The shareholder meeting ends with several people pitching Musk on their personal business ideas. He adds another note about FSD’s rate of improvement. And that’s the end.
Thanks for following along with us! We’ll have more coverage of the meeting tomorrow, so stay tuned for that.
Musk kind of sidesteps a question about whether there’s a succession plan in place in the event that he gets hit by a car — or just decides to leave. “I think Tesla has a good future without me,” he said. “I think I’m a helpful accelerant to that future.”
“People will have super helpful humanoid helper robots,” Musk says in response to a question about robot personalities. “And, yeah, you’ll be able to customize the personality, customize the voice and really kind of, the robot will kind of get to know you as well and know your preferences.”
Let’s be real: people are going to try to bang the robots. We all know it.
Trump has been a huge critic of electric vehicles on the stump. But Musk says he talks to Trump a lot and maybe its just a put-on. “I think a lot of his friends now have Teslas,” Musk says. “And they all love it. And he’s a huge fan of the Cybertruck. So I think those may be contributing factors.”
He goes off on a tangent about “homicidal maniacs” after one shareholder asks him how he’s doing with everything. We have fully left the substantive portion of the meeting and are now just coasting on vibes.
This sounds like a question about financial risks of autonomy, but it could also be seen as one about human collateral. Musk leaps to his usual difference: “There’s a small chance of something bad happening. But when you look at the sort of safety per mile, it’s very clear that the safety better than human driving.”
In response to a question about bundling software, Musk says the company will continue offering free trials of Full Self-Driving to new customers as long as there are new versions of the software to release.
Musk is known for his tendency to over-hype his companies products, but this is definitely above the normal level. “I don’t want to trivialize what’s necessary to get there. I mean, it’s an immense amount of work that is required to get there, like super difficult, but we are moving very fast down that road,” he says before shifting to Q&A.
Musk says that it has several humanoid Optimus robots performing tasks at its factory in Fremont. They’re taking cells off the end of the assembly line and putting them into shipping containers. By the end of next year, Musk predicts Tesla will have a thousands robots working in its factories.
[Twitter]