Just dig out my 2015 iMac to give Omarchy a try @dhh to see if I can extract meaningful value from the 32G RAM and 1T SSD that have been collecting dust in my basement 😂
Eventually, application will happen on the interface, not connected to the interface.
Hot take. This is not the 2008 App Store moment.
These connectors have ZERO intrinsic value.
Most of the economic value will go to the Agent platforms and incumbents with scare underlying assets: airlines, banks, ride sharing, opentable, online merchants, insurance cos. The phone apps we use today.
The agent is the interface.
This isn’t a land grab for new startups. Unless you have valuable proprietary data that was previously not distributed at scale.
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AI has solved vibe coding, and the next high leverage thing to solve is video editing. What should we call it? Vibe editing? Video vibing?
One side says Tesla will kill Uber. The other says Uber owns the customer relationship and can just aggregate competing robotaxi fleets. I think both miss what changes when you remove the human driver.
Uber built an incredible business around a scarce resource: people willing to drive other people around. Recruiting those drivers, coordinating them, and connecting them with riders is difficult. Uber solved a real problem. But a robotaxi network changes that equation. Once you solve autonomous driving safely, you can grow supply by manufacturing vehicles. You don’t have to recruit another human for every additional car. That’s a completely different business.
Imagine a company putting enough robotaxis into a city to offer much shorter waits at half the price of Uber. How hard is it to convince someone to download another app at that point? People talk about Uber’s brand, payment relationships, and existing users as if those automatically carry over into a robotaxi world. They matter. But I think people underestimate how quickly a dramatically better service can create demand for its own network.
And this is where the “Uber will aggregate everyone else” argument gets difficult. If another company actually solves robotaxis and can deploy them at scale, why would it keep giving Uber a meaningful cut of every ride? Why wouldn’t it build its own network and pass those savings to customers? Uber might help it get started. That doesn’t mean Uber remains essential once it scales.
There’s an even bigger problem for the second and third robotaxi networks: they have to compete with whoever gets to scale first. I mean real scale. Enough vehicles, coverage, and availability that the service feels significantly better to the customer. A few impressive demos don’t establish that. Once a network reaches that point, the next competitor has to match its availability AND its price. That could require a lot of subsidies while building out a fleet.
This is why I think Tesla’s work on Cybercab manufacturing is such a big deal. A competitor needs great autonomous driving software. But it also needs a vehicle cost structure that lets it compete sustainably. Tesla is working on both sides of that equation. If Tesla gets the software right and scales a much cheaper vehicle, that combination becomes extremely difficult to compete against.
Does that mean Uber goes bankrupt overnight? I don’t think so. There are plenty of services where people want or need a human involved. Delivery, assistance, specialized transportation. Habits also change more slowly than people in the tech world sometimes assume. Uber has room to adapt. But I think a true robotaxi network becomes a different class of transportation: cheaper, more available, and useful for far more trips.
The big questions are when Tesla can reach the required safety and reliability, how quickly it can deploy, and who else can match the complete service at a competitive cost.
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I think people are seriously underestimating what Cybercab means for Tesla’s future.
For the past few years, everyone has been waiting for a smaller, cheaper Tesla to restart growth. And as that car failed to arrive, the assumption became that Tesla had lost its way or abandoned its high-volume ambitions.
I think Tesla is laying the foundation for something much bigger.
My read is that Elon made a deliberate decision to give up the obvious next product—a cheaper car with a steering wheel—and concentrate the company’s engineering talent on Cybercab and FSD.
That takes conviction. You’re walking away from a product people already want, accepting slower growth, and putting enormous pressure on your teams to deliver.
But I think Elon understands something that gets overlooked: a large company can have all the talent and resources in the world and still produce mediocre products because its attention is scattered. Remove the backup plan, and suddenly the entire company has to make this work. That kind of urgency can produce extraordinary innovation.
And here’s where I think this gets really interesting.
Once Tesla proves Cybercab’s software, manufacturing, and vehicle architecture, it can build an entire lineup on that foundation. Small cars. Larger cars. SUVs. All designed around the passenger. All benefiting from simpler systems, fewer parts, and a fundamentally different way of manufacturing. That’s the path I see back to millions more vehicles a year.
Cybercab is the first step in that future. The work going into it today could make the vehicles that follow dramatically better and more affordable.
Yes, Tesla is paying a price for this decision right now. But I think the focus it creates gives Tesla a much stronger shot at leading the next era of transportation.
Five or ten years from now, I suspect we’ll look back at this period and realize how much of Tesla’s future was being built while people were declaring its growth story over.
I break down the reasoning and the path ahead in my new video.
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