Elon’s Autonomy Endgame Nears as TSLA Removes Humans From Robotaxis (Everybody Stay Calm)

“It’s happening! Everybody stay calm, everybody stay f***ing calm…”

It’s been a minute since Elon dropped a true market-moving hype post… but Sunday night, the future commander of a $1 trillion robot army clocked back in.

Musk hopped on X and announced that Tesla is now testing fully driverless robotaxis with zero humans inside.

Tesla shares exploded nearly 5%, tagging $481 and clocking their highest level in almost a year.

For context, that puts the stock just a few bucks shy of its all-time high from last December… back when investors convinced themselves regulatory gravity was about to turn off.

I know what you’re thinking… wait, they actually did it?

Yes. According to Musk, Tesla is now testing robotaxis in Austin with no occupants at all. 

That’s a meaningful escalation from June, when Tesla rolled out a limited robotaxi program using modified Model Y vehicles… each one babysat by a human “safety monitor” sitting awkwardly in the passenger seat like a nervous parent during a driving test.

That person is gone now.

Which means Tesla has officially moved from “trust us, the human’s just there in case” to “nah, the car’s got it.”

(Source: TechCrunch)

Online Tesla watchers did what they always do: sprinted to the app, ordered rides, and tried to see if they could catch one of these empty cars in the wild. (They couldn’t. Yet.)

But the message was loud and clear: this isn’t a demo anymore. This is Tesla inching toward the holy grail… the moment when a car earns money while you sleep and Elon gets to say “told you so” into the mirror.

As we all know, Tesla’s valuation (currently hovering around $1.5 trillion) has always rested on one big promise:

Autonomy.

Yes, Tesla sells a ton of cars. Yes, EVs still pay the bills. But nobody’s valuing Tesla like a car company. They’re valuing it like a software platform that accidentally also makes vehicles.

Robotaxis are the bridge between those two worlds. If Tesla can deploy fully driverless cars at scale, it flips the economics of transportation on their head.

That’s why even small steps (like removing a safety monitor) get analysts like Dan Ives acting like they just saw fire for the first time.

As Morningstar’s Seth Goldstein politely put it, this move lines up with what Tesla said on its last earnings call. Translation: they told us this was coming, and now it actually is.

Of course, Tesla has been here before. The company has hyped self-driving for years, only to run headfirst into regulators, edge cases, and scandals that involve running over civilians.

But this moment feels different… not because regulators suddenly disappeared, but because Tesla is now testing without the training wheels.

Worth noting: while Tesla is testing, Waymo is already operating.

Alphabet’s self-driving unit runs more than 2,500 robotaxis across major U.S. cities and is reportedly handling 450,000 paid rides per week. That’s not theoretical. That’s people getting in cars, going places, and not tweeting about it afterward.

The difference? Waymo’s approach is slower, geo-fenced, and deeply conservative. Tesla’s is… well, Tesla’s.

One company wants perfect maps and total control. The other wants scale, data, and to learn in public.

Guess which one excites markets more.

Tesla is expected to ramp testing aggressively as it gears up for its Cybercab launch next year… a purpose-built robotaxi that skips things like steering wheels and human expectations entirely.

If testing continues smoothly, investors will keep treating autonomy progress like a dopamine drip. 

If something goes wrong, the stock will remember (very quickly) that most of Tesla’s revenue still comes from selling cars to humans who prefer their vehicles not to experiment in traffic.

But for now? Elon’s got everyone leaning forward in their chairs.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Tesla and Google as mentioned in the article.