Tesla investors:
I used to have a front-row seat on Steve Jobs. Had the first ride in the first Tesla with @elonmusk and have watched him closely ever since. Yes, I'm an investor. My biggest holding in a diversified portfolio. My kids portfolio is 100% in Tesla, since they can take bigger risks betting on one company.
And have watched, at close view, many other entrepreneurs with similar leadership capabilities.
Yeah, why I believe in @Tesla.
I wrote eight books about the future. Each detailed decade-long change coming at us. I wrote an influential book about social media, "Naked Conversations," back in 2005. X, formerly Twitter, started in 2005. It laid out why every human and business would soon be on social media.
My latest book, written with @IrenaCronin, lays out spatial computing, which includes robots and VR/AR. Including a chapter about Robotaxis. I wrote that chapter six years ago and it was updated earlier this year.
The world I see, and I've done a ton of consumer research, driving around America for more than a decade, understanding consumer belief, and interviewing a ton of @waymo customers, and getting into R&D labs and robotics startups. Several last week alone. And been on many hundreds of X audio spaces talking with thousands of people.
My thesis is that in 10 years:
- We are going to see robotaxis completely change our BELIEF about transportation.
- We are going to see millions of generalized humanoid robots running our businesses and homes.
- We are going to see the evolution of "everything as a service" because of those two first things. Cleaning as a service. Cooking as a service. Laundry as a service. Gardening as a service. Almost anything you can do will turn into a service. The AI agent revolution is here, but will lead into robots making AI Agents be very useful to do everything in the real world as a service.
- Holodecks (er, world models and simulators and digital twins) will go from something only a small niche is using to things everyone in modern society uses.
- Electric car adoption will go way up. From something only upper middle class people adopt to something that will go deep into all of society.
All of which Tesla is a leader in. So my thesis is that in next decade Tesla's business will greatly expand.
Now, why do we want Elon in charge of all that?
Go back to Steve Jobs. Apple, with him at the helm, iterated faster.
That's very important in rapidly growing fields. Today only a few million people have had a ride in an autonomous vehicle. Even if you include all of Tesla's competitors, here in USA, and in China. 10 years from now that number will be in the billions.
But having a strong leader that everyone in a company treats as a "God" (what one of my friends who worked for Jobs for more than a decade said) has deep impacts on innovation speed. When Jobs called you on a weekend, my friend said, it was like God himself calling and you found yourself back at work because he wanted to work on something with you.
I saw that inside Microsoft and Rackspace and other companies I worked for. When Bill Gates called and needed something all other "priorities" in life were put on hold.
It might not be nice, it caused my friend to get a divorce because he chose to work with Jobs way too many times vs. going to an important family event. But it speeds up innovation.
And speed of innovation MATTERS DEEPLY in rapidly growing markets, like the ones I laid out above.
There are other effects of having such a person running a company.
If Steve Jobs wanted to get the CEO of Sony on the phone. He could. Every other CEO will always pick up the phone. I heard this personally from Steve Jobs' executive assistant.
And if there is a deal to be made that the other company doesn't want to do (my friend, Andy Grignon, pitched visual voicemail to AT&T and its CTO told Andy there was no way in hell AT&T would build such a thing. Jobs called the CEO and made a multi-billion-dollar deal in a phone call) then the feature gets built.
In the valley we even had a name for it "Jobs' distortion field."
There are hundreds of such stories about how Jobs could get investors to pour money in, or other companies to do things, just because Jobs laid out a vision of the future that was compelling and everyone treated him like a God that could make anything happen.
Musk is in that role today. The dude puts wires on people's brains, digs tunnels under Las Vegas, has the best spaceship company, and is the only one that will bring autonomous vehicles to the world at scale next year. Builds major datacenters in 19 days. So when he calls no one calls a committee meeting and argues about whether they should listen.
I could go on for hours about why having a leader like Musk will speed up a company like Tesla.
But let's talk about what happens if, say, Musk dies today, or if he leaves Tesla. First of all, I've talked with MANY employees about the role Musk plays in their lives. They are at his companies because he clears the way for them to execute. One guy wrote the code that lands the rockets back on earth. You think he wants to work for a committee at Lockheed Martin?
If Elon called his key employees and said "I'm leaving Tesla behind and starting a new company" many would follow without even learning about what Musk was planning to do. He has that kind of pull with so many in all of his companies.
Even factory workers tell me this. They remember when GM and Toyota laid them off. And sold Elon the Fremont factory for almost nothing, laughing at him because they KNEW that Elon would never be able to make a profitable car there.
Today that factory is building the robot all the other robot companies look up to. I hear it over and over when I sit down with AI geniuses building other robotics companies. They all saw how he built FSD and took on EVERY belief against him. And built a data flywheel they all are struggling to build to make their own dreams come true.
And today that factory is making the humanoid that I believe will dominate the others for decades.
But all of this is far more likely to come to fruition with Elon at the helm.
I hope you shareholders vote for Elon's pay package.
If not, I will sell a good percentage of my stock. Why? While Tesla will probably still see massive growth without Elon, after all, everyone knows the job at hand, it will see the best employees leave and, worse of all, will not have a God forcing them to innovate as fast as if he were still there.
This will be dramatically true in humanoid robots. Tesla has all the advantages now. Brand. Manufacturing. Distribution. Belief. But if Elon isn't there to make decisions fast and keep committees from forming it will slow down. Others, like Figure, will be emboldened, and the Chinese are already going to be a huge problem for Tesla even with Elon in charge. Without Elon? They will move into most markets around the world without a strong competitor with a bullhorn on X to get everyone to pay attention to Optimus.
And also on the vote is an investment into xAI.
That is a harder one to sell to everyday investors who don't spend all day on X. They don't understand just the power of the data that is coursing through X every day. And that xAI is building the best human-understanding AIs in the business. Optimus needs Grok to really get to the promised land of a generalized humanoid robot that will bring everything as a service for many, many reasons.
I will be happy to walk through what xAI is building that will greatly help Tesla grow its business and make its Robotaxi and humanoid robots (or other robots that are possible in the future) get to the promised land.
And there are so many other opportunities for xAI to greatly help Tesla's business that I could go on for entire books. Join us on one of the Tesla audio spaces that @WholeMarsBlog or @SawyerMerritt join and I can lay that all out.
Either way, please vote.
This is the most important shareholder vote of my 60 year life and one that will open up opportunities for all of us (or bring deep consequences if the vote goes against my advice).