Jon Quast

I think it's a little bit of both, Tyler.

Love them or hate them, I think we can all agree that nobody tells a better story than Elon Musk.

To be sure, there's an element of storytelling in here somewhere.

There's a desire to create a narrative.

I think that part of the narrative creation has to do with its recent change of the Tesla mission statement.

This is a big thing.

The mission statement was to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.

Now the mission statement is to build a world of amazing abundance.

As Musk tells this story, Optimus robot program, autonomy, this is all part of creating abundance.

Considering that that is now the mission statement of Tesla, it makes perfect sense to go all-in on production of Optimus and these other autonomy efforts.

Discontinuing the lines of S and X models to repurpose them for robot production is what's going on.

This fits that narrative.

But here's the thing.

Matt pointed this out before the show.

X and S models, they account for less than 5% of Tesla's overall vehicle sales.

The truth is, these models aren't really selling anyway.

It made sense to get rid of them, whether or not autonomy was the big picture plan here.

It's a little bit of both, in my opinion.

X and S aren't selling.

It makes sense to get rid of them.