The Great Tesla Rebrand

For months maybe years Elon Musk has been trying to sell Tesla as more than an electric car company. The pitch has evolved with the times. When Tesla bought SolarCity in 2016, Musk framed the company as a vertically integrated sustainable energy business. More recently, he’s leaned hard into a new identity: Tesla as an AI and robotics company.

 The branding ambition is clear. The financial reality is harder to ignore.

 Tesla still makes most of its money selling cars. Its latest earnings underscore that gap between narrative and numbers. In 2025, Tesla generated $94.8 billion in revenue. About $69.5 billion of that came from selling and leasing electric vehicles, plus regulatory credits. The remaining $25 billion was split roughly evenly between energy generation and storage, and “services and other,” which includes Superchargers, parts, and Full Self-Driving subscriptions.

 That dependence on vehicle deliveries has consequences. As EV sales slowed, Tesla’s broader financial picture weakened with them. Profits in 2025 fell 46% year over year.

 Tesla has been trying to build up its non-EV businesses to offset that slowdown, and its fourth-quarter and full-year earnings—and the accompanying call—suggest a shift from lofty AI-and-robotics talk toward concrete steps. For now, those steps are expensive. Musk repeatedly emphasized that 2026 will be a massive capital-expenditure year, with spending more than doubling to $20 billion. That level of investment would likely push Tesla into negative cash flow.

 Some of the moves are symbolic. Musk announced that Tesla will end production of the Model S and Model X—vehicles that account for roughly 2% of total sales volume, a point Barclays analyst Dan Levy highlighted in a recent note. Even so, it marks the end of an era. The Model S, first sold in 2012, helped reshape the global auto industry and Tesla’s own trajectory.

 More consequential is what comes next.

Tesla plans to use the production capacity freed up by the Model S and X to build Optimus humanoid robots at its Fremont, California, factory. Musk also said Tesla intends to expand its robotaxi operations to more cities in 2026 and floated the idea of building a “TerraFab” factory to secure chip supplies.

 The move that stood out most, though—and one that fits neatly into Musk’s growing corporate ecosystem—was Tesla’s plan to invest $2 billion in another Musk company, xAI, while signaling closer alignment between the two. At the same time, reports suggest discussions are underway about a potential merger, in some form, between SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI.

 For all the future-facing ambition, Tesla’s present is more grounded. Vehicle sales are down year over year, while its smaller energy storage business is showing growth. The rebrand may be accelerating, but the core business remains very much tied to EVs.

Elsewhere in the autonomous and mobility world, deal activity is heating up.

Sources say Waymo is still exploring a fundraising round in the neighborhood of $15 billion, largely backed by parent company Alphabet, with strong interest from outside investors. One potential participant, according to industry chatter, could be an original equipment manufacturer.

 Waabi takes this week’s “deal of the week.” The autonomous vehicle startup raised $750 million in a Series C round co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, plus another $250 million in milestone-based capital from Uber. The funding supports a plan to deploy 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis exclusively on Uber’s platform.

 Uber has backed Waabi since 2021, but this partnership goes beyond a financial stake. Waabi started out focused on autonomous trucking; the Uber deal signals its intention to scale a single AI stack across multiple self-driving applications. That’s a tough path. Others, including Waymo and Aurora, have tried to span both trucks and robotaxis—only to narrow their focus later.

Other notable deals caught our eye:

 Gatik AI, which focuses on middle-mile autonomous trucking, signed a five-year contract worth $600 million with a major consumer goods company. The trucks operate without safety drivers and have completed about 60,000 fully driverless deliveries since mid-2025, according to the company.

MicroVision acquired Luminar’s lidar business for $33 million after winning an auction that included a last-minute mystery bidder with a higher offer.

Rad Power Bikes, which entered bankruptcy roughly a month ago, agreed to sell itself to Life Electric Vehicles Holdings for about $13.2 million. Including liabilities, the deal values the company at $14.9 million—a sharp fall from its former $1.65 billion valuation after raising $329 million.

Redwood Materials raised $425 million in a Series E round led by Eclipse, with new participation from Google and Nvidia’s NVentures, alongside existing investors.

 A few other developments worth noting:

 Obi released new data showing the price gap between Waymo robotaxi rides and Uber or Lyft trips in the San Francisco Bay Area is narrowing. Uber also launched a new unit, Uber AV Labs, focused on sharing sensor data collected from Uber vehicles with partners like Waymo, Lucid, and Waabi—though no contracts have been signed yet.

Waymo received approval to operate robotaxi services to and from San Francisco International Airport, with a limited rollout ahead of broader access. The win is tempered by investigations from U.S. safety regulators following an incident in which a Waymo robotaxi struck a child in Santa Monica in January. Meanwhile, San Francisco police are investigating a crash involving a Zoox autonomous vehicle and a parked car.

One last thing: it’s been a while since we ran a poll, so here’s a fun one—what do you think Musk’s combined supercompany would be called, and what would its ticker be?

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