EXCLUSIVE: Wall Street Just Realized Tesla Won Robotaxi

So a lot of times you'll go back to this kind of from the Waymo people that are very bullish on Waymo. Oh, it took 10 years to get to this point. I'm like, okay, just because it took the first guy 10 years to do that doesn't mean that AI can't accelerate that development process for everyone that follows. And even if you talk about the fact that Waymo can launch in new markets faster, that's because of AI. So everything is happening faster in terms of the development. So now it just goes down to execution. But the market is open. And I think to your point, if you're an OEM, let's say you're afraid of Google, you're afraid of Tesla, you're going to have to partner with someone, right? Because it is my belief that, and anyone out there that has used FSD 14.12, I think gets it that this is going to be a key feature for future car purchases as it progresses to the next step.

Thank you so much for having me. And conversely, a lot of that information that I get, I do seek out on channels like your own and trying to understand. I mean, it's amazing the type of stuff that we can find on YouTube and Reddit and like that community that exists out there, whether it's the Tesla community or the Waymo community and the battles that exist between them. The information that's helpful for us to continue to get a better understanding for the industry. So we love the feedback whenever we get it.

I mean, I understand obviously that your audience is very focused on Tesla. And so for me, just to kind of understand my approach to it, it's similar to my approach to Apple, a stock that I've covered for, god, it feels like 20 years. Basically, whenever the iPhone was launched, which is 2007, we can do the math, 19 years, I guess. And the approach at the time was analysts were always, you know, heading to Asia, you know, trying to figure out the supply side of the equation. And that became the major input, you know, in terms of the, you know, how the stock would move one way or another. Our approach, you know, given my history, has primarily been in the wireless technology industry and the tech and the spectrum and the operators, was okay, what is the demand side doing? How do we leverage the relationships that we have at operators? Because we were constantly tracking, you know, subsidies, which was a key role. So similarly as we look at Tesla, I really don't care how many Teslas that they manufacture this year, next year or last year. I will care about robots over time. So Optimus as a reflection of or a manifestation of AI will certainly be of interest to me. But the primary focus is on autonomy and that really dates back to 2016. At the last firm I was at before we founded LightShed was BTIG back in 20, I think it was 16, when Uber was first coming public. We were involved in that IPO. At that time, like many people, were very optimistic about what autonomy could do. Obviously things did not progress as fast as any of us would have liked. So we just kind of let that kind of lag and go. And Uber with under their new CEO obviously did a great job at moving to free cash flow, which was important for them. So it's only more recently over the last couple years where we've definitely seen this inflection point in large part driven by AI for a lot of the companies and clearly Tesla being a leader there in terms of AI and their development of their FSD service will be a major player. So our interest in Tesla is really solely in autonomy right now. Frankly, if you think about the movement of the stock, a lot of times I'll see critics on Twitter or wherever talk about how well Uber is not going to deliver this many cars or that many cars. And if you look at the valuation on Tesla overall, like the number of cars they make this quarter is just not relevant. It's how big is this robo taxi market going to be? Will they be a primary player? Will it be private ownership? Will it be ride share? And then obviously the other things that go by the way. We also across our coverage at LightShed touch these companies across a couple of different paths. SpaceX being one of them, been obviously very close in watching that progression. That's obviously an offshoot in the telecom world as well as X and xAI on the media side under Rich Greenfield. These are companies that we spent time with and frankly there can be a path where there's a lot of intersection of why these companies can work together in the future. So that is the basis by which we're coming at Tesla. So now the primary work for me is to understand where is FSD today, where we can get robo taxis to, how soon we can get to the next milestone, how soon they can scale compared to where the rest of the market is going to be, which is the process that we're working on right now.

I mean, there are a few that believe, obviously you can see some of them on the shareholder list, were also their involvement in funding the purchase of Twitter, which is now X. But I think broadly speaking, there still isn't broad institutional sponsorship or belief that Tesla can get to that point and that this can drive the valuation. And just to back up, our clients are, we don't deal with individual investors, we don't deal with smaller funds. We deal with the largest investors in the TMT space. So they need to care about the big companies, whether it's Uber or Tesla or SpaceX if they do go public next year. And in that case, there's a lot of skepticism about the ability for Elon to deliver on a lot of the promises that have been made on robo taxi.

I mean, the context for SpaceX really comes to a lot of these conversations that I have, which is, you know, you'll talk to an investor or you'll talk to people in the industry and they will say, well, you know, I've talked to someone at Waymo or, you know, there was a big debate that Sterling Anderson, formerly of Aurora, now at GM, had at CES last year where they were debating the need for lidar or not. I'm sure your listeners are well aware of how many people out there that are saying that lidar is required, you know, for the product to be safe. And it just reminds me of, you know, things that I've heard over the years as it relates to SpaceX. Meaning that, you know, everyone in the satellite industry saying you're never going to get these LEOs to provide satellite connectivity, you know, to airplanes like you can from geos, which are not stationary, right? And orbiting effectively with the Earth as opposed to spinning around the globe. You're never going to be able to, you know, have a rocket land itself or catch it with... I mean, I've heard these things. I know I've kept those receipts. I know that the trolls that have come at me and others on Twitter saying that, you know, they can't do that. So, to me, look, I don't know. I'm not an engineer. I understand the arguments of lidar and I understand the arguments of the Tesla engineers and others like Wayve out of the UK that have made this kind of argument of why AI changes things. And even by the way, Google themselves through Waymo filed a white paper last year talking about using cameras only in a generalized AI function. So I look at this and say like, I don't know. And frankly, by the way, when I've talked to a lot of these autonomy companies and we talk to them all, we try the technology out. A lot of times I will ask them like, how am I supposed to tell? Am I supposed to look in the code? Am I supposed to figure out the technology? Because all these so-called experts are coming after me like they know. And the common response I always get is, well, you just have to try the service and see what it's like and see how it changes over time. And thankfully I've been put onto the early adopter program for Tesla, so I'm on 14.1.2. Didn't like 13. I'm not sure if you discussed that on your podcast, but there was times where it was much better, but others where there was a lot of braking issues. But like, you use this. I think 93% of my miles now are autonomous. I took it from where I live in Westchester all the way to Brooklyn. No interventions. I mean, I'm using the product. I went to Austin, right? I did the, you know, in that first month the robo taxi when it was launched with the safety attendant. So I felt it and so I felt what that felt like and I know what the competing technologies. So I don't like, I get the concern, but again, I've heard these concerns before. I'm not an expert and most of the people that are insisting that it can't work without lidar are also not experts themselves. So all we can do is continue to monitor the situation and make our best analysis possible.

Well, Herbert, let me just interrupt you there for a second. Not only did I try it on one of the, you know, one of the things we do as a service to our investors, you know, we go out to California, we visit with a lot of the autonomous companies, we were able to get a bunch of the Tesla cars, you know, to our hotel and put these investors, exactly to your point, people that have this strong opinion about what Tesla can or can't do, and we stuck them in the cars and they drove around and it was like the light bulb, like it obviously reminds me from a couple years ago when people would go out and try a Waymo and the light bulb goes off. And the light bulb went off on Tesla and people were like, you know, oh, I got to think about my Uber position, I got to think about, you know, the economy in general and the impact there because when you're in it and you feel how smooth it is in various scenarios, you know, you're right. It has to be tested. And I'm just amazed the people that criticize it. And by the way, their pushback is like, well, you know, I'm not going to put my life at risk. I'm like, you don't have to put your life at risk. You can literally just sit in the driver's seat, hover your hands over the wheel if you want, and have your foot right over the brake. Experience it. And I think I haven't had a situation yet where I've put someone in my car or had them in these situations where they didn't come out very impressed.

Just to give you some context, like, you know, Waymo obviously part of Google, a larger company, huge, but obviously Google being a monopolist search engine, not necessarily moving their stock one way or another. Hopefully at some point they will go public and we'll see more numbers. I think they're a long way off for that. We will talk about that. But the way it gets expressed, this is the term that we use, right? How do you express your view on a company? It gets expressed in Uber and there has been some back and forth in terms of that Uber relationship. Will Waymo rely on Uber and as a result Uber benefit from this or does Waymo go it alone? So that's how people can make money on this in the institutional markets. In terms of Waymo themselves, obviously the technology is great. I mean, I think most of us have probably been to San Francisco or Austin. I mean, I tried it in Austin when I was down doing the robo taxis with Tesla. You know, the product is good. I will say that there was one podcast, I can probably tell you the episode later, where we talked about how we were switching between Waymo and Tesla in Austin. So granted, like, that is the software load that these two technologies happened to be on at that time. At that time, Tesla just felt like a more natural ride in Austin. And I've also noticed how in some cases Waymo dials up the aggression in some cases and dials it back in terms of trying to find that right balance where it's not going to scare the consumer. But the bottom line is the technology is great. And frankly, why 2025 was such a key year is you go back to that white paper and this is how AI is changing things for companies, their ability to generalize and start to launch more and more markets faster. That's great except for one thing. They just need cars. I mean, there are only 2,500, 2,600 cars on the market. So you can keep announcing market after market, but you need to get the cars on the roads. And if you think about the cars that they are putting on the roads, this is the big challenge. And as a result, for what your listeners care probably more about, the opportunity for Tesla, the cars that they're putting on the road, they're buying an expensive, in this case, Jaguar for the first round and then upfitting. That means, you know, putting the sensors on after the fact. Same thing with Zeekr. They're not letting Zeekr look at their technology, right? Chinese car company. They are accepting those cars and then upfitting that technology. We're waiting on Hyundai, which by the way, Hyundai is also the OEM partner of WeRide, which is, you know, initially a Russian company. They've obviously escaped from Russia. That brought a lot of their engineers here, partner with Uber in Dallas. But Hyundai also these initial cars upfitted, meaning like you're getting a car and you're affixing sensors on there. This is not coming off the production line. So if you think about it, you know, we're just early stages and the point is like they will get to it. Like when we talk to any of these companies, Nuro, Wayve, May Mobility, I think Nuro just announced a new OEM partner with Nissan, I believe, just yesterday. They'll get to a point where it'll be integrated and they'll come off the manufacturing line. That's when we're at scale. That's when things really take off and maybe we get private ownership. But up to that point, you know, the door is left open for new technologies. Your listeners care about Tesla, but the reality is there's also Nuro and Wayve and other companies that they can progress their technology. And if they can work faster with their OEM partners, the more cars that you can get on the road, the better. So the flip side of that is it's almost like this balance of who's going to get there first. Is Waymo going to get their OEM partners cranking out thousands of cars a month or a quarter? Or is Tesla going to what I always call lock down the technology? Because as your listeners well know, like if it gets locked down and it quote unquote works and it proves the safety case, they're just cranking these cars right off the manufacturing line, right? How quickly do you think Tesla could put 2,500 cars? That's the number right now for Waymo. And by the way, you ask someone, I think I got attacked on Twitter yesterday by someone who really hates Tesla and they were talking about scaling. I'm like, okay, what is your estimate for Waymo on the road by the end of next year? It's like 5,000. So how quickly do you think Tesla could crank out, even if they put new hardware, right? New chips, new software, how quickly could they crank out 5,000 cars and put them on the road? So the bottom line is I'm super excited for Waymo, great technology. So in that vertical for that company specifically, what we're primarily focused on is finding what OEM relationships they're going to have. And on that front, look, you go back, they had a press release with Toyota. It was like an intent to have a letter of intent. It was like, I don't even know how you would define that as a press release. The question is when are they going to sign more OEMs? The challenge is if you're an OEM, right, and you look at Google as this mega company that has already been defined as a monopolist, even though judges did not ever, you know, in this latest court ruling when the judge determined they were a monopolist, there was no effective remedies, right? They didn't take away the $20 billion that they were paying Apple to be the default search engine. So they are almost like an unfettered power. If you're an OEM, are you going to basically partner with Google, right? They're going to become your OEM. And what is the endgame? If you have private ownership of cars, of autonomous cars, it reduces the number of cars that are out there, right? And it's bad for you. Like you don't, and I've seen this happen in other industries. You don't want to let the fox in the hen house. So I think this presents an incremental challenge for Google to develop these OEM relationships to get the supply that they need. That again leaves the door open for a lot of the other technology companies, whether it's Tesla, Wayve, Nuro, May Mobility or others.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's going to take over for them. I don't think the answer is any different. I mean, you know, the same concern that they would have with partnering with Google, they'd be partnering with Tesla. But if you ask Tesla about this, I mean, and I think Elon's response has been like, yeah, we created this kit. You can take the kit with the instruction book and go figure it out and put it in there. It's not the same type of partnership that you're seeing Waymo enter into with Hyundai or May Mobility with Toyota or, you know, all these other companies. So, and by the way, even if you are integrated and working with these companies, these OEMs move slow, right? It is a slow process. And then there's the group of OEMs, like take GM for example, where Sterling Anderson who was at Aurora, you know, Aurora was Chris Urmson had spun out of, you know, Waymo, and they want to build it on their own. Maybe they'll partner with Mobileye or whatever else. So there's, and again, I've seen that before in telco land, the, you know, not invented here, we've got to build it internally, and those things don't typically go too well, especially, you know, in a fast-moving market like this. So I just don't think there's an intention. I would look at it the other way. If you're Waymo, unlike Tesla that doesn't have the manufacturing capabilities, at what point do they just give up on the OEMs and they look to contract manufacturers? I mean, you have a company, it was formerly X Auto, they call themselves Tensor now. They've got a car. I've seen the car. I have not driven in the car yet, but I've seen the car. And their strategy is, I think it's with a contract manufacturing company in Vietnam. If the OEMs move too slow, again, they'll just make a purpose-driven vehicle to do that. There's been other companies that have talked about that. If you go back to the history of Waymo, the early days of Google, it was originally to build their own cars. I think a lot of the companies moved away from that because there was this concept of, well, I want some residual value. Who's going to fund all of these cars? So like after it's done, you know, with its purpose, I want to have some residual value in the market, some purpose-driven car. I think that's wrong thinking. Like again, look at, you know, the robo taxi or the Cybercab that's planned, that's purpose-driven. If it doesn't have a wheel, you're probably not, you know, having any residual value. You're just going to run that thing into the ground after, you know, a couple hundred thousand miles. So I think this OEM and this supply issue is a critical one. And I think, you know, look, you've seen a lot of press releases about Waymo launching new markets. New markets. At some point that question is going to be asked like, great, you just launched a new market, but when are you going to have enough cars where when I hit the Waymo app or the Uber app that I'll get a car in five or ten minutes, right? Because if you're not doing that, you're, you know, it's just still kind of a science project in that particular market.

We have great respect for all of them. These are smart people that have come from larger companies or come out of universities. We've gotten in cars. We've had different experiences depending, you know, on which technology company that's there. Some have had different rounds of funding. Some are partnered with Nvidia, some partnered with Uber in terms of dollars. But again, AI has changed this for a lot of them in terms of that pace of development. So a lot of times you'll go back to this kind of from the Waymo people that are very bullish on Waymo. It's like, oh, it took ten years to get to this point. I'm like, okay, just because it took the first guy ten years to do that doesn't mean that AI can't accelerate that development process for everyone that follows. And even if you talk about the fact that Waymo can launch in new markets faster, that's because of AI. So everything is happening faster in terms of the development. So now it just goes down to execution, but the market is open. And I think to your point, like if you're an OEM, let's say you're afraid of Google, you're afraid of Tesla, you know, you're going to have to partner with someone, right? Because, you know, it is my belief that, you know, and anyone out there that has used FSD 14.12, I think gets it that this is going to be a key feature for future car purchases, you know, as it kind of progresses to the next step.

I mean, you have Wayve in the UK, you have Nuro, you've got May Mobility, you've got a bunch of trucking companies that also, like Aurora, which is the Chris Urmson thing, you know, they're doing trucks, which are their own challenge, but they also have side developments where, like, okay, the Aurora driver and in a partnership with Toyota, they can develop some technology there as well. You've got WeRide, you know, which we just talked about out of Texas, part of Nebius, which is, you know, a larger kind of cloud-type business. So there's, I mean, there's, and then there's obviously the Chinese technology companies, WeRide and, you know, Pony AI and, you know, Baidu. So there's a lot of technology. I'm more focused on the markets that can be sold into the US and Europe. We'll keep an eye on those technologies. Obviously things can change, but I'm more interested in the European and US developers of this technology.

I mean, so in investing, it's, you know, what do they say, a rising tide lifts all ships, right? I mean, the key thing to first understand, which I think is still underappreciated, is where autonomy in general is going to be in 2030. Like you looked at what Dara from Uber had said, I think just this past week, the numbers he was getting to five or ten years from now in terms of the percentage of miles that would be autonomous was much lower than I think is possible. In the near term, it's a hockey stick type of thing where you have to focus on the bottoms up, like how many cars can actually get on the road. And then you make basic assumptions like if an Uber driver is thirty-five thousand miles a year and an autonomous car can, you know, as it ramps, get up to one hundred, one hundred fifty thousand miles a year. This is just, you know, basic math based on first supply and then it's percentage of cars sold, you know, within the industry. And this reminds me a lot like a lot of the consumer devices that I've tracked over the past thirty years being an analyst. I mean, you see kind of it goes slow, slow, slow. You hit a certain penetration, whether it was cell phones or televisions or, you know, any device, and then you hit this kind of S-curve where you get to whatever it is, twenty percent if it's household up to, and it goes quickly to eighty percent. I remember years ago, you know, we saw this happen in the US. No one thought that, you know, cell phone penetration in Latin America would hit eighty percent. And we covered this company, America Mobile, still a public company today. And the same thing happened. Every single market that you would go to, they would hit this certain penetration and boom, it would just rock it up in terms of this adoption curve of technology. And that's the thing to watch. So if you look at, you know, how many cars are on the road this year, next year, it's not really relevant. But you get to 2030, I think everyone would agree that whether it's the OEMs or Tesla, you're going to see a lot of cars hitting the market. You have a couple hundred thousand, let's just look at the US market alone, right? Let's say there's whatever it is, two million plus Uber cars on the road. You put a couple hundred thousand cars on the road by the end of '29 going into 2030, right? One hundred doing one hundred twenty-five thousand miles a year relative to the Uber cars doing thirty-five thousand. You can quickly get to a quarter, thirty percent of the miles on ride share, right? Being autonomous. And then you're at that thirty percent and how quickly do you get to eighty percent? And it's really quick because then they start really cranking off the manufacturing line and before you know it, you're at eighty percent, you know, of ride share or on those networks. So then you say, okay, what's the split? I mean, that's going to be determined on, you know, which technology gets the funding, who are the partners. We talk about this a lot on Autonomy Markets, like success is not only getting the technology right, that's kind of the table stakes, but it's also having the infrastructure in place to charge these things, to clean these things. I mean, I've met with fleet managers who they set up a fleet of EVs and they can't get power. They bring it in like a truck with propane, hook it up to a generator just to charge the cars. Then they get a gas connection, you know, a month later, and then they're waiting for the power company a year later. So think about servicing New York City with however many Teslas that you need. Where are you going to charge them? Where are you going to clean them? Like this stuff, this infrastructure part of the equation, you know, also takes time. So there's, I think there's a lot of things that have to play out. And I'm certainly not willing to make the claim now that I know that Tesla's technology is better than Waymo's or it's better than Wayve's or it's better than Nuro's. I think, you know, some of them have better shots than others, right? Tesla's got manufacturing capability. That's a huge positive. And obviously, we've all, you know, at least many of the people here have tried this technology, so you know it's good. You know, Waymo's got technology lead, but there's a lot of other things that happen that I've seen happen that will determine those longer-term shares. So what you end up doing is you make sensitivities. I will say this, right? Anyone that has an eight percent market share for Tesla, like what's your point? Like you might as well just be at zero, right? If Tesla's in the market, it's going to be successful. It's not going to be eight percent. Like in some cases, it's binary, right? I get the concerns. I'm not going to completely discount the concerns. Like I'm sure some of your listeners will say, absolutely, they can do this without lidar. I don't know. It doesn't seem like that's the case, but if they can do it and they can execute, their share is not going to be eight percent. Is it going to be fifty, eighty percent? Like that's not, we're not at that point yet. I don't need to make that point. Why? Because if investors start to believe the previous numbers that I just told you about the industry, they're going to bet on everything, everything that they can to get into autonomy because they're going to see this opportunity as being so big that like they'll say, okay, there's an X percent probability that they're going to be a twenty percent share. There's a Y percent probability they'll be. They will run these probabilities and say, you know, these are a variety of outcomes that we can get to that will determine, you know, their success or their lack of their success. One other thing to note, the bigger issue here is what if private ownership takes over ride share altogether? Meaning my Tesla, you know, in my garage, they can go pick up my sushi, drive me to the airport, drive me to the train station, and then come back to deal with whatever errands that my kids have during the day. All right. If I have that car, I don't need as many cars and I don't need ride share. Like does everyone just have an, like what is the long-term opportunity? Is it, does ride share even exist anymore or does everyone have, you know, a, or exist in a much smaller way or does ride share just take over everything and then who really wins there? Like who has partnered, who has strategically positioned themselves with ride share companies versus those that have positioned themselves to go direct, you know, direct to the consumer. On the flip side of that, what if ride share got so cheap, right? Let's say the cost to own a car is whatever it is, I think two dollars a mile or something like that, but ride share is because they're utilizing these cars so much has driven the price down so, you know, so low that no one owns cars, right? That you only use ride share or you only have one car for ownership. Like these are the variety of scenarios. If you really want to think big about how autonomy can change our economy, you need to consider all of these different paths, apply probabilities to each, and then come up with some sense of where you want to invest. And then as time goes by, that's why every little data point matters. Meaning that if Tesla gets that attendant out of that car in Austin in December, all of these clocks, you know, kind of click for you, say check, and then you move on to the next thing. And it brings, it changes the probabilities and changes the dynamics of how that's going to work.

I mean, their strategy is very simple, which is to fragment the market as much as possible so they can be the central point of value within the overall equation. So you'll see them invest in a lot of different autonomy companies, and even within the autonomy companies that I have a relationship with, like take Waymo as an example, they have different infrastructure partners, like they'll have a Vumo in one market, a Move in another market. So, and that's part of like the Uber mentality of fragmentation.

It's all about leverage. It's all about leverage. And I'm like, you know, I said to them like, at some point, private equity can come and mop some of these guys up and then use that against you. But in a lot of these cases, like Vumo, you know, they own a minority stake. I haven't seen the contract. I don't know if they have like a right of first refusal if there's some rollup. Lyft has taken a different approach where they have Flexdrive and they're trying to build this up. I think Lyft is a different scenario, right? Their share is so small that if, let's say for example, Avis doesn't execute well for Waymo in that market, then maybe, you know, Lyft will be willing to step in and say, look, just use Flexdrive, you don't even have to put it on the Lyft app yet, right? Now let us develop some relationship that way because they're in a weaker position. Uber wants to maintain this, we're the big dogs, right? We want to fragment every part of the equation possible so we are the central, the central value. And I, you know, as a result, you know, the most important relationship for them, which is Waymo, just hasn't gone that well. And I think that, you know, a lot of investors got the wrong signal. I think when they originally launched in Austin, there was some data that came out, everyone's getting excited like, oh, Austin was so great for Waymo that, you know, they're going to do every other market. I'm like, I don't really think that's the case. And then sure enough, the next market pops out and Waymo uses someone else. So I would, I'd actually, and I've suggested this on our Autonomy Markets podcast, I, you know, I don't think you're going to see a lot more markets there. And I think there's also risk that, you know, Dara, the CEO of Uber, has done short-term contracts with Waymo. So as some of these contracts come up, there is risk that some of these Waymo-Uber markets actually just go and revert back to Waymo. So the one caveat I do on all this is like, who really knows where Waymo is going to end up? As I said earlier in the podcast, still kind of a science project, right? Still putting sensors on cars that they bought, not really at scale yet, not getting ready to go public quite yet. You have two CEOs at that company that again are about getting the technology to bear, not necessarily, think of this as like the Tim, you know, the, you know, Steve Jobs to Tim Cook. You've got the technology and then they hand off to Tim Cook and he just figures out how to manufacture a ton of phones, develop the relationship with the contract manufacturer. So it's possible that as Waymo moves through its life cycle, whoever the new CEO is that takes them to scale, maybe the existing CEO is, but however the management works there has a very different viewpoint on whoever's cutting the deals today between Waymo and Uber. But what I've seen the signal is like Waymo, I think, believes that they can do this on their own. They don't necessarily need Uber for demand. They can drive enough demand. I mean, look, getting in an autonomous car, I think as we all know, is much better than getting with an Uber driver. I mean, my daughter had an incident in, you know, taking an Uber in a city and, you know, we're well aware of like the inconsistency of what life is like in hopping into an Uber and what you're going to get. So people will seek out what is a better product because it's safer, it's cleaner, and it's more consistent. Like, you know what you're getting when you're getting into that autonomous vehicle. So I think Waymo is probably headed more in that direction. They'll continue to partner with companies because it's still early stage, but I think you're more likely to see kind of a full Waymo one network over time than necessarily be on a rideshare program.

I mean, again, I could be wrong, right? In the meantime, what they're doing, what they should do, which is develop as many alternative technologies as possible. One thing I would do that they're not doing is rather than fragment the charging cleaning, just own it, right? Yeah. Become a, like, because Waymo does not want to do that. And like, look, Tesla, you're right, they have chargers everywhere, but like, go to these charging stations. These are not locations where they're cleaning the cars. I've got great, I mean, again, going back to SpaceX, great respect whether it's SpaceX or I've been to, I was actually at the Tesla plants early on. They had tents right in the early days when they wanted to crank out production. Scrappy company that will figure out how to get it done in the near term, but you never know. And they're just like, look, if it's cheaper and I can outsource this to someone else, maybe there's a role for them to play there. And then that, you know, maybe tightens their ecosystem fit. That doesn't seem to be the plan. Why? Because Uber's in this phase, you know, post Travis, right, which has been a number of years now, give investors money back, share repurchase or whatever it is. It's not about investing in growth in the next wave. Like they have done it, right? You're seeing hundreds of millions of dollars invested in individual technology companies, fleet partners, like things like this. They're kind of dabbling there, but it's not like a full, it's not a full investment there because they still feel beholden to an investor base that wants to see that cash come back to them in, you know, in the form of share repurchase.

Um, never say never, but I highly doubt it. I just, I don't think that is the mentality of Tesla at the moment. They're a kind of build it here, including what I just talked about in terms of the servicing of the vehicles. Even if that means, like, let's say Austin has 500 cars by, you know, whatever, June, that's our prediction, 500 cars in Austin, no one in it, no driver, no safety attendant by midyear, which would be, I think, for many investors a very positive thing. Maybe not for your listeners, your listeners probably have much higher expectations, but for institutional investors that would be a huge win. They might be doing that in tents and cleaning those vehicles in tents, and that's fine because that's not what we really care about, you know, right now. So over time, you never know. Like maybe they could plug into the Uber network, but I don't think that's in the culture of Tesla. I don't think that that is going to happen.

I mean, yes, I mean, just a quick response to that, they have 30-something million users, but like if you look at the percentage of miles driven on rideshare today versus total miles driven, like it's nothing, right? This is again, rideshare is a great market, right? Uber has generated tons of free cash flow, but like rideshare itself is not even really taking off. If anything, if you wanted to be really bullish on Uber, you would make the argument that, look, you know, autonomy is going to drop the cost down, improve their performance. As the cost comes down, you get broader adoption. And then just the market in general grows so much that even if their share drops from 80% down to 20%, they can probably grow faster than some of the expectations that exist out there. The flip side of that argument also is like you talk about these 30 million, like who cares? Like if I deliver you a cleaner car that's safer, download and cheaper, deal and cheaper, right? How are you going to, how do you compete with those labor? I mean, look at the complaints that we see in Seattle in terms of the labor costs and how it's impacted that market.