Yesterday afternoon, following the end of trading on Wall Street for the day, Tesla published its financial results for 2025. They weren’t particularly good: Profits were almost halved, and revenues declined year on year for the first time in the company’s history. The reasons for the company’s troubles are myriad. CEO Elon Musk’s bankrolling of right-wing politics and promotion of AI-generated revenge porn deepfakes and CSAM has alienated plenty of potential customers. For those who either don’t know or don’t care about that stuff, there’s still the problem of a tiny and aging model line-up, with large question marks over safety and reliability. Soon, that tiny line-up will be even smaller.
The news emerged during Tesla’s call with investors last night. As Ars and others have observed, in recent years Musk appears to have grown bored with the prosaic business of running a profitable car company. Silicon Valley stopped finding that stuff sexy years ago, and no other electric vehicle startup has been able to generate a value within an order of magnitude of the amount that Tesla has been determined to be worth by investors.
Musk’s attention first turned away from building and selling cars to the goal of autonomous driving, spurred on at the time by splashy headlines garnered by Google spinoff Waymo. Combined with ride-hailing—a huge IPO by Uber took the spotlight off Tesla long enough for it to become a new business focus for the automaker too—Musk told adoring fans and investors that soon their cars would become appreciating assets that earned money for them at night. And as intermediary, Tesla would take a hefty cut for connecting rider and ridee.
Autonomy remains a stated goal for Tesla: last week it announced it’s moving to a purely subscription-based approach for its FSD partially automated driving assist for all new Teslas purchased from mid-February. At the same time, it’s doing away with Autopilot entirely, it’s less-capable, partially automated driving assist. The company’s goal is more ambitious, involving selling two-seat robotaxis that lack even a steering wheel or pedals, but only once it has proven the technology, something it’s currently attempting with little success on the streets of Austin, Texas.