The Real Reason Elon Musk Wants Us Looking at His Flying Car

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“What you see with your eyes, you will not believe!” That’s what Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Thursday evening in Texas, as he commenced a dramatic livestreamed spectacle: Tesla’s new Roadster, almost a decade overdue, was going to fly! It would be “some crazy stuff,” Musk said, as the crowd went wild. The car, a mashup of a 1970s-era Lotus Esprit and the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, has an electric drivetrain that can do 0 to 60 mph in 0.8 seconds. But most importantly, in Musk’s eyes, at least, the car can be equipped with SpaceX-designed gas thrusters that boost acceleration and, yes, produce bursts of flight.

Are we hurtling into a future of flying cars now? This Roadster is designed to deliver a message, but it’s not really that one. The car can only kinda sorta fly. It’s more accurate to say the vehicle can briefly elevate. The Texas event was signaling the end of an era but not the era of cars that stay on the ground. Get ready for the sunsetting of Tesla as a car company—with Musk clearing the way for a SpaceX–Tesla mother of all mergers.

At the Texas event, Tesla set up a gigantic C-shaped ramp, and the Roadster ascended to the top of the curve. It used a downforce-generating fan system to remain stuck upside down, and then blasted free, flipped—this was the flying part—and touched down amid a cloud of compressed air. Next it jumped over a lineup of parked Tesla vehicles, throwing in another roll. Impressive, perhaps, but it was far from the wildest of Musk’s PR stunts. That came in 2018, when Musk’s own original red Roadster was literally launched into space atop SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket (it’s still out there, in a solar orbit that might occasionally allow for a Mars drive-by).

Musk says the Roadster will be the last manually drivable car the company ever builds, and that tells you everything you need to know about where Tesla is headed as a company. The future is the Cybercab, a vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals that will autonomously convey customers in a fleet of robotaxis for hire. It’s also Optimus humanoid robots, which Musk has claimed will push Tesla’s market capitalization to an epic $25 trillion (from the current $1.4 trillion). The robots will sell for $30,000 apiece, and they will relieve us from all manner of drudgery. They’ll do everything from bolting together Cybercabs to mowing your lawn, from tending bars to caring for the elderly and, naturally, assisting in the colonization of the moon and Mars.

Tesla is also stressing its margins through massive spending on A.I., so the company doesn’t look like the EV juggernaut it once was. That’s where the flamboyantly bonkers Roadster event served as a clear indication that Tesla’s destiny isn’t to become the electric Toyota but rather to merge with SpaceX. That way, Musk can rescue the Tesla balance sheet and use the combined companies to do what he does best: raise staggering amounts of money from the public markets. Why else make SpaceX technology the star of what was meant to be a long-awaited Tesla showcase?

Will Tesla ever build and sell this crazy almost-flying car? If history is a guide, probably not. The 2017 new Roadster prompted true believers to plunk down $50,000 reservations ($250,000 to secure a Founder Series model). Tesla now wants $50,000 for what it is calling the “Performance” trim level of the new-new Roadster, $250,000 for the “Thrust” version, and an unknown, invite-only sum for the “Rocket” trim (aka the one that “flies”). According to Tesla, customers will have to wait until 2028 to get their cars, and everybody understands that caveat emptor is key when dealing with Musk’s promises.

For the record, Tesla delivered more than 1.6 million manually drivable vehicles in 2025, and the company generated about $95 billion in revenue, mostly from its automotive efforts (solar and energy storage are also in the picture). Why, you might ask, would Tesla want to sunset that business after decades spent proving EVs are viable, capturing a gigantic chunk of market share in the process? Because its profit margins are shrinking. It hasn’t introduced an all-new, nonflying vehicle since the Cybertruck in 2019, and it has ended production of the high-priced Model S sedan and Model X SUV, leaving just the Model 3 four-door and Model Y crossover to carry the business. An immense amount of competition has arrived from Chinese automakers (particularly in Europe, where Musk’s support of right-wing parties hurt Tesla sales), the government has eliminated regulatory credits that Tesla cashed in on to the tune of billions of dollars, and the loss of federal tax credits has weakened the overall EV market in the U.S.

A potential Tesla–SpaceX merger has generated a lot of speculation, with Barclays analyst Dan Levy recently suggesting that it’s almost a done deal. SpaceX would do the acquiring, with Tesla investors swapping their shares for SpaceX stock; the resulting firm would be valued at something like $3.5 trillion. More importantly, Musk would then be able to use SpaceX’s ability to raise money to cover the enormous costs of converting Tesla’s current vehicle production to Cybercabs and Optimus robots. Not to mention keeping pace with Anthropic and OpenAI on data-center construction. And, of course, there’s a brain-melting plan for SpaceX to launch data centers into orbit, harvesting free power from the sun.

Musk has quickly determined that selling millions and millions of moderately priced EVs isn’t exactly that great a business. Everyone in the auto industry already knew this and wondered why Tesla was killing off lucrative luxury models and not moving into potentially more profitable segments, such as larger SUVs and normal-looking pickups. The man himself would doubtless contend that the EVs going back to the original Roadster were a means to an end: develop the global manufacturing capability and expertise to crank out a Cybercab every 10 seconds—and march armies of Optimus robots off the assembly lines. Tesla investors and customers should be grateful that they bankrolled this brave new world.

The best that can be said for the Roadster event was that it was, for some, a guilty-pleasure throwback to the good old days of Tesla stagecraft. Musk was back in carnival-barker mode and genuinely appeared to be enjoying himself. The trick with thrusters was evocative of what SpaceX has now been doing for years with booster rockets cruising back to earth, touching down in landing pads or being snared by launch towers. Say goodbye, though, to Tesla, which will now inevitably disappear forever into SpaceX and Musk’s dream of a galactic mega-entity. Surely, it will put the Weyland-Yutani Corporation of the Alien movies to shame.