After the Meltdown, Elon Looks to Robotaxis

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Let me tell you we have a new star. A star is born Elon On Mars Juthan Kennemy.

He is the Thomas Edison plus plus plus of our age.

Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity. I feel for the guy. I would say ninety eight percent really appreciate what he does.

But those two percent that are nasty, they are up pay in four fos.

We are meant for great things in the United States of America, and Elon reminds.

Us of that.

I'm very disappointed in Elon.

I've helped Elon a lot.

A lot.

Welcome to Elon, Inc. Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Muskets Tuesday, June tenth. I'm your host, David Papadopolis. So the Wild Feud, the feud to end all feuds between Elon and the President appears to be sick down a bit for the moment. Saalacious posts are being deleted. Nice thaties exchanged, but the damage to their alliance is done and will break it all down. Also, a big date is upon us this Thursday. Tesla will apparently finally start its long awaited Robotaxi service

Hey, David, happy to be here.

Good day, David.

How are you guys doing you look you're smiling again.

Max, I mean, crazy week last week. I'm still I'm still still a buzz.

You're still a glow. So we spoke. You did an emergency pod on Thursday with Josh, and then you and I did the Friday one. Stuff keeps happening. Although I guess maybe tacking back in the other direction bring us now up to speed.

Yeah, we I mean I think we started to kind of hint at this in our conversation on.

Friday Elon Musk, I mean.

You know, pretty quickly started to at least turn the the the dial down it. He deleted the most incendiary tweet, the one about Jeffrey Epstein. He I believe deleted the tweet calling for Donald Trump to be impeached.

He's deleted at least two.

Yeah.

He's also gone back to sort of something resembling his regular scheduled programming. At the end of last week, he like just started tweeting about, you know, a big win for Starlink and Dominica, you know, the Islands, I guess, which I thought was kind of funny because it's like, Okay, here's the world, here's we're huge, where the world leader does not hate me. But in any case, he's been talking about his companies again. He is also sort of

Got so so yeah.

I mean, he's sort of trying to edge his way back into the good grades of Donald Trump without explicitly apologizing. He hasn't done that or really come close to doing that.

Now Trump is still keeping him at arms length, though.

Yeah.

Trump was asked yesterday about Elon Musk's drug use, and he answered the question in a way that seemed very diplomatic.

We should just listen to that, David, I think, yeah, let's do that.

There was this New York Times report that he did not want to talk about Elon Musk, that alleged that he, towards the end of his time in the White House was blurring the lines between recreational use of drugs and medicinal Do.

You think he ever had drugs here at the White House? I really don't know. I don't think so. I hope not. Look I wish him well. You understand, we had a good relationship, and I just wish him well, very well.

Actually, I mean it's not exactly a total denial, but he also said he didn't see anything concerning you know. To me, that's sort of a rear that tells you that this feud is still going on, although it does appear that Donald Trump's to turn that down down as well.

A day or so earlier, the Washington Post had I think this is over the weekend, reporting that Trump in phone calls with some of his advisors and such, had called Musk a big time drug addict. So yes, certainly a very differ tone here in this in this press conference.

It's a different thing to say I never saw somebody take drugs versus I know he's not a drug addict, right like, So there's like he could have denied it in a more complete way, although he does back up Elon's denials to some extent.

Okay, now, Danna, we missed you last week and we didn't get your hot takes towards the end of the week. So as you are observing at all, what is what is your take from there?

Yeah?

I was.

I was off at the end of last week, trying to be like a normal person. So I was following this like tit for tat back and forth sort of on my phone, but not in real time, and then it was very hard to play catch up anyway. It was it was just sort of crazy. But I thought that Trump's what Trump said in that clip, I wish

My reading of that was door number three. I wish him well. Muski's working very hard to try to simmer things down, and I'm gonna take a step in that direction as well. I wish him well so that he keeps sending me miney.

Yeah, you know, my hot take was it totally reminded me of the whole pedo guy thing from twenty eighteen when like Elon, with zero zero proof whatsoever, basically just like went on this rampage and called this cave rescuer a pedo guy, and like then doubled down on it and just he's like when Elon is certain that he's right about something, or when he's upset or when he feels like he's being attacked, he just goes thermonuclear.

And specifically you're referencing the Epstein thing.

Yeah, like this is a thing like Elon is like obsessed with his idea that people are our pedophiles.

It's the pedo guy insults all over. I mean, the allegations around Jeffrey Epstein It's exactly the same insult, except the difference. I see one of those guys, one of those guys as president, and one was a guy who had you know, been on TV once exactly.

But for him to level this at the president and to do the twofer of he's in the Epstein files and that's why they haven't been released and he should be impeached, I was like, Wow, Okay, someone really needs to like step in and take his phone away. In the old days, that would have been Sam Teller, his chief of staff. I don't know who takes the phone away these days. Is it Katie Miller?

Is it somewhere else?

Like I would love to just know, like the apparatus. And then there was a lot of reporting about how this datane was reached because of intermediaries, and I'm like, well, who exactly is the who exactly are the intermediaries at this stage of the game.

It's Bill act and Kanye West And that's a non on Twitter Alaska or whatever. He was like, hey guy, Hey, Elon, I think you should cool down. And Elon was like, you know, that sounds like a pretty smart IDEA random guy with a couple hundred Twitter followers.

You know, one thing I've been thinking about in the sober light of day.

You know, we have as we've been talking about the Elon Trump kind of relationship a lot of Trump reporters, including Josh Green, who was on the podcast last week.

I said I told you so, Yeah.

I have said I told you so yeah. And I am happily eating crow. Although I do think we're starting to see that my take that this relationship may continue, I don't know.

Want you want to share the crow with other people.

Yeah, it's not like as bad as did last week.

I do wonder if Elon is sort of a combination of like one of these Trump advisors who were sort of chewed up and spit out by the White House and a world leader. You know, Elon is part Scaramucci and part Kim Jong Um. And I say that because Elon, because that's quite a merging, has leverage, you know, and we saw it over We saw it last week when he was threatening to to you know, cancel the Dragon program.

He has the kind of like the you know, campaign donations, Dragon all those things are right, but Max, at the same time, you can't tell me that he doesn't have more to lose in all this than than Trump. No, he totally does.

But I just think there's a way to reach kind of a equilibrium where they are neither friends nor enemies, which is kind of the way it works with all these world leaders, where Trump one day will be hinting at the possibility of nuclear war, the next minute saying I love this guy, you know. And we've seen it with Kim Jong Um, We've seen it with Ajijenping, We've seen it with Vladimir Putin, where he will swing rather

I would just like to point out that we had all this bs for so many episodes about the cage match and what the real cage match was, and David, this was the cage match. This is the true cage match. Trump on like Bannon in one corner, Katie Miller and another I.

Don't know, Like it's just Bannon is Trump's cup man? Who who's Musk cup Man? Yeah, that's it's not It's not Katie Miller, Zachman or Cacumen or Zachman the ref. No, it's true. It's the cage match to end all cage matches, and now they just write each side has gone to their respective corners at least for the time being. Okay, now, Dana. On Thursday, Tesla has a big day of sorts, the

I don't want to go overboard and say it's like a big launch of it, you know. Bloomberg has reported My colleagu Ed Ludlow has reported that Tesla was sort of eyeing June twelfth as the day that they would begin some kind of robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. We don't know if this is paid customers, if it's employees, if it's just like delivering you know, vehicles from the

And by the way, so for those listeners in Austin, Texas, they should write into us Max at what is our address again, Elon Inc.

At Bloomberg dot net.

And give us any hot tips on that. But I do wonder Max if Dana's last point is exactly it that this went from a year or so ago to be Matt, this is going to be big. It's gonna be huge. We're gonna have bunkeding up all over the stadium and it's going to be.

A big knowledge just launch you could possibly imagine. And and it's particularly noteworthy because this is a company, this is a guy who is kind of known for these big events. Elon Musk really likes to do these grand shows.

Why he's going to be so bitter that he misses the screaming his name and.

And you know, they started to signal this during the earnings call.

We talked about this on our the episode that we did immediately after the last Tesla earnings. We're talking about ten to twenty taxis with teleoperation a very restricted area. It also sounded like on the earnings call that they are are kitting these things out with more sensors than at least the standard model. Hy has so a lot of reasons to not look at this as a true commercial.

Launch, and really not anywhere near a true commercial launch. But you know, maybe who knows.

I'm prepared to be surprised because that's what Elon Musk does. But we have not seen any signs that this is going to be a big event, and in fact, I think it's gonna be the kind of thing where investors, maybe not on Thursday, but start to ask, hey, didn't he promise that we would have a commercial launch?

You know what I mean?

Didn't he promised it? Didn't We friggin bid this price of the stock up a whole heck of a lot based on all this isn't you know, and so but you know what one of the interesting things is is they always seem to forget that they had bid them, they did price the stock up, and then when it doesn't, if it doesn't come to pass, then they just go, well, we're just gonna bid it up on some some other thing.

Yeah, so this was just sort of a horrible, tragic tale of how a seventy one year old grandmother in Arizona was killed by a Tesla and it all came to late in a very weird sequence of events, which was in October, NITSA announced that they were investigating Tesla FSD because of four separate crashes where the vehicle with FSD engaged seemed to have difficulty where there was fog, dust or glare. And they listed these four crashes and

Oh, but the long wind did response was what, hey, don't sweat it. We got it.

Yeah.

It was basically like, we've solved this problem. We had this breakthrough recently, we can bypass the image processor, we're doing photon counting.

Well. So this is one of the questions I had for you, which is this accident did happen a couple of years ago. So is there any confidence out there, not just among Elon in his inner circle, but among broader Tesla followers that they indeed have made advancements and developments that would fix such a problem.

Yeah, I mean to be clear, you know, Tesla is always updating its hardware stack and its software stack, and so what version of hardware and software the Tesla that was involved in this fatal crash had in November twenty twenty three versus now, I don't really know because I asked Tesla if they could tell me, like what was the hardware version and what was the software version? And they didn't respond.

Did Tesla respond at all to anything you ask them?

No, I mean I said, to a long list of questions to several executives. But you can it's reasonable to presume that, yes, the current use out there is a different version. Maybe they've solved it, maybe they haven't. Doesn't matter, Like this woman is dead and NITZA is investigating this crash as part of a potential defect investigation. And you know, we only know about this crash because Tessel reported it to NITSA.

Dan of course, NITSA being National.

Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Right basically the men and women who regulate the transportation sector. Now, Max, as Dana is saying here, regardless of what happens with the technology going forward, that's not going to bring this

Obviously society is not ready to accept that. There are two problems here. One is that Tesla has all of these statistics about the number of miles driven by what it calls full self driving parentheses supervised FSD supervised. Those statistics are interesting, but they are not the same as what Tesla is purporting to launch in Austin or anywhere else, which is the same system but without a human in.

The loop, the exact same system.

Yeah, and that's what Elon Musk has been saying.

So just sounds the supervised and gets ready.

For the lack of supervision.

FSD unsupervised basically.

But in the nitty gritty of it, all you're doing is stripping out one we.

Heard a couple of I mean, there are a few modifications that they're that they appear to be making in Austin because it's not ready. But my point is where we're taking one thing and attempting to make a judgment about another thing that is different, and that is different and in like a hugely important way. The second thing

Than any final points on this before we move on.

Yeah, I just think that there's going to be a lot of questions about the rollout, the parameters of it. You know what happens if there is an accident in Austin.

One other thing about Dana's story, and this is kind of important when you're talking about cities like Austin.

Do read it. By the way, it ran as a big take, a bloomber big take last Wednesday.

Oh so one important thing also about the story is av systems. Autonomous vehicle systems have trouble with non vehicles, so with pedestrians, with cyclists, and with children, and like, this is not the first time an autonomous vehicle has killed a pedestrian. That that of course happened with an uber autonomous vehicle, like about eight years ago or so. And of course cities are driving environments where you have lots and lots of pedestrians, where the interaction between pedestrians

Listen, I think for sure those things are going to happen, especially as you roll out more of these things. I mean, it's interesting to me, Unlike you, I happen to pretty much firmly believe that human drivers are lousy and that if given the opportunity, the robots will eventually do it better than us. But you're also starting to convince me that, you know what, we the humans may never allow the robots to be tested enough to get to that point.

And that is that's like one of the reasons when you talk to people in the industry who are skeptical, that is their skepticism. They're not saying the robots could never do this, we could never get there. It's that the things we would have to do are things we are not going to be willing to do. Like, are you going to be willing to accept a technology that kills pedestrians at a higher rate than human drivers?

I mean initially or maybe total?

Like fer people die, Well, what a fewer people in cars die, but more pedestrians die? Would you know that's still of course not Okay, Well that's going to be a problem.

Well they call the whole thing off, all the robo taxi launch off.

Yeah, I guess the question is like, are you willing so? Roughly forty thousand people die in traffic accidents every year in the United States. Alcohol, drug use, and speed and not wearing seatbelts are all huge factors in these crashes. But the premise of autonomous driving is that we can get to crash zero, but on the way to crash zero, are we happy if robots like end up killing people? I don't think so. I mean, so that's the calculus

I mean, this is the kind of scenario where I mean, and again we don't know for sure, it's very dangerous anytime you get out of your car on the highway, it's very dangerous.

Yes, but this does sound like.

A scenario where a human driver might have done a better job. And like we're like, as Dana is saying, there's lots there's a lot of context around this that that a human driver might pick up. It's also kind of upsetting that the pedestrian who got out of the car was attempting to help, was attempting to kind of like you know, direct traffic around this incident, and in a way that like again maybe a human driver, a tentive human driver anyway, is able.

To avoid and avoid this tragedy.

All Right, I'm sure next week we will have a bit of a recap of just exactly what transpires down there in Austin hard pivot now Max hard hard pivot to a mini feud that has been thrown off that is a shard of sorts of the feud to end all feuds. Tell us about it.

Yeah, Elon versus Rock.

Now, this isn't the first time Elon and his favorite chatbot have beefed in public, but there was in the kind of like back and forth over Elon Musk and the Trump administration. Grock cited a tweet from Elon Musk that was that was fake. It essentially Grock essentially fell for a meme. I'm gonna try to avoid getting too far into the meme because I don't want to defame anyone, but it's a left wing meme without a lot of basis around Elon Musk and a love triangle within.

The Trump administration. Grock cited this tweet from.

Elon purporting to be for this and acting as if it was real, and Elon wrote, O f FS, which means for sake, this is fake and.

With some sort of emoji.

Yeah, I can't remember that.

Like the hanging hands, what's the one where they had you put that hand, which to me just screams of groc. I'm so so disappointed in you, so like you.

Gra is not a person, I just want to say, and we should not be anthropomorphizing uh Rock or any other AI.

It's just a It's just like a it's like a spell checker or something. You cannot fall in love with your spell checker. You cannot be mad at you can't be disappointed in it.

On the other hand, it is kind of funny that Elon Musk is simultaneously saying that these that this AI is basically gonna like lead to a super intelligence and at the same time baby getting into.

These baby steps Max baby steps. By the way, I did, something came to me. Uh, if there is truly a detent between Musk and Trump and coming days, there's no better place to end it or or or I should say to Ring in that detent than at the military parade. And it happens. I think you have Musk at some point in one of the tanks and then he just suddenly pops up from the turret, right, I mean.

The cyber truck.

I mean that's cyber truck could bear. It's like the Cyberg gets Russian warlord.

Dam Yes, exactly, Uh, Cyberg, that's good. We should send that over to them.

But look, this is a lesson that you can't believe every screenshot you see on the internet, and you definitely shouldn't believe every screenshot cited by an Ai Chapbop and El almost knows that well, so, which is why you know why he's disappointed.

So disappointed, very very disappointed, Max, Dana, thanks as always.

Thanks David, Always a pleasure.

This episode was produced by Stacey Wong and edited by Anna Masirakas, Blake Maples handles engineering, and Dave Percell fact checks. Our supervising producer is Magnus Henrickson. The elon Ing theme is written and performed by Taka yes Suzawa and Alex Sugi Eira. Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer, and Sage Bowman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. A big things. As always to our supporters, Joel Weber and Brad Stone, I'm David Papadopoulos. If you have a minute, rate and