Elon Musk did not deliver on his three big robotaxi promises

Updated on: January 02, 2026 8:33 AM
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When Tesla's (TSLA) board approved a potential $1 trillion pay package for CEO Elon Musk back in November, it led to significant debate both inside and outside of Wall Street about the logic behind paying anyone that much money.

Of course, when that someone is Musk, whose entire persona is arguably the only reason that Tesla's stock is priced at over 300 times its trailing twelve-month earnings, it becomes a little tricker to calculate his true worth to the company.

Tesla's massive stock price and its $1.5 trillion market cap shows that it's always been about a bet on the future for investors, which is directly related to Musk's propensity for making bold predictions about where Tesla is heading.

Among Musk's most recent predictions were three very ambitious promises about Tesla's robotaxi fleet that he said would happen in 2025, none of which were met.

On Tesla's second-quarter earnings call back in July, Musk proclaimed that the company would "probably have autonomous ride hailing in probably half the population of the US by the end of the year."

However, by the end of the year, Tesla was still only operating its robotaxis in its home base of Austin, Texas. Although Musk cautioned on the earnings call that the goal was "subject to regulatory approvals," it wasn't the federal regulators who prevented Tesla from achieving its goal.

In January 2024, Musk predicted that Tesla would be flooding the market with its autonomous vehicles.

“Next year for sure, we’ll have over a million robotaxis,” he said at the time.

In reality, Tesla only has about 30 robototaxis in its fleet in Austin, and most of them are reportedly not even in operation.

And then, Musk had repeatedly claimed that Tesla would be offering driverless robotaxi rides in Austin by the end of the year, including as recently as December at xAI's hackathon.

“Unsupervised is pretty much solved at this point," Musk said. "So there will be Tesla Robotaxis operating in Austin with no one in them. Not even anyone in the passenger seat in about three weeks.”

But that also never materialized.

It should be noted that for Musk to become a trillionaire (at least on paper), Tesla's board has placed aggressive market cap and operational milestones that he must meet. One of those operational milestones is having a million robotaxis in commercial operation.

With a current fleet that totals about 30 vehicles, Musk has got a lot of ground to cover in order to reach that target.

Wall Street's confidence in Tesla remains unwavering

The question, though, is whether Wall Street really cares that Musk is failing to deliver thus far on his promises, or whether they just take his forecasts with a grain of salt.

Wedbush tech analyst Dan Ives appears to be undaunted by Tesla failing to meet its goals for 2025, expecting 2026 to be a "historical" year for Tesla. He maintains that "autonomous will be worth $1 trillion to the Tesla story."

Ives has placed a bullish price target of $800 on Tesla's stock.

Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said in a Dec. 15 note that he expects Tesla to "meaningfully increase its robotaxi fleet size" in 2026.

And by "meaningfully," Percoco is projecting that the company will reach 1,000 robotaxis by the end of 2026, which is a far cry from the million-strong fleet that Musk had predicted would be on the US roads by 2025.

Percoco does actually predict that Tesla will reach that million vehicle target - by 2035.

Of course, Tesla's biggest rival, Alphabet's (GOOG) Waymo, ended 2025 with a fleet of about 2,500 robotaxis, operating across five US cities. Waymo is now serving 1 million fully autonomous rides every month, and is predicting to begin hitting that number every week in 2026.

Waymo is planning to launch its service in four new US cities in 2026, and is also expanding internationally to London.

But despite Tesla trailing Waymo by a significant margin, many analysts appear to be unwavering in their confidence about what Musk will deliver, even if sometimes their confidence goes unrewarded.

At the beginning of December, TD Cowen analyst Itay Michaeli said in a note that he had taken three Tesla robotaxi rides in Austin and found them to be "impressive all around."

So much so, that Michaeli was convinced that Musk was going to deliver on one of his three promises.

"Does Tesla seem to be on track to begin removing Austin safety monitors by year end? We think so," he said.

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