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Elon Musk

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MappingMay 28

Tesla’s own AI trainers don’t trust ‘Full Self-Driving’ or its safety stats, Reuters finds

A Reuters investigation based on interviews with nine former Tesla data labelers, a former self-driving engineer, and 11 traffic-safety researchers found that Tesla's "10x safer than human" FSD safety claim relied on comparing Tesla airbag-deployment crashes to federal tow-away crash data, a mismatch a University of Michigan researcher recalculated to roughly 3x when normalized. The report also documents that Tesla extensively pre-mapped its Austin robotaxi zone and the Warner Bros. Cybercab demo route, doubling its Utah labeling staff to about 300 ahead of the June 2025 Austin launch, which still operates around 20 unsupervised vehicles.

Why it matters

The headline finding for operators isn't the safety stat. It's the mapping. Tesla has built its entire AV thesis, and a meaningful portion of its valuation, on the claim that it doesn't need the geofenced HD-map approach Waymo uses. Reuters now has sourced internal accounts of staff driving the Austin zone every night for weeks, labelers annotating curbs and stop lights by hand, and the Utah team doubling to ~300 specifically to prep the launch. That's the Waymo playbook with worse tooling, not a generalized self-driving stack.

The scaling math follows directly. Nearly a year in, Austin is still ~20 unsupervised cars in a hand-annotated zone, some with front-seat monitors. If each new metro requires hundreds of labeler-hours per square mile of operating domain, Tesla's cost-to-expand curve looks a lot more like Waymo's than like a software update push. The 3x vs 10x safety restatement matters for the NHTSA cases and the $243M Florida verdict; the mapping disclosure matters for anyone modeling robotaxi unit economics or competing capex plans.

EconomicsMay 26

Tesla ‘Robotaxi’ fleet is actually shrinking, not growing, new data shows

Source: Electrek

Tesla's unsupervised Robotaxi fleet has dropped to 20 active vehicles (14 in Austin, 3 in Dallas, 3 in Houston) from 25 cumulative in late April, according to Robotaxi Tracker data. The total Tesla ride-hailing fleet including supervised Bay Area FSD vehicles has fallen to 34 active units, down from 165 in April, with Bay Area operations collapsing from 107 to 9 vehicles.

Why it matters

One year into commercial operation, Tesla cannot sustain 25 unsupervised vehicles on the road. The reported crash rate at roughly 4x human drivers explains the shrinkage: every additional vehicle adds miles, and miles add incidents that would trigger NHTSA scrutiny Tesla cannot afford during the FSD v15 transition. Pulling vehicles is the rational call, but it inverts the scaling narrative that underwrites the autonomy portion of Tesla's market cap.

The Waymo comparison is now structural, not rhetorical. 20 active vehicles in three cities versus roughly 3,000 across multiple metros, with a Magna-built Mesa line spinning up another 2,000 units. Tesla's bet remains that a vision-only stack with a software rewrite collapses the gap in 2026-2027. For operators modeling robotaxi supply, the takeaway is that geofence size and fleet count are downstream of validated crash rate, and no amount of hardware optionality fixes that until the per-mile safety number moves. Until then, Waymo is the only US operator with a deployable cost model.

DealsMay 21

Anthropic Commits $45 Billion to xAI Compute Over Three Years

Source: Bloomberg Technology

Anthropic has agreed to pay SpaceX's xAI division nearly $45 billion over three years for computing resources to support its Claude AI software, according to SpaceX's S-1 filing. The deal works out to approximately $1.25 billion per month and represents one of the largest AI compute contracts ever disclosed.

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