Ross Gerber Says Elon Musk's Tesla Should Sell EV Business To Rivian, Says TSLA Brand Reduced To 'Negative'

This sounds great on paper but unless rivian I've got an EU model ready to go it would be a waste of resources for them to try to absorb Tesla. What's more likely is byd would buy it to get to the US market

It will never happen. Tesla is too useful to the Elongated Muskrat

Rivian is probably thinking "Why would we pay what Musk thinks Tesla is worth now when we can probably get the bits we want later at pennies on the $".

I remember this guy was one of the most unbearable tezla fanboyz, what happened? When did it finally click for him?

What would Rivian be buying anyways? People who aren't buying Tesla's because they hate Must aren't going to buy Model 3s or Ys from Rivian. The entire car line ups would need to be redone to not look like Teslas. The battery tech is really the same across all of the manufacturers now. I don't think Rivian needs any insider info from Tesla on how to build electric drive trains and vehicles. They're fine. Really it's only FSD that Rivian would benefit from and it's not worth nearly what Musk would ask for Tesla. I love Rivian but the reasons I never bought one are the poor quality control/service centers and the absurd cost of repairs. Those side and rear panels are pretty much non-repairable. It's terrible engineering.

even if rivian buys tesla, those cars would still be pedomobiles, and that rivian would have had to have paid him assloads of money directly for it on top of that

After he finished unloading his bags

Why would Rivian, or any other carmaker, want to buy that crap? The brand is tainted, so there won't be much marketshare to grab. The stock overvalued by a factor of about 30x. The technology is substandard, as is quality. At best it's worth the value of the real estate and maybe some of the tooling.

FSD might be worth something if Musk swallows his pride, puts LiDAR and sensors on the cars and builds his software around those and the cameras. This camera only approach is worthless nonsense

Why Rivian? Why not Lucid or Ford?

Yup. Exactly my first thought.

Supercharger network.

Didn’t he just pilfer this company for billions last year in compensation ceo do nothing pay?

or Apple.

Yes, the problem with Tesla is that even in the hands of another, it's still the same shit design quality. Anyone who cares about their reputation would need to replace the existing lineup with a new one, so what benefit is there beyond buying the name which is now poisoned. No, FSD is not worth buying either. It's 2 levels behind its competitors. \>It's terrible engineering. So is Tesla. Look at the reports showing a high number their cars failing their first safety inspections, not to mention being the leader in traffic fatalities.

Why does Ross Gerber want to sink Rivian?

Nobody wants to buy Tesla’s EV business in 2026, at least not for a premium. They might find a buyer in a fire sale - since Elon completely destroyed the brand’s value lately. PS: Tesla’s revenue would fall to almost zero if they sold their EV assets now. Optimus and all other vaporware products do not generate any real revenue yet.. and won’t for a long time. Suicidal.

Which to my understading, Tesla uses a different connector type to other makers so they would have to be modified to accomodate non-Teslas.

Ford already has all the parts of Tesla’s EV business that it wants: Alan Clarke (former Tesla Engineering Director, now head of Ford’s new EV-development “skunkworks”), and Doug Field (former Tesla SR VP of Engineering, now Chief Advanced Technology Officer for Ford), and presumably specific members of their engineering teams. The new Ford “universal” EV platform is essentially what the next-generation Tesla vehicles would have been (if Tesla had ever done a wheels-up redesign of their platform). Tesla doesn’t have much left that Lucid or Rivian really need.

That would mean building a new dataset, though. So called FSD is trained on millions of hours of camera data.  Not sure integrating other data sources would be doable. Certainly wouldn't be easy.

I wouldn't say that. With another owner, I might be able to take Tesla cars off my 'do not, under any circumstances, buy' list. Tesla pioneered the mass market electric car and they still have some brilliant engineers. Under another company, they might make improved cars. However, I just can't see Rivian paying the price that Tesla would be demanding at this point.

He still is. Someone who believes that the car business (cars and associated services are 90% of their revenue) is just some side business and they really are a "AI/robotics company" is still a completely delusional fanboy.

Well no other car manufacturer is going to be interested in it then as it won’t be as safe or as useable as systems that make use of the most suitable hardware.

They still have solar. But yeah everything else is 0 revenue.

Supposedly they are all switching over to it (NCAS) which annoys me. Edit NACS? North American Charging Standard? Whatever you know what I mean.

Even keeping solar and stationary batteries (packs) would reduce revenue by 85-90% from current levels. Tesla would become a skeleton operation. Most of their revenue is still tied to EVs.

Steve-O is too smart to buy Tesla.

I simply do not understand why anyone sees Tesla as AI or robot company. They have very little experience doing both. They are far, far, far behind competition.

Every gas station will be converted to a charging station. Superchargers are only useful because there is no other charging infrastructure.

Why would they want to take on Tesla's failures?

Apple spent $10 billion dollars on rd the car. They did the math and couldn’t compete with china profitably

Yeah, TSLA, the stock is the actual product.

Apple could have developed a west coast-first business model, just like In n Out. Electric car brands don't have to be global.

they're delulu

No, the Germans got their shitty CCS plug 'standardized' alongside Nissan's Chademo ~10 years ago when DC charging was being rolled out in the US, then in 2021 Biden's infrastructure bill required it for Federal $$$. The federal money prompted Elon to panic and open up the proprietary plug to others, and Ford and everybody relatively quickly defected from CCS-1 to "NACS". VW was the last holdout IIRC but they agreed too to abandon CCS-1 in the US (good riddance to bad trash).

You must know more than Tim Cook

Speaking as a BEV driver since 2012, NACS is a million times better than CCS-1. Europe's CCS-2 is marginally superior for AC charging (it supports 3-phase power to up the max power delivery from 11 to 40-ish kW, pretty good for street side "park & shop" applications, and apartments). Rivian's R2 having NACS in the right location for S/C stalls is super super awesome.

Ghosn's Nissan pioneered the mass market electric car.

yup, he's already extracted all the net profit Tesla is ever going to make, and then some.

Apple has ZERO manufacturing capability. How the hell could they build cars?

Do you mean Tim Apple, the technofascist?

Rivian be like : "500 millions, take it or leave it"

In China the oi companies own much of the EV charging infrastruture.

Importantly their service revenue and FSD revenue are fully dependent on EVs. The investor justification of them licensing FSD to other companies has clearly not played out but the stock price is fully divorced from that.

Yeah...all the platforms are aging at Tesla. They just cancelled their high end models. They have done nothing but refreshes on any of their models. I anticipate the stock will hit 500 on this news.

The supercharger network might be valuable to Tesla, but I'm not sure it would be to a traditional OEM such as Ford. Car makers simply leave the fueling to others. I've seen car owners complain that even at dealerships, OEMs do a terrible job managing charging stalls. They just simply aren't in the business of fueling the cars they sell. And remember, many of these superchargers are loss leaders - they only exist to give drivers confidence that they can drive cross country, but no way some station in some far corner of Wyoming actually makes money. Finally, I can tell for my locar station, Tesla does not own the underlying real estate. I suspect this is typical. So they could sell equipment...and I suppose transfer a rental contract? There's not much value in that - any investment made to pave the stalls and install equipment is essentially moot when it comes to re-sale, unless they can finagle a guaranteed long term transferable lease with the property owner prior to the sale.

Exactly. Oil companies are not going to sit around and let Elon take the entire charging infrastructure. That’s a ridiculous assumption.

Rivian owner here, please no. Elon is going to good bank/bad bank this or he is going to merge it into SpaceX and cover with their money. At this point the only thing I see being worth any value is the supercharger network and Ionna or someone will buy it cheap on the auction block when it all falls apart

Why would Rivian do that? They already have a good vehicle lineup

Only value in my opinion is the charging network.

It makes a lot of sense, actually. Why waste resources on an inefficient, difficult, loss-making car business, when the meme-manufacturing, X-trolling, and right-wing-funding parts of the business are the most profitable? You can save payroll too because those parts only need one person to do it.

So if they sell their EV business to Rivian what the fuck are they banking on? Robots and FSD that won't be unsupervised for another 20 years let a lone regulated throughout the world?

Funnily enough I had a conversation about this at a dinner party last night. The EU (and by extension the UK as we mirror their regulations) has decreed that all public chargers must be open to all comers and clearly display the cost per KWH, also they must be payable with a contactless card. The guy I was talking to was worried because this could lead to the end of the fuelcard industry, because lots of fuel cards sell fuel at a lower price than the board outside the petrol station, he is in the fuelcard industry (Surprise Suprise) ..

Did not know this. Thank you for the summary. I stopped following Tesla a long time ago because actions speak louder than words.

I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out Tim Apple and Peter Theil were either current or former lovers.

I would like the ccs-2 for home if it was available. But what is the advantage of nacs, you said a million times better but don’t cite anything?

I’m genuinely curious what makes NACS better.

Bonus item - Andrew Kim is heading design on Ford’s universal EV project. He is best known for the Xbox One S and parts of a few cars known as the Model 3, Y, and Roadster concept. I fully expect a reinventive, timeless design that calls back to classic fords like the F100.

Exactly this.

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Displaying the price per kWh aligns with the requirement to do the same for gasoline in the US. I think its a good idea. More importantly, I think allowing card payment is a great idea - I don't want to go through the machinations of registering with a provider and downloading an app to buy "fuel".

People don't realize how much Musk has destroyed a once promising American company that had a decade lead on both China and its other domestic/foreign competitors. He rerouted GPUs and compute power at below market value to his private firm xAI. He gutted in house AI research and robotics to, again, funnel this into his private company. He pushed for no LiDAR in his vehicles. He killed the sub $30k model in favor of the disastrous Cyber Truck. He DESIGNED the Cyber Truck. He constantly over promised and under delivered on every aspect of this company, whether that be FSD, range, robotics, Robo Taxi, Cyber Truck pricing + performance, and so much more. It makes me so sad to see this, as I was quite proud to have a domestic auto manufacturer pushing the envelope of manufacturing and green technology. Here is the truth, Musk is NOT an engineer. He is a snake oil salesman that sells investors and consumers on ideas that still haven't been realized after a decade. He is a slave driver that grinds his workforce to dust and maximizes short term growth-- that is until he burns his workers out and then chases out the real engineering and leadership talent that made his companies great.

You know that's purely a US thing, right? The value of the supercharger network is in the double digit millions

They have a lot of plants and manufacturing capital and skilled people. Would be a shame for all the GiGa plants and such to be broken up for parts etc. it’s the leadership that needs changing. Unless they really are done with their mandate, most builders are building EV’s now. So maybe mission accomplished time for the next thing. I hope that’s not true n

It's amazing how being a nazi will destroy your brand.

Apple would occupy the Aston Martin, Ferrari, BMW level of the market.

Go to an EVgo charger with both and it will be immediately obvious

$5.00 is more like. It's just taking its sweet time getting there because nobody wants to offload too much at once. It will hit critical mass sooner or later though.

and how would Rivian acquire it ? their market cap is 1/10th of Tesla. not saying i don’t like the idea

CCS was “designed” (using the term loosely) by people who hated people and hated EVs. The same people half-assing EA gave us CCS-1

But they are even better at "corporate puffery".

Apple has approximately $1T in the bank. I assume they could figure it out.

I agree, he is one of Tesla's biggest fan boys but knows when to be skeptical of the company so I respect that about him. When on Yahoo Finance, there is another Tesla and Bitcoin fanboy guy that is still delusional about Tesla and talks only about Robo Taxis and Tesla being an AI company. All with a serious face and never smiles. I don't remember his name. I'm not talking about Dan Ives or Michael Saylor. Update: I found him. It's not Yahoo Finance but on Schwab Network. The guy is Andy Swan with LikeFolio. He always looks angry when he isn't talking and when he talks. Last year, he compared Tesla to Alphabet and continuously talked about Tesla robo taxis and AI even though both those products are not out yet. He is also a big fan of Target. There is a pattern to his madness.

Now that's corporate puffery.

Your lips to God's ear. The stock has been so untethered from reality for well over 2 years now. It should have tanked when the Cyber truck was obviously an epic flop. But then Elon made some hand waving about robotaxis and robots, and all the Tesla stans said: "you just don't get it, Tesla is not a car company, it's an AI automation company".

Just more examples of how the "smartest man in the room" is probably the only man in room.

Figurehead pay.

Ok but truly dude and I am upvoting you by the way because I don’t believe in downvoting based on disapproval of messages or whatever but help me understand as someone who uses a CCS charger every day at my house and has never used a NACS, why does CCS suck and why is NACS so good? Sounds like only good things are in store for me and I have no idea what I’m missing.

Never seen one with both. I have seen ccs and chademo or whatever that mongo thing is called.

The IP for the cars could be sold for any price they agree between them.

And that revenue is a drop in the ocean compared to the stock price. They could lose the automotive side of the company and the meme will continue until it collapses under its own weight.

You probably do not have CCS plug at your house. Here is the direct size comparison https://evoffer.com/product/500v-125a-ccs1-to-nacs-dc-adapter/

Yup! I have the Type 1 AC Adapter I guess? Ok, I think I see what you’re saying. Those things are clunky pieces of shit.

I still think Apple will end up buying it.

WHOMP WHOMP https://www.flickr.com/photos/136377865@N05/albums/72157658490111523/

Manufacturing infrastructure and real estate holdings. They definitely don't have any technology worth buying, being 2 full levels behind everyone else on autonomous driving. Any goodwill value the company had was destroyed when Elron started playing politics. Buying up marketshare now is pointless to with sales figures crashing.

So if I have a Volvo c40/polestar is this what I want to be able to use Tesla chargers with my car: 1000V 500A NACS to CCS1 DC+AC Adapter ?

In order to sell FSD, they first have to make it work, but even so they have to sell the cars to run it on first. The robots are just an idiotic idea in the first place. There's no market for such a thing, nor will there be for at leaste a generation or two when they might possible do something useful.

The only market for the robots would bed be to manufacturing plants and logistics companies. Problem is places like UPS, FedEX, Amazon, DHL, etc have probably spent 10s of billions if not hundreds of billions into robotic and AI technology over the last 20 years to eventually erase the human component in packing and loading trucks, cargo, etc. like you said there's no market for these robots. For FSD until they get the technology to a point where it's legitimately unsupervised(which they won't) then it's vaporware.

Except for manufacturing you need actualy robots that can do something useful. They don't have humanoids capable of doing that, yet.

Ford is winding down the EV business anyway as the current administration is doing everything it can to kill EVs in USA. Of course opposite to every other country and any common sense. Rivian could be a good candidate but do they have the money? Maybe Mercedes could buy Tesla, but they are struggling as well the same for VW. Most likely will BYD or some other Chinese company buy the EV business if it ever comes to that.

Ford is keeping the throttle down on the universal EV project but is winding down the F150 lightning and eventually Mach-e. Ford absolutely cannot afford to not offer EVs globally due to the chinese onslaught, regardless of the US.

They have $1T in the bank becaused they already figured out, it wasn't worth figuring out. Just because you have the money to lose, doesn't mean you aught to see if you can lose it better than others chasing a solution that the general public cannot afford. General consumers can afford a $600~$1,300 new phone every year. Apple's business model is based on planned obsolescence and the consumer's desire for the status symbol of having "the new shiny thing" first. This does not equate well to a $60k+ vehicle loan at 7% interest rates... they don't have multiple cell phone companies willing to take monthly installments from consumers with high access fees just for someone to drive their own car less than 1~2 hours a day commuting. Most cellphone users doom-scroll for many more hours a day. Potentially, when cars are actually capable of L4, this could pan out. Arguably, Tesla's L2 FSD Supervised is not that solution.

Doesn't matter. I will never buy a tesla. Not after his salute at presidents in auguration

Elon has achieved some amazing things, the price of $TSLA being the most amazing

Remarkably so. Tesla is the ur-meme stock

> they still have some brilliant engineers. Based on what? They haven't engineered anything good for long time.

Tesla auto division has fallen too far behind the competition. The only thing worth anything at Tesla anymore is the charging network, which should get carved out and sold off..

Buy their ev brand to basically just kill it. They've let the line stagnate so much that software and factories are really the only true benefit.

If anything, Rivian should acquire the Supercharger network.

Tesla and SpaceX (after the xAI merger) will merge and Elon is going to sell the car business off.

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They’d be making cars mainly for themselves

They should wait for it to go to zero first

I would 100% buy a Tesla the day the asshole no longer owns it.

The company is unsellable. The cost to clean out the board and Musk’s insane bonus structure is worth more than the company. The factories use processes other auto makers are not remotely interested in. Retooling them isn’t worth it. Musk has even given up and is retooling one to do his robot’s which has no value. The tech (software) has no value unless there are customers. They are getting it cheaper by poaching staff. Rivian would stay the hell away unless they can get it for scrap metal prices.

sort of. They're keeping the Lightning but adding EREV. They're not killing the vehicle, just the wholly electric version

Depends on what Musk thinks the EV part of the business is worth. On one hand, it clearly doesn’t account for the stock price by any sane or conventional valuation metrics. On the other hand, it’s the only part of the Tesla conglomerate that has an actual product and revenue. Robots, CyberTaxi, the other random stuff he throws out is all just somewhere between a sketch on a napkin and a prototype to test the market. It’s hard to believe the EV business is worth as much as Tesla is valued at, but inconceivable what’s left makes up the difference. Which of course is why it won’t be split up.

If anything is really worth something these days, where Tesla has mostly paddled in place and competitors have sprinted to catch up, it might be the software platform. Obviously parts of it have major issues, but my impression is that it’s mostly when it comes to autonomous functionality and not the base car functionality. But the buyer would have to be someone without a good platform already, and money to burn to port it to their needs. So not sure who that would be. And given you can build on Android Auto and customize the user-facing parts, I don’t know if they bring enough value.

Yeah, they're winding down by announcing a $45k mid-size pickup (potentially called the Ranchero) for introduction in 2027. Unlike the Lightning, which was an adaptation of the F150, the new truck will be new from the ground up (and presumably much easier and cheaper to build).

I'm not even sure if that would help. People hate pedos and Nazis so much at this point that being the world's loudest example of both is aways going to imbibe everything you've ever been involved in with a permanent stink, even after it's bought by someone else.

"Elmo, how much do you want for this $15 million company?"

Tesla's execution is the antithesis of Apple. Apple makes high quality products to near impossible standards. Tesla vehicles barely fit together.

Why the fuck would anyone want Tesla? It literally only functions because Enron Musk is a conman and convinces lemmings to give him their money.

Yes, I dumped my stock as soon as I found out what a colossal douchebag he is. Think it was shortly after he called that guy a pedophile who rescued those people. All because Elmo offered to help once rescue plans/operations were already underway (only to get himself in the latest news cycle I’m sure), and was told, “No thanks. We got this.” Apparently the prima donna couldn’t handle that.

Hahahaha. Its a trillion dollar company.

I push a button in my garage and arrive 300 miles later without touching the wheel or pedals. So what competitor allows me to do this? LOL.

I push a button in my garage and arrive 300 miles later without touching the wheel or pedals. I love this nonsense! LOL...moron.

Elons said a handful of times in the past 6 - 9 months, Tesla will go from being 90% a car company to about 20% focus on cars. He will make it a robotics company.

Wow, you missed out on a ton of money.

They can't sell it to anyone. A massive chunk of valuation is tied to FSD, and without them building their own vehicles there is no FSD. The fact that they haven't been able to sign a single partner to use FSD tells you everything you need to know about it's longer term viability. Tesla has already lost the automation war. Tesla investors are just oblivious to this fact, so far. The nail in the coffin will be Cybercab, because it's another ridiculous vehicle, like the Cybertruck. There will be very little demand for a two seater that requires Tesla intervention to move it when it FSD fails. No company is going to invest in a fleet of these for any purpose, either.

wOw yOu MiS.. Shut up

There is also that little home office hedge fund setting billions on fire juicing the stock through options + the influencer rathole scheme.

https://imgur.com/tZNs7GZ I need 3 fingers with NACS, vs. 3 hands with CCS-1

Rivian should merge with Lucid

Omg love the moniker.

Newbs never care about P/E. Ride the artificially inflated Elon wave until reality hits you on the jaw, just take your profits or take it from behind.

The cable and nozzle size and weight make ccs-1 very difficult to deal with for persons with low upper body strength ~= half the eventual usage population. And it’s not fun for the rest of us. NACS has the additional advantage of using the same nozzle for DCFC (level 3) and level 2, whereas the j1772 nozzle is a subset of the ccs-1 nozzle. One nozzle to rule it all! [and i say this as a j1772 and ccs-1 user].

So … i have a question. Long-term, is the Tesla charging infrastructure actually going to be an albatross for the Tesla car company? The Tesla network equipment does not aupport 800 volt charging, yet other networks are installing more and more 800volt chargers, which can bring down 20% to 80% charge times to 10 minutes for modern 800 volt EVs with less than 99kwh batteries. Tesla the car company has not upgraded its car offerings to 800volt, and if Tesla did do the model upgrades, the owners wd see no advantage on the 400volt Tesla charging network. Does that conjecture make sense?

That's the part that gets me too. If Tesla didnt have any competition in these spaces I could tilt my head, squint, and sort of see how the fervor could attach itself to Musk. There's a lot of people who want their flying car/robot butler future come hell or high water. But Tesla is so obviously where it is because it got their first. And only with a specific subset of their products, which are now facing stiff competition. Outside of that core business theyve demonstrated little more than elaborste demos.

Yep. If anyone has been in long enough to see substantial gains, they should get out. I would not want to be tied to this stock for another year.

Makes a lot of sense. I’m convinced!

Fords trying to bail on ev’s Trump removing the $7k rebate pretty much torched fords ev plan. Lucids tech is arguably better than Teslas, so they don’t really need it. Rivian needs something that’s making a profit to prop up their cars.

Yes lucid is a much nicer car and more luxurious than Rivian and Tesla

Yeah but he probably didn’t miss out on character

Apple should buy it. It’s more a rebranding need.

But his honour and ethics are intact….how is yours?

Based on people in my circle that know who work at Tesla. Competitors would be happy to have these people.

facts? no cap?