Of course, Elon is referring to net profits, not gross profits (margin).
I mean.. obviously?
Gross profit margins have been industry leading for years now (20% plus), net ones have only (relatively recently) been above 0. Elon was making it clear to investors those are going to REMAIN low, because they'd rather plough money back into the company for both growth and making their products more affordable to advance the mission.
Thus the folks who were suggesting there's obscenely large net profits coming Real Soon Now continue to not listen to Elons actual words.
Instead continued production growth, tech and manufacturing advancement, and more available (both in numbers and cost to customer) products are coming.
If you have been following the FSD Beta rollout, you would have realized that FSD is SOLVED
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
It's unquestionably the most advanced generalized self-driving system out there- it's
absolutely not "solved" yet.
If it were they wouldn't need Dojo in the first place and it'd be deployed as L5 to everyone, especially it'd be deployed to other countries (and of course the US states it's not out in even beta yet)- and the company would be fully recognizing FSD revenue- none of those are the case.
Also if it were actually solved the stock price would have at least one extra zero on it. It's that massive a thing for whomever actually "solves" it- ideally that's Tesla, but not yet.
Instead what we are seeing in the FSD beta is a version of the software trying to be feature complete- which is a different term, and Elon has called out the difference a number of times.
Essentially Feature Complete means zero intervention drives are possible.
Solved means they're expected every time.
Feature complete is likely good enough for Tesla to recognize deferred revenue from at least those who bought FSD after roughly March 2019, but probably
not good enough for them to recognize that revenue from those who bought before that and were promised a much more finished version as part of the purchase.
FSD subscription finally confirmed:
This was confirmed a good while back- it's not new news and wasn't unconfirmed.
Elon mentioned it in the Q1 earnings call- though he said "towards the end of the year" and obviously that has slipped into next year now (and has mentioned it a few other times since then)