Becky Peterson

But Wall Street isn't really that interested in these numbers.

Tesla is in a moment of transition where they say pretty clearly their electric vehicle business is not the focus.

This is big news because Wall Street had been expecting Tesla to be making really heavy CapEx investments.

This quarter, the CFO reiterated that they'll be spending $25 billion on CapEx.

Their focus is on getting the new products up and running.

Those products, which are autonomous vehicles, the Robotaxi ride-hailing app, and humanoid robots, which they're calling Optimus.

The pitch Musk has made is that you will be able to step into your Tesla, enter an address and go to sleep, text, eat a meal, just live in your car as if you have a chauffeur.

And that's what people don't quite have yet.

The unsupervised version of full self-driving isn't something that any customers have access to right now.

The pitch Musk has made is that you will be able to step into your Tesla, enter an address, and go to sleep, text, eat a meal, just live in your car as if you have a chauffeur.

And that's what people don't quite have yet.

They're not able to get away from the customers who want access to this technology.

These are customers who bought the car in 2017 or 2019 and paid for this lifetime upgrade and then didn't get the service because the technology wasn't ready, despite what Tesla and despite what Musk said.

Now there's the question of, are these people going to buy new Teslas?

How do they feel about the brand?

Someone like Tom LoSavio, who is the California lawyer suing Tesla, he says, I bought this car in 2017.

The hardware on the car is out of date.

And you promised me full self-driving, and I've never gotten it.

So he is both asking for Tesla to make good on not delivering this product to him, but also he wants damages for them for false marketing and overpromising.

On the earnings call, Musk and other executives will say, we know we're probably going to have to update this hardware, but we don't want to do it until we have a final product, until we have an unsupervised version of the autonomy software that we know is going to be stable.