Elon Musk is ready to make his biggest pitch yet that Tesla is more than just a car company

Over its roughly 100-year history, the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California, has set the stage for some of America's most iconic stories. It may do so once again as Elon Musk prepares to use the studio lot to tell another story: Tesla is more than just a car company.

On Thursday, the billionaire Tesla boss is set to take center stage at the historic site in California to host Robotaxi Day. The long-awaited event — originally scheduled for August — is meant to give weight to the electric-vehicle maker's pitch that it is a tech company first and a car company second.

More and more, Musk has been positioning Tesla not just as a company focused on accelerating the clean-energy transition, much like traditional automakers, but also as one with plans to lead in artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.

Musk has played his part in generating the hype, sharing a poster about the event on social media titled "We, Robot," alongside claims that the day will be "one for the history books." But as Musk prepares to unveil a major part of his vision for Tesla's future, he faces a high-stakes situation.

Tesla's high-risk pivot

Musk has given investors strong signals over the years about his intent to evolve Tesla into something more than just an EV maker.

In 2019, at Tesla's then-headquarters in Palo Alto, the EV chief told shareholders that by 2020, he was confident that a fleet of 1 million driverless robotaxis would swarm the streets and carry passengers. Though he missed this deadline, he has driven Tesla into other areas.

In July, Musk wrote on X that "Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production" for internal use next year and hoped to ramp up production to sell them to other companies in 2026. A prototype first shown in 2022 has been dubbed "Optimus."

More broadly, Musk could look to humanoid robots and driverless cars as a way for Tesla to generate value from AI, the hyped technology put firmly on Silicon Valley's agenda after Sam Altman, Musk's fellow cofounder at OpenAI and nemesis, released ChatGPT in late 2022.

That Tesla can capture a broader opportunity through robots and AI is not just Musk's conviction. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's former director of AI, said in a recent episode of the "No Priors" podcast that he didn't think Tesla was a car company; in his view, "cars are basically robots," he said. Meanwhile, in July, the Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said the "Tesla AI story could be worth $1 trillion-plus and is the most undervalued AI name."

However, what's critical to note is the timing for Tesla's robotaxi push. It comes at a tough moment for Elon Inc. For one, Tesla has been unable to escape the sales pressure that has hit the wider EV market.

In the first half of the year, Tesla generated $46.8 billion in revenue, down from $48.3 billion in the same period last year. While Tesla posted a 6.4% year-on-year jump in deliveries for its third quarter, its value remains over $600 billion short of the $1.2 trillion peak it hit in November 2021.

Caspar Rawles, the chief data officer at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, an industry firm focused on market prices and supply-chain data for EVs, said he expected EV growth to continue long term but acknowledged that recent macroeconomic headwinds had led to a slowdown.

"You've seen higher interest rates, inflation, all kinds of hangovers from the pandemic," Rawles told Business Insider. "EV sales have grown far more quickly than traditional internal-combustion-engine vehicles; they're just not growing as quickly as people thought."

Reactions to Musk's overall brand have become more visceral as Tesla's shareholder base has split on his leadership following his controversial transformation of Twitter into X and his endorsement of former President Donald Trump.

"Elon bought Twitter and decided that he was going to become a global leader for the right-wing country of Elonville," Ross Gerber, Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management's CEO and a Tesla shareholder, said.

Gerber told BI that while he believed EVs were a business that could be "wonderfully profitable" — something that made the case strong to invest in Tesla in years prior — he felt far less confident about the robotaxi pivot.

This is largely because Musk will be entering a market where competitors have a head start. Waymo, owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, struck a partnership with Uber last year. BYD, a Chinese EV maker, has also partnered with Uber to bring "autonomous-capable vehicles" to customers globally, a press release said in July.

In China, Tesla's biggest market outside the US, the local internet giant Baidu has already deployed a robotaxi fleet called Apollo Go, launched in Wuhan in 2022. It is aggressively enticing consumers with heavy subsidies that translate to dirt-cheap fares.

"Robotaxis, in theory, could be profitable as long as there's not a lot of competition," Gerber told BI. "The problem is that there is, and it's already on the road."

Questions also remain over how confident regulators are about the safety of robotaxis. Last year, the GM-owned self-driving company Cruise took a reputational hit following crashes involving its vehicles. Incidents like this have a knock-on effect on how the wider autonomous-vehicle space is perceived, including Tesla's robotaxis.

That's especially true because experts think the fully realized version of Musk's robotaxi ambitions presents technical challenges. Paul Miller, a principal analyst at Forrester, said full autonomous driving meant "a vehicle should be able to drive itself pretty much anywhere a human driver could, on any type of road, in any weather conditions."

"It's more achievable to allow cars to drive themselves on particular types of road, in known locations, and in specific conditions," he said ahead of Tesla's Robotaxi Day.

Clearly, then, Musk has a big story to tell on Thursday. Under the Hollywood lights, he'll be hoping investors are willing to believe in it as much as he is.