By James Pethokoukis

The annual meeting for Berkshire Hathaway shareholders is called “Woodstock for Capitalists.” Ten of thousands of attendees show up to hear from legendary investor Warren Buffett. So good news for all those Buffett fanatics: The company said earlier this week that its current plans are to hold the meeting in person on April 30. For the past two years, the meeting was held online only.

I wonder if at some point the Tesla shareholder meetings might inherit that “Woodstock for Capitalists” moniker. CEO Elon Musk certainly has a pretty devoted and massive following. He also uses annual meetings and quarterly earnings calls to opine on a variety of subjects beyond the immediate business prospects for his car company.

And Tesla’s Q4 earnings call this week was no exception. The big business news for Tesla investors — as well as fans of Tesla’s electric cars — is that Musk said the company won’t introduce new models this year, preferring to focus on “increasing deliveries over diversifying its product offerings in the face of ongoing supply-chain disruptions,” as The Wall Street Journal characterized the plans. Oh, and this: “I would be shocked if we do not achieve full-self-driving safer than a human this year,” Musk said. “I would be shocked. Being safer than a human is a low standard, not a high standard. People are often distracted, tired, texting. . . . It’s remarkable that we don’t have more accidents.”

But there is a lot of other interesting stuff, such as Musk giving a bit of color about the Tesla Bot, first introduced (kind of) last August:

So in terms of priority of products, I think the — I think actually the most important product development we’re doing this year is actually the Optimus humanoid robot. This, I think, has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time. If you think about the economy, it is — the foundation of the economy is labor. Capital equipment is distilled labor. So what happens if you don’t actually have a labor shortage? I’m not sure what an economy even means at that point. That’s what Optimus is about, so very important. . . . The first use of the Tesla Bot, Optimus, the Optimus name seems to be sticking at least internally, Optimus Subprime. Like if we can’t find a use for it then we shouldn’t expect that others would. So the first use of the Optimus robots would be at Tesla, kind of like moving parts around the factory or something like that.

Another thing that struck me was Musk’s thinking about the importance of autonomous driving and its broader potential impacts (including a bit on the Boring Company, his tunneling effort):

We can get rid of a lot of parking lots if you have a car that is operating all the time. . . . But there will be a challenge with traffic. So, you know, we like this little tiny baby company, The Boring Company, which I initially started as a joke, but now I think it actually could be quite essential to alleviating the insane traffic that will happen when cars are autonomous because you reduce the pain of travel and you reduce the cost of travel so dramatically that there will be a crazy number of cars on the road. . . . It will cost less than the subsidized value of a bus ticket. So, if we want to get — I’m not going to take the bus, you know, if it costs you, I don’t know, for argument’s sake, $2 to travel 10 miles point to point, nobody’s taking the bus, especially in cold weather or it’s dark or maybe a little bit dangerous or how bad, you know. I just do not understand how profound a change this is. It’s not like some little feature, select the most profound software upgrade, maybe in history. Millions of cars suddenly have about four or five times utility in the U.S. overnight. I don’t actually know how to quantify that financially except that it’s some big number.

Now imagine if SpaceX were public, and we had a Tesla/SpaceX mega-meeting for shareholders. That would definitely be worth checking out — even if you had no financial interest in either.

The post Elon Musk and a new ‘Woodstock for Capitalists’ appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.