Tesla
includes Tesla Model 3, Tesla Autopilot, Tesla Cybertruck, Tesla Optimus, Tesla Full Self Driving, Tesla Model S, Tesla Supercharger, Tesla Powerwall, Tesla Roadster, Tesla Model X, Tesla Cybercab, Tesla Dojo and 8 more
48 statements across 36 episodes · 28 bullish · 9 bearish · 25 people on the record · first statement Jul 15, 2017 by Frank Chen · said 440 times in 104 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Marc Andreessen (54), Benedict Evans (41), Frank Chen (31), Erin Price-Wright (31), Qasar Younis (28), Ben Horowitz (23), Steven Sinofsky (18), Sonal Chokshi (16)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 82 mentions in 10 episodes 8 per episode
- Tesla and SpaceX Alumni on Elon Musk, Decision Velocity, and the Future of Hard Tech | a16z
- Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | The a16z Show
- The Founders Who Left Tesla to Rebuild America | a16z
- Building a Company in Stealth | Travis Kalanick with a16z
- Why AI Demand Is Outrunning Compute Supply
- Inside The $100M Bet on the Future of Space | Northwood CEO on a16z
- The Economics of AI Usage and What's Next For SaaS | Benedict Evans on a16z
- Goldman Sachs Chairman on Why Finance Adopts AI Differently | a16z
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 79 mentions in 28 episodes 3 per episode
- Autonomy is no longer a moonshot—it’s a market
- The U.S. Can’t Build AI Without These Materials
- “How We Can Eliminate Crime” | Ben Horowitz and Garrett Langley
- Robinhood CEO: Making Everyone An Owner
- Dylan Patel on GPT-5’s Router Moment, GPUs vs TPUs, Monetization
- "Is there an AI bubble?” Gavin Baker and David George
- Opendoor CEO: Building the Amazon for Homes
- Former Microsoft Executive on Apple’s Hidden China Problem
- 20 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 32 mentions in 11 episodes 3 per episode
- AI, Robotics & the Future of Manufacturing
- AI, Robotics & the New Global Arms Race
- Virtual Worlds Mean Real Business: How Games Power the Future
- Marc Andreessen & Andrew Chen Talk Creative Computers
- Startup Building: Challenges & Opportunities
- Jobs of the Future: Where Hardware Meets Software
- Trump is About to Change Everything For Tech Startups
- Truth Terminal - The AI Bot That Became a Crypto Millionaire
- 3 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 43 mentions in 12 episodes 4 per episode
- The Electrification of Everything: From Sky to Sea
- Where We Go From Here with OpenAI's Mira Murati
- The Rise of the Exponential Organization with Peter Diamandis and Salim Ismail
- Building Hardware and Taking on the Phone Giants with Carl Pei
- Expert AI as a Healthcare Superpower
- What is the Future of Hollywood?
- AI Will Save The World with Marc Andreessen and Martin Casado
- Big Ideas 2024: A New Age of Maritime Exploration with Grant Gregory
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2019 156 mentions in 32 episodes 5 per episode
- a16z Podcast | Tesla and the Nature of Disruption
- a16z Podcast | Welcome to the New Era of Commerce
- a16z Podcast | When Software Eats Cars
- a16z Podcast | The Rise of Full Stack Startups
- a16z Podcast | Beyond One Size Fits All for Startup Employee Options
- a16z Podcast | Startups and Pendulum Swings Through Ideas, Time, Fame, and Money
- a16z Podcast | The (Definite) Optimism of Peter Thiel
- a16z Podcast | When Humanity Meets A.I.
- 24 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 10 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
2017 38 mentions in 7 episodes 5 per episode
- How 'Going Direct' Changes Everything: for Brands, Retail, Marketing, and Advertising
- 16 Questions About Self Driving Cars
- The End of Cloud Computing
- Quantum Computing: A Primer
- The Future of Money: Banking on Fintech
- Kevin Fu
- AI, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning: A Primer
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
Everything said about Tesla, oldest first
Jul 15, 2017 bullish
Jul 16, 2017 bullish
Jul 16, 2017 bullish
Tesla Generated $14B in Model 3 Pre-Orders Without Mass Media Ads
“Tesla recently launched a pre-order for their Model Three, and in one week, they got to reserve demand for 300,000 cars, starting at 35,000 dollars per car. That represents demand of at least fourteen billion dollars. What is more interesting on that is they d…”
Oct 26, 2017 bullish
Rampell: Internet-connected cars like Teslas will sell personalized insurance directly
“One of the really cool things about the new cars like the Teslas that have built in, ah, three G antennas because they're internet connected, is you could actually imagine your next car selling you insurance, because all the information that you need is actual…”
Feb 3, 2018 bullish
Feb 3, 2018 neutral
Chen: Full EV transition requires 14 to 27 Tesla-sized Gigafactories
“UBS ran the numbers, and they think that depending on how quickly adoption happens, anywhere between sort of 14 and 27 of the Tesla-sized gigafactories would be enough to produce batteries for all of the world's electric vehicles. In aggregate, this would be s…”
Nov 16, 2018 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Tesla built its full-stack strategy incrementally using off-the-shelf components
“It's even beyond that because they, you know, they started the first car. They didn't make half the components. So there's been a steady road. You know, they start with like, well, let's do a roadster and we'll buy in half the bits. And then you kind of step s…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Andreessen: Elon Musk saving Tesla and SpaceX in 2008 was spectacular
“So to start, think about this, to start a new electric car company... Simultaneously to start the first new private rocketry company in the United States in probably 40 years... And then to go through the 2008 crash... And have both come out the other side, li…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Thiel: Tesla and SpaceX's real breakthrough was complex system coordination
“Both Tesla and SpaceX were stories that involved complex coordination, where you needed to get a lot of different pieces to fit together in just the right way. And so if you ask, you know, what was the real breakthrough with Tesla, or the real breakthrough wit…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Evans: B2B fleet purchasing of autonomous cars neutralizes Apple's consumer advantage
“So and so that becomes interesting for Apple and potentially for Tesla, because it means that, you know, if the drivers, if the people riding around are not the people choosing these things, then maybe Apple's strengths don't really get to come into play becau…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Cooper: Tesla grants smaller initial equity, favoring larger performance refreshers later
“And one of the things that Tesla does is, instead of the typical practice, which is most people get a very significant grant, you know, the day they join the company, and then over time, they might get some refresher grants, but those refresher grants are ofte…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Beshara: Tesla used customer pre-orders to secure $2 billion in debt
“Yes. You could sell today directly to your customers, get the demand before you put an ounce of production to work and use that to Tesla since use that, I believe for debt financing of two billion dollars. So be able to use that to verify the demand and securi…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Beshara: Tesla generated $14 billion in Model 3 pre-orders in days
“In about three or four days, they sold 200,000 cars. I mean, this is a car manufacturer. I think they've sold essentially about fourteen billion dollars worth of their new model. And they're expecting, you know, 30% to drop off, but still 70% of that would be …”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Rigetti: Despite incumbent efforts, Tesla is the only electric car company
“General Motors is building an electric car, and still, there's got to be a Tesla, and eventually electric cars and hybrids are going to kind of be a technology that is adopted across the industry, but there's one electric car company. There's one that matters.”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Qasar Younis: Autonomous vehicles will cause a bloodbath among Tier 1 suppliers
“I think the real bloodbath in this ecosystem is not going to be at the manufacturer's level because consumers have some affiliation to, like, a Tesla vehicle or, like, a Mercedes-Benz, etc. It happens at the tier ones, but where there's that destruction, there…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Sinofsky: EV adoption is an industry-wide secular shift, not single-company disruption
“Instead of looking at this as disruption, another way to look at this is to use an old phrase that existed before disruption and just refer to it as a secular shift, and that this is a shift. There's just a shift. We're going to all be in electric cars and ele…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 negative
May 8, 2019 positive
Carlson-Wee: Homomorphic encryption enables machine learning on private, encrypted user data
“One interesting intersection is homomorphic encryption, which allows you to train a machine learning system based on data that you actually don't know the plain text, so you only see the encrypted version. It allows people to say, okay, I'm going to share the …”
Jan 9, 2023 positive
Andreessen: Tesla deploys live autonomous software without federal testing, improving safety
“Tesla has been climbing the ladder on self-driving car functionality capability. They do new software releases, push live to car at night anytime they want. Those new releases are not being tested by any federal, the federal, you know, it's a, whatever it's no…”
Feb 6, 2023 negative
Schimpf: DoD spends far less on software than commercial tech firms
“When you look at, like, how these things play out in terms of, like, what do modern technology companies spend? Take a Tesla, take any of these companies that are building, you know, kind of modern hardware, software enabled systems. You know, what's the perce…”
Aug 2, 2023 negative
Horowitz: Non-founder manufacturing giants lack agility to execute major shifts
“Many of the kind of big manufacturers these days, you know, with the exception of, you know, companies like Tesla are not at all run by their founders and to kind of change from anything they're doing, I think would be quite the challenge.”
Dec 24, 2023 bullish
Dec 24, 2023 bullish
Arc Boats brings Tesla and SpaceX manufacturing principles to maritime
“Arc boats has done a great job of encapsulating what the future of maritime looks like in that, you know, from a process and team perspective, Mitch and Ryan delivered the Tesla and SpaceX vision and mission to maritime. They're not just creating Consumer boat…”
May 16, 2024 negative
May 16, 2024 bearish
Horowitz: GM is vulnerable to Tesla because it only assembles cars
“GM is totally vulnerable to Tesla and BYD. This is why, you know, HP ended up being totally vulnerable to Apple because Apple was still building computers and HP was assembling computers and GM is assembling cars and Elon completely kind of re-engineered how y…”
Jul 23, 2024 neutral
Casey predicts increasing performance dispersion among Magnificent Seven tech stocks
“Now I feel like we're in much more of a stock pickers kind of market where The Magnificent Seven aren't all magnificent this year. One's down a ton, Tesla. One's down a little, Apple. You know, I think there's going to be more separation in the market in gener…”
Oct 29, 2024 positive
Dec 12, 2024 positive
Apr 14, 2025 positive
Yudis: Software quality depends on the CEO's proximity to software expertise
“In the companies, and you can literally measure from the CEO, how many levels do you have to go to where they really know software? Those companies are, you take a Tesla in this example, Elon knows software. So you're right at the CEO level and therefore the p…”
Apr 14, 2025 neutral
Yudis: Tesla and Waymo autonomous vehicle approaches will technically converge
“And so the next kind of 10 years is, and I think what you'll ultimately see is, like, somewhat of a very technical convergence, because the Tesla system is a very sensor light system. It's basically just a camera system. And the Waymo system is very sensor hea…”
Apr 21, 2025 positive
Shortal: Veteran founders should first observe execution at top tech companies
“I think it's, it helps to go to somewhere and see what right looks like. For me, personally, you know, especially at Android, Palantir, you know, I could go to SpaceX, You know, and then Tesla, just some companies that are producing these founders. I think it …”
Apr 29, 2025 bullish
Andreessen: Full-stack tech disruptors can become larger than the legacy industries they replace
“Those companies, good news, those companies can get to be gigantic, right? Because if you crack the mother load, like, you know, Netflix has, for example, entertainment, you know, you could, or like Tesla has in cars, you can build a company that's maybe multi…”
Jul 23, 2025
Caldwell: Tesla vertically integrated early because no subcomponent market existed
“Tesla had to vertically integrate early because people just weren't making the parts that were needed. Like that was a, it was a do or die, There was no incentive. There was no market for people to build the kind of like sub components that were required. And …”
Oct 30, 2025 bullish
Dec 10, 2025 bullish
AI assistants will evolve into full autonomy like self-driving cars
“Yeah, I mean, it's a moving target, obviously, is gonna get increasingly more capable, and our view is it's like self-driving cars, where it's not self-driving overnight, it's you drive the Tesla at first, And then there's assisted steering and braking, and th…”
Mar 27, 2026
Caldwell: Tesla requires eight to ten interview conversations for engineering hires
“The, like the key part of the hiring process at, you know, Tesla at least, and I'm sure it's SpaceX is the like technical evaluation, it goes quite deep. And so there, you know, you're going to talk to six engineers. If you're applying for an engineering role,…”
Mar 27, 2026
Mar 27, 2026 positive
Caldwell: Musk's aggressive deadlines force teams to prioritize critical paths
“When Elon sets, like, super aggressive targets, the goal is actually to get the team to think really deliberately. There's a thousand things that have to happen, but a hundred of them cannot be done in six months, so we have to go attack those hundred things.”
May 12, 2026
May 13, 2026 positive
Baglino: Existential urgency drove Tesla's peak team performance
“Many times in Tesla's history, You know, the company's future success, really, like, whether or not the paycheck will clear, you know, was bet on the team within the company executing well. And that is a very, like, focusing reality. And it drives people to do…”