The CEO of ride-sharing platform Uber has shared some of his doubts about Tesla’s ability to effectively execute robotaxi plans for its customers, pointing to the customer service side of the business as well as vehicle owner skepticism about letting strangers into their cars.
Tesla plans to launch a robotaxi platform in October, and CEO Elon Musk has talked at length over the years about hopes that such a platform could let owners’ vehicles work in a ride-sharing capacity while not in use, effectively making them money while driving themselves and ride-share passengers.
On Friday, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi appeared on the Logan Bartlett Show on YouTube to discuss autonomous vehicles, during which he expressed more than a few doubts about Tesla’s robotaxi plans. For one, he says, peak ride-sharing times might coincide with the times owners want to use their own vehicles.
“Probably the times at which you’re going to want your Tesla are probably going to be the same times that ridership is going to be at a peak,” Khosrowshahi said during the interview.
He also notes that he doesn’t think society is prepared for self-driving vehicles, even if they are getting closer to goals of becoming safer than human drivers.
“Logic would dictate that if robots are twice as good a driver or three times as good as drivers as humans, that’s good for society going forward, but I honestly don’t know if society’s ready to accept that,” Khosrowshahi said.
The Uber CEO also talked about the business changes that Tesla would need to invest in to successfully build such a platform, and he noted how different he believes the ride-sharing and vehicle-building businesses really are.
“It’s a really, really different business you know, as well as talking about hardware, to build a $20,000 or $50,000 piece of hardware from driving over 30 million transactions every day that on a revenue basis you make $2 off of,” he added. “It’s just a very, very different business.”
Khosrowshahi also goes on to highlight the extra platforms that companies have to create to accommodate things that can go wrong in a ride-sharing vehicle, from people getting sick and wanting to pay with cash to those losing items in their ride-share, accidents, and more.
Unsurprisingly, he notes that it might be worthwhile for Tesla to partner with ride-sharing services like Uber in the future instead of developing its own, noting that he thinks the automaker could benefit from partnering with Uber.
“It’s taken us 15 years. It’s taken us tens of billions of dollars of capital, and we can provide that instantly to a partner,” Khosrowshahi added. “Hopefully, Tesla will be one of those partners.”
You can see the full interview with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi below, as hosted by the Logan Bartlett show.
To be sure, Tesla has already teased a mobile platform it has been building for its robotaxi plans, and it has been developing its Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised for the past several years through testing and training from drivers that have purchased the software.
Other companies like Waymo and Cruise have also been working on their own driverless ride-hailing solutions, with the former already offering paid rides in select areas for the service. Despite this, Musk has previously highlighted that he thinks these companies will have a lot more trouble scaling these services, due to their requirements of high-density mapping of specific serviceable areas.
These, Musk says, are unlike FSD, which can theoretically be used just about anywhere due to its camera-based system and continuously-trained neural network. It’s worth noting that Tesla’s FSD still requires supervision, hence the name FSD “Supervised,” and it isn’t exactly clear just yet when the company expects to launch unsupervised versions of the software.
Although Tesla was originally supposed to hold its robotaxi unveiling event this month, Musk noted that the delayed event would allow the company to make some important changes and allow it to show off additional features.
“Requested what I think is an important design change to the front, and extra time allows us to show off a few other things,” Musk wrote in a post on X last month.
What are your thoughts? Let me know at zach@teslarati.com, find me on X at @zacharyvisconti, or send us tips at tips@teslarati.com.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next Starship launch is about to attempt its biggest leap yet
SpaceX targets September 22 for Starship Flight 14, its first attempt to reach real orbit.
SpaceX has set September 22 as the target date for Starship’s 14th test flight, and this one carries a different goal than any of the 13 that came before it. Every previous Starship mission has intentionally flown a suborbital arc, reentering the atmosphere within the same hour it launched. Flight 14 is designed to send the craft into a genuine orbit around Earth for the first time.
The launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. Central time at Starbase in South Texas and runs for 75 minutes, pending regulatory approval, according to SpaceX’s mission description published Tuesday. If the flight goes as planned, Starship will circle the planet roughly six times at an altitude near 275 kilometers over about ten hours before a deorbit burn sends it toward a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, a departure from the Indian Ocean recoveries used on the last several flights.
The mission also marks the first attempt to put a working batch of Starlink V3 satellites into actual service. Flight 13 carried 20 of the new satellites in July, but because that mission never left a suborbital trajectory, the payload reentered along with the ship instead of separating into orbit.
SpaceX tells the FCC that Starship Flight 14 is going to orbit
Each V3 satellite is rated for roughly one terabit per second of downlink capacity, so a successful deployment on Flight 14 would be SpaceX’s largest single jump in network bandwidth since Starlink began flying on Falcon 9.
Flight 13 still did the heavier lifting on the technical side. That July mission flew a deliberately more stressful reentry profile to test Starship’s heat shield, and the ship survived its softest splashdown yet, intact enough for drone inspections shortly after landing. Elon Musk said the flight delivered “all the heat shield data we needed and then some,” a result Teslarati covered in detail when he later said SpaceX had solved the vehicle’s biggest reusability challenge. Flight 14 is where SpaceX starts spending that confidence on an actual orbital insertion rather than another controlled fall back to Earth.
One thing Flight 14 will not attempt is a tower catch of the ship. Musk floated the idea right after Flight 13, but walked the timeline back in August, saying a catch attempt was more likely “in a few months.” The Super Heavy booster will still aim for its own recovery, targeting an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America, the same approach used on recent flights.
September 22 is SpaceX’s own target, not a locked date. Starship’s schedule has slipped before over hardware readiness and FAA sign off, and the company has said as much in its own mission notes. But the plan itself represents the clearest marker yet that Starship is moving from a suborbital test program into something meant to carry paying payloads and, eventually, people.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk gives his most telling Tesla-SpaceX merger conversation yet
Elon Musk hinted a Tesla-SpaceX merger could be coming, and Wall Street is taking notice.
Elon Musk gave his clearest signal yet that Tesla and SpaceX could eventually combine, telling the All-In Summit in Los Angeles that the two companies’ deepening collaboration makes the question worth asking. Sawyer Merritt first surfaced the highlight on X Tuesday.
Asked directly why Tesla and SpaceX remain separate given how closely they already work together, Musk told hosts at the summit: “Great question there. With all this collaboration, on so many levels, who can imagine what action one might take when there’s so much close collaboration in so many areas.” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who joined Musk on stage, added that SpaceX personnel have already moved into xAI to fill leadership and engineering gaps, saying the businesses are integrating “faster than I thought,” though “not fully integrated yet,”
The comments landed on top of merger speculation that has been building on Wall Street for months. JPMorgan has called a tie-up “strategically coherent on paper,” pointing to overlapping ambitions in AI, robotics, energy, transportation and space. Jefferies went further, estimating Musk could retain roughly 55.3 percent voting control in a deal structured without a premium, a scenario that would still leave room for Tesla shareholders to come out ahead. On Kalshi, traders now put the odds of a merger before 2028 at 66 percent.
Tesla’s stake in SpaceX, still under one percent, traces back to its earlier investment in xAI, which converted to SpaceX equity after SpaceX absorbed the AI company. The two are also jointly building Terafab, a chip facility in Austin meant to serve both Tesla’s AI computing needs and SpaceX’s satellite ambitions. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has stood by a 2027 merger timeline for months, and Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest recently floated a similar case, an idea Musk pushed back on directly at the time.
Another Tesla SpaceX merger prediction by ARK Invest has Elon Musk talking
The timing adds another layer. Tesla has scheduled an October 1 unveiling for its next generation Roadster at a venue near SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas test site, using the phrase “Go for launch” in its promotional material. Both stocks dipped roughly 2 percent Monday before recovering slightly in premarket trading Tuesday, with SpaceX shares up about 0.4 percent and Tesla essentially flat.
Musk stopped short of confirming anything is in motion. But unlike his past denials of a corporate restructuring, this response didn’t rule one out, and it came with Shotwell sitting next to him describing an integration that’s already underway.
The Tesla Roadster unveiling is getting hyped up by the company’s CEO Elon Musk, who has been a big reason the product has such high expectations due to delayed timelines and a constant need to make it even more insane than before.
Tesla announced on September 12 that it would officially unveil the Roadster in Waco, Texas, on October 1, ending years of patience for fans and reservation holders who have waited for the all-electric supercar to enter production since 2017.
Musk has said that this event will be well worth the wait on several occasions, and last year on the Joe Rogan Experience, he said that there should be a closing chapter to supercars- the end of cars that aren’t focused on safety.
He said:
“Whether it’s good or bad, it will be unforgettable. My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars. I think if Peter wants a flying car, he should be able to buy one. I think it has a shot at being the most memorable product unveil ever. This is some crazy technology in this car. Let’s just put it this way: if you took all the James Bond cars and combined them, it’s crazier than that.”
Musk’s teases have continued, and now that the event is roughly two weeks away, it seems like Roadster is finally going to show up and blow some minds:
It’s out of this world
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2026
Excitement guaranteed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2026
Tesla has definitely dragged out the development of the Roadster, but there is a good reason for it.
Tesla has been working on many other projects, most notably self-driving efforts to increase passenger safety, and those simply took priority over the Roadster, a low-volume, high-performance sports car that has a lightning-fast acceleration rate of 0-60 MPH in just 1.1 seconds, could potentially fly, and contributes very little to the company’s mission.
However, many people have the Roadster on pre-order through the referral program or with their own money, and it is time that Tesla delivers on that.
SpaceX’s next Starship launch is about to attempt its biggest leap yet
Elon Musk gives his most telling Tesla-SpaceX merger conversation yet
