Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said Friday he was planning to vote against the central bank's decision to hold rates steady this week after February's jobs report showed 92,000 payroll losses."I thought that's it, I'm dissenting," Waller told CNBC's Squawk Box. But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and surging crude prices convinced him otherwise.
Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) has spent years selling the robotaxi ambition. Now, that ambition is facing something more tangible-a 50,000-vehicle deployment plan backed by Rivian Automotive, Inc. (NASDAQ: RIVN) and Uber Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: UBER). This isn't another prototype or pilot. It's scale.
Rivian and Uber say they plan to roll out up to 50,000 R2 robotaxis across 25 cities spanning the U.S., Canada, and Europe by 2031.
That immediately shifts the conversation from "who has the best tech" to "who gets there first at scale."
From Vision to Deployment
Tesla's approach has been clear: build a vertically integrated autonomy stack and deploy it across millions of vehicles over time. The bet is that once Full Self-Driving is solved, scale follows naturally.
But Rivian and Uber are taking a different route-pairing vehicles, platform, and network upfront.
Uber brings demand. Rivian brings hardware. Together, they're attempting to compress the timeline between development and real-world deployment. And with a defined rollout plan across multiple geographies, this looks less like experimentation and more like execution.
That contrast matters.
The Network Vs The Stack
At its core, this is shaping up as a philosophical split.
Tesla is building a closed system-owning the vehicle, the software, and eventually the networ...
