CNBC Special: Tesla CEO Elon Musk 5/20/25

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David Faber (1:09)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk dominates the headlines. Today, he is shifting his focus back to the electric car-making giant, with the launch of the company's RoboTaxi right here in Austin, Texas, next month. I sat down with Musk for an exclusive interview. Here we're in the lobby of the Gigafactory here in Austin. Last time I was here was your annual meeting a couple of years ago, so thank you for having us back. Welcome back. Got a RoboTaxi right behind you. Are you gonna have full autonomous on the roads of Austin by the end of June?

Elon Musk (1:38)

Yes.

David Faber (1:39)

You are. What gives you that confidence?

Elon Musk (1:42)

We have cars driving 24-7 with drivers in the cars, and we see essentially no interventions. So we want to be very careful with the first introduction of unsupervised full self-driving, meaning that there's the cars driving around with no one in it.

David Faber (2:01)

So we're gonna be- No one behind the drivers?

Elon Musk (2:04)

Well, yes, and sometimes no one in it at all. Right. It's going to pick someone up. So the car seems to be incredibly safe. So we're just being- we have thousands of cars that are being tested, which is creating some strange situations where we just drive. There's just a bizarre number of Teslas driving past people's houses. They're like, what's going on?

David Faber (2:26)

I think we even saw one last night coming from the airport. Yeah, driving at night alone. It looked very lonely.

Elon Musk (2:32)

It's just a little lonely. Yeah. So yeah, it's looking good for the next month.

David Faber (2:39)

Some estimates have been that you're only going to have 10 to 12 of them on the road initially. I mean, it's going to be a very small amount. Is that correct?

Elon Musk (2:45)

Yeah, for the first week.

David Faber (2:46)

First week. How do you see it ramping up?

Elon Musk (2:50)

Well, we'll have to see how well it does, but I think it's prudent for us to start with a small number, confirm that things are going well, and then scale it up proportionate to how well we see it's doing.

David Faber (3:03)

Right. And what's going to be a judge of how well it's doing?

Elon Musk (3:06)

Are there any incidents? Are there any interventions?

But we want to deliberately take it slow. We could start with a thousand or ten thousand on day one, but I don't think that would be prudent. So we'll start with probably ten for a week, then increase it to twenty, thirty, forty. And I think by, say, it will probably be at a thousand within a few months. And then we'll expand to other cities, so expand to San Francisco, California, Los Angeles.

David Faber (3:45)

Is that a real possibility in the not-too-distant future? I mean, Texas is very different, I don't need to tell you, than California when it comes to regulation. They don't really have much here in terms of dealing with autonomous, but it's a different story in California.

Elon Musk (3:58)

Yeah, but California has already approved, Waymo has been doing autonomous driving in California for a while.

David Faber (4:03)

But do you need a separate approval, or is it somehow?

Elon Musk (4:05)

Right now, the approval process is very haphazard, and sort of state by state, and sometimes city by city.

David Faber (4:13)

We were talking to the Secretary of Transportation about that very fact a moment ago, yeah.

Elon Musk (4:17)

Right, so it's going to be important to have a unified set of national regulations for self-driving cars, otherwise, you're going to get into this weird situation where if you're driving from Maine to New York, you're going to go through tens of different sets of regulations, cars are going to behave differently. It's not going to make any sense.