Elon Musk Isn't Telling You Something About The 25K Tesla...

I don’t mean to alarm you, but Elon Musk just announced that he’s stolen your car.

He’s been planning this heist all along - hiding in plain sight - and he would have gotten away with it too, if the ‘lying’ mainstream media hadn’t forced Elon to play his hand.

Dude, Where’s My Car?

April 5th was a rough day for a lot of would-be Tesla customers as news dropped that the car so many had been anticipating for years had been canceled - the 25K Tesla, the Model 2, Project Redwood… It’s not happening.

Or is it? Elon Musk was pretty quick to respond to the news report by posting on X that “Reuters is lying (again)” - But didn’t elaborate any further.

What Reuters did publish were claims made by three anonymous sources within Tesla who showed the news agency what appear to be internal company messages that back up their story.

The primary allegation here is that Tesla has canceled their long standing plan to bring an affordable, yet compelling electric car to market that people all over the world would be able to purchase for a starting price equivalent to around $25,000 USD - and instead, the report claims that Tesla will continue developing a self-driving robotaxi built on the same small vehicle platform.

So the vehicle itself is not canceled - just the plan to offer said vehicle as a consumer product - and that plan to sell a 25K Tesla has deep roots going back to the company’s Battery Day presentation in 2020 when we first saw the image of a white sheet draped over a car shaped object - an image that became a recurring theme at Tesla events: the car-with-a-sheet-on-it was featured prominently at the company’s Investor Day in 2023 along with the promise that hundreds of millions of these vehicles would hit the road by the end of the decade - Investor Day also included a lengthy, yet non-specific discussion on the new manufacturing process that Tesla was developing to build their ‘next-generation’ vehicle platform.

Even as recently as January 2024, Elon Musk told investors that Tesla had plans to start production of the the new, affordable EV at their Texas factory in the second half of 2025 - he confirmed a “revolutionary manufacturing system" for the vehicle that's far more advanced than any others in the world - and hinted that there would be a strong push to ramp up assembly, saying, "We'll be sleeping on the line practically."

Now where things get really interesting is how Elon ultimately responded to the news - if his goal was to prove that Reuters was lying and dunk on the mainstream media, then Elon could have come straight out and said, ‘the 25K Tesla is not canceled, it’s real and it will be revealed on this day.’

But instead, Elon simply wrote, “Tesla Robotaxi unveil on 8/8”

Which I believe is Elon’s way of saying, ‘the car is real, but it’s not what you think it is, because you don’t know what I know.’ – Tinfoil hats in position, we’re going deep.

Robotaxi vs 25K Tesla 

So the 25K Tesla and Robotaxi are the same vehicle - always have been - the distinguishing factor between the two is whether the vehicle is being sold as a product or as a service.

Doing both is not an option that Tesla has right now - simply because there would be no way to produce enough volume to meet the simultaneous demand anytime within the next few years.

So Elon has a pretty big choice to make - does Tesla release the vehicle into the consumer market with a 25K price tag? Or do they bet it all on the robotaxi?

We’re all familiar with the idea of a car as a consumer product - this is why the promise of a 25K was so compelling and easy to understand - it meant that any person with a middle class income could buy the car and see for themselves how great it was to own a high quality electric vehicle.

In theory, this should break down the largest barrier to EV ownership for most car buyers - the purchase price - so now everyone is going to want to own a Tesla, right?

Well, the reality of today’s auto market might not be as simple. At the $25,000 price point, Tesla is suddenly in direct competition with a lot of very compelling new and used ICE vehicles that come with a much higher degree of consumer confidence - which carries a lot more weight for the middle class income bracket - these consumers are going to own one car that they will drive every day and rely on that vehicle to get them to work and back without any complications.

Even if the reality of the situation is that an EV does offer a higher degree of reliability and safety - the average car buyer has no frame of reference to prove these statements. For example, everyone knows that a used Toyota Corolla is going to be a very affordable, safe and reliable vehicle in the long run - this has been proven time after time, year after year - we all know someone with a 20 year old Toyota that still runs better than most cars on the road.

A new offering from Tesla will never appeal to the hearts and minds of value conscious buyers in the same way. Especially when you factor in that the majority of these middle class consumers don’t own homes with driveways and garages - this very quickly strips away most of the value proposition that comes with an affordable EV - if people can’t charge at home, then they are much less likely to have a positive experience with an electric car - this would require such a massive ramp up in charging infrastructure nationwide that I don’t think even Tesla would be able to match anytime in the near future.

And when you look outside of the USA, things get even more difficult - at $25,000 USD, this would not be anywhere near the cheapest EV in the world - the BYD Seagull is still less than half the cost - even if the Tesla is twice as good, that’s still too much of a price discrepancy to realistically overcome.

For example, everybody knows that $120 shoes are better than $60 shoes, they last longer, they’re more comfortable, they do a better job of protecting your foot - no one would deny that, not even the people who buy $60 shoes - but sometimes you just don't have 120 bucks to spend - same goes for cars.

Now, just for argument's sake, let’s flip that around and assume that everything we just said was wrong - imagine if everyone overnight just decided that they were going to buy a Tesla.

This would instantly dwarf the 2 million Cybertruck pre-orders - this would be an unprecedented demand that Tesla could not possibly meet in any reasonable amount of time.

Most people who pre-ordered a Cybertruck are cool with waiting 4, 5 , 6 years because they don’t actually need a Cybertruck, they just want to buy one because they can - because they’ve got money to spend. But again, when we’re talking about the middle class worker who relies on one vehicle to commute back and forth every day - when they need a new car, they need a new car - they’re not waiting around. Tesla would burn the vast majority of the market they are trying to penetrate and earn a reputation as the company that doesn’t deliver.

So in many ways, I honestly believe that if Tesla did release their 25K EV in 2025, they might enter into a no-win scenario.

Which is Why Elon Musk has decided to take that car for himself and make it into a Robotaxi instead.

You Will Own Nothing and You’ll be Happy

In order to really get your head around the concept of the robotaxi, you need to move beyond the idea of a car as a product or possession - and start embracing the idea of a car as a service.

This is not an easy shift - especially in America where car ownership is synonymous with freedom and independence - the idea of a post-ownership, service based transportation model might sound a bit too much like communism for most - I can guarantee that dudes who are afraid of 15 minute cities are terrified of autonomous robo taxis as a primary means for transportation.

And yet, this is what Elon Musk is betting his fortune on. He recently posted on X that Tesla has spend 10 billion dollars on Full Self Driving and all of the infrastructure that supports it like high powered supercomputer clusters, data pipelines and video storage - In Elon’s mind, autonomy is the end game for Tesla - when they finally transcend the automotive industry and become the world’s largest provider of autonomous, AI powered transportation.

In a world where a car can operate on its own as a transportation service provider, we’re looking at a drastically changed relationship between cost and value.

If it ends up costing Tesla somewhere between 15 and 20 thousand dollars to build one of these compact cars, and they sell it for 25 - then that’s a perfectly fine profit margin - for a car. And in the best case scenario, that person who buys the car might come back in 5 or 10 years and buy another one - this is the typical automotive business model.

But in the case of a robotaxi, the car is not a car, it’s an autonomous driving robot that has the potential to spend 20 hours a day operating as a ride hailing service.

Now all that robotaxi has to do is generate more than 5-10 thousand dollars in service income to outcompete the 25K Tesla in terms of value to the company - the potential for profit on an autonomous vehicle is only limited by the operational lifespan - how many miles it can go before it dies - which in the case of a Tesla with the right battery system could be a million miles.

So put yourself in the shoes of Mr. Elon Musk - if you’ve got a car with this much potential to literally print money - would you do anything so stupid as to sell it? For any price?

And that’s why Elon just stole your car - because he believes that the time has arrived to begin the autonomous vehicle takeover and he’s going to commandeer Tesla’s newly developed, low cost, high volume vehicle manufacturing system to make it happen.

Back when the idea of a 25K Tesla was first announced, Full Self Driving was still a pipe dream - it always had the potential to work out, but it was nowhere near a done deal - obviously that’s not something that Elon would ever tell you but there was always the chance that robotaxi would fail - or at least take much longer to realize than Tesla could bear - in which case, Tesla would need to continue growing as a car manufacturer or risk falling into mediocrity…

So, in many ways Elon was able to kill two birds with one stone - hype up a potential future product release and develop his robotaxi vehicle at the same time - and then when the day finally arrives that the vehicle platform is ready for prime time, Elon can flip the switch to determine Tesla’s future - one path is to sell more cars than any other automaker in the world - the other path is to unleash the robotaxi and ensure that Tesla goes down in history as a revolutionary AI pioneer.

On August 8th, Elon’s vision of the future is revealed.