Ed Ludlow

I would start with Tesla, but only because the story that jumped out wasn't the story we were prepared for.

And I think that it's important to be honest about that.

And that is Tesla pulling the trigger on a $2 billion investment in XAI.

If you guys remember, this was a non-binding shareholder resolution in November as part of the annual shareholder meeting.

And the outcome was kind of weird because a lot of shareholders abstained from voting.

That told us that even though the board wasn't bound to the outcome, a lot of shareholders were like, do we really want to go down that route?

Well, Tesla's done it.

Not only are they investing $2 billion into XAI through XAI's recent Series E round, but they now have an agreement in place, what they call a framework, to work on technology and product together.

And it's this closer intermesh of Elon Inc., right?

There are like 10 different answers to that.

I mean, the first thing to state is that this was, believe it or not, double check the Bloomberg, the first annual revenue decline that Tesla's ever had.

So revenues, overall revenues from all its divisions dropped 3%.

And they blame that on lower vehicle deliveries and sales and lower regulatory tax credits.

So that's kind of interesting.

But this shareholder deck is about the future where Tesla doesn't sell vehicles as its principal line of business.

It does physical AI through robotics and through robo-taxi.

And as it relates to XAI, there were definitely two schools of thought.

There were the Tesla bulls that basically said, if they invest in XAI, all of this stuff will happen quicker because XAI is so good at the software side of AI.

They're very bullish Tesla shareholders that were like, whoa, this XAI is a company that burns billions of dollars a quarter.

Do you want Tesla to be the entity that's propping that up?