The Cybercab in the mirror has never been quite as close as Elon Musk invariably made it out to be.

But now, at long last, Tesla’s fully autonomous robotaxi is upon us. The company is hosting a launch event in Austin, Texas, today, after quietly building up a fleet of about 50 operational Cybercabs in the city’s streets. In a note to clients on Wednesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco wrote that Wall Street will likely need to see “more than a handful” of new Cybercabs on the road to be stirred. In the meantime, the Cybercab’s chief rivals, Uber and Waymo, are both making moves to remain one step ahead of the category’s latest entrant.

Cash Cab

According to a Reuters report, Waymo is in the final stages of raising debt for the first time in its history, seeking more than $3 billion from big-name lenders such as Blackstone and Pimco. The move comes as Waymo expands into San Diego, Denver and Tampa Bay this month, and rolls out service for its new “Ojai” minivan model; Waymo now services 14 US cities.

Uber, meanwhile, is cutting about 10% of its global headcount, or 3,300 employees. The restructuring will allow it to “innovate across our core businesses and build the autonomous future,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote in a memo obtained by Bloomberg. The company has vowed to commit more than $10 billion to various robotaxi partnerships in the coming years, including an agreement to buy 35,000 autonomous vehicles from Lucid. The end goal? According to COO Andrew McDonald in a recent podcast appearance, a near-future world in which robotaxis help send car ownership into extinction.

But to win the robotaxi game, players ultimately need to get wheels on the road, as cheaply as possible:

• Percoco previously surmised that the robotaxi company offering the lowest costs would win the most market share, assuming all else is equal. For Tesla, Percoco has written that means its robotaxi and full-self-driving units could be worth $1 trillion … or roughly equivalent to its entire market cap today.
• Tesla already has a few hundred self-driving Model Y robotaxis on roads today, but the Cybercab, which features just two seats and no steering wheel, is expected to be cheaper to produce and deploy. Waymo currently has about 4,000 cars on the road, with plans to add thousands more by the end of the year.

Drive to Survive: Goldman Sachs Research estimated earlier this year that the total number of robotaxis on the road will increase from about 7,000 last year to 1 million by 2030 and 6 million by 2035. It all adds up to potentially $440 billion worth of economic disruption in the coming years, Goldman says, when factoring in both lost car sales as well as lost wages and lower booking fees for human rideshare drivers.

The charismatic US general George S. Patton is credited with the quip, “No good decision was ever made in a swivel chair.”

In which case, hopefully, Ford executives weren’t sitting down when they came up with their plan to team with UK company Ricardo and US defense contractor General Dynamics to compete for a major British defense contract. The three will develop a proposal based on Ford’s Ranger pickup to supply the £2 billion ($2.7 billion) Light Mobility Vehicle program.

Re-Reporting for Duty

During World War II, Ford was a crucial part of the US-wide mobilization to support the Allied forces, building thousands of light military utility vehicles, light armored tracked vehicles, tank engines and other parts. By 1990, however, global defense spending was in decline, a trend that would continue for years after the collapse of the USSR, giving automakers cause to retreat. That year, Ford sold its aerospace subsidiary, not long after Chrysler did the same.

The past two years have made the case for a revival. Tariffs and inflation pressured automakers’ margins, while emerging Chinese rivals undercut them on price. Slowing electric vehicle sales led to massive writedowns, $19.5 billion in Ford’s case last year. Against that backdrop, Ford lost $8.2 billion in 2025 even as it reported a record $187 billion in revenue. Opportunities emerged on the defense front, however. Motivated by the Ukraine-Russia war, NATO members last year pledged to spend 5% of GDP on defense by 2035, or roughly $3 trillion a year, up from the previous 2% target. With hundreds of billions in spending on tap, NATO defense contracts will be lucrative, but the competition cutthroat:

• Ford has distinct advantages when it comes to the UK, including a massive British manufacturing presence with a 6,000-strong workforce. The Ranger has been Europe’s best-selling pickup for over a decade, so Ford has capacity in place to rapidly scale up the production of military-grade vehicles based on it.
• But top Detroit rival General Motors is working on a rival bid with BAE Systems and NP Aerospace. So is Ineos Automotive, the off-road vehicle specialist founded by UK billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, which counts SMT Defence and NMS UK as its partners.

Locking Horns on the Home Front: GM reestablished its standalone defense unit in 2017, something Ford has not signaled it plans to do. In any case, the two are already battling it out for multiple contracts: Both were selected earlier this year to build prototypes for the US Army’s new Heavy Infantry Squad Vehicle program.

In the planet-spanning battle of the billionaire space entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos just got a major win.

This week, NASA announced the selection of Bezos’ Blue Origin to develop the Mars Telecommunications Network, which will provide high-bandwidth communications and navigation services for Mars missions. The contract, which could be worth as much as $700 million, says the aerospace manufacturer will deliver a telecommunications orbiter by Dec. 31, 2028.

Reducing Risk

The federal space agency is borrowing from an adage nearly as old as the universe: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has become a key player for NASA’s space ambitions, with the government often tapping the recently public company’s Falcon rockets, and SpaceX being heavily involved in NASA’s Artemis program, which sends astronauts to the moon.

But as any good investor knows, it’s important to spread out your bets:

• When NASA picked Blue Origin as its second Artemis lunar lander provider in 2023 after naming SpaceX the first in 2021, the agency explicitly said that adding another partner would increase competition and allow for a regular cadence of lunar landings. In March, the NASA Office of Inspector General said that challenges would delay the planned Artemis launch dates. That makes it even more important for the government to have options.
• Last year’s feud between President Trump and Musk also showed how important it is for the government’s space agency to not be solely reliant on SpaceX. Plus, SpaceX is busy. Last month, Reuters reported that the company is prioritizing launching its own Starlink satellites, causing challenges for competitors who rely on space on its rockets.

Blue Origin’s Blues: NASA isn’t exactly playing it safe. Blue Origin is still reeling from an explosion on one of its New Glenn rockets, which badly damaged its only launch pad, during a test in May. “The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections,” the company’s CEO Dave Limp said on X last month.