Investors Say “Never Bet Against Musk” as Tesla Announces The Rise of Robotaxi

American automotive company Tesla announced its quarterly and full-year earnings via a webcast after the stock market closed on Wednesday, with company management answering questions from analysts and retail investors. Tesla announced it delivered 1.77 million vehicles worldwide in 2024, marking a decline of 2.2 percent from 1.81 million in 2023. This represents the first year-over-year drop in deliveries, resulting in lower revenue unless other sectors of Tesla’s business can compensate for the sales difference.

The earnings announcement was the company’s first since Musk joined the Trump administration. The delivery numbers for the fourth quarter of 2025 did show some encouraging signs for Tesla. In the fourth quarter, the firm supplied 495,570 automobiles, 7 percent more than in the third quarter and roughly 2.28 percent more than during the same time in 2023.

The Robotaxi Era

On Wednesday, Musk shared a video on his social media platform, X, indicating that Tesla now lets completed vehicles drive themselves to a parking lot used for delivery prep. Musk explicitly confirmed plans to launch an in-house robo-taxi fleet in June in Austin, TX, and aims to enable unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) across the U.S. in the second half of 2025.

“While most of the earnings report was disappointing, filled with a lot of ‘fluff’ like this, and had some loftier goals in mind, we are a part of the ‘never bet against Musk’ crowd and a lot of what he said could come true at some point,” analyst Connor Mahoney at Mahoney Asset Management said. “It could just be a matter of when. The robo-taxi/FSD fleet is extremely ambitious for this year in our opinion, particularly when they use the term ‘unsupervised’.”

As the AI landscape grows more crowded and more competitive, leaders are beginning to emerge in different branches of the technology. In his remarks, Musk claimed that Tesla was going “balls to the wall for autonomy” last year. Making Tesla vehicles autonomous has been long touted but never fulfilled. Musk was motivated to lay off almost 10 percent of Tesla’s global workers because of this pledge, which has kept the company’s stock price at an all-time high.

UBS analyst Joseph Spaks believes that investors don’t particularly view Tesla (TSLA) as a carmaker anymore. “We can almost definitively say the market doesn’t treat TSLA like an auto company, but rather an AI company,” Spaks said in a company report.

Looking Back

The company’s operational income and its profitability on an adjusted basis—$2.06 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023—presented a clearer financial success. Tesla reported $25.2 billion in sales for the third quarter of 2024 and a $2.2 billion profit—essentially flat compared to the same quarter in 2023. In the fourth quarter of 2023, Tesla recorded a net income (on a GAAP basis) of $7.9 billion, and the company’s sales were $25.17 billion, year over year. A one-time non-cash tax advantage of $5.9 billion for the release of valuation allowance on specific deferred tax assets was included in this disproportionately large amount.

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