Elon Musk Says Your Tesla Will Earn You Money While You Sleep

Your autonomous car won't do you any good sitting in the garage.

Good for Shareholders

Tesla shareholders weren't the only ones seeing dollar signs on Wednesday.

Around 6:30 pm ET that evening, CEO Elon Musk jumped on a conference call to discuss Telsa's finances for the third quarter of 2018. For the first time since 2016, he had positive financial news to share: The company made $312 million in profit, far more than many experts had predicted.

Good for You

But during the call Musk also shared his prediction for the future of ride-hailing, and if his vision becomes reality, you won't need to own stock in Tesla to earn some greenbacks — you'll just need to own one of the company's green vehicles:

We absolutely see the future as kind of a shared electric autonomy, so that you’d be able to do ride-hailing or share the car anyway, you know, sort of a long-term model that’s probably some combination of like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. There will be Tesla dedicated cars for ride-hailing and any customer will be able to share their car at will, just like you share your house on Airbnb.
So, it's a combination of those two models, I think is pretty obvious where things are headed long-term. The advantage that Tesla will have is that we’ll have millions of cars in the field with full autonomy capability, and no one else will have that. So I think that will end up putting us in the strongest competitive position long-term.

If Musk's right, your Tesla could one day earn money ferrying people across town while you sleep. Now if he could just program the vehicles to pick up breakfast on their way home.

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