Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!
I am sure you are waiting to learn the results of last week’s poll. (Reminder: Sign up for the Mobility newsletter to participate in our polls!) Here is what I asked: “What is the best business model for autonomous vehicle tech? (Keep profitability in mind.)”
Far and away, readers think longer-haul delivery is the best bet, with 40% picking this option. Robotaxis came in next with 25.5% of the vote, followed by licensing tech to automakers at 19.1% and last-mile delivery with 14.9%. One reader emailed to point out that I didn’t include warehouse applications like autonomous forklifts. The longer-haul delivery category can be broken down further, though, and is worth another poll, which we included in this week’s newsletter.
In the long list of arguments one might make to justify a $1 trillion compensation package, having control over a robot army was certainly not on my mind. And yet, this is the argument Elon Musk made during Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call.
Here’s the rundown: On November 6, shareholders will vote whether to approve a board-endorsed compensation package that would grant Musk up to 12% of Tesla’s stock. If the company hits its target market value of $8.6 trillion, that package would be worth about $1 trillion.
The board and Musk have spent weeks lobbying shareholders to approve the measure, even as proxy advisers Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis have recommended that investors reject it. Musk is now in attack mode, which was on display at the end of the earnings call when he called the firms corporate terrorists and made his final pitch. His robot army argument centers on power and control, not so mu …