Tech
TechCrunch Mobility: The great Tesla rebranding
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent months — years? — trying to position his company as something more than just a maker of electric vehicles. When Tesla acquired Solar City in 2016, he (and his comms team) pitched it as a sustainable energy company. Over the past year, he has pushed the idea of Tesla as an AI and robotics company.
Musk’s aspirational branding has slammed right up against financial reality: The bulk of its revenue comes from selling EVs. Its latest earnings support this.
The company generated $94.8 billion in revenue in 2025. Of that, $69.5 billion came from selling and leasing EVs as well as related regulatory credits. The remaining $25 billion is split nearly down the middle between its energy generation (solar) and storage business and “services and other,” which include revenue from its Superchargers, parts sales, and Full Self-Driving subscriptions. That reliance on deliveries means that as EV sales have dipped, so has Tesla’s entire balance sheet. Its profits in 2025 were 46% lower year-over-year.
Tesla has tried to grow its non-EV businesses to compensate for the decline in sales, and its Q4 and full-year earnings report (and its accompanying call) signaled a shift beyond the persistent AI-robotics talk and toward action. For now, that action involves spending money, not making it. Musk repeatedly stressed that 2026 would be a huge CapEx year, more than doubling spending to $20 billion, which would put them in negative-cash-flow territory.
For instance, Musk announced that Tesla is ending production of the Model S and Model X, which is more symbolic than material. Those two models represent about 2% of Tesla’s sales volume, a point that Barclays analyst Dan Levy also makes in his most recent note. Still, it is a notable end-of-an-era moment for Tesla and the broader automotive industry, which was forever changed when the Model S went on sale in 2012.
The more material move is what Tesla plans to do now.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
Tesla plans to fill the production void left by the Model S and X with its Optimus humanoid robots, which will be made at its Fremont, California, factory. Musk also intends to scale Tesla’s robotaxi operations to more cities in 2026 and even floated the need for Tesla to build a TerraFab factory to shore up chip supply.
But the item that really stood out to me — and a true Elon Inc circular economy deal — was Tesla’s plan to invest $2 billion into another Musk company, xAI, and signaled plans to more closely align those two companies. Meanwhile, other outlets are reporting talks are underway to possibly merge (in some combination) three of Musk’s companies: SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI.
But let’s come back down to earth for a moment and review Tesla’s current business. Its sales are down year-over-year, while its smaller energy storage business made positive gains.
A little bird
We’re not quite ready to share the full details, but we’ve heard from one little bird that there is some activity on the fundraising front for Waymo. You probably saw reporting last month about Waymo raising up to a $15 billion round led by its parent company Alphabet. Based on my conversations, it is still in “the realm” of $15 billion and large portion is coming from Alphabet, and there is high interest from external investors to join. One little bird told me one of the other investors may be an OEM (original equipment manufacturer.
Stay tuned for more on this.
Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or my Signal at kkorosec.07, or email Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com.
Deals!
Waabi gets my “deal of the week” badge — and not just because of the dollar figures attached. The autonomous vehicle startup has raised $750 million in a Series C round co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, plus another $250 million in milestone capital from Uber to support the deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis exclusively on its platform.
Uber is already a Waabi backer, participating in one of its earliest raises in 2021. But this is about more than money. When Waabi first launched, it focused on applying its autonomous vehicle tech to self-driving trucks. The deal with Uber is a declaration that it intends to scale its tech across multiple self-driving verticals with a single technology stack.
Can Waabi do it? Others have tried and retreated. Waymo shuttered its self-driving trucks program to focus on robotaxis; Aurora, which is also an investor in Waabi, was working on both trucks and robotaxis, too, before deciding to focus just on big rigs.
Other deals that got my attention …
Gatik AI, a startup developing autonomous trucks focused on the “middle mile,” has signed a deal with a major (unnamed) consumer-goods company. Here’s why it matters: The contract will deliver $600 million in revenue over five years. And these are for driverless transport, meaning no safety driver is behind the wheel. These Gatik trucks, which run 24 hours a day moving ambient, refrigerated, and frozen goods between distribution centers and stores, have been operating driverlessly since mid-2025. According to the company, it has completed 60,000 fully driverless orders without incident.
Luminar’s lidar business has been sold for $33 million to Redmond, Washington-based MicroVision. The company, which is developing its own sensors, beat out Quantum Computing in an auction for the assets. TC’s Sean O’Kane interviewed MicroVision CEO Glen DeVos about his plans for Luminar. The sales process did have a bit of last-minute intrigue when a mystery bidder, with a far larger offer, made a play for Luminar’s lidar business.
Rad Power Bikes, which started the bankruptcy process about a month ago, reached a deal to sell itself to Life Electric Vehicles Holdings (or Life EV) for around $13.2 million. When accounting for Rad Power’s liabilities, the total value of the bid is $14.9 million. History lesson: Rad Power has raised $329.2 million since its founding and once had a valuation of $1.65 billion.
Redwood Materials raised $425 million in a Series E round that includes Google as a new investor. The round was led by venture firm Eclipse and includes a strategic investment by Nvidia’s venture capital arm, NVentures, as well as existing investors Capricorn and Goldman Sachs. Read the full story to learn what Redwood plans to do with the capital.
Notable reads and other tidbits
Obi, a company that aggregates real-time pricing and pickup times across multiple ride-hailing services, shared new data on ride-hailing and robotaxis in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are a few takeaways — so please go read the full story — including that the price gap between Waymo and rides provided by Uber and Lyft is narrowing.
Uber launched a new division called Uber AV Labs, that is not — as senior reporter Sean O’Kane points out — a ploy to start developing its own robotaxis again. This is a data-sharing play; sensor-equipped Uber cars will collect and then share data with partners like Lucid, Waymo, and Waabi. Important note: No contracts are signed yet.
Waymo is now allowed to operate a robotaxi service to and from the San Francisco International Airport (SFO). The company will begin offering access to SFO to a select number of riders before offering it to all customers in the coming months. That win comes with a bit of tarnish, however. Waymo is under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and National Transportation Safety Board after the company reported one of its robotaxis struck a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica on January 23.
The San Francisco Police Departmentis investigating an incident involving a Zoox autonomous vehicle that crashed into the driver’s-side door of a parked car.
One more thing …
It’s been a few weeks since we’ve had a poll and here is a fun one: What will the name or ticker of Musk’s combined supercompany be?
Sign up here to take get the newsletter in your inbox and participate in our polls!
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
Fresh off play-in win, Suns take on top-seeded Thunder
Experienced Lightning face young Canadiens in first round
