Elon Musk says Tesla is an AI company now. Here’s how plausible that is.

When Tesla recorded its first annual profit in 2020, it had done something fairly remarkable. Starting a new car company has never been easy. It's harder still when those cars are electric and outside your average buyer's comfort zone; more than a dozen have tried and failed since Tesla was founded in 2003. Even mighty Apple, with all its billions in the bank, thought better of it. So why, after all that hard work, would Tesla's CEO now tell everyone that Tesla is an AI company?

The company's greatest successes have come when it innovates, like when it realized that laptop cells were about energy-dense enough to power a sports car if you just had enough of them. Building out a reliable fast-charging network was another such innovation. But Tesla CEO Elon Musk has also never been afraid to chase a trend, and the hype du jour is artificial intelligence, a field that attracted more than $67 billion in investment last year.

"We are an AI, robotics company; if you value us otherwise, the right answer is impossible to the questions being asked," Musk told investors and journalists in April.