Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American engineer, inventor and futurist, known for his discovery of the rotating magnetic field, the basis of the modern Alternating Current (AC) electricity supply system.
Nikola Corp (ticker: NKLA) is a hydrogen-powered truck company, exposed as an “intricate fraud” by Hindenburg & the Financial Times, when it was confirmed that its “Nikola One” truck, during a demonstration, was simply rolling down a gradual slope with no onboard propulsion and instead by using the force of gravity (report here). Co-founder Trevor Milton was once worth $12bn, whereas today, NKLA itself has a market cap of $200m (and miraculously, is still listed).
Tesla Inc (ticker: TSLA) needs no introduction. The Robotaxi event, that we previewed here, took place last week and everything pretty much went as expected (including the fact the Robotaxi only has 2 seats, which surprised many!). There was, however, one sideshow which brought back memories of NKLA:
Optimus Robots were spread around the event and they looked sooooo impressive! One was talking to the crowd, the other one was serving drinks! However, there was one key detail which only surfaced later… the robots were remote-operated and even the talking was done by an operator in the control room. You can see the videos here and here.
We did note that the Robotaxi event was taking place in Warner Studios, so we were psychologically ready for special effects and a strong dose of poetic license.
Still, this little incident did smell a bit like NKLA’s gravity-powered truck.
To be fair though, the first time we saw Optimus, was 3 years ago and it was a guy in a suit (video here)! Within those 3 years, we’ve progressed to remote-controlled robots. That’s certainly a step change!
The TSLA event turned out to be a “sell the news” event and TSLA stock closed down -9% on Friday. With Elon done for the week with TSLA, he moved on to his weekend job at Space-X. Then, in a feat of extraordinary engineering, he redeemed himself, when his Space-X rocket booster was successfully caught by the tower, with the same accuracy as Karate Kid using chopsticks to catch a fly. The video is here, has 1 million views, and 100 of those are mine. Well done, Elon. Well done (and we’ll pretend the Optimus thingy didn’t happen).