Elon Musk’s New $20 Billion Wallet

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

24/7 Wall St. Key Points

  • Tesla Inc.’s (NASDAQ: TSLA) earnings call was a laundry list of what the company is planning to do in the future.

  • Tesla committed to $20 billion for capital spending, double what it was last year.

  • The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 stocks and Tesla wasn't one of them. Get them here FREE.

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Elon Musk’s New $20 Billion Wallet

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Tesla Inc.’s (NASDAQ: TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction) earnings call was a laundry list of what the company is planning to do in the future. The company will kill its high-end Model S and Model X. The Model S, released in 2012, was Tesla’s first mainstream car. It has not changed a great deal since then.

Tesla will invest $2 billion in xAI, the social media and artificial intelligence company Musk controls. It would seem to be a conflict of interest, but there has been no outcry. Musk’s SpaceX has already put money into xAI. Tesla wants access to xAI to help it build robots and a true self-driving car. A broad license of xAI software might have done just as well and would not have taken the $2 billion off Tesla’s balance sheet.

Of course, Tesla mentioned that its 2025 revenue dropped 3% to $98.4 billion.

The company also said it would open its wallet and take out $20 billion for capital spending. That is about double what it was last year. The money, and part of the production facilities for the Model S and Model X, will boost Tesla’s investment into cars that really drive themselves completely and without human help. Self-driving tests of Tesla and Waymo robotaxis require a human to be involved, if only for safety if the self-driving feature fails to function.

Musk says billions of dollars will go toward the new Optimus robot. It will, he says, cut much of the need for human labor worldwide and “eliminate poverty.” Companies have dreamed about making a fully operational robot for decades. This has never worked. All experiments to build a robot so advanced have stumbled because sophisticated software was lacking.

Tesla’s challenge in the self-driving business is that it has competition. That competition, most notably from Alphabet’s Waymo, is ahead of it in terms of the cities where it can be tested. Waymo also has the advantage that several car companies could eventually use its offerings. Should Tesla’s service work well enough, it will only be available on its own cars. The Tesla self-driving service also assumes people will want it. The demand for electric vehicles (EVs) was supposed to be insatiable. That was not the case, and it hurt Tesla badly.

Tesla’s stock did not move much during the announcements. Investors appear to be willing to wait another year, and perhaps a year after that, to see if the new products and services work. In the meantime, Musk has a huge wallet to spend with.

Tesla Stock Price Prediction and Forecast 2026–2030

 

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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