a hardware company. This is a very big deal because car companies are not software companies normally. So this matters a lot. Things like our auto bidder software for energy storage, all the software that controls the cars, the Megapacks, the Powerwalls, the solar, obviously for AI and Full-Self Driving are a big deal, insurance, services, and collisions.
Tesla also writes a lot of software internally that helps, that we call the Tesla operating system internally, that is head and shoulders above what any other company has I think probably better than any Fortune 500 company. The Tesla internal software is it’s just way better. It’s just far more than what people normally think of as a car company.
And Tesla is also the leader in real-world AI. So there’s really… this is a big deal. Tesla is ahead of Google, Meta, anyone on real world software. Actually taking in video and making decisions based on video. No one can no one is even close. And it’s getting better, I say with each passing month, if not each passing week.
It’s also worth noting that Tesla is actually pretty good at chip design. So the the AI inference chip that was designed by Tesla, that’s in cars, we had sort of our Hardware 3 AI inference, cars made over the past year have the Hardware 4. We’ve just completed design on Hardware 5, which we’re now calling AI 5, because it really is… There still actually is not a chip from Nvidia, and I have a lot respect for Nvidia, or from any company that we would prefer to put in our car, that is better than what we have in the car.
We started from scratch in chip design, just as we started from scratch in AI software, and we have the best real-world AI software, and the best AI inference chip in the world from nothing. So this is a big deal.
And the the capability of the chips in the car is dramatic. Right now, all the cars are actually training. We have Hardware 4 run Hardware 3 in emulation mode. So we’ll continue to make significant progress on Hardware 3, but later this year, we’ll actually bifurcate—continue working on Hardware 3, training on Hardware 3—but then do separate training on Hardware 4 that will be the sort of training cluster that we’re building at the south side of the Gigafactory.
And that’ll be dedicated Hardware 4 video and inference. Hardware 4 has cameras that have about four or five times better resolution and, depending on how you count the sort of Hardware 4, it’s about anywhere from three to eight times better than Hardware 3.
But everything you’re seeing thus far is just Hardware 3, and we still have a long way to go before we reach the limits of Hardware 3. So Hardware 3 I think will still do amazing things, but Hardware 4 I think will probably do about five times better. Then Hardware 5, which comes out in about 18 months or so, is 10 times more capable than Hardware 4. It’s like a, if you know Nvidia hardware, it’s sort of a B200-class computer.
So what we’ll just progressively do is improve how many nines of reliability the car gets, and then of course that will go into Optimus as well, so the same chip will go into—Hardware 4 will go into, is in Optimus—Hardware, AI 5, which will be switching from Hardware 5 to AI 5, will be in Optimus and in all cars in about 18 months.
And it’s really just a staggering amount of compute, and it’s very power efficient compute, because if you’re in a mobile application like a humanoid robot or a car, you can’t just be sucking down 10 kW, like you can in a data center. So you’ve got to be very power efficient.
So Hardware 3 and 4 are only a few hundred watts. It’s hard. The Hardware 5 will be able to go probably up to about 700 or 800 watts, but it’ll power fluctuate contingent upon the complexity of the scene that it is in. So if it is in a parking lot stationary, you know, you don’t have to think very much. Just like a person, like if you’re in a complicated traffic scenario, you’ve got to think a lot more than if you’re just cruising along on an empty road.
But something that I think is potentially interesting down the road is, like at some point the Tesla fleet I think will probably be over 100 million vehicles, and if each vehicle has a kilowatt of efficient inference compute, I think there’s a sort of an Amazon Web Services AWS-type opportunity.
Because if you’ve got 100 million vehicles with a kilowatt of efficient inference compute, you’ve got 100 gigawatts of compute. Like 100 gigawatts of compute is a lot, and it’s distributed all over the world.
So when the car is not in autonomous mode, which I think probably is, doing Robotaxi work maybe 50-60 hours a week, but about 100 hours a week, it’s not. It’s probably stationary. So there’s 100 hours of 100 gigawatts of inference compute, which I think we should use. Why not?
You know, when people looked at Amazon, which started out obviously as an online bookseller, and it has grown to be like this incredible place where you can buy anything. And then Amazon Web Services, like they’ve got all these computers that only really see peak usage sometimes. But what are they going to do when it’s not peak usage? And sometimes Amazon servers are down like 10 percent. So that’s when they said, “Well, let’s do Amazon Web Services.”
And then Amazon Web Services became more valuable than the entire rest of Amazon.
Anyway, I think there’s there’s some kind of opportunity there, that’s pretty significant for Tesla down the road. Again, nobody’s really factoring that in, but I think that that actually will be quite significant.
We also are no longer compute constrained for training, and I check in with the team and it’s like “Is there anything we can do to improve the pace of progress with respect to training and inference?” And currently, that is not the limiting factor. In fact, the limiting factor right now is that the amount of miles between interventions is so long that it takes quite a while to figure out which version is better than the other version, because none of them are requiring any interventions.
So it’s like, if you start getting to like thousands of miles between interventions or like 10,000 miles to get an intervention, then, the average person only drives about 10,000 miles in a year.
And if it’s like in an urban environment, and the average speed is 20 miles an hour, I mean, our professional test drivers get pretty bored, frankly. They’re like, “Okay, I drove all week, and there was no intervention.” Like the highlight of the week would be like, “Yes, an intervention finally.” It’s like getting to that point.
So this is where actually having a giant fleet is extremely important, because we can deploy a new FSD model and run it in Shadow Mode and see how well it performs. Compare how the human drives the car versus the new self-driving build, and then analyze that delta in Shadow Mode, like the shadow knows, or doesn’t know, just in case maybe, and then be able to assess by getting billions of miles very quickly with the giant fleet.
That data engine is incredibly helpful. Like actually, it’s not possible to solve the self-driving problem without having millions of vehicles on the road. So that’s actually… it’s like figuring out clever ways to test how good the next FSD build is, is actually a limiting factor right now.
And then of course, so we are building another training data center, right here, which will be dedicated to Hardware 4 training. So we’ll bifurcate Hardware 3 and Hardware 4 training later this year, we’ll keep improving Hardware 3, but we’re going to uncork the full capability of Hardware 4 as well. So yeah.
But I think most people here have tried out version 12. We did say Unsupervised Full Self-Driving would be version 12, so we are actually just keeping the version arbitrarily at 12, and then like pulling a 12.3, 12.4, 12.5. But it’s actually really like version 13, version 14. But anyway, it’s just an arbitrary designation.
So 12.4 is actually like a whole different version than 12.3, and 12.5 is a whole different version 12.4. So, you’ll see a really giant improvements I think sometimes factor 10 improvements in between successive versions.
And then, as I mentioned, the way it’ll work for the existing fleet is you’ll be able to add or subtract your car to the fleet as you’d like. And there will also be Tesla-owned cars, so it’ll be a combination of like, Uber plus Airbnb.
But it’ll be pretty wild that there’ll be a software update and then the whole the whole fleet suddenly becomes accessible. It’s like suddenly you’ve got, I don’t know, 7 million, 10 million cars, ultimately tens of millions of cars, that can do autonomous driving, and instead of being used 10 hours a week, can be used 50 or 60 hours a week.
So it’s pretty wild to just be in Palo Alto with a bunch of cubes and then a humanoid robot just walks past.
We’ve made a massive amount of progress with Optimus in a short period of time, from someone pretending to be a robot dancing in a suit, to a pretty hodgepodge robot, to a robot that is actually doing useful tasks in the factory today. So we have two Opimus robots in our Fremont factory that are doing basically this task, which is take taking cells off the line and placing them in a shipping container.
We actually have quite a few of these cruising around our offices in Palo Alto. And I think we’ve got one major hardware revision, which should be done by end of this year or early next. And then we’ll move into a limited production next year of Optimus—limited production for use in our factories where we’ll test out the product, kind of, as I say, sort of eat our own dog food or whatever, the electronic equipment, that is.
But I think like next year, my prediction is next year we’ll have over over 1,000, maybe a few thousand, Optimus robots working at Tesla.
And things are going to scale up very rapidly from there. So we’ll iron out the bugs. The degree of autonomy will be radically better. You’ll just literally be able to talk to it and say “Please do this task,” or “I’m going to show you something, now do that the thing that I’m showing you.”
And it’ll get to the point where it can watch a video of something, like a person, and then learn just by looking at that video and do that task. So yeah.
So really it’s gonna be quite something. And I’m confident of the prediction that there will be more… like the ratio of humanoid robots to humans will be greater than one to one. So there’ll be more than 10 billion humanoid robots in the world, probably 20 or more, and Tesla’s gonna be by far the leader in that.
You’re seeing a lot of robot startups. But I think it’s actually very challenging to do Optimus as a robot startup. Because what we’ve found, to make Optimus work we’ve had to design from first principles, from scratch, every part of the robot. So the motors, the gearbox, the sensors, the power electronics, the communication system, everything had to be done from scratch. We found that there’s basically nothing, there’s no supply chain.
So even though there are many electric motors made in the world, there’s no supply chain for the types of motors and sensors and gearboxes that are needed for a humanoid robot. What you’re seeing here is our current generation, a hand and arm which has 11 degrees of freedom, our next generation has 22 degrees of freedom. It will be able to play the piano. So it’s really like “Wow.”
Now of course, like I said, we need to make sure you don’t have the Terminator scenario. That’s very important. So safety of the humanoid robot will be very important.
But because it requires so much ground-up design, designing every motor, gearbox, sensor, power electronics, from scratch, it’s very hard for a startup to, if not impossible, for a startup to replicate that. But at Tesla, we have the world’s best electrical engineering. I think we’ve got the world’s best mechanical engineering for for gearboxes and for electric motors, power electronics. So we have the resources to do that and it applies quite well.
And then you also have to have the brain. You need a power-efficient inference computer, which we’ve got for the car and we’ll be using in Optimus. You need the best in real-world AI, and Tesla has the best in real-world AI. So you need all of these. You need a very strong hand of cards in order to make a compelling robot.
And then you also need to be very good at scale manufacturing. So in order to have the robot not cost like hundreds of thousands of dollars, in order to make it cost like $10,000 or $20,000, you actually need to design for manufacturing and be very good at manufacturing.
In my experience, prototypes are easy compared to volume manufacturing. Prototypes are easy, production is hard, relatively speaking. Tesla has the production capability, it has the engineering capability, and it has the AI, hardware, and software capability.
Even the most optimistic estimates that I’ve seen for Optimus, the Optimus optimist, I think underaccount the magnitude of of what the robot will be able to do. You know, as I said at the beginning of the presentation, I agree with the Ark Invest analysis that autonomous transport is called sort of a $5 to $7 trillion market cap situation. Optimus I think is a $25… literally a $25 trillion market cap situation.
Now, I don’t want to trivialize what’s necessary to get there. I mean, it’s an immense amount of work that is required to get there, like super difficult. But we are moving very fast down that road, and we’re gonna make it happen. So, thank you.
I guess with that, we can go to Q&A. Oh, I guess we’ve got mics lined up. Dive for the mic.
Unknown stockholder: Hey Elon. Last year, I thank you for making the world a better place for my son to live in, and I wasn’t clear. In particular, I was referring to what you’ve done for the First Amendment and our rights.
Elon Musk: Thank you.
Unknown stockholder: History will not forget it, and the sacrifices you made, and the risks you took will pay off and have paid off.
Elon Musk: Thank you. Well I very much appreciate that. You have to say like, “Why was the First Amendment so important?” You know, because people came here from places where if they spoke their mind, they’d be put in prison, or killed, or just shut out from society, ostracized. And so freedom speech is absolutely fundamental to a good future. And yeah, that’s the reason for, you know, acquiring a Twitter and just making it a free speech platform.
I think it’s like, very important to just the future of civilization. So, thank you.
Ronnie, Employee Shareholder: Hey Elon, my name is Ronnie. I’m on your right side. How’s it going? Hey. I work for Tesla sales in Orland Park, Illinois, and I was always wondering, do you think Tesla could ever move forward towards bundling software as like a package to, possibly increase take rate for FSD? You know, maybe bundle it with premium connectivity and future software options?
Elon Musk: I think we definitely want to encourage people to try FSD, and one of the things that I think probably makes sense, is that when we have a significant improvement, every time we have a significant improvement in FSD, give your customers a like, two-week free trial. So like, “Hey, we’ve made an improvement to FSD, try it for another two weeks.”
With 12.4, we finally get rid of the steering wheel nag which I know was driving people crazy. Like, thank heaven for small mercies.
Even just something like that, not having the steering wheel nag, and obviously having a far lower intervention count, like far more miles between interventions. So I think we’ll keep, sort of offering people free trials of FSD every time we make a significant improvement.
I’m sorry, yeah. When you hear the loud speakers, ears don’t work.
Justin (Bearded Tesla Guy), Shareholder: Good afternoon. Two questions, actually. First, after $56 billion, you can afford to probably take your kids to Disneyland now. Is that where you’re going?
Elon Musk: Well, and by the way, it is worth emphasizing that it’s Tesla stock that I have to own for five years, so you know, it’s not possible to like, it’s not actually cash and I can’t cut and run, nor would I want to. But I’ve actually been to Disneyland, Disneyworld many times with the kids. It’s a little tough for me to go these days without causing a ruckus.
Maybe I should just like, wear a Mickey Mouse outfit and just go and pretend I’m like one of the people in the park.
Justin (Bearded Tesla Guy), Shareholder: So as we work on autonomy, and we’re getting to that threshold where things are getting to seriously advanced level, eventually there are going to be some harsh consequences. Part of breaking through, right? And I’m just curious where your mind is at on that, and have you thought about, some of those early consequences that we’re unfortunately going to have to have, in order to have a better, safer future. I’m just wondering.
Elon Musk: You mean like scary robots, or what?
Justin (Bearded Tesla Guy), Shareholder: No, no, in the cars with Full Self-Driving.
Elon Musk: Okay.
Justin (Bearded Tesla Guy), Shareholder: Like, we’ve seen some companies that there’s been some unfortunate mishaps, and they’ve just straight up closed shop and, you know, I know that’s not the plan, but those are real consequences of developing this technology, and I’m just wondering where your mind is at on that.
Elon Musk: Yeah, well, we are we do try to be very careful with the deployment of FSD. And we do have a lot of cars so like, inevitably, when there are a lot of cars and you’ve got billions of miles, you do have the law of large numbers, where “Okay, there’s a small chance of something bad happening.” But when you look at the sort of safety-per-mile, because we’ve got a lot of miles, it’s very clear that the safety-per-mile is better than human driving.
So, we can show that to regulators and obviously make our case of the public and say like, “Actually, human driving is not perfect.” There’s a person killed roughly every 80 million miles. So I think like 35,000 to 40,000 people are killed every year in the U.S. from auto accidents.
What matters is, “Are we making that number smaller?” And as long as we’re making that number smaller, we’re doing the right thing.
Bikash (?), Shareholder: Hey Elon, this is Bikash (?), I have one question.
Elon Musk: Sure. Sorry I…
Bikash (?), Shareholder: So we know that, we love you all from our bottom of the heart. We love you so much, Elon.
Elon Musk: Thank you, love you too.
Bikash (?), Shareholder: My question is like, we all know Tesla will be the most valuable company in the world one day. We just want to know if you have any prediction when and what is the inflection point.. when we can say this is the inflection point. Is it solving the FSD, or is it like Optimus on-ground will be that point, from your perspective?
Elon Musk: Well, as I mentioned before, I think it’s worth looking at the the Ark Invest analysis. I think that is the most accurate analysis. Their prediction is, I think $5 to $7 trillion by 2029 market cap. So more than 10 times what things are today, in five years. I think that is accurate.
Bikash (?), Shareholder: Thank you.
Unknown Shareholder: Hey, Elon, a huge fan and I think history will show that you’ve had a profound impact on humanity. So I think that’s just given.
Just a couple questions, I guess. I’ve fixed my Tesla addiction by putting cars on Turo and I found that about half my renters, it’s the first time they’re driving a Tesla, and then the other half really want to buy one after they’ve tried it out. So I guess a couple questions.
When could we expect maybe the referral program to come back if it would come back? And could we also get a passenger van, like a 12-passenger van sometime soonish.
Elon Musk: I’ll add that to my list. So the referral program… Yeah. I think we’ll re-examine the referral program probably next quarter.
It is very important to sort of look at the, what is the fully considered cost of a Tesla? So, with the referral program, it effectively increases the price of the car. So, you know, is the price increase… What is better for the end customer: a slight price increase because the referral program, or not?
But we’ll re-examine that I think in, next quarter and see if it makes sense. I think some kind of referral program does make sense.
But I think for a lot of people, like by far the biggest thing we see is that people just can’t afford the car. That’s the biggest thing. Like, that’s the limiter on demand. You can imagine in the limit, if there was say like if Model Y cost like less than $20,000, it would probably sell like, probably 5 million units. It’d be insane.
Now that’s not feasible, you know, today, but I think working on figuring out ways to make more affordable vehicles is really the game changer. For most people, it is really not a question of whether they want a Tesla—they do want a Tesla—they simply do not have enough money to afford one. So we have to make it affordable. That’s essential.
Thank you.
Hamza, Shareholder: Hey Elon, I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Hamza. First of all, thank you for introducing me to Anuarbek, he and I are now close, thanks to you. And I moved to Austin, thanks to you.
My question is basically for FSD transfer: I think that should be something that should be ongoing. I think not only on the benefit of you for getting more people on the fleet and getting statistics and info, but also as Tesla owners, it makes us want to get the next model and transfer over.
For instance, the thing that’s been holding me back is wanting to wait for the FSD transfer again. So is there a reason why you haven’t implemented that for like ongoing time?
Elon Musk: It is pretty complex for us to do this. It sort of adds a fair bit of complexity to the sales process, but yeah. And it is tough, because we’ve got to earn revenue somehow, so… You know, transfer is tough.
Shareholder, from the audience: “One more quarter!”
Elon Musk: Sorry? One more quarter? Okay, one more quarter. Alright, you got it—one more quarter. Alright.
Unknown Shareholder: Elon thank you for hosting us. If you can see me I’m trembling uncontrollably. I really look up to you. Shareholder, consumer, tripled my humble, tiny little portion of your shares the last two days, just being engaged, knowing we were coming here. And appreciate you hosting shareholders, and it means so much to us.
Elon Musk: You’re welcome.
Unknown Shareholder: You’re an absolute idol. This question comes because I care about you as a human being, but in the context of being a shareholder, unlocking these values of Optimus, we need you. And just with all the global uncertainty, you’re so high-profile, I just want to make sure you’re doing everything to take care of yourself, safety, and health for the future of the company.
I say that because I care about you as a person, but since this is a shareholder meeting in the spirit of shareholder value.
Elon Musk: Well, thank you I appreciate the kind sentiments. Yeah, I think I probably need to like work out. And like, not get assassinated or something, you know.
I mean, it is getting a little crazy these days. Like to first approximation, the probability that a homicidal maniac will try to kill you is proportionate to how many homicidal maniacs hear your name. Okay.
They hear my name a lot, so I’m like, “Okay, I’m on the list,” you know.
Yeah, so we actually did have two homicidal maniacs in the last roughly seven months come to aspirationally try to kill me, and a bunch of other people. So it’s not just me. And then there wasn’t like an actual issue that they articulated, they were just in the homicidal maniac career, so I do need to be kind of careful.
Which is not great because it like forces me to be a bit more sort of standoffish. So now, I’ve stopped signing things because that’d be a sure way to like, homicidal maniac, I’ll just have him sign something and then shoot him, that type of thing. So I have to be like more standoffish and stuff.
Which I prefer not to be, but it seems wise. Like John Lennon, who was like singing about like, “Hey, can’t we all just be nice to each other?” And then he got shot, by one of his fans.
And you’re like, “Okay.” We’re trying to avoid that.
So, anyway, I appreciate the kind sentiments. I will endeavor to stay alive and keep…
Unknown Shareholder: Hi, Elon. I was reading an article the other day: does Tesla still have somewhere in the product timeline a home HVAC system in the works.
Elon Musk: A home interact system. We do not have a home interact system that I’m aware of. No, no, we do not one.
Unknown Shareholder: HVAC system.
Elon Musk: Oh, HVAC system. Yeah yeah, sure. Yeah, in the list of things that would be like more useful than… like it would be nice to do would be a great HVAC system that is very power-efficient and you know has like a built-in HEPA filter, and like take a lot of things that we’ve learned in the car and apply that to home HVAC.
Because actually, maybe there is a great home HVAC system out there, but I haven’t found it, which is pretty wild. And just building in the filtration system and being able to sort of maybe also control humidity somewhat, and like I said, be super efficient and quiet, which are all things that we do in the car.
That would be a pretty sweet thing to do. Maybe we can combine that with the Powerwall or something. On the list of things to do, that is not super high, but it would be it would be cool to do that one day.
Sandeep (?) Shareholder: Hi Elon, this is Sandeep (?). I just want to thank you for making the Cybertruck.
Elon Musk: You’re welcome.
Sandeep (?) Shareholder: Yeah, kids love it. Really. My four and six year old, they love it.
Elon Musk: Exactly. That’s what I was saying kids, it’s like amazing.
Sandeep (?) Shareholder: I went to Disney last week. Nobody looks at Disney, everybody looks at Cybertruck. And there’s a funny story if you may allow. So we were preparing my daughter. We went to Destin and then from there we were driving to Disney and then we were preparing my daughter—she’s four years—to just get used to lines, and you know, you have to have a lot of patience to get in the line.
And she’s like, “Dada, why don’t we just say ‘we’ll show you our Cybertruck and then we will cut the lines.’”
I mean, she got used to it because we were trying Superchargers and then everybody was coming over taking pictures.
Elon Musk: Sure.
Sandeep (?) Shareholder: It’s a funny story, you know. Yeah. And then I have a request. Would you allow a six-year-old to tour the factory, maybe someday in the future? Right now, it’s capped at 12 years. Even though we have referral rewards, it’s capped at 12 years. Would you allow the kids to tour to the factory? Maybe they can see the robots? Maybe you can make it an event or something like that?
Elon Musk: Yeah, sure. Yeah maybe we can have like a… I’m always worried kids’ safety and stuff. In case a kid like, goes running off into like, the robot cell or something.
But yeah, we could I think lower the… maybe have like a more limited tour that enables younger kids to go. Sure, we’ll do that.
Unknown Shareholder: Donald Trump has been a big critic of electric vehicles. But last week, he surprised us by saying he’s a big fan of Tesla, and a big fan of you. What did you tell him?
Elon Musk: Well, you know, I can be persuasive. So yeah.
Actually, I don’t exactly know why he… that’s a good question. I mean, I have had some conversations with him and he does call me out of the blue, for no reason. I don’t know why, but he does.
And it’s like, he’s very nice when he calls. And you know, I was like, “You know, electric cars, I think are pretty good for the future. America’s the leader in electric cars, you know. Buy America and stuff.”
Oh, and I think he actually, a lot of his friends now have Teslas and they all love it, and he’s a huge fan of the Cybertruck. So, I think those may be contributing factors.
Keanu, Shareholder: Hey Elon, on your right. Yeah, my name is Keanu, longtime fan of your like, brand and company and everything. I’m wondering when you take the driver out of the seat for the driverless car, how do you plan to handle interventions, which I’m sure will happen at some rate, even if they’re rare?
Elon Musk: Yeah, so there’s, I mean, clearly we want to make sure that if there’s no driver in the car, the probability of a severe intervention is extremely low. We we want to make sure that the car is extremely cautious around vulnerable road users like cyclists or pedestrians. So really, we’d want the, the probability of hurting a pedestrian or cyclist to be incredibly low, like, way lower than someone driving a car.
Now, then there are interventions that happen where the car is simply like, I don’t know, it gets stuck down a one-way street, where like crazy construction situation that, in which case it’ll basically phone home and say “Help, I’m stuck.”
And then I think we can probably solve a lot of these things just by you know, remoting into the car and kind of like staring at like a giant RC car. That’s what I’m guessing. That’s what I think we’ll do.
Anuarbek, Shareholder: Hey Elon, Anuarbek from Kazakhstan. Thanks for installing Superchargers I just want to acknowledge Tesla Boomer Mama and Sawyer Merritt for all the efforts they did to organize the…
There’s an after party, to celebrate, at Lustre Pearl East if you guys want to come and celebrate all the efforts for the community. Congratulations Elon. Thank you.
Shareholder: Thaks for hosting today, Elon. It’s about four years since you did battery day and throughout those very ambitious targets of getting to a Terawatt-hour of batteries, and earlier in your presentation you alluded to the great difficulty of scaling up this new technology.
I think as shareholders we’re most interested… can you tell us a little bit more, because in terms of affordability, which you also mentioned as this huge burden, these 4680s get manufacturing credits and also on the consumer side, get large credits as well. If you could scale that so that we could produce full level of Cybertrucks and also start to put them back in the Y and the 3, potentially, it would greatly improve affordability and be great in terms of scale.
Elon Musk: Sure. So achieving affordability is actually at this point more about the rest of the car than it is actually about the battery pack.
So, like the price per kWh of cells from suppliers has dropped dramatically. So there was a massive spike for a few years in the cost of of lithium-ion cells from suppliers, because every car manufacturer put in gigantic orders for battery packs, like giant, giant orders. So the price of like, of lithium and like all the raw materials and the battery cells went crazy. It doubled. The price of sales doubled. The price of lithium I think went up at almost like five-fold, or like 500 percent like went up crazy numbers.
So since then, suppliers, battery cell suppliers have increased their supply, and the orders from other car manufacturers have declined. So, I mean, it is worth noting that it’s tough sledding out there for EVs. You know, GM announced I think a 50-percent reduction in recently in their EVs. Ford announced reductions. I think almost every manufacturer has announced reductions in their electric vehicle plans.
Now, Tesla we’re going to increase, but it is not an easy market. To get the cost of the car down it’s really… the battery pack is a piece of the puzzle, but it’s really everything else too. So I really would describe like, making a car more affordable, it’s like Game of Thrones but pennies. Game of pennies.
So there’s called to first approximation 10,000 unique items in a car, and if each each one costs five bucks, then you’ve got a $50,000 car. So to actually get the cost of car down, you’ve got to chisel away pennies, and to get the 10,000 items to be, you know, $3 instead of $5. That’s kind of what it amounts to.
Now, with respect to our own cell production, we do see a path to cost parity by the end of this year. A very difficult path to cost parity. Currently, 4680s cost more than our suppliers. Now, they cost more than the suppliers today, but they cost less than suppliers a year ago.
So you know, there’s a bit of a feast famine thing with with battery cell supply. It’s kind of like for DRAM chips. Like, the DRAM industry goes from like, over supply to under supply. The price of DRAM changes like crazy.
It’s kind of like that for cells. So we expect to achieve cost parity with even the much lower supplier sell price today, by the end of the year.
Unknown Shareholder: Hi, Mr. Musk. I’ve been a long-term investor since 2012. I voted for your compensation package in 2018 and again this year, and shout out to Tesla Boomer Mama, Alexandra. I had the privilege to talk to you in 2013 briefly and you spoke about the truck which became the Cybertruck. You’re a man of your word.
I have friends all over the world in Asia, Canada, and Europe. And I know the Cybertruck has been on tour. How’s been the reception for it, the Cybertruck, and when will it be, or is it possible to sell, and when will it be sold internationally?
Elon Musk: Yeah, so I think probably, we might be able to certify it for other markets sometime next year. But like for sure this year, it’s just North America.
We did design the car to North American requirements, because if you start going with a superset of all international requirements, it forces a lot of constraints on the Cybertruck that would make the product, frankly, worse.
So I think we’ll need to make a special version that is, for example, China-compliant or Europe-compliant.
But it realy doesn’t make sense to add that complexity until we’ve achieved a higher-volume production on the Cybertruck. There’s still a lot of work to do on cost down for the Cybertruck. I generally would say like the level of difficulty of going from, say, a prototype, you go from a prototype to production, it’s 100 times harder to go from, you know, prototype to production is 100 times harder, and then once you reach production, to improve the price by 20 percent, like, the cost of goods by 20 percent, is harder than reaching production in the first place.
Like it’s mega pain. To be frank, it’s not the funnest job in the world. Like chiseling pennies is not… it’s like washing the dishes, frankly, like wash a lot of dishes here. Like it’s super fun to make prototypes. That’s really fun and it’s kind of cool to get, it’s pretty cool to get the production going. Then the cost of production is a grind. That is like, you know, it’s hard work.
You know, there’s some reward to it. Like the sort of a reward to washing the dishes, I guess. You have clean dishes. But that is a tough… so, that’s real hard work.
Unknown Shareholder: I just have to say that there’s been a really big reception, like I have friends message me that they loved the Cybertruck design, and it’s definitely head-turner.
Elon Musk: Oh, yeah. I think from a demand standpoint, we would have plenty of demand in other parts of the world for Cybertruck. No question. Like wherever it goes anywhere in the world, it gets a massive crowd.
So it’s not a demand thing, it’s really we’ve got to reach volume production, go through the cost grind. It would be difficult to overstate the difficulty in the cost grind. It’s really intense. And then we’ve got to recertify the car, which includes making some design changes for it to meet, to be compliant in other markets.
Unknown Shareholder: Good afternoon, Elon. I like your shoes. I don’t know if everybody else can see them out there. Cybertruck. Yeah. My question was, in regards to the Foundation Series, do you guys have a certain number that you are planning on making or a timeline of when the non-Foundation Series are going to come out?
Elon Musk: Yeah, we’ll start making the… We’ll end the foundation series actually pretty soon and the non-Foundation Series sometime next quarter.
Michael, Shareholder: Hi, Elon. Thank you for delivering shareholder value, and congrats on your pay package. And I’m Michael, I ask a lot of questions on the quarterly investor calls. And I wanted to ask you, can you give a little bit more color on the neural net scaling laws that you’re seeing as you’re training FSD? Like how much data, how much more inference compute, how much more training compute do you need for each successive nine in reliability of the Full Self-Driving software? And how much data are you currently collecting? Thank you.
Elon Musk: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, that’s something that we go through, really every week at Tesla. I spend a lot of time with the Tesla AI team, and I think probably like, a huge portion of, I mean, it’s really like, a big part of my job is like, “Okay, we need to get the car to drive itself.”
And yeah, you need to solve things on a chip level for inference for training. For software, there’s also massive data storage challenges because you have petabytes of video coming in. And even for, say, for a big Nvidia cluster, it’s actually really hard to make a big Nvidia video cluster actually work in training. It doesn’t just open the box and plug it in. It’s not like that at all. It’s like a massive effort required to get a big trading cluster to operate at all, and then to operate with high uptime.
With respect to like the various versions that we’re seeing, like you go from version 12.3, just ignore the 12 and think of it like 3, 4, 5, 6, that’s actually the way to think about it. Ignore the 12 part and just call it like version 3, version 4, version 5, version 6. That’s how to think about it.
Between each one, there’s anywhere from, I don’t know, a minimum of a doubling of improvement to, in some cases, I think, a five- to 10-fold improvement. Especially as we eliminate sort of, say… I think we’re close to eliminating almost all static-object collisions. So, you know, like curbs and medians. Like, we’re pretty close to having it, to have almost zero static object collisions.
So once you get to zero static… now you have a gigantic improvement in miles between interventions.
Then you get into classes of dynamic objects that are in different classes and different, things can get obviously very complicated. If you’ve got a complex intersection with traffic lights all over the place, and like somebody bumped the one traffic light, and now it’s pointing in the wrong direction, or the traffic light’s broken, and there’s someone who is not obeying the traffic laws because they’re just running a red or they got confused about traffic light. So you get these very complex situations that are much harder to solve.
And then, like I was saying earlier, it actually gets, as the system gets better, it gets harder to figure out which AI model is better, because now you know, like, “Okay, it’s thousands of miles between interventions.”
How do we, as quickly as possible, figure out which AI model is better. And when you make these different AI models, they’re obviously not like super deterministic, so we have a new model that eliminates one problem but creates another problem. So we’re trying to solve this by a combination of simulation, uploading models, having them run in Shadow Mode.
It’s actually kind of helpful that not everyone has Full Self-Driving, because we can see, we can run it in Shadow Mode and see, “What would this new model have done compared to what the user did?”
So since we’ve got, you know, millions of cars that we can do this with, that gives us a delta between what the AI model predicted would do and the user would do. And if you kind of sum up the errors between them, you can see “Oh, there was a bigger error stack from this model versus that model,” when you uploaded them into, each uploaded them into 100,000 cars.
But that’s the biggest limiter right now. It’s not training, it’s not data, it’s actually testing the AI models.
And then figuring out clever ways to figure out if a new model is better or not. Like there were sort of particular intersections that are difficult. And so if we just, like all the models will be great at like driving on a well-painted road, with no intersection. They’ll all be great at that. But will they be great at the complicated…
So we’ve identified several thousand intersections in the United States where we’ll actually take the new model and try the car in those very difficult intersections. Like the, you know, the sort of famous like “Chuck’s left turn.” So if you imagine Chuck’s left turn—hey Chuck. I wonder what the neighbors think.
But there’s many such complicated traffic situations in the country. So we’ve identified several thousand, which we then send cars to those locations to compare the models.
And then as I mentioned, as we’ve yet to uncork any of the ability of Hardware 4, which we’ll do later this year. So I think the exponential rate of improvement of miles between intervention will continue and will accelerate.
Unknown Shareholder: Hey Elon. I was wondering if, as you’ve called it, a Tesla is basically a robot with wheels, and so I’m wondering, as that logic transfers over to Optimus, what kind of… Will Tesla use any large language models on top of the current Tesla robotics capabilities? And also, if so, will Optimus have any kind of personality? And would that be something that the end user might be able to have control over?
Elon Musk: Yes, to all of those questions. Yes to all. Like we’re headed for a wild future. Wild, wild wild. Cars will drive themselves, people will have super helpful humanoid help robots. And yeah, you’ll be able to customize the personality, customize the voice. And really, the robot will kind of get to know you as well, and get to know your preferences. You won’t even have to say things because it’ll just kind of understand you.
I think we’ll get to this point where it’s like, it’ll be odd not to have a robot buddy, sort of, not to have your C-3PO and R2-D2.
Max, Shareholder: Hi, Elon. Max here, huge fan. Thank you for hosting us. I wanted to ask you, how much integration work do you think will be needed to deploy Optimus into different types of factories, industries? Like unique technicians, or just have them go watch? How do you foresee that?
Elon Musk: Well, I think if you fast forward a few years, it really will be quite a generalized robot, like I’d say two years from now. Like next year… this year it’s quite specific, task-specific training. So to do a particular task, we have to kind of do a fair bit of training to solve that task.
But over time, I think you sort of accumulate these kind of training primitives where like, calling walking, for example, is a training primitive. Picking something, identifying an object, and grabbing it, would be a primitive.
And these primitives are then generalized to anything. So you can say “Pick up a cup, pick up a shirt, fold the shirt.” These these things will generalize quite quickly.
So I expect probably not next year, but like in 2026, it’s really the kind of thing where you could tell it to do kind of a wide range of tasks, including tasks where it has not specifically done that exact thing before. Probably, I’m guessing, 2026.
Max, Shareholder: And do you foresee a cheaper version where tasks don’t require like walking for example, so the hardware will become a lot simpler, or cheaper?
Elon Musk: We’re gonna focus on making just a fantastic humanoid robot at scale, and really achieving scale economies and building that humanoid robot. At very high volume, if you’re really good at manufacturing, you can get the cost of almost anything down to its constituent elements.
Essentially, the weight and if you just look at the weight of the raw materials times the value of those raw materials, excluding circuit boards, you really can say like if if it weighs less, it’s going to cost less.
But what I’m saying is that it’s better for us to achieve very high volume with Optimus than to have a wide range of robots that have lower volume.
Uh, hi.
Unknown Shareholder: One of the best things about the recent certifying of your compensation package was listening to all the positive feedback of current and former employees to what you have contributed to Tesla. In the unfortunate event that you’re hit by a car, not Full Self-Driving, can you take a few minutes or a few seconds and brag on your board and the rest of your leadership to assure us that, even without you, Tesla has an incredible future at $30 trillion?
Elon Musk: Well, I think Tesla has a good future without me. I think I’m a helpful accelerant to that future.
For technology, it matters if you’re ahead or not ahead, a lot. What matters is not innovation, but the rate of innovation. Can you do in one year what other companies do in two years or three years? So probably my biggest, most helpful thing is as innovation accelerant.
Because given enough time, the various startups that are doing humanoid robots will eventually succeed. One of them will. So what really matters is, can we be much faster than everyone else? Can our product be done a few years before theirs and be better?
Because if that’s not the case, then they will achieve the valuation and not Tesla. They will make the value product, and not Tesla. So, you know, that’s where I think I’m probably most useful, is that accelerating pace of technology and innovation and getting to scale. Yeah.
That’s it for me, mostly, but I am very much heartened by and appreciate the support of current and former Tesla employees, Tesla board, and all of you guys for helping out. My heart goes out to you.
Jessica, Shareholder: Hi Elon. Jessica, or my name’s Jessica, and I have lived full-time RV for about three years in South Texas. And I just wanted to thank you for your Starship, or for the Starship program and everything you’re doing there, in addition to Tesla.
Elon Musk: Wait, do you work at SpaceX or something?
Jessica, Shareholder: No.
Elon Musk: Okay, but you live in an RV in South Texas?
Jessica, Shareholder: Yeah. Hi. And in my RV park, they don’t allow car camping for Teslas or electric vehicles at all if you’re not pulling a trailer. And I feel that there’s a huge opportunity there, but also for, just for example, people who are coming into town for Starship launches in Teslas, if they could park somewhere overnight and trickle charge, and maybe have access to a bathroom facility or just something simple like that. Just something I wanted to just put forward, because I know that a lot of people come into the park and are disappointed they can’t stay so. Just a thought.
Elon Musk: Okay, got it. Alright. I’ll inquire and see if there’s like maybe some place that would allow people to stay in their cars. Which in a Tesla, you really can often stay quite comfortably in a car. And yeah, and charge. Alright, thanks.
I think, so this will have to be the last question, I think? Or maybe last two. Yeah, alright. So last two questions. You and you, two guys.
Steven, Shareholder: Hey, Elon, my name is Steven. I’m truly thankful for all you’ve done for humanity and watching your companies and what you’ve done has been the most exciting, hope-inspiring movie that there’s ever been. So thank you so much.
Elon Musk: Thank you.
Steven, Shareholder: And my question today is about lithium refining. In the past, you stated that would be a limiting factor in the future, and I know Tesla has built the refinery in Texas. I was just kind of curious, your current opinion about the refinery. Do you think there’s enough capacity coming online or will Tesla need to expand past Texas in that regard?
Elon Musk: There’s enough lithium refining, if you count China. If there’s a geopolitical challenge on that front, then there may be a shortage of lithium. But China is very good at refining, so.
But I think, just Tesla figuring out lithium refining, understanding what it takes, and then, once we understand how it works, then we can scale it up from there. I think it’s pretty important to be careful with geopolitical risk, and just make sure that, in a worst-case situation, that Tesla is okay. Alright.
This is the last question.
Nikhil, Shareholder: Hi, Elon, thank you. Congratulations for yet another big win. I’m Nikhil, I’m based out of Silicon Valley. And as you mentioned on FSD awareness and giving people rides, because most people unless they really experience it, they don’t quite know how safe it is becoming, and how convenient it is becoming.
So I built Tesmi (?), a company, it’s a platform for Tesla owners to offer learning experiences for FSD, and we would love to explore how we can help scale with your support and guidance. And we’d love to have a follow-up conversation to discuss more details with you how we can work together. Thank you.
Unknown Shareholder (from the line for the mic): I have a suggestion.
Elon Musk: Okay, sure. Okay, sure, sure, sure, sure. You really want to ask a question.
Unknown Shareholder (from the line for the mic): A follow-up, please.
Elon Musk: I’m not sure how to answer that question, exactly. But we are focused on improving FSD for sure.
I think adoption will be widespread when it is really working insanely well, and it’s driving like a five-star Uber driver, I think adoption will be will be very, very quick.
Unknown Shareholder (from the line for the mic): I have a really good suggestion.
Elon Musk: Okay, what’s the suggestion? Sure.
Unknown Shareholder (moves up to mic): I shared this suggestion with one of your FSD team, but I don’t know whether it reached you or not. Basically, as FSD keeps on improving, we are not quite sure at what rate it will be improving, the march of lines. And so a lot of sort of skeptic remains as to when you can exactly operate Robotaxi.
So it occurred to me that in between Supervised FSD and Robotaxi, there is something, intermediate stage, that’s commercializable, which is what I would call a robot rental car.
Okay. The idea is that you would, people would go to your platform to order a rental car, and you would deliver that overnight to the front of their driveway. And then, so the only time that the car would be driving without a person is at night with nobody, and you can take as long and you drop in the front of the car, and after that it’s supervised. So that will get you to commercialization much sooner, much more guaranteed. So that’s my suggestion.
Elon Musk: Alright. Well, I appreciate the thought. I think like I said, the progress in FSD will be really amazing. You’ll see with each successive version, like I said, the best way to think of FSD, ignore the 12. Just think of the point number going from version 3 to 4 to 5 to 6, and you’ll see just radical improvements with each successive version.
If the current current trend continues, it’s going to be like… you will really find that you don’t intervene in the course of a year, type of thing, even in complex situations.
Anyway with that, thank you very much for your support. Thanks, guys. Alright.
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