I watched Elon Musk squirm. It wasn't subtle.
During that recent Doha interview, when Saudi investors pressed him about Tesla's actual car business—you know, the thing that pays the bills—Musk's body language screamed discomfort. He'd rather discuss anything else: humanoid robots, Mars colonies, autonomous taxis... just please don't make him talk about selling cars.
It was a revealing moment. Because here's the uncomfortable truth that's becoming increasingly obvious: beneath all the futuristic promises and grand visions, Tesla remains fundamentally a car company. And Musk, it seems, is finding that reality increasingly... inconvenient.
Can you blame him? The automotive industry is brutal—capital-intensive, cyclical, with margins thinner than the patience of Wall Street analysts. It's why traditional auto executives don't become celebrity billionaires with 170 million Twitter followers. They're too busy obsessing over production efficiencies and supply chain logistics to host SNL.
But here's where things get interesting (and potentially problematic for Tesla investors). Musk appears increasingly determined to reframe Tesla as anything but a car company. A tech platform. An AI powerhouse. A robotics innovator. Anything but the thing it actually is.
I've covered corporate repositioning strategies for years, and this one's a classic—I call it the "anchor-blurring strategy." When your core business faces headwinds (slowing growth, margin pressure, increasing competition), you redirect investor attention toward speculative future revenue streams. And the further in the future, the better! Ten years out is perfect, since it's just distant enough that today's disappointing quarters can be reframed as "investments in the future."
It's worked before. Amazon spent years training Wall Street to ignore retail margins while building AWS into a profit machine. But—and this is crucial—Bezos never stopped executing relentlessly on the core business. He didn't suddenly find retail boring.
The Full Self-Driving conundrum perfectly encapsulates this tension. Tesla enthusiasts point to impressive videos of the system navigating complex scenarios, while skeptics note it remains officially classified as Level 2 automation—driver assistance, not true autonomy. This isn't just bureaucratic hairsplitting; it's the difference between "helpful feature" and "foundation of a trillion-dollar robotaxi network."
And the suggestion that Tesla could simply add lidar if its camera-only approach proves insufficient? That misses the competitive reality. If Tesla pivots to lidar, they'd be entering a race where Waymo has been running laps for years. And Waymo doesn't have to simultaneously manage a global manufacturing operation with eroding margins.
Look, the approaching crisis for Tesla isn't financial collapse—the company has plenty of cash. It's the widening gap between Musk's attention (spread between SpaceX, X, xAI, and whatever shiny object caught his interest this week) and Tesla's operational needs (refreshing aging models, improving quality, defending market share against hungry competitors).
Car companies require obsessive focus on execution. You can't run them as a side hustle... even if you're Elon Musk.
Having followed Tesla since its early days, I've seen the company defy skeptics repeatedly. But markets can maintain faith in future promises for surprisingly long periods—just not indefinitely. At some point, the robots need to start walking, the taxis need to start driving themselves, or investors might notice that Tesla's anchor—the one Musk is trying so hard to blur—is dragging.
And that's a reality even Elon Musk can't tweet his way out of.
